I do not choose my listeners

“I do not choose my listeners. What I mean is, I never write for my listeners. I think about my audience, but I am not writing for them. I have something to tell them, but the audience must also put a certain effort into it. But I never wrote for an audience and never will write for because you have to give the listener something and he has to make an effort in order to understand certain things. If I were thinking of my audience and one likes this, one likes that, one likes another thing, I would never know what to write. Let every listener choose that which interests him. I have nothing against one person liking Mozart or Shostakovich or Leonard Bernstein, but doesn’t like Górecki. That’s fine with me. I, too, like certain things.”

– Henryk Górecki, Polish composer

Source: Duffie, Bruce. “Composer Henryk-Mikolaj Górecki: A conversation with Bruce Duffie“. bruceduffie.com, April 1994. Retrieved December 22, 2007.

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