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"My operas usually come from musical ideas rather than ideas about subject matter."
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Exlpore more Ideas quotes
"I had no new ideas on the physics we might learn, and I could not compete with the younger generation."
"Sometimes I have a good idea, something I wish I could remember, and instead of writing it down, commit it to my memory only to disappear when I needed it. Write your ideas as they come, if you wait it will be too long and you may not recover it. It may get destroyed as it is to seed to and fro in the ever rushing river of our thoughts."
"Opinions of the masses kill the 'extra' in an 'extraordinary' idea."
"Ideas won't keep; something must be done about them."
"The purpose of writing is to inflate weak ideas, obscure pure reasoning, and inhibit clarity. With a little practice, writing can be an intimidating and impenetrable fog!"
Explore more quotes by Harrison Birtwistle
"The thing about influence is that any composer worth anything will give you the same names."
"This sounds horribly pretentious, but I like to think that if music hadn't existed, I could have invented it."
"One thing I've tried to do in writing music is take on very basic things, very archetypal things."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"The opera tells the story with all the built-in contradictions and from many different angles."
"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."
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