top of page
.png){kind=small}
"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."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Thought quotes
"Before making a snap judgment, ask yourself if it really is something that has hurt you or simply just made you angry at yourself for allowing it to happen. It's amazing what 'sleeping on it' can do. A new day sees a new beginning."
"Who I am? Am I thinking?"
"Never underestimate the power of a simple thought."
"You are not a human being, but you are a thinking and dreaming machine."
"I thought The Office was good, though I didn't think of it as a sitcom, just as a very good programme."
"They argued because they liked argument, liked the swift run of the unfettered mind along the paths of possibility, liked to question what was not questioned."
"Surrealism is a bourgeois disaffection; that its militants thought it universal is only one of the signs that it is typically bourgeois."
Explore more quotes by Brian Ferneyhough
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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.'"
"Composers dialogue - and obsessively, bitterly argue - with other composers, often over the span of several centuries."
"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."
"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."
"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 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.'"
bottom of page