Brian Ferneyhough Quotations

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

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

Certainly being in California has encouraged a sustained commitment to rethinking the nature, purposes, and relevance of the contemporary arts, specifically music, for a society which by and large seems to manage quite well without them.

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.

I frequently compose out the entire metric structure of a piece in modified cyclic form, where each cyclic revolution undergoes some form of 'variation' much as if measure lengths were concrete musical 'material.'

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 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.

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.

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.

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.