Any ridiculously complex music like Kiyama and others is mostly written by a small group of charlatans one-upping each other, I think. It's like post-modern philosophy; if you strip away the extreme pretentiousness and try to analyze it, it's just gibberish.
While we're at the topic of pseudo-intellectualism, this is one of the most worthless rants I have ever read:
"As the program notes point out, this composition has to do with language. To what extent is music a language; to what extent can one treat music *like* a language without regard to how far it actually succeeds in fulfilling the linguistic norms that pertain in structuralist discourse? But, far more, this particular piece examines the degree to which, historically speaking, Sprachähntlichkeit -- the 'speech resemblance" which was one of the main models or ideologies of expression at the turn of the century -- remains a viable gestural or rhetorical vehicle for organizing and assessing music. All these things enter into my Fourth Quartet, and, if I assert that it has to do with the 'history' of only a limited tradition of the string quartet, of course it's the history of my reception of certain quartets -- in particular, Schoenberg's Second String Quartet -- which I feel is a work of exceptional interest by virtue of initially attempting to be a string quartet, and then absolutely failing to achieve that goal. I have a theory concerning what I call 'threshold works,' a category of compositions typified by what I understand to be a *surplus* of meaning, caused by their straddling the divide or fault line between one way of perceiving and another in a way somehow embodied in the actual texture. Parts of my Fourth Quartet are, in fact, quite narrative, and certainly the narrative of Schoenberg's Second String Quartet is that of the dissolution of the string quartet genre as such -- of the predominately discursive logic of the genre as defined, say, by Haydn through to late Beethoven. In a sense, the final Beethoven quartets are a paradigmatic example of this quality, and one can imagine that, at the time, it must have been difficult to imagine a continuation of that remarkable phenomenon of dis-balance between the imposition of the subjective self on Beethoven's part (representing, if you will, an exemplar of prevailing humanistic attitudes towards self-formation) and the various relatively stabilized conventional forms into which the quartet had congealed in the preceding decades. If we compare the early, middle, and late quartets, we can distinctly perceive this transformation taking place. it seemed to me, when beginning to think about my own quartet, that -- as with the concept of post-histoire which everyone has been talking about lately -- the logic of this linear progression from generally objectively viable forms of musical communication to subjectively authentic but communally no longer sustainable 'languages' (or, at the very least, stylized forms of intercommunion) that had reached such a decisive stage in the last works of Beethoven has, during the course of this century, led to what can only be termed a certain degree of subjectively imposed gratuitousness. In fact, though, if we consider Schoenberg's Second Quartet, we see that one *could* take a further step, precisely when the genre found itself in the grip of self-dissolution, that is, when the very problem itself is turned, inside-out, into its own solution. There is a sort of transcendence which comes about with the introduction of the voice immediately subsequent to the awesome breakdown of the scherzo second movement, where we witness the total automation, the sort of pataphysical, self-destructive logic of late tonal thinking in which the interwoven harmonic patterns typical of early Schoenberg are no longer capable of carrying the discourse for more than a handful of measures at a time, with the consequence that matters grind to a halt. The gears need oiling before the piece can move on. It is apparent right from the beginning of the third movement that Schoenberg has crossed his Rubicon, emblematized by the participation of the voice and supported by the intensely imagistic, almost religious fervor of the text. This Steigerung, this surplus of expressive energy serves to mobilize one last time (and to tremendous effect) the tradition fo Sprachähnlichkeit towards both the almost metaphysical investiture of language with a transmundane concept of communication and the total realization of the self at the instant of its eruptive radiation as expressive intelligence. All this fascinated me a great deal. In so far as one perceives, assesses and rethinks the nature of linear creation and dissolution of genre-like phenomena in a progressive and contiguous historical continuity (and one can only really envisage 'history' within the circumscribed domains of conventionalized genres) I imagine Schoenberg pushing the Beethoven closure one step further, and thus closing-off that specific option for our time. One of the conditions for the commission leading to my Fourth Quartet was that it should be performed as a sort of companian piece to the Schoenberg, in the same concert. For me, this was a daunting challenge, even though I had suggested the conjunction myself: one of the works I take as representing major turning-points of 20th century music was to be my touchstone, my constant point of reference. I am not suggesting a direct comparison of the two works, since I was by no means pursuing the same train of thought: I don't take Sprachähnlichkeit for granted; in fact, the appropriateness of the concept was part of the problem I set myself. What I tried to do in this work was to honor Schoenberg by suggesting that the particular approach to transcendence he adopted was actually to have few direct consequences, that is, that it was no longer possible to adhere to that particular analogical line whose main ingredient is the supposition that verbal and musical modes of expression and intimately and immediately interrelated. In some ways, of course, Schoenberg drew the same inferences himself, through the development of dodecaphonic techniques and the circling-back to forms of referential relationship -- even if necessarily somewhat dialectical in tone -- to received notions of classical forms. In my Fourth Quartet, I set myself the task of examining, one more time, how, and if, the phenomenon of verbal language and the essentially processual nature of much recent musical composition could be coaxed into some kind of Einklang, some mutually illuminating co-existence."
This is what Ferneyhough wrote about his own 4th String Quartet. I'm not sure if it's more worthless than his music, though.
Topic: Finally, a modern classical composer that doesn't alienate the audience!