Daily Inspiration Quote by Brian Ferneyhough

“Naturally enough” is Ferneyhough’s little blade of self-protection: a casual phrase that preempts blame while admitting, almost with a shrug, that history has outpaced whatever artistic or institutional assumptions once felt stable. He’s not dramatizing reunification so much as marking the mismatch between a composer’s long timelines and politics’ sudden accelerations. In new music, careers are built on slow accretions of taste, funding, venues, and networks. Reunification didn’t just redraw maps; it rewired who pays, who programs, who gets heard, and which aesthetic lineages are treated as “central” versus “provincial.”

The phrase “vast sea change” borrows from Shakespeare, which gives the sentence an oddly literary grandeur, then Ferneyhough undercuts it with the bureaucratic chill of “associated events.” That tonal swerve matters: it signals a composer speaking from inside cultural machinery, aware that the most consequential forces arrive packaged as policy, restructuring, and “events” that sound neutral until they dismantle entire ecosystems. It’s also an indirect admission of contingency. Ferneyhough’s music is famous for its meticulous complexity, the fantasy of total control on the page; the world he’s describing is the opposite, a cultural scene subject to abrupt mergers, absorptions, and reputational resets.

Contextually, this is a post-1989/1990 reckoning with the German-speaking avant-garde’s infrastructure - festivals, radio orchestras, academies, and East/West institutional hierarchies. The subtext isn’t nostalgia so much as realism: artistic identity may feel self-authored, but the “scene” is always a political artifact, and it can be remade overnight.