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
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.
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 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.'
If nothing is at risk, nothing is established.
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.
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.