About Me
Brian Ferneyhough is composer of mostly orchestral, chamber, choral, vocal, and piano works that have been performed throughout the world. He received his formal musical training at the Birmingham School of Music from 1961-63 and studied composition with Sir Lennox Berkeley at the Royal Academy of Music in London in 1966-67.
Ferneyhough was awarded the Mendelssohn Scholarship in 1968 and moved to Europe to study with Ton de Leeuw in Amsterdam, and later with Klaus Huber in Basel. As of 1999, he is William H. Bonsall Professor in Music at Stanford University.His honors include the Mendelssohn Scholarship (1968), three prizes in the Gaudeamus competition (1968-70), an honorable mention in the competition of the Italian section of ISCM (1972), and a special prize from ISCM for the best work submitted in all categories (1974). He has also received a Heinrich-Strobel-Stiftung bursary from SWR (1974-75), a Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst award (1976-77) and the Koussevitzky Award (1978, for the best recorded contemporary work). He was given the title Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the government of France (1984) and was named an Associate of the Royal Academy of Music (1990). More recently, he served as a fellow of the Birmingham Conservatoire (1995) and the Royal Academy of Music (1998) and received the Royal Philharmonic Award for Chamber Music Composition (1996). In addition, he has been a member of the Akademie der Künste in Berlin since 1996.Ferneyhough became closely associated with the so-called New Complexity school of composition, characterised by its extension of the modernist tendency towards formalisation (particularly as in integral serialism). Ferneyhough's actual compositional approach, however, rejects serialism and other "generative" methods of composing; he prefers instead to use systems only to create material and formal constraints, while their realisation appears to be more spontaneous. Unlike many more formally-inclined composers, Ferneyhough often speaks of his music as being about creating energy and excitement rather than embodying an abstract schema.His scores make huge technical demands on performers -- sometimes, as in the case of Unity Capsule for solo flute, creating parts that are so detailed they are likely impossible to realise completely. Contrary to the widespread belief that Ferneyhough is merely attempting to tie down interpretative possibilities by stipulating everything with such precision, the purpose here is to give the performer creative freedom in deciding which aspects to focus on, which elements may be omitted and so on. As he acknowledges, numerous performers have refused to take his works into their repertoire because of the great commitment required to learn them and a perception that similar effects can be achieved through improvisation. The compositions have, however, attracted a number of advocates, among them the Arditti Quartet, the members of the Nieuw Ensemble, and EXAUDI Vocal Ensemble.One of his latest works, an opera, Shadowtime, with a libretto by Charles Bernstein, and based on the life of the German philosopher Walter Benjamin, was premiered in Munich on 25th May 2004, and recorded in 2005 for CD release in 2006.Ferneyhough was the recipient of the Ernst von Siemens Music Prize 2007 for lifetime achievement.
