Steven Stucky Quotes
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I have a tendency to postpone starting a piece until it's kicked around in my head a little bit.
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One kind of artist is always striving to annihilate the past, to make the world anew in each new work, and so to triumph over the dead weight of routine. I am the other kind... who only sees his way forward by standing on the shoulders of those who have already cleared the path ahead.
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The only way for me to compose is intensively. To pick at it over a long period doesn't seem to work.
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It's not possible to build a piece that stands successfully without talking about its shape. But if you talk too much, you lead people away from the music itself.
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I don't think music teaches about mundane, everyday life. It teaches us what it is to be a human being.
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We all need strategies for facing unknown repertory.
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I find composition difficult. I never thought of myself as someone who can crank it out. I can't crank it out - I have to dig it out the hard way. In some sense, you become more confident in your technical apparatus, but it becomes harder to do something you haven't done already.
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The general direction seems to be becoming fairly clear to me, but every new piece is a small adventure.
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I'm trying to do the exact thing Verdi or Mendelssohn did - open up that spiritual space where we can all be fully ourselves.
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I want to know exactly how the first few measures are going to go, and the rough shape of a movement or the whole piece and its essential character.