"The Western musical canon came about not merely by accumulation, but by opposition and subversion, both to the ruling powers on whom composers depended for their livelihoods and to other musics."

Composer, Composers, Opposition

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"The Western musical canon came about not merely by accumulation, but by opposition and subversion, both to the ruling powers on whom composers depended for their livelihoods and to other musics."

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Jascha Heifetz, American Musician

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"Composers in the old days used to keep strictly to the base of the theme, as their real subject. Beethoven varies the melody, harmony and rhythms so beautifully."

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"Pianists call me a composer, composers call me a pianist. The classicists think me a futurist, and the futurists call me a reactionary."

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"Other composers have taken this particular technique much further than I in the meantime, with the result that the Law of Diminishing Returns has begun to apply."

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"Well, let me, first of all, say, that as a microtonal composer, I've never been much of a theorist."

John Eaton, American Politician

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"The Western musical canon came about not merely by accumulation, but by opposition and subversion, both to the ruling powers on whom composers depended for their livelihoods and to other musics."

Brian Ferneyhough, British Composer

Composer, Composers, Opposition

Explore more quotes by Brian Ferneyhough

"Composers dialogue - and obsessively, bitterly argue - with other composers, often over the span of several centuries."

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"I don't see 'lines of force' as being destructive, except to the extent that they are exclusively traceable through observance of the path of distorted material left in their wake."

Being, Force

"I am certainly not arguing for the de facto autonomy of the individual work, even though there is much to be said for making the attempt to see it in that light as one facet of the reception process."

Work, Light

"I frequently compose out the entire metric structure of a piece in modified cyclic form, where each cyclic revolution undergoes some form of 'variation' much as if measure lengths were concrete musical 'material.'"

Revolution, Measure

"I would not say that I was, these days, a 'student' of philosophy, although in my youth I was quite deeply involved with certain aspects of the British pragmatists."

Philosophy, Youth

"So: we're all tired. Now what? Manuscripts written in Club Med?"

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"Questioning the nature and implications of liminal instances necessarily involves failure, if only in the specifically technical sense of entering spaces where prevailing criteria of success scarcely apply."

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"Actually, most things I say in public lead more or less directly to my own compositional practice, so I should be careful about generalizing lest they come back to haunt me."

Practice, Public

"The idea of 'machine assemblage' is, especially, very alien to my sensibility, since it suggests a relative indifference of the strata to one another during the process of construction."

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"What makes a specific quality or quantity of innovation retain its intense newness over the years?"

Quality, Innovation, Quantity, Years