Daily Inspiration Quote by Brian Ferneyhough

Ferneyhough’s dry shrug lands like a fermata over a collapsing barline: a private ritual of “personal accounting” made quaint by forces too large to tally. Coming from a composer synonymous with maximal complexity, the line reads less like surrender than a clear-eyed admission that systems outgrow their makers. “Scope and implications” is bureaucratic language, but in his mouth it becomes an aesthetic diagnosis: the consequences of certain cultural, institutional, and technological currents can’t be reconciled with the old tools of self-justification.

The phrase “accounting ritual” is doing sly work. It suggests a repetitive, almost superstitious practice of keeping the self coherent - explaining the choices, measuring the output, balancing the artistic books. That he calls it “obsolete” hints at a double displacement: not only has the world shifted, but the very idea that a composer can narrate his position with tidy clarity has become suspect. Ferneyhough’s music often demands more than listeners (and performers) think they’ve signed up for; this sentence mirrors that tension, acknowledging that the usual narratives of intention, reception, and legacy can’t keep pace with the real engines shaping contemporary art.

Then the kicker: “That’s how things sometimes go.” It’s anti-mythmaking, refusing both melodrama and martyrdom. The subtext is a quiet critique of the demand that artists constantly audit themselves for relevance, ethics, or accessibility. He doesn’t grandstand against those pressures; he notes, with understated irony, that history has already rewritten the ledger.