A Quote by Brian Ferneyhough

The Western musical canon came about not merely by accumulation, but by opposition and subversion, both to the ruling powers on whom composers depended for their livelihoods and to other musics.
In New York, I was excited about the music in New York because the only music that I was more or less involved with in the South was either country and western or hillbilly music as we used to call it when I was a kid and, ah, gospel. There was no, there was no in between. And when I got to New York all the other musics that's in the world just came into my head whether it was the classics, jazz, I never knew what jazz was about all, had heard anything about jazz.
It's nice for me to have a ballet as a kind of platform for creativity, because unlike modern dance or contemporary dance or downtown dance, ballet is formalized, and there's something orthodox about it that I like. I like that there's less emphasis on subversion and innovation. I actually think that my musical vernacular or my musical voice is also less inclined toward innovation and subversion. I think I'm a traditionalist.
All political revolutions, not affected by foreign conquest, originate in moral revolutions. The subversion of established institutions is merely one consequence of the previous subversion of established opinions.
COIL would very much like to see the creation of a newsgroup for minimal musics. We enjoy a wide spectrum of such musics, from La Monte Young, Alvin Lucier, Arvo Part, Nurse With Wound's Solilique For Lilith,The Dream Syndicate (orig.concept not the newer group who plundered the name) to Synus, Earth and so on.and on and on. Some new so called ambient musics fall between genres and so between newsgroups: some of our own music has certainly been deeply inspired by and informed by such musics,from Partch to Subotnic.
The governments and the communist parties in Vietnam and China are doing their best to develop their local economies. But the rise of countries in Asia is not in opposition to development and affluence in Western nations. It is a mutually beneficial development. The interests of Western investors are protected in our country. Both we and the West benefit from this in equal measure.
Books and opinions, no matter from whom they came, if they are in opposition to human rights, are nothing but dead letters.
So many of the sounds that contemporary composers were trying to create were to be found in the traditional musics of the world. That was encouraging but also little daunting to think that you had to work so hard to be new and yet it was old.
I have mixed feelings about 'Car 54, Where Are You?' Because we shot it as a musical and whoever the studio head was at Orion, or whoever the powers that be were, cut all but, like, two musical numbers out of it. That is the same as cutting the musical numbers out of 'The Wizard Of Oz'; it wouldn't be that interesting.
I did a 20-minute selection of scenes from the play 'Spring Awakening' in college, well before the musical came around, so when the musical was becoming a hot thing, and I was reading interviews with Duncan Sheik about how he came to do the music, I think it's interesting.
The community of mathematicians is similar to an imaginary community of musical composers whose only satisfaction is obtained by the interchange among themselves of the musical scores they compose.
The Saudi, Arabian ruling class, for example, have rights because they are performing a service for Western power, ensuring that oil profits go to the West and not to the regional population. The local gendarmes like Israel, Turkey and so on have rights, at least in their ruling groups. Others do not.
Composers dialogue - and obsessively, bitterly argue - with other composers, often over the span of several centuries.
However my parents - both of whom came from impoverished backgrounds and neither of whom had been to college, took the view that my overactive imagination was an amusing quirk that would never pay a mortgage or secure a pension.
In a sense, photographs are highly literary, and the photographer, like the writer, has to be both a master of craft and a visionary. Patient accumulation of facts and then speculation about their meaning is the nature of authorship in both mediums.
The Opposition aren't really the Opposition. They're just called the Opposition. But in fact they are the Opposition in exile. The Civil Service are the Opposition in residence.
It's a very erroneous strategy to try to push the Russian opposition to unite. First of all, the opposition is addressing different parts of Russian society that have differing points of view. And besides, a united opposition is a nice big target that the authorities have a much easier time fighting. And besides, resisting an authoritarian regime with an authoritarian opposition merely means that, in the event of victory, you're just doing yet another round of the same old, same old.
This site uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience. More info...
Got it!