Daily Inspiration Quote by Brian Ferneyhough

Ferneyhough is slyly pointing to a happy accident at the heart of “new music” labor: the more rigorously you try to specify sound, the more language betrays you into art. “Weird translation” isn’t just about going from German to English or notation to rehearsal directions; it’s the whole relay race from idea to score, from score to performer’s body, from performer to air. Each handoff introduces noise, and that noise starts to resemble poetry - compressed, suggestive, full of gaps you can feel but not quite close.

Coming from a composer famous for dense, hyper-detailed scores, the line has a double edge. On one level, it’s a wink at the unintentionally lyrical tone of technical directives when they’re filtered through international ensembles, rushed rehearsals, and jargon that doesn’t travel cleanly. On another, it’s a quiet defense of complexity: if instructions become poem-like, that’s not necessarily failure. It’s evidence that music-making can’t be reduced to a user manual without smuggling in ambiguity.

The subtext is anti-managerial. The contemporary world loves protocols: clarity, optimization, “best practices.” Ferneyhough suggests the opposite: that precision breeds its own kind of estrangement, and estrangement is fertile. In his aesthetic universe, the performer isn’t a compliant technician executing orders; they’re an interpreter navigating a text whose very awkwardness generates meaning. The “poems” here are not decorative. They’re the proof that even the strictest control systems end up human, and that’s where the music lives.