Science & Tech Quote by Brian Ferneyhough

Ferneyhough is bristling at a whole aesthetic of making: the fantasy that you can bolt music together like a modular device and call the result “constructed.” “Machine assemblage” isn’t just a metaphor he dislikes; it’s a warning label. It implies parts that don’t care about each other, layers stacked with the emotional neutrality of a factory line. For a composer whose work is famous for its density and interdependence, that indifference is basically a moral failure disguised as technique.

The key word is “strata.” He’s talking about musical layers (rhythmic grids, timbral planes, registral bands, notational systems) and insisting they’re not interchangeable components. In Ferneyhough’s world, one layer can’t be pasted onto another without consequences; the friction is the point. His music often stages a kind of high-pressure ecology where every parameter disturbs every other, and the listener feels the instability: intention struggling with overflow, control haunted by excess.

There’s also a quiet polemic here against certain mid-century modernist clichés: the postwar romance with systems, processes, and quasi-industrial objectivity. Calling something an assemblage flatters the composer as engineer and the piece as product. Ferneyhough pushes back with “sensibility,” a word that re-centers subjectivity without getting sentimental. He’s not rejecting craft or complexity; he’s rejecting the idea that complexity can be automated into meaning.

Underneath the complaint is a demand: composition should be an arena of mutual implication, where layers are accountable to one another, not just aligned. That’s why the music feels so alive - not assembled, but negotiated under stress.