"In my model, important interference phenomena arise when individual strata come into contact. These chaotic fluctuations are, I suppose, what my music is really 'about.'"
About this Quote
Ferneyhough isn’t describing “texture” in the cozy, program-note sense. He’s pointing to collision as a compositional ethic: the moment where separate layers of musical behavior - rhythm, articulation, pitch trajectories, instrumental gesture - stop coexisting politely and start contaminating each other. “Strata” suggests geology, not melody: compressed histories, stacked systems, each with its own logic. The drama happens when those logics touch, producing interference patterns that aren’t decorative but structural.
The sly move is in “important” and “I suppose.” Ferneyhough is both insisting and half-disavowing. His reputation (and the “New Complexity” tag) primes listeners to hear difficulty as a kind of doctrinal severity, yet he frames his central claim in almost offhand language, as if the chaos were an empirical finding rather than an ideology. That understatement is doing work: it resists the usual demand that contemporary music justify itself as either expressive confession or technical stunt. The “about” in scare quotes sharpens the refusal. He knows the question: What does it mean? He answers by undermining the premise that meaning sits outside the mechanism.
Context matters: post-serial technique, hyper-notated performance demands, and a late-20th-century suspicion of seamless narratives. Interference becomes a metaphor for modern listening itself - attention split across competing streams, agency distributed between composer, performer, and the physical limits of execution. The “chaotic fluctuations” aren’t a failure of control; they’re the audible trace of too much structure pressed into the same space, like weather generated by intersecting fronts.
The sly move is in “important” and “I suppose.” Ferneyhough is both insisting and half-disavowing. His reputation (and the “New Complexity” tag) primes listeners to hear difficulty as a kind of doctrinal severity, yet he frames his central claim in almost offhand language, as if the chaos were an empirical finding rather than an ideology. That understatement is doing work: it resists the usual demand that contemporary music justify itself as either expressive confession or technical stunt. The “about” in scare quotes sharpens the refusal. He knows the question: What does it mean? He answers by undermining the premise that meaning sits outside the mechanism.
Context matters: post-serial technique, hyper-notated performance demands, and a late-20th-century suspicion of seamless narratives. Interference becomes a metaphor for modern listening itself - attention split across competing streams, agency distributed between composer, performer, and the physical limits of execution. The “chaotic fluctuations” aren’t a failure of control; they’re the audible trace of too much structure pressed into the same space, like weather generated by intersecting fronts.
Quote Details
| Topic | Music |
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