Quotes by Harrison Birtwistle

• My operas and my theatre works are very formal pieces.
• You either are or you're not.
• When I was a kid, I wrote music - from the age of 11 until the age of 18.
• When I dealt with set theory, I could never make it be the music that I wanted.
• This sounds horribly pretentious, but I like to think that if music hadn't existed, I could have invented it.
• 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.
• The thing about influence is that any composer worth anything will give you the same names.
• 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.
• The piece that had a large influence on me was Turangalila.
• My operas usually come from musical ideas rather than ideas about subject matter.
• 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!
• Music is such a problem in the time it takes.
• One thing I've tried to do in writing music is take on very basic things, very archetypal things.
• 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.
• 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.
• I think there are influences that you open the door to, and influences that come under the door.
• 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.
• It's the irrational things that interest me.
• In the end it doesn't matter what you do.
• I always write the pieces I want to write.
• The opera tells the story with all the built-in contradictions and from many different angles.
• I wrote music as soon as I knew notation.
• I think music has gone through a period of something very severe, rather radical, rather the way painting did with cubism.
• I don't think there is much American music.
• 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.
• I didn't have a record player.
• I'm not an architectural composer.