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"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."
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"Photograph: a picture painted by the sun without instruction in art."
"The capacity to be puzzled is the premise of all creation, be it in art or in science."
"I see my life in terms of music."
"Logic: The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding."
"It is impossible to give a clear account of the world, but art can teach us to reproduce it-just as the world reproduces itself in the course of its eternal gyrations. The primordial sea indefatigably repeats the same words and casts up the same astonished beings on the same sea-shore."
"Few artists thrive in solitude and nothing is more stimulating than the conflict of minds with similar interests."
"The crushed teapot in the rubbish of the bulldozed house will sing in your ears forever."
Explore more quotes by Brian Ferneyhough
"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."
"Other composers have taken this particular technique much further than I in the meantime, with the result that the Law of Diminishing Returns has begun to apply."
"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.'"
"This was possible only by dint of extended periods of frequently quite painful reflection and digestion."
"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."
"Composers dialogue - and obsessively, bitterly argue - with other composers, often over the span of several centuries."
"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."
"I don't 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."
"What makes a specific quality or quantity of innovation retain its intense newness over the years?"
"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."
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