American - Composer | April 23, 1976 -
In terms of identity, I'm the same person no matter what I'm doing.
Bryce Dessner
IdentityDoingPersonMatterSame
David Harrington asked me to write a piece for Kronos Quartet for a performance in Prospect Park, Brooklyn. I live just two blocks from the park and spend many mornings running around it. The park for me symbolizes much of what I love about New York, especially the stunning diversity of Brooklyn with its myriad cultures and communities.
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As little boys, my brother and I used to spend hours with my grandmother, asking her about the details of how she came to America. She could only give us a smattering of details, but they all found their way into our collective imagination, eventually becoming a part of our own cultural identity and connection to the past.
ImaginationPastIdentityBrother
The danger of a rock band is repeating oneself. It's our greatest fear - that it evolves into the myopia of a semi-successful band that's in love with its own shadow.
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Bands like Arcade Fire finding a larger audience has opened a lot of doors. They've empowered a whole community in Montreal.
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Working with Bob Weir directly, we learned how high the bar is for Dead music.
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When we learned to play in bands, what we were covering was equal part the Velvet Underground and the Grateful Dead. That would defy the logic that somehow these things don't fit in the same musical well.
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Nobody plans on playing their own songs in front of thousands of people.
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When I'm scoring something like a string quartet, it's all notated music, so it's meticulously written in the score, which is very different than doing things by ear.
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When I'm writing for certain instruments, you want to write within what you know about that instrument but also challenge the player. Something like 'Aheym' is very virtuosic - but because I have a history of performing music, I don't like unplayable music.
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There is a reactionary conservative side of classical music, which is not the most exciting side of it. The side that draws me in, there's a real encouragement of risk-taking, going back to masters of that tradition like Beethoven and Bartok and Stravinsky.
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The thing I realised about composition is, we remember most composers for four bars of music. Four singable bars of music. Pretty much any major composer from Debussy to Ravel to Mozart to whoever else - you can kind of hum it.
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