Harrison Birtwistle Quotes

Some people start with the lyrics first because they know what they want to talk about and they just write a whole bunch of lyrical ideas, but for me the music tells me what to talk about.

A lot of what a composer does has to do with storytelling, and there are different ways of fusing music with picture to express different storytelling ideas.

I've always thought of music as something which gives the words their flight and their wings and the music often comes first, although sometimes I'll have a concept, a title idea, a lyric idea that I want to write and the lyric will come first.

Every song I've ever written always starts with the words because I want the music to be the musical extension of the feelings of the words, and not the words being the emotional extension of the feeling of the music.

The further the music develops, the more complex the apparatus used by the composer to express his thoughts becomes.

I'm obviously very keen on the theater and I think it's inevitable that some of the orchestral and chamber pieces have got dramatic elements which might even suggest an unspecified dramatic plot of some kind or other, even though it's not in my mind at the time.

I like to make songs that are based on concepts.

Sometimes when you're writing a song and that song comes into your head, it definitely comes from somewhere, like a real experience.

When I was writing 'Shotgun,' it's one of the first songs that's come to me as an image.

Everything I see and hear... I will take ideas from anyplace, anywhere, anytime, and life has become a song to me. I'm always looking for a song.

Tones sound, and roar and storm about me until I have set them down in notes.

My template for most songs is 'Is this inspiring?' and with the blues it so often is.

You have certain expressions when you write music, a lot of different emotions, a lot of different feelings.

For example, after developing a sound similar to an elephant trumpeting, I wrote the song Elephant Talk which gave my elephant sound an appropriate place to live.

I like to read and dream and create music that is based on the imagery of text. If you have the combination of a great book and a great filmmaker, what could be better for the composer?

It'll help you be imaginative if you listen to classical music. It helps you understand dynamics and how important they are to create an environment.

There's many, many ways to write a song. But generally, sitting down at a table and writing is not one of them.

You're just playing, playing, playing, and then an image or something will come into your mind, and basically you're just narrating it with music, letting it move along.

Every day you can write a song but some days there is just some magic in the air and something special about the catch; other days you write all day on a song line or idea.

What I've learned how to do as I've gotten older is to take all of the information that I have, and push it aside, and try to distill each song into an emotional theme. The hardest thing that I've ever had to learn how to do in playing music is use the sound of my instrument to create an emotional effect.

I think that a song, when it works, never mind a piece of long form music, even a song is something that speaks to itself but has a language all of its own, ideally.

A composer knows that music is written by human beings for human beings and that music is a continuation of life, not something separated from it.

Even if I'm writing music, it's with a lyric in mind, to communicate some kind of feeling.

I think people hire me for the slightly weird angle that I bring. Part of the trick is keeping it sort of simple; you have to give the impression of not that much music playing when there's really a lot.

For me, making music just starts with a simple melody, and lyrics will come sometime after that.