Daily Inspiration Quote by Brian Ferneyhough

Ferneyhough is doing that very Ferneyhough thing: sounding almost modest while describing an aesthetic high-wire act. “In my own recent String Trio” is a disarming opener, a composer pointing to a single work as evidence, not issuing a manifesto. Then comes the real tell: “attempt.” It’s a small word that signals a larger philosophy in the New Complexity orbit - composition as a problem set, a laboratory, a deliberate courting of friction rather than a smooth delivery of “expression.”

The phrase “superimpose two quite different sets of formal strategies” frames form less as an inherited container than as an active layering of systems. Superimpose implies simultaneity: competing logics running at once, creating a surface that can feel overdetermined, even resistant. That resistance is part of the point. In late-20th-century modernism’s aftershocks, the scandal wasn’t complexity itself; it was insisting that coherence could be produced without simplifying the experience for listeners or performers.

Then he slips in the quiet provocation: “both of which, ultimately, refer back to historical precedent.” This isn’t the comfy “tradition matters” of neoclassicism. It’s closer to a legal argument: even the most labyrinthine contemporary form can cite its sources. The subtext is defensive and aggressive at once - a rebuttal to the charge of sterile novelty, and a reminder that “history” isn’t a style you either obey or reject. It’s a toolkit you can splice, collide, and re-weaponize.