Words matter. These are the best Brian Ferneyhough Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Why, in such a case, should the performer essay any sort of considered approach at all?
My own position is, that it is largely up to the work itself to suggest the nature of these referential points without dimensions in and through the processes by which the distance between them is maintained.
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.
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.
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.
By reason of weird translation, many such sets of instructions read like poems anyhow.
If nothing is at risk, nothing is established.
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.
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 of exhaustion as exhaustion, although that does de facto seem rather limiting.
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.
Sometimes one can be so closely involved with things that the larger context is lost to view.
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.
So: we’re all tired. Now what? Manuscripts written in Club Med?
What makes a specific quality or quantity of innovation retain its intense newness over the years?
In any case, the fewer boundaries that exist hindering free movement between all forms of articulate human cognition, the better.
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 stylistic ‘family’ in the world outside.
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.
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.’
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.
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.
I am certainly not arguing for the de facto autonomy of the individual work, even though there is much to be said for making the attempt to see it in that light as one facet of the reception process.
