"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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A composer best known for music that seems to court the edge of the playable is, here, poking at a very particular late-20th-century reflex: turning fatigue into aesthetic virtue. Ferneyhough’s syntax performs the point. The line is a maze of hedges ("one might", "I suppose"), qualification, and self-interruption, as if the act of naming "exhaustion" risks collapsing into the very dead-end he’s diagnosing. It’s a sly meta-gesture: exhaustion isn’t only the topic, it’s embedded in the sentence’s overdetermined, breathless architecture.
The intent feels double. On one level, he’s granting a plausible argument: maybe new artistic languages require a culture primed to hear the worn-outness of old ones. Modernism and its aftermath taught audiences to recognize breakdown, friction, and overload as meaningful signals, not failures. But the subtext is a warning shot at a fashionable pessimism, the idea that art’s next move must be a commentary on its own depletion. To "respond uniquely to exhaustion as exhaustion" is to fetishize limits, to make a cul-de-sac into a destination.
Context matters: Ferneyhough emerges from postwar European modernism and the New Complexity, where density and difficulty aren’t macho barriers so much as a critique of easy consumption and inherited grammar. He’s not denying constraint; he’s skeptical of mistaking constraint for an endgame. The acid little phrase "de facto seem rather limiting" undercuts the romanticism of cultural burnout. If exhaustion is the prerequisite, you’ve already accepted a small horizon. His better provocation is that new forms don’t have to mourn the old ones; they can refuse the script that says we’re always running out.
The intent feels double. On one level, he’s granting a plausible argument: maybe new artistic languages require a culture primed to hear the worn-outness of old ones. Modernism and its aftermath taught audiences to recognize breakdown, friction, and overload as meaningful signals, not failures. But the subtext is a warning shot at a fashionable pessimism, the idea that art’s next move must be a commentary on its own depletion. To "respond uniquely to exhaustion as exhaustion" is to fetishize limits, to make a cul-de-sac into a destination.
Context matters: Ferneyhough emerges from postwar European modernism and the New Complexity, where density and difficulty aren’t macho barriers so much as a critique of easy consumption and inherited grammar. He’s not denying constraint; he’s skeptical of mistaking constraint for an endgame. The acid little phrase "de facto seem rather limiting" undercuts the romanticism of cultural burnout. If exhaustion is the prerequisite, you’ve already accepted a small horizon. His better provocation is that new forms don’t have to mourn the old ones; they can refuse the script that says we’re always running out.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
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