"My own position is, that it is largely up to the work itself to suggest the nature of these referential points without dimensions in and through the processes by which the distance between them is maintained"
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Ferneyhough is staking out a kind of hard-line autonomy: meaning doesn’t arrive as a preloaded program you decode, it’s generated by the piece’s internal mechanics as you move through it. The deliberately abstract phrasing is part of the point. “Referential points without dimensions” sounds like coordinates in a score that can’t be reduced to melody, harmony, or a neat narrative. They’re markers you feel rather than measure - perceptual events, structural pivots, densities, timbral shifts - and the work “suggests” them only by forcing you to track relationships in real time.
The crucial word is “distance,” and the even more crucial claim is that the distance is “maintained” by process. That’s Ferneyhough’s aesthetic in miniature: complexity not as decorative difficulty, but as a system that keeps elements from collapsing into simple equivalences. If two ideas ever become too easily comparable - if the listener can say, “Ah, that equals this” - the music has surrendered its tension. His compositional procedures (layered rhythms, extreme notation, unstable textures) operate like safeguards against premature comprehension.
Context matters: as a New Complexity figure, Ferneyhough is reacting against the comforting legibility of postwar orthodoxies (serialism’s grids, minimalism’s glow). The subtext is a defense of opacity as an ethical stance. He’s not asking you to stop searching for reference; he’s insisting the references must be earned, locally, through attention. The work doesn’t communicate by pointing outward to a stable map; it builds a temporary map while you’re inside it, then refuses to let you keep it as a souvenir.
The crucial word is “distance,” and the even more crucial claim is that the distance is “maintained” by process. That’s Ferneyhough’s aesthetic in miniature: complexity not as decorative difficulty, but as a system that keeps elements from collapsing into simple equivalences. If two ideas ever become too easily comparable - if the listener can say, “Ah, that equals this” - the music has surrendered its tension. His compositional procedures (layered rhythms, extreme notation, unstable textures) operate like safeguards against premature comprehension.
Context matters: as a New Complexity figure, Ferneyhough is reacting against the comforting legibility of postwar orthodoxies (serialism’s grids, minimalism’s glow). The subtext is a defense of opacity as an ethical stance. He’s not asking you to stop searching for reference; he’s insisting the references must be earned, locally, through attention. The work doesn’t communicate by pointing outward to a stable map; it builds a temporary map while you’re inside it, then refuses to let you keep it as a souvenir.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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