Daily Inspiration Quote by Brian Ferneyhough

Ferneyhough’s sentence performs a tightrope act that mirrors his music: dense, self-aware, allergic to easy consumption. He’s refusing two lazy extremes at once. On one side is the old modernist fantasy that a piece of art is a sealed object, self-sufficient, immune to history, institutions, and listeners. On the other is the equally flattening idea that meaning is nothing but context and reception, that the “work itself” is a mirage. His move is to deny “de facto autonomy” while still defending the usefulness of trying it on, temporarily, as a listening strategy.

That hedged posture is the real tell. “Certainly not arguing” signals a composer who knows the academic landmines: post-structuralism, institutional critique, the death of the author, all the 20th-century arguments that turned “the work” into a contested category. Yet he won’t surrender the work to sociology. The subtext is pragmatic: autonomy isn’t a metaphysical truth; it’s an interpretive tool. Treating a piece as if it were autonomous can sharpen attention to internal logic, craft, and constraint - especially in Ferneyhough’s world, where complexity isn’t decorative but procedural.

The phrase “one facet of the reception process” is the soft power move. He relocates autonomy from ontology to methodology. Autonomy becomes a mode of listening, not a claim about what art is. It’s a way to keep the score from being swallowed whole by biography, scene politics, or the listener’s instant hot-take economy - while still admitting that those forces are always in the room.