Brian Ferneyhough Quotes
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.
In any case, the fewer boundaries that exist hindering free movement between all forms of articulate human cognition, the better.
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.
What makes a specific quality or quantity of innovation retain its intense newness over the years?
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.
I suppose that the scope and implications of such forces have rendered my personal accounting ritual pretty much obsolete. That's how things sometimes go.
Composers dialogue - and obsessively, bitterly argue - with other composers, often over the span of several centuries.
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.
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 to write a piece using just tuning as a symphony.
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.
I dont see lines of force as being destructive, except to the extent that they are exclusively traceable through observance of the path of distorted material left in their wake.
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 precedent.
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 they come back to haunt me.
Sometimes one can be so closely involved with things that the larger context is lost to view.
This was possible only by dint of extended periods of frequently quite painful reflection and digestion.
I would not say that I was, these days, a 'student' of philosophy, although in my youth I was quite deeply involved with certain aspects of the British pragmatists.
By reason of weird translation, many such sets of instructions read like poems anyhow.
I don't like listening to my music, not even new pieces. Generally, they sound pretty much like I expected them to sound, so it's what I wanted, and that's it.
