ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to bring Gilles Deleuze and Theodor Adorno work into dialogue by examining their respective influences on the aesthetics and music of Brian Ferneyhough, as expressed in his Collected Writings. It aims to attempt to articulate what is, essentially, a phenomenology of Ferneyhough's music: there is physicality about his material that is often considered secondary, in the extant literature on the composer, to his famously abstract, parametric techniques. The chapter considers some essential differences between Adorno and Deleuze in order to draws out certain 'Deleuzian' aspects of Ferneyhough's thought and practice. Ferneyhough's career-long concern to engender a 'personal style' of composition that preserves the modernist vision of progress whilst accepting the absence of a grand narrative and its associated codes of meaning, hence Paul Griffiths' appellative: 'postmodern modernist'. For Adorno and Ferneyhough, musical material, mastered through compositional technique, preserves the subjective identity, though in mediated form: music is 'another aware subject'.
