Brian Ferneyhough [1 ed.] 9781783202324, 9781783200184

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CRITICAL GUIDES TO CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS

BRIAN FERNEYHOUGH Lois Fitch

Brian Ferneyhough

Brian Ferneyhough

Lois Fitch

intellect Bristol, UK / Chicago, USA

First published in the UK in 2013 by Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK First published in the USA in 2013 by Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, USA Copyright © 2013 Intellect Ltd All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Cover designer: Stephanie Sarlos Copy-editor: Richard Walsh Cover photo of Brian Ferneyhough by © Sisi Burn Production manager: Tim Mitchell Typesetting: Contentra Technologies Print ISBN: 978-1-78320-018-4 ePDF ISBN: 978-1-78320-232-4 ePub ISBN: 978-1-78320-233-1 Printed and bound by Hobbs, UK

Contents Acknowledgements

vii

Score Copyright Permissions for Musical Examples

ix

LIst of Images

xv

Editorial Note

xvii

Introduction

1

Chapter 1: Biography: Brian John Peter Ferneyhough (born January 16, 1943).

15

Chapter 2: Notation

29

Chapter 3: The Solo Works: ‘Black Scherzo’

63

Chapter 4: Chamber ‘Concertos’

101

Chapter 5: Chamber Music

129

Chapter 6: String Quartet

157

Chapter 7: Time and Motion Study Cycle

199

Chapter 8: Carceri d’Invenzione: Style and Invention

223

Chapter 9: Shadowtime

271

Brian Ferneyhough

Chapter 10: Works for Orchestra and Large Ensemble

299

Chapter 11: Aesthetics

329

Illustrations

359

Bibliography

367

Discography

383

Index

389

vi

Acknowledgements It is a pleasure to acknowledge the numerous individuals and organizations without whose assistance this project would have been impossible. My period of research at the Paul Sacher Stiftung, Basel in the Spring of 2012 was greatly facilitated by the expertise, efficiency and patience of Prof Dr Ulrich Mosch, Evelyne Diendorf, Michèle Noirjean-Linder and Johanna Blask, who generously provided access to the archive’s resources, and a conducive working environment. I am particularly indebted to the Arts and Humanities Research Council for the award of an Early Career Fellowship in 2012, which enabled me to undertake my research over a consolidated period and thus bring this project to completion. My work has also benefited from the financial generosity of the Research Committee at the Royal Northern College of Music, Manchester, and I thank my colleagues for their support and encouragement throughout the period during which this book has been in preparation. I am also extremely grateful to Marc Dooley at Peters Edition, London, both for the supply of a complete set of Ferneyhough’s scores, and for his prompt and helpful responses to my numerous requests for information. Others who have helped in various ways with materials, useful suggestions and the practicalities of my stay in Basel include David Fallows, Dagmar Hoffmann-Axthelm, Graham Hayter and Robert Worby. I have found Stephanie Ferneyhough a source of good humour and biographical information throughout, and I thank her for her willingness to answer my many questions in detail. John Hails has provided invaluable support, setting the musical examples, loaning his unpublished work on the Carceri d’Invenzione cycle, and discussing many ideas with me in detail. I thank Brian Ferneyhough for answering detailed biographical questions and granting permission to access to the sketch materials, correspondence and embargoed juvenilia held at the Paul Sacher Stiftung. I am also grateful to him for allowing me to consult scores of his most recent works prior to their publication. My editor, Martin Iddon, has offered his expertise from the outset, and made incisive and detailed comments on several drafts, always at my convenience. I am indebted to him for his patience, phenomenal efficiency and willingness to share ideas (including several useful areas of exploration which have been incorporated in the following pages), and his support throughout. This book would not have been possible without his commitment to, and faith in, my work. Thanks are also due to Tim Mitchell at Intellect Press for his hard work and support during the publishing process.

Brian Ferneyhough

I thank my mother and step-father, Karen and Manny Kawycz, and parents-in-law, Brian Fitch, and Josette Fitch-Ramel for their constant love and support since I began this book, and their good humour throughout. Above all, I reserve my sincerest gratitude for Fabrice Fitch, whose patience, capacity for encouragement, unfailing support and enviable musicianship have enabled me to benefit from his generosity in so many ways, from our discussions about the music to ensuring that, throughout, my research maintained momentum and focus. This book is for him, with my love.

