"Thus, we find the similarity of expression to be, quite clearly, 'totally lacking.' The (two songs) are so utterly dissimilar that reasonable minds could not differ as to a lack of substantial similarity between them".
It is the early works, though, that have proved so influential, not only to composers who studied with him, utterly dissimilar figures such as Gerald Barry and Wolfgang Rihm, but those of a slightly older generation like Harrison Birtwistle, for whom Stockhausen's music offered a genuinely new way forward in the late 1950s.
And we chose summings-up by songwriting prodigies who each redefined the term "popular music," though in utterly dissimilar ways.
Geisel did not enter this sweepstakes himself, but he commented sympathetically on the utterly dissimilar, and universally unnaturalistic, results.
It began life in 1965 as Neil Simon's Broadway hit about the domestic discord between two divorced yet utterly dissimilar roommates, the finicky neat freak Felix Unger and the sloppy, beer-swilling Oscar Madison.
Ashton's version has a pas de deux for the fairy monarchs Oberon and Titania that's at least as marvelous, utterly dissimilar, and with tensions and releases that express the conflicts and resolutions of not only this couple but also of the drama's mortal lovers too.
But he also knows that they're not deterministic in the lives of individuals, that the historical stakes and the intimate ones, the long-term scope of ideas and the immediate desires that drive people, are utterly dissimilar, askew, even contradictory.
Mason calls it "a beautifully unified work on utterly dissimilar poems, held together by the most superficial but most effective, and therefore most suitable symphonic method.
Not to dissimilar to Taarabt.
"It's not dissimilar to soccer in this country".
