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"My operas usually come from musical ideas rather than ideas about subject matter."
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"If unconventional ideas = sperm, then public opinion = abortion."

"There are tree main bulwarks of defence against new thoughts: to pay no heed, to give no credence, and finally to assert that it had already long existed."

"Good designers can create normalcy out of chaos; they can clearly communicate ideas through the organizing and manipulating of words and pictures."

"Archimedes will be remembered when Aeschylus is forgotten, because languages die and mathematical ideas do not."

"In doing everything, from coming up with the ideas and putting them on paper till doing the final edits, you are always thinking the next three steps, you're always thinking what next, what next, what next?"

"I wanted more in depth ideas about the character and it never came."

"Very often, if I know the orchestra doesn't know a piece or it's a new piece, I have main ideas about it. But then we start to play and I never talk about places where they played so beautiful and so clear in the beginning that there is nothing to say."
Explore more quotes by Harrison Birtwistle

"Minimalism now is a reaction to what came before. It's absolutely of its time. Music moved into the set theory thing, and moved out of it."

"People say my music is English. I don't know what it is. Maybe it's not me writing English music, but that English music is becoming more like me."

"The theatre only knows what it's doing next week, not like the opera, where they say: What are we going to do in five years' time? A completely different attitude."

"When I was confronted with official tuition, the academic thing, I could see no relationship whatever between that and the music I'd been writing since I was 11."

"I'm not a music lover in the sense that I look for something to have on. I've never had that attitude to music."

"I don't have ideas so much as there are things which constantly evolve... there are various threads or layers, if you like, which change."

"The opera tells the story with all the built-in contradictions and from many different angles."
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