You either are or you're not.
From Harrison Birtwistle
When I was confronted with official tuition, the academic thing, I could see no relationship whatever between that and the music I'd been writing since I was 11.
When I was a kid, I wrote music - from the age of 11 until the age of 18.
When I dealt with set theory, I could never make it be the music that I wanted.
This sounds horribly pretentious, but I like to think that if music hadn't existed, I could have invented it.
There are rhythmic ideas which sometimes only work up to a point. In writing there are moments when it just comes off the page, it's not just a collection of notes.
The thing about influence is that any composer worth anything will give you the same names.
The theatre only knows what it's doing next week, not like the opera, where they say: What are we going to do in five years' time? A completely different attitude.
The piece that had a large influence on me was Turangalila.
The opera tells the story with all the built-in contradictions and from many different angles.
3 perspectives
2 perspectives
1 perspectives