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"I began like all composers, writing for small groups. Chamber groups."
Author Name
Personal Development
"The Russian composers, especially, tricked the symphony orchestra into the kind of dynamic, rhythmic thing."
Author Name
Personal Development
"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."
Author Name
Personal Development
"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."
Author Name
Personal Development
"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."
Author Name
Personal Development
"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."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Then I started listenin' a lot to classical composers. Piano works. Just to see what they were doin'. That sort of put me in a different groove to try to blend all that in."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Composers dialogue - and obsessively, bitterly argue - with other composers, often over the span of several centuries."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Many composers today don't know what the human throat is."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Composers shouldn't think too much - it interferes with their plagiarism."
Author Name
Personal Development
More
"If nothing is at risk, nothing is established."
Nothing
"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
"When I left Europe in 1987 I did so with the thought that my relevance as a composition teacher would benefit from a certain cool distance to certain tendencies I had been observing for several years with increasing disquiet."
Thought
"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.'"
Music
"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
"My own position is, that it is largely up to the work itself to suggest the nature of these referential points without dimensions in and through the processes by which the distance between them is maintained."
Nature
"This was possible only by dint of extended periods of frequently quite painful reflection and digestion."
Reflection
"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."
Art
"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."
Work
"Certainly being in California has encouraged a sustained commitment to rethinking the nature, purposes, and relevance of the contemporary arts, specifically music, for a society which by and large seems to manage quite well without them."
Society
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