"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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"I've heard though that there is a younger generation of tonal French composers who are reacting with vigour."

Gavin Bryars, English Composer

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"The Russian composers, especially, tricked the symphony orchestra into the kind of dynamic, rhythmic thing."

Gerry Mulligan, American Musician

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"Perhaps two million years ago the creatures of a planet in some remote galaxy faced a musical crisis similar to that which we earthly composers face today."

George Crumb, American Composer

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"Physicists are more like avant-garde composers, willing to bend traditional rules... Mathematicians are more like classical composers."

Brian Greene, American Physicist

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"Let us not forget that the greatest composers were also the greatest thieves. They stole from everyone and everywhere."

Pablo Casals, Spanish Musician

Composer, Composers, Forget

"Most of the important composers in our country are clustered in the Northeast."

Carlisle Floyd, American Composer

Composer, Composers, Country

"When I began, the guitar was en-closed in a vicious circle. There were no composers writing for the guitar, be-cause there were no virtuoso guitarists."

Andres Segovia, Spanish Musician

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"In Hollywood, the rainbow hits the ground for composers."

Hoagy Carmichael, American Composer

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"I was not influenced by composers as much as by natural objects and physical phenomena."

Edgard Varese, American Composer

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"I began like all composers, writing for small groups. Chamber groups."

David Del Tredici, American Composer

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Explore more quotes by Brian Ferneyhough

"When I left Europe in 1987 I did so with the thought that my relevance as a composition teacher would benefit from a certain cool distance to certain tendencies I had been observing for several years with increasing disquiet."

Thought

"This was possible only by dint of extended periods of frequently quite painful reflection and digestion."

Reflection

"Hence my obstinate emphasis on stylistic continuity from work to work rather than specific sibling relationships between the individual work and other members of its stylistic 'family' in the world outside."

Work

"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

"My own position is, that it is largely up to the work itself to suggest the nature of these referential points without dimensions in and through the processes by which the distance between them is maintained."

Nature

"With respect to the respective French and German traditions you are no doubt correct, although I am reluctant to see individual achievement reduced to archetypes."

Achievement

"By reason of weird translation, many such sets of instructions read like poems anyhow."

Poems

"If nothing is at risk, nothing is established."

Nothing

"As a necessary prerequisite to the creation of new forms of expression one might, I suppose, argue that current sensibilities respond uniquely to the notion of exhaustion as exhaustion, although that does de facto seem rather limiting."

Creation

"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."

Idea