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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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"The Russian composers, especially, tricked the symphony orchestra into the kind of dynamic, rhythmic thing."
"Composers dialogue - and obsessively, bitterly argue - with other composers, often over the span of several centuries."
"Pianists call me a composer, composers call me a pianist. The classicists think me a futurist, and the futurists call me a reactionary."
"Well, let me, first of all, say, that as a microtonal composer, I've never been much of a theorist."
"Then I started listenin' a lot to classical composers. Piano works. Just to see what they were doin'. That sort of put me in a different groove to try to blend all that in."
"The composers could no longer direct all performances in person, and so the responsibility of interpreting their works in the spirit in which they had been conceived was placed upon conductors."
"Physicists are more like avant-garde composers, willing to bend traditional rules... Mathematicians are more like classical composers."
Explore more quotes by Brian Ferneyhough
"When I speak of "cycles," I am referring to lengthy intervals of relative homogeneity, if not in the resolving of problems, than at least with respect to the consistency of their capacity to productively irritate."
"Composers dialogue - and obsessively, bitterly argue - with other composers, often over the span of several centuries."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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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