Brian Ferneyhough's Quotes

My own position is, that it is largely up to the work itself to suggest the nature of these referential points without dimensions in and through the processes by which the distance between them is maintained.

Naturally enough, I couldn't have foreseen the vast sea change which has come upon that scene as a result of German reunification and associated events.

Other composers have taken this particular technique much further than I in the meantime, with the result that the Law of Diminishing Returns has begun to apply.

Questioning the nature and implications of liminal instances necessarily involves failure, if only in the specifically technical sense of entering spaces where prevailing criteria of success scarcely apply.

The idea of 'machine assemblage' is, especially, very alien to my sensibility, since it suggests a relative indifference of the strata to one another during the process of construction.

The Western musical canon came about not merely by accumulation, but by opposition and subversion, both to the ruling powers on whom composers depended for their livelihoods and to other musics.

There would seem to be a limit, even for an art preoccupied with boundaries and transgressions, beyond which a work reaches its breaking point and becomes an actual failure, a mere experimentation.

When I speak of 'cycles,' I am referring to lengthy intervals of relative homogeneity, if not in the resolving of problems, than at least with respect to the consistency of their capacity to productively irritate.

With respect to the respective French and German traditions you are no doubt correct, although I am reluctant to see individual achievement reduced to archetypes.

Sometimes one can be so closely involved with things that the larger context is lost to view.

When I left Europe in 1987 I did so with the thought that my relevance as a composition teacher would benefit from a certain cool distance to certain tendencies I had been observing for several years with increasing disquiet.

By reason of weird translation, many such sets of instructions read like poems anyhow.

Composers dialogue - and obsessively, bitterly argue - with other composers, often over the span of several centuries.

I'm perplexed, though, by your application of the term 'negative' to my figural imagery.

If nothing is at risk, nothing is established.

In any case, the fewer boundaries that exist hindering free movement between all forms of articulate human cognition, the better.

So: we're all tired. Now what? Manuscripts written in Club Med?

The past nine years in San Diego have represented such a period of questioning.

This was possible only by dint of extended periods of frequently quite painful reflection and digestion.

What makes a specific quality or quantity of innovation retain its intense newness over the years?