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

Composer, Composers

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

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"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

Composer, Composers, Guitar, Writing

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

Gavin Bryars, English Composer

Composer, Composers

"I occasionally play works by contemporary composers and for two reasons. First to discourage the composer from writing any more and secondly to remind myself how much I appreciate Beethoven."

Jascha Heifetz, American Musician

Composer, Composers, First, Play, Writing

"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."

Johannes Brahms, German Composer

Composer, Composers, Harmony, Old

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

Anton Rubinstein, Russian Musician

Composer, Composers

"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."

Brian Ferneyhough, British Composer

Composer, Composers, Law, Result

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

John Eaton, American Politician

Composer, First

"Composers shouldn't think too much - it interferes with their plagiarism."

Howard Dietz, American Musician

Composer, Composers, Plagiarism

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

Edgard Varese, American Composer

Composer, Composers

Explore more quotes by Brian Ferneyhough

"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

"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

"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

"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

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

Now

"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."

Nature

"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

"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

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

Quality

"Naturally enough, I couldn't have foreseen the vast sea change which has come upon that scene as a result of German reunification and associated events."

Change