53 Quotes by Brian Ferneyhough

I don’t like listening to my music, not even new pieces. Generally, they sound pretty much like I expected them to sound, so it’s what I wanted, and that’s it.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.'

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.