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"Composers dialogue - and obsessively, bitterly argue - with other composers, often over the span of several centuries."
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"I've heard though that there is a younger generation of tonal French composers who are reacting with vigour."
"Pianists call me a composer, composers call me a pianist. The classicists think me a futurist, and the futurists call me a reactionary."
"I was not influenced by composers as much as by natural objects and physical phenomena."
"Well, let me, first of all, say, that as a microtonal composer, I've never been much of a theorist."
"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."
Explore more quotes by Brian Ferneyhough
"This was possible only by dint of extended periods of frequently quite painful reflection and digestion."
"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."
"In my model, important interference phenomena arise when individual strata come into contact. These chaotic fluctuations are, I suppose, what my music is really 'about.'"
"There would seem to be a limit, even for an art preoccupied with boundaries and transgressions, beyond which a work reaches its breaking point and becomes an actual failure, a mere experimentation."
"If the work of art is to continue pursuing the vision of both being in and of the world but nevertheless in some fashion being more than just one more object to the mounting clutter, this is the specific point, I think, where this must be assured."
"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."
"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."
"What makes a specific quality or quantity of innovation retain its intense newness over the years?"
"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."
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