Composer Quotes

I find it enormously valuable to be sure that that the pacing is what I think it is and that the scenes have the shape I think they have musically and dramatically.

Anyone who creates something new or does something different artistically is going to be singled out.

America tends to worship the modest talent because it doesn't put us in an uncomfortable position vis-a-vis the artist.

There is no room in the world, as you say, for second rate work.

But no work from a first rate mind is ever really second rate.

You turned on the radio and heard all kinds of things.

With the piano I'm completely in control of the gestural situation-not that I'm going to play the piece myself, but I know what's difficult, what's impossible.

Whereas Schaeffer and Henry were working like samplers, their idea was to capture those sounds which couldn't be serially calibrated because they were too complex in character.

When the Domaine Musical started up, I wasn't part of it. They were the major players in contemporary music at that time, braodcasting old and new composers' work. And I wasn't one of them.

Well, first I studied piano. I wasn't very satisfied because I though my teachers were dumb... and repressive.

So the ideology was that: use sounds as instruments, as sounds on tape, without the causality. It was no longer a clarinet or a spring or a piano, but a sound with a form, a development, a life of its own.

My sisters were going out with artists and poets, and eventually it was the creative world which attracted me.

I was born in Paris, and I haven't moved, except until now - I live in the suburbs and I hate it.

I wanted to play piano, and that slid quickly into writing - it wasn't enough to play other people's notes: I had to write notes too.

I think I came across Cecil Taylor a bit later, in 65 or 66. That really impressed me - Cecil Taylor is an amazing character... Both his music and the way he approaches the instrument are astonishing.

I probably went to musique concrete concerts - though not the very first ones - at the beginning of the 50s.

I have problems with machines which aren't gestural.

Electronic music used pure sounds, completely calibrated. You had to think digitally, as it were, in a way that allowed you to extend serial ideas into other parameters through technology.

Boulez seemed to me to be a guy who wrote laws. Like a company lawyer.

So: we're all tired. Now what? Manuscripts written in Club Med?

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.

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.

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.

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.

It is still true that it is easier to compose a poem in the form of a manual for adjusting a VCR than it is to write a piece using just tuning as a symphony.

In my own recent String Trio I attempt to superimpose two quite different sets of formal strategies, both of which, ultimately, refer back to historical precedent.

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.'

In any case, the fewer boundaries that exist hindering free movement between all forms of articulate human cognition, the better.

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.

If nothing is at risk, nothing is established.