viii

Score Copyright Permissions for Musical Examples Chapter 2 Figures 2.2, 2.3: Brian Ferneyhough: Unity Capsule Edition Peters No. 7144 ©Copyright 1975 by Hinrichsen Edition, Peters Edition Ltd, London Reproduced by kind permission of the publisher Figure 2.4 Brian Ferneyhough: La Chute d’Icare Edition Peters No. 7362 ©Copyright 1988 by Hinrichsen Edition, Peters Edition Ltd, London Reproduced by kind permission of the publisher Figure 2.5 Brian Ferneyhough: Time and Motion Study II Edition Peters No. 7223 ©Copyright 1978 by Hinrichsen Edition, Peters Edition Ltd, London Reproduced by kind permission of the publisher Figure 2.6 Brian Ferneyhough: Opus Contra Naturam Edition Peters No. 7606 ©Copyright 2000 by Hinrichsen Edition, Peters Edition Ltd, London Reproduced by kind permission of the publisher Chapter 3 Figure 3.1 Brian Ferneyhough: Trittico per G.S. Edition Peters No. 7361 ©Copyright 1989 by Hinrichsen Edition, Peters Edition Ltd, London Reproduced by kind permission of the publisher

Brian Ferneyhough

Figures 3.2, 3.3 Brian Ferneyhough: Unity Capsule (as above) Figure 3.4 Brian Ferneyhough: Lemma-Icon-Epigram Edition Peters No. 7233 ©Copyright 1982 by Hinrichsen Edition, Peters Edition Ltd, London Reproduced by kind permission of the publisher Figures 3.5, 3.6, 3.7 Brian Ferneyhough: Sisyphus Redux Edition Peters No. 72065 ©Copyright 2010 by Hinrichsen Edition, Peters Edition Ltd, London Reproduced by kind permission of the publisher Figure 3.8 Brian Ferneyhough: Unsichtbare Farben Edition Peters No. 7536 ©Copyright 1999 by Hinrichsen Edition, Peters Edition Ltd, London Reproduced by kind permission of the publisher Figure 3.9 Brian Ferneyhough: Bone Alphabet Edition Peters No. 7389 ©Copyright 1995 by Hinrichsen Edition, Peters Edition Ltd, London Reproduced by kind permission of the publisher Chapter 4 Figure 4.2 Brian Ferneyhough: On Stellar Magnitudes Edition Peters No. 7420 ©Copyright 1994 by Hinrichsen Edition, Peters Edition Ltd, London Reproduced by kind permission of the publisher Figure 4.6 Brian Ferneyhough: Le Chute d’Icare (as above) Chapter 5 Figure 5.1 Brian Ferneyhough: Funérailles Edition Peters No. 7224 ©Copyright 1980 by Hinrichsen Edition, Peters Edition Ltd, London x

Score Copyright Permissions for Musical Examples

Reproduced by kind permission of the publisher Figures 5.2, 5.3 Brian Ferneyhough: O Lux Edition Peters No. 7793 ©Copyright 2005 by Hinrichsen Edition, Peters Edition Ltd, London Reproduced by kind permission of the publisher Figures 5.4, 5.5 Brian Ferneyhough: Dum transisset I–IV Edition Peters No. 7979 ©Copyright 2007 by Hinrichsen Edition, Peters Edition Ltd, London Reproduced by kind permission of the publisher Figure 5.6 Brian Ferneyhough: Liber Scintillarum Edition Peters No. 72248 ©Copyright 2012 by Hinrichsen Edition, Peters Edition Ltd, London Reproduced by kind permission of the publisher Rhythmic matrix ©Copyright 2012 Brian Ferneyhough Reproduced by kind permission of the composer Chapter 6 Figures 6.3, 6.5, 6,6 Brian Ferneyhough: Third String Quartet Edition Peters No. 7312 ©Copyright 1988 by Hinrichsen Edition, Peters Edition Ltd, London Reproduced by kind permission of the publisher Figures 6.7, 6.8 Brian Ferneyhough: Fourth String Quartet Edition Peters No. 7367 ©Copyright 1990 by Hinrichsen Edition, Peters Edition Ltd, London Reproduced by kind permission of the publisher Figure 6.9 Brian Ferneyhough: String Trio Edition Peters No. 7454 ©Copyright 2000 by Hinrichsen Edition, Peters Edition Ltd, London Reproduced by kind permission of the publisher Figures 6.10, 6.11 Brian Ferneyhough: Fifth String Quartet Edition Peters No. 7863 xi

