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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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"Give people films, they will forget after a few weeks, but give people ideas, they will assimilate them into their consciousness."
"But once you become successful, everyone has an idea of what you should do."
"We are, perhaps, uniquely among the earth's creatures, the worrying animal. We worry away our lives, fearing the future, discontent with the present, unable to take in the idea of dying, unable to sit still."
"We may take it to be the accepted idea that the Mosaic books were not handed down to us for our instruction in scientific knowledge, and that it is our duty to ground our scientific beliefs upon observation and inference, unmixed with considerations of a different order."
"A celibate clergy is an especially good idea, because it tends to suppress any hereditary propensity toward fanaticism."
Explore more quotes by Brian Ferneyhough
"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."
"As a necessary prerequisite to the creation of new forms of expression one might, I suppose, argue that current sensibilities respond uniquely to the notion of exhaustion as exhaustion, although that does de facto seem rather limiting."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"I suppose that the scope and implications of such forces have rendered my personal accounting ritual pretty much obsolete. That's how things sometimes go."
"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."
"This was possible only by dint of extended periods of frequently quite painful reflection and digestion."
"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.'"
"Composers dialogue - and obsessively, bitterly argue - with other composers, often over the span of several centuries."
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