Brian Ferneyhough
Brian Ferneyhough
Brian John Peter Ferneyhoughis an English composer, who has resided in California, United States since 1987. His work characterized by highly complex notation and the extensive use of irregular nested rhythmic tuplets, Ferneyhough is typically considered to be the central figure of the New Complexity movement. 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...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionComposer
Date of Birth16 January 1943
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.
Naturally enough, I couldn't have foreseen the vast sea change which has come upon that scene as a result of German reunification and associated events.
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.
This was possible only by dint of extended periods of frequently quite painful reflection and digestion.
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.
In any case, the fewer boundaries that exist hindering free movement between all forms of articulate human cognition, the better.
In my own recent String Trio I attempt to superimpose two quite different sets of formal strategies, both of which, ultimately, refer back to historical precedent.
By reason of weird translation, many such sets of instructions read like poems anyhow.
It is still true that it is easier to compose a poem in the form of a manual for adjusting a VCR than it is to write a piece using just tuning as a symphony.
So: we're all tired. Now what? Manuscripts written in Club Med?
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.
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.
Sometimes one can be so closely involved with things that the larger context is lost to view.