| Harrison Birtwistle QUOTES / QUOTATIONS |
All the melodic material in this new piece has minor seconds, major seconds, fourths, augmented fourths, and fifths. I can control that melodically.
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Anything you might say is English now, has it got anything to do with something that finished in the 17th century?
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As a point of departure, English music was what I wasn't interested in. I was interested in the thing that came from Europe.
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As I'm moving through the piece, searching for the place for the idea to work, to be inserted, I can't use it.
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Certain things I do I think actually work in terms of the way they sound.
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I always write the pieces I want to write.
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I can give you examples of little corners of pieces, moments of pieces, aspects of pieces I like, which I think is the best thing I've ever done.
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I can never look back and say how I did something, particularly with rhythmic processes.
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I can see there's a way in doing something which might exploit something.
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I chose the Orpheus myth because it has so many dimensions.
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I developed a method of working in which I would improvise something, like the sound of it, and then subject it to analysis, to a way of thinking about it.
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I didn't have a record player.
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I do a lot of things that spring from one idea. It goes through a lot of different processes, which I forget and re-invent as I need them. Pitch, rhythm, whatever.
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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.
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I don't think there is much American music.
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I just won this prize, the Siemens prize.
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I like the violence. There are all sorts of strange mixtures in it.
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I only do Ph.D. students. I try to get into their heads, find out why they're doing it, if they understand all the implications and possibilities of what they do.
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I see my opera things as occasional music, not central.
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I think I amused a lot of people with my choice of music. The only modern piece I took was Gruppen.
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I think music has gone through a period of something very severe, rather radical, rather the way painting did with cubism.
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I think there are influences that you open the door to, and influences that come under the door.
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I was a student, completely on my own, writing this music which people thought was silly.
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I wrote music as soon as I knew notation.
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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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I'm not an architectural composer.
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I'm often very surprised if I hear a piece I haven't heard for a long time.
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If I've arrived anywhere, I've arrived a different way from somebody like Vaughan Williams.
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If you're dealing with a myth, I believe that you have to deal with the whole thing.
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In the end it doesn't matter what you do.
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In the opera, each character has three manifestations.
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It's a very different sort of energy in music when it's not notated.
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It's the irrational things that interest me.
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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.
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Music is such a problem in the time it takes.
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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!
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My operas and my theatre works are very formal pieces.
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My operas usually come from musical ideas rather than ideas about subject matter.
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My pieces, I can see in retrospect that they've changed.
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One thing I've tried to do in writing music is take on very basic things, very archetypal things.
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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.
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Pitches do have these qualities. It's important to know; it's important for composers. But for me, hearing didn't come into it.
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Retelling Orpheus embraces not only one aspect of the story of Orpheus but the entire myth.
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The only self-conscious thing I've ever tried not to be, or the one thing that I resisted as an arrogant youngster, was English music.
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The opera tells the story with all the built-in contradictions and from many different angles.
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The other thing that came into my life was serialism, and that seemed to be a sort of alternative, a different direction.
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The piece that had a large influence on me was Turangalila.
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The problem with ideas is that no matter what they are, and try to articulate them by writing something to identify them.
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The question was not whether I could define it, but rather did I know my music was English or British or whatever.
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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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The thing about influence is that any composer worth anything will give you the same names.
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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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There are things to do with intervals which I've never heard anyone else deal with. I have systems where I can control this, and at the same time be free.
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There's a sort of melancholy thing - I think that's one aspect which comes out through folk music.
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There's a sort of tragedy in a way, wanting to write a symphony, which is always the big manifestation.
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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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To me it's got nothing to do with the symphony. That was a mistake Bartok never made.
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What comes first is an idea while I'm writing the last piece.
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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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When I was a kid, I wrote music - from the age of 11 until the age of 18.
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When I was a kid, it seemed very clear. Now I don't know how you decide, what the issue is.
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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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You can't really talk about an English tradition.
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You either are or you're not.
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You get a feeling for the way a piece speaks. There are also practical things like how long you're being paid to write for!
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