"It is still true that it is easier to compose a poem in the form of a manual for adjusting a VCR than it is to write a piece using just tuning as a symphony"
About this Quote
Ferneyhough’s jab lands because it flips the usual complaint about “difficult” new music on its head. The joke isn’t that contemporary composition has become mechanical; it’s that the audience’s idea of what counts as “natural” musical sense is already highly engineered. A VCR manual is the archetype of dead, procedural language: step-by-step, error-proof, designed to eliminate interpretation. By claiming it’s easier to write a poem in that form than to build a symphony out of “just tuning” (read: pure tuning systems, “natural” intervals, acoustic purity), he’s mocking the fantasy that stripping music down to supposedly fundamental materials makes expression simpler.
The subtext is a defense of complexity as honesty. Ferneyhough, a central figure in the so-called New Complexity movement, is often caricatured as writing scores so dense they seem like bureaucratic documents. He parries that stereotype by arguing the opposite: the procedural look of complexity can be an aesthetic mask, while the real challenge lies in making limited materials generate large-scale meaning. A manual can be assembled from conventions; a tuning-based symphony has to create drama, contrast, and narrative without leaning on the familiar grammar of functional harmony or orchestral rhetoric.
Context matters: late-20th-century composition is haunted by two competing temptations - the hyper-specified score (control, information, density) and the back-to-basics impulse (purity, minimal means, “nature”). Ferneyhough needles both camps, implying that neither guarantees substance. Difficulty can be rote. Simplicity can be brutal. The line’s bite is that it refuses the comforting moral that less is more; sometimes less is just less to hide behind.
The subtext is a defense of complexity as honesty. Ferneyhough, a central figure in the so-called New Complexity movement, is often caricatured as writing scores so dense they seem like bureaucratic documents. He parries that stereotype by arguing the opposite: the procedural look of complexity can be an aesthetic mask, while the real challenge lies in making limited materials generate large-scale meaning. A manual can be assembled from conventions; a tuning-based symphony has to create drama, contrast, and narrative without leaning on the familiar grammar of functional harmony or orchestral rhetoric.
Context matters: late-20th-century composition is haunted by two competing temptations - the hyper-specified score (control, information, density) and the back-to-basics impulse (purity, minimal means, “nature”). Ferneyhough needles both camps, implying that neither guarantees substance. Difficulty can be rote. Simplicity can be brutal. The line’s bite is that it refuses the comforting moral that less is more; sometimes less is just less to hide behind.
Quote Details
| Topic | Poetry |
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