Art & Creativity Quote by Brian Ferneyhough

There’s a wry sting in Ferneyhough’s sentence: California, land of invention and entertainment, becomes the place that sharpens his suspicion that serious contemporary music is optional to modern life. The line is built like a polite academic remark, then quietly detonates at the end. “Encouraged a sustained commitment” sounds like committee language; “for a society which… seems to manage quite well without them” is the dry punchline. He’s not lamenting obscurity in a romantic way. He’s describing a cultural ecosystem where art music is no longer assumed to be a public necessity, and where its marginality forces a ruthless audit of purpose.

The intent isn’t self-pity so much as a challenge to the composer’s job description. If society “manages” without contemporary music, then claims about its moral uplift or civic importance won’t survive on tradition alone. Ferneyhough’s subtext is: fine, let’s stop pretending we’re central. What, then, can this music do that other forms can’t? That question fits his broader aesthetic reputation: complexity not as ornament, but as a deliberate refusal of background-function art in an attention economy.

California matters because it’s both a real geography (Ferneyhough taught for years at UC San Diego) and a symbol of late-capitalist cultural abundance: endless media, lifestyle as identity, creativity as content. In that landscape, “relevance” becomes suspect, even coercive; the quote carries a composer’s anxiety that chasing relevance is how you end up writing for the algorithm. The sly pessimism is also a kind of freedom: if no one needs this music, it can insist on being something other than necessary.