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.
Brian Ferneyhough

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.
Brian Ferneyhough

So: we're all tired. Now what? Manuscripts written in Club Med?
Brian Ferneyhough

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

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.
Brian Ferneyhough

The past nine years in San Diego have represented such a period of questioning.
Brian Ferneyhough

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.
Brian Ferneyhough

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.
Brian Ferneyhough

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

What makes a specific quality or quantity of innovation retain its intense newness over the years?
Brian Ferneyhough

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.
Brian Ferneyhough

When I speak of "cycles," I am referring to lengthy intervals of relative homogeneity, if not in the resolving of problems, than at least with respect to the consistency of their capacity to productively irritate.
Brian Ferneyhough

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

With respect to the respective French and German traditions you are no doubt correct, although I am reluctant to see individual achievement reduced to archetypes.
Brian Ferneyhough