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"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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Exlpore more Idea quotes

"From the port of ideas, not only the most clever ones put out to sea and conquer the world but also the most stupid ones do this!"

"Through your ideas, you open the window of your mind and say a hello to the world."

"An idea can change your fate in a wonderful way but you must first let the idea to touch your mind and your heart! No closed book can ever be your hero!"

"Unless you close your door to other ideas, you will never remain idealess!"

"Many things about our bodies would not seem to us so filthy and obscene if we did not have the idea of nobility in our heads."

"A celibate clergy is an especially good idea, because it tends to suppress any hereditary propensity toward fanaticism."

"Give people films, they will forget after a few weeks, but give people ideas, they will assimilate them into their consciousness."
Explore more quotes by Brian Ferneyhough

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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.'"

"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."

"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."
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