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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

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Brian Ferneyhough
Age: 81
Born: 1943
Born: January 16
Composer
Pedagogue
Coventry
England
UK
Since
Sensibility
Idea
Construction
Process
Aliens
Another
Indifference
Ideas
Relative
Strata
Machine
Assemblage
Machines
Suggests
Especially
Alien

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The past nine years in San Diego have represented such a period of questioning.
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Composers dialogue - and obsessively, bitterly argue - with other composers, often over the span of several centuries.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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If the work of art is to continue pursuing the vision of both being in and of the world but nevertheless in some fashion being more than just one more object to the mounting clutter, this is the specific point, I think, where this must be assured.
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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.
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This was possible only by dint of extended periods of frequently quite painful reflection and digestion.
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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.
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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.
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