Brian Ferneyhough

“If nothing is at risk, nothing is established.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“Why, in such a case, should the performer essay any sort of considered approach at all?”

“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.'”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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 more than just one more object to the mounting clutter, this is the specific point, I think, where this must be assured.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”