Brian Ferneyhough

“The score is not a blueprint for a performance; it's a field of possibilities.”

“For me, art is a mode of thought, a way of shaping experience and giving it a form that is both personal and universal.”

“If a piece of music is comprehended in its entirety on a first hearing, it has probably not said very much.”

“I see composition as a way of mapping the mind's processes.”

“Art must be a matter of risk, of going to the edge of what is known and communicable.”

“The act of listening is as creative and as demanding as the act of composing or performing.”

“I have always been interested in the idea of the labyrinth as a metaphor for musical form.”

“Every work is a ruin of a vaster, unachievable project.”

“My music is an attempt to come to terms with the multiplicity of the world, not to reduce it.”

“The composer is a privileged spectator of the terrible battle between the inherited language and the unruly desires of the imagination.”

“Difficulty is not a goal in itself, but a consequence of the density of the musical argument.”

“I don't think of music as a language in the sense of a system of fixed signs, but as a dynamic process of sense-making.”