Hence my obstinate emphasis on stylistic continuity from…

In my model, important interference phenomena arise when individual strata come into contact. These chaotic fluctuations are, I suppose, what my music is really…

— Brian Ferneyhough

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

— Brian Ferneyhough

Certainly being in California has encouraged a sustained commitment to rethinking the nature, purposes, and relevance of the contemporary arts, specifically music, for a…

— Brian Ferneyhough

There would seem to be a limit, even for an art preoccupied with boundaries and transgressions, beyond which a work reaches its breaking point…

— Brian Ferneyhough

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

— Brian Ferneyhough

In my own recent String Trio I attempt to superimpose two quite different sets of formal strategies, both of which, ultimately, refer back to…

— Brian Ferneyhough

I don't see 'lines of force' as being destructive, except to the extent that they are exclusively traceable through observance of the path of…

— Brian Ferneyhough

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

— Brian Ferneyhough

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

— Brian Ferneyhough

If nothing is at risk, nothing is established.

— Brian Ferneyhough

I would not say that I was, these days, a 'student' of philosophy, although in my youth I was quite deeply involved with certain…

— Brian Ferneyhough

The Western musical canon came about not merely by accumulation, but by opposition and subversion, both to the ruling powers on whom composers depended…

— Brian Ferneyhough

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

— Brian Ferneyhough

If the work of art is to continue pursuing the vision of both being in and of the world but nevertheless in some fashion…

— Brian Ferneyhough

I frequently compose out the entire metric structure of a piece in modified cyclic form, where each cyclic revolution undergoes some form of 'variation'…

— Brian Ferneyhough