Daily Inspiration Quote by Brian Ferneyhough

The Western canon doesn’t get to pose as a neutral museum collection once you accept Ferneyhough’s premise: it was engineered in conflict. Coming from a composer synonymous with “New Complexity,” this isn’t just a historical footnote; it’s a defense of difficulty, rupture, and friction as the canon’s real engine. The line quietly attacks the comforting story that great works simply rose to the top on merit. Instead, it frames canonical status as a byproduct of strategic dissent carried out under patronage - composers writing with one hand while biting the one that fed them with the other.

The shrewdness is in the double target. First, “ruling powers”: church, court, state, later bourgeois institutions. Ferneyhough reminds you that dependence doesn’t equal obedience. A requiem, a mass, an opera commission can smuggle in destabilizing choices: harmonic shocks, formal insolence, text setting that changes what words seem to mean. Second, “other musics”: the canon defines itself not only against authority but against rivals, vernacular traditions, imported sounds, and the “low” or “popular” that threatens its prestige. Canon-making becomes boundary-making.

Subtext: if opposition is foundational, then contemporary composers aren’t betraying tradition by resisting taste, institutions, or market logic; they’re reenacting tradition’s core method. Ferneyhough is also hinting at a politics of listening: what we call “Western music” is partly an archive of victories, where subversions survived and alternatives were sidelined.