Brian Ferneyhough

©Copyright 2006 by Hinrichsen Edition, Peters Edition Ltd, London Reproduced by kind permission of the publisher Chapter 7 Figures 7.1, 7.2, 7.3, 7.4, 7.5 Brian Ferneyhough: Time and Motion Study I Edition Peters No. 7216 ©Copyright 1977 by Hinrichsen Edition, Peters Edition Ltd, London Reproduced by kind permission of the publisher Figures 7.6. 7.7 Brian Ferneyhough: Time and Motion Study III Edition Peters No. 7148 ©Copyright 1974 by Hinrichsen Edition, Peters Edition Ltd, London Reproduced by kind permission of the publisher Chapter 8 Figures 8.1, 8.3, 8.4 Brian Ferneyhough: Carceri d’Invenzione I Edition Peters No. 7291 ©Copyright 1983 by Hinrichsen Edition, Peters Edition Ltd, London Reproduced by kind permission of the publisher Figures 8.5, 8.6 Brian Ferneyhough: Carceri d’Invenzione IIa Edition Peters No. 7292 ©Copyright 1985 by Hinrichsen Edition, Peters Edition Ltd, London Reproduced by kind permission of the publisher Figures 8.7, 8.8 Brian Ferneyhough: Etudes transcendantales Edition Peters No. 7310 ©Copyright 1987 by Hinrichsen Edition, Peters Edition Ltd, London Reproduced by kind permission of the publisher Figures 8.9a, 8.10, 8.11 Brian Ferneyhough: Intermedio alla ciaccona Edition Peters No. 7346 ©Copyright 1986 by Hinrichsen Edition, Peters Edition Ltd, London Reproduced by kind permission of the publisher

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Score Copyright Permissions for Musical Examples

Figure 8.9b Brian Ferneyhough: Mnemosyne Edition Peters No. 7347 ©Copyright 1996 by Hinrichsen Edition, Peters Edition Ltd, London Reproduced by kind permission of the publisher Chapter 9 Figures 9.1, 9.2, 9.3 Brian Ferneyhough: Shadowtime Edition Peters No. 7732 ©Copyright 2004 by Hinrichsen Edition, Peters Edition Ltd, London Reproduced by kind permission of the publisher Chapter 11 Figures 11.1, 11.2 Brian Ferneyhough: The Doctrine of Similarity Edition Peters No. 7564 ©Copyright 2000 by Hinrichsen Edition, Peters Edition Ltd, London Reproduced by kind permission of the publisher

xiii

List of Images Photograph 1: Brian Ferneyhough, c.1948. Photograph 2: W  illenhall Church of England School play, c.1953. Ferneyhough is front row centre right. Photograph 3: School photograph, c.1954. Photograph 4: C  oventry Festival Band (led by John R. Major) processing through Coventry Precinct, c.1956–7. Ferneyhough (only partly visible behind Major’s left shoulder) plays the euphonium. Photograph 5: R  ehearsing at home prior to a performance of Handel’s Messiah, December 1963 (Coventry Evening Telegraph, reproduced by permission of Trinity Mirror plc). Photograph 6: With Franco Donatoni, Royan, c.1973. Photograph 7: C  onducting the London Sinfonietta and soloists in Transit, Royan, March 1975. Photograph 8: With Michael Finnissy, Royan, c.1975. Photograph 9: With Klaus Huber at an open-air concert, Rathausplatz, Freiburg, 1977. Photograph 10: At home (with Lancelot), Palo Alto, California, c.1998.

Copyright Note The intellectual property of this book rests with the author except in the case of those images and musical examples for which the author gratefully acknowledges the permission to reproduce copyright material. Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain permission for the use of photographic materials. The author apologises for any errors or omissions and would be grateful to rectify these, if notified via the publisher, in future reprints or editions of this book.

Editorial Note In quotations, original spellings and emphases have been retained, unless indicated otherwise. Ferneyhough’s sketch materials are kept in large folders under the title of the piece to which they relate at the Paul Sacher Stiftung, Basel, Switzerland. Only the total number of loose leaf sketch pages is indicated for each folder. Consequently, sketch materials that have been consulted in preparing this book and those quoted directly are acknowledged according to the piece to which they correspond and the year of the sketch, if known. In all cases, the location is given as Paul Sacher Stiftung, Basel. All references to entries from Grove Music Online give the relevant hyperlink and date of access to the resource, which is accessible by subscription. The online resource gives the texts of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Second Edition (2001), revised subsequently in some cases.

