Harrison Birtwistle

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

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

“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.”

“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!”

“I'm not an architectural composer.”

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

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

“I always write the pieces I want to write.”

“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.”

“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.”

“It's the irrational things that interest me.”

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

“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 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.”

“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.”

“My operas usually come from musical ideas rather than ideas about subject matter.”

“In the end it doesn't matter what you do.”