Art & Creativity Quote by Brian Ferneyhough

Ferneyhough’s sentence performs the very problem it worries over: art drowning in its own abundance. The phrasing is deliberately overbuilt, full of qualifying clauses that pile up like the “mounting clutter” he names. That’s not a bug; it’s a composer’s mind letting you hear the pressure of contemporary culture, where every new piece enters a room already jammed with objects, opinions, content, noise. The work has to be “in and of the world” because it can’t pretend to purity, timelessness, or insulation from politics, markets, institutions, and listening habits. Yet it also has to be “more than” the world’s inventory, not merely another commodity or artifact filed into the archive.

The subtext is a defense of difficulty, or at least of insistence. Ferneyhough, often linked to the “New Complexity,” writes music that refuses the easy glide of consumption. Here he’s staking out a criterion: the artwork must secure a kind of surplus value that isn’t financial and isn’t decorative. “This is the specific point” reads like a private memo turned public, the moment where aesthetics becomes ethics: what obligation does a composer have when novelty is cheap and attention is scarce?

Contextually, this is postwar modernism talking to late-capitalist saturation. Museums, concert halls, recordings, and now endless streams create a paradox: more access, less impact. Ferneyhough’s line argues that the task isn’t just to make another thing, but to justify making at all by ensuring the work presses against the conditions that would reduce it to clutter.