Brian Ferneyhough Quotes

• If nothing is at risk, nothing is established.

  Brian Ferneyhough

  Topics in Risk

• I’m perplexed, though, by your application of the term ‘negative’ to my figural imagery.

  Brian Ferneyhough

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Applications

• 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.

  Brian Ferneyhough

  Topics in Youth

  Tags in Involved

• 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.

  Brian Ferneyhough

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Implication

• 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.’

  Brian Ferneyhough

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Compose, Structure

• 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.

  Brian Ferneyhough

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Destructive

• 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.

  Brian Ferneyhough

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Arguing, Certainly

• 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.

  Brian Ferneyhough

  Topics in Work

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

  Brian Ferneyhough

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Composer

• 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.

  Brian Ferneyhough

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Commitment

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

  Brian Ferneyhough

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Reason, Translation

• 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.

  Brian Ferneyhough

  Topics in Creation

• 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.

  Brian Ferneyhough

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Public, Things

Brian Ferneyhough (33)

Birth:	16th January, 1943
Nationality:	British
Profession:	Composer, Professor

About

Brian Ferneyhough was born in Coventry, England. He is an English composer, who has resided in California, United States since 1987.  Ferneyhough taught composition at the Hochschule für Musik Freiburg and the University of California at San Diego, and currently, Stanford University, and is a regular lecturer in the summer courses at Darmstädter Ferienkurse. Ferneyhough was awarded the Mendelssohn Scholarship in 1968 and moved to mainland Europe to study with Ton de Leeuw in Amsterdam, and later with Klaus Huber in Basel. For the 2007–08 academic year, he was Visiting Professor at the Harvard University Department of Music. In 2007, Ferneyhough received the Ernst von Siemens Music Prize for lifetime achievement.

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