British - Composer | July 15, 1934 -
Minimalism now is a reaction to what came before. It's absolutely of its time. Music moved into the set theory thing, and moved out of it.
Harrison Birtwistle
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I'm not a music lover in the sense that I look for something to have on. I've never had that attitude to music.
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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.
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When I dealt with set theory, I could never make it be the music that I wanted.
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You either are or you're not.
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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.
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When I was a kid, I wrote music - from the age of 11 until the age of 18.
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This sounds horribly pretentious, but I like to think that if music hadn't existed, I could have invented it.
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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.
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The thing about influence is that any composer worth anything will give you the same names.
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The piece that had a large influence on me was Turangalila.
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The opera tells the story with all the built-in contradictions and from many different angles.
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