Introduction

B

rian Ferneyhough is an enigmatic and controversial figure, cast variously as the inheritor of 1950s integral serialism, the father figure of so-called ‘New-Complexity’ and the émigré who found continental Europe more welcoming than his native Britain. Yet each characterization poses more questions than it answers: Ferneyhough remains difficult to evaluate, whether as man, musician or intellect. Jonathan Harvey’s observation — made in Ferneyhough’s fiftieth year — remains as true today in his seventieth: ‘he refuses to allow socio-economic pressures of rehearsal time, box-office viability, easy social-role messages and so on to dilute his push to ever greater musical development.’1 In the same text, Harvey also notes that ‘he is, for many, a bogeyman’,2 and although this comment has lost something of its pertinence in the intervening years, there is no doubt that this misrepresentation persists in some quarters, be it critical discourse or journalism.3 Commentators outside the United Kingdom such as Richard Toop, author of the defining essay ‘Four Facets of the New Complexity,’ have observed the peculiarly deep-seated British suspicion of intellectualism of which Ferneyhough has fallen foul, along with others associated with a similar compositional aesthetic.4 Toop is particularly critical of ‘a country like Great Britain where nineteenth-century traditions of amateur music making and all-purpose antiintellectualism are still very much embedded in the collective psyche of the musical establishment.’5 Even as recently as the British premiere of Ferneyhough’s opera, Shadowtime (July 9, 2004), a small group staged a picket outside the performance, attempting to ‘defend’ Walter Benjamin from Ferneyhough’s supposed ivory-tower academicism.6 The technical difficulty of the music has been associated with his avowed interest in philosophy and a certain fondness for abstraction in the way that he expresses himself, leading to the impression that these things precede musical creativity itself in his thinking. He has been perceived variously as a philosopher, aesthetician or notational artisan, and the music itself relegated to a mere exemplification.7 He has written numerous essays and given interviews alongside his composing activities, and the reception of these has inevitably coloured that of the music. Roderick Hawkins argues that ‘from the early reception in the late seventies, the intellectual facets of Ferneyhough’s personality are a prominent feature in reviews and features (indeed, they are often cited as a cause for his exile). The manner in which Ferneyhough presents himself in verbal and written forms (interviews and programme notes) is notorious for its idiosyncratic, sometimes difficult discourse, something which is seen to reflect the way in which his music operates.’8 Yet fundamentally he is first and foremost a musician, who quickly channels any discussion into matters musical, however challengingly for the reader or listener,

Brian Ferneyhough

and however much he may admit to preserving a deliberate distance: ‘an artist can’t be alltoo-specific in his cognitive imagery. He has to take care to stay a bit out of reach.’9 One of the most striking facets of Ferneyhough’s music is the consideration given to the roles of performer and listener, both of whom contribute to his concept of the work. Far removed from the image of a creator standing loftily above the work, some of Ferneyhough’s most fundamental musical concerns directly involve the impact of the material on the psyche of its interpreters. The concept of time-perception (to which he returns again and again) is one example intended to affect the listener in particular, whilst the processing and filtering of a surfeit of information is demanded of both the performer and listener in different ways. The performance situation has moved on from the perception of the forbidding, hermetic figure prevalent in the 1970s. At that time, relatively few performances of his music were undertaken, simply because few performers were capable (or believed themselves capable) of surmounting its technical challenges. Indeed, some dismissed the very possibility of performance through lack of empathy with the score and style. During the course of his subsequent career, Ferneyhough has progressively forged links with an increasing number of performers, to the extent that there are now many prominent interpreters of his work, as seen in his long-standing working relationship with the Arditti String Quartet. That the cast of these performers is too numerous to list separately — and includes undergraduate conservatoire students — attests to the progressive attenuation of the ‘bogeyman’ image over time. In addition, video documentation of the composer’s interaction with musicians in rehearsal has begun to be publicly available. The Arditti Quartet and the ’cellist Neil Heyde have both featured in recent short documentaries with his participation, thus presenting in an altogether more sympathetic light, and to a wider audience than hitherto, Ferneyhough’s motivations as a composer, placing his concern with notation and technical difficulty within a more balanced context.10 The present book, the first study of the composer in English and the first exhaustive survey of his life and works in any language, aims to do the same for his output in the round. For many years, Toop was the most prominent commentator on Ferneyhough’s music and thought, leading to his co-editorship of the composer’s Collected Writings.11 Recent scholarship has complemented Toop’s probing work, adding further to the range of articles reflecting on Ferneyhough’s musical techniques and motivations. Amongst these the most differentiated are Cordula Pätzold’s structural analyses and the evaluations of Ferneyhough’s aesthetics addressed in two French-language monographs.12 Pätzold has produced highly detailed analyses of works comprising the Carceri d’Invenzione cycle, drawing on Ferneyhough’s sketch materials and painstaking logical deduction. Her work reveals and explicates the abstract processes operating at every level in the scores: one section of her doctoral thesis offers a reconstruction of the compositional process for Superscriptio (solo piccolo).13 Yet the resulting insights do not amount to ‘Ferneyhough-by-numbers’, which might reinforce suspicions of total abstraction; rather, she subtly reveals the creative intuition that deploys the parametric information she uncovers.14 As Ferneyhough himself puts it, ‘you’ve got to know what calculation is good for.’15 4

Introduction

Of the two French monographs noted above, the most comprehensive critique of Ferneyhough’s music and aesthetics is Francis Courtot’s Brian Ