Harrison Birtwistle Quotes

#1. The thing about influence is that any composer worth anything will give you the same names.

Harrison Birtwistle

#2. I don't have ideas so much as there are things which constantly evolve ... there are various threads or layers, if you like, which change.

Harrison Birtwistle

#3. 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.

Harrison Birtwistle

#4. 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.

Harrison Birtwistle

#5. In the end it doesn't matter what you do.

Harrison Birtwistle

#6. You either are or you're not.

Harrison Birtwistle

#7. I'm not an architectural composer.

Harrison Birtwistle

#8. My operas usually come from musical ideas rather than ideas about subject matter.

Harrison Birtwistle

#9. 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

#10. One thing I've tried to do in writing music is take on very basic things, very archetypal things.

Harrison Birtwistle

#11. I always write the pieces I want to write.

Harrison Birtwistle

#12. I don't think there is much American music.

Harrison Birtwistle

#13. Music is such a problem in the time it takes.

Harrison Birtwistle

#14. 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.

Harrison Birtwistle

#15. 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.

Harrison Birtwistle

#16. My operas and my theatre works are very formal pieces.

Harrison Birtwistle

#17. This sounds horribly pretentious, but I like to think that if music hadn't existed, I could have invented it.

Harrison Birtwistle

#18. Composing's not voluntary, you know. There's no choice, you're not free. You're landed with an idea and you have responsibility to that idea.

Harrison Birtwistle

#19. My attitude to writing is like when you do wallpapering, you remember where all the little bits are that don't meet. And then your friends say: It's terrific!

Harrison Birtwistle

#20. It's the irrational things that interest me.

Harrison Birtwistle

#21. People say my music is English. I don't know what it is. Maybe it's not me writing English music, but that English music is becoming more like me.

Harrison Birtwistle

#22. I didn't have a record player.

Harrison Birtwistle

#23. I think music has gone through a period of something very severe, rather radical, rather the way painting did with cubism.

Harrison Birtwistle

#24. I think there are influences that you open the door to, and influences that come under the door.

Harrison Birtwistle

#25. I wrote music as soon as I knew notation.

Harrison Birtwistle

#26. The piece that had a large influence on me was Turangalila.

Harrison Birtwistle

#27. When I dealt with set theory, I could never make it be the music that I wanted.

Harrison Birtwistle

#28. The opera tells the story with all the built-in contradictions and from many different angles.

Harrison Birtwistle

#29. When I was a kid, I wrote music - from the age of 11 until the age of 18.

Harrison Birtwistle