Brian Ferneyhough Quotes

37 quotes in 677 categories

• Hence my obstinate emphasis on stylistic continuity from work to work rather than specific sibling relationships between the individual work and other members of its…
• If the work of art is to continue pursuing the vision of both being in and of the world but nevertheless in some fashion being…
• What makes a specific quality or quantity of innovation retain its intense newness over the years?
• If nothing is at risk, nothing is established.
• 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…
• In my model, important interference phenomena arise when individual strata come into contact. These chaotic fluctuations are, I suppose, what my music is really about.
• 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…
• 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…
• Sometimes one can be so closely involved with things that the larger context is lost to view.
• Actually, most things I say in public lead more or less directly to my own compositional practice, so I should be careful about generalizing lest…
• 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.
• As a necessary prerequisite to the creation of new forms of expression one might, I suppose, argue that current sensibilities respond uniquely to the notion…
• 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…
• In my own recent String Trio I attempt to superimpose two quite different sets of formal strategies, both of which, ultimately, refer back to historical…
• In any case, the fewer boundaries that exist hindering free movement between all forms of articulate human cognition, the better.
• 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…
• It is still true that it is easier to compose a poem in the form of a manual for adjusting a VCR than it is…
• This was possible only by dint of extended periods of frequently quite painful reflection and digestion.
• So: we're all tired. Now what? Manuscripts written in Club Med?
• 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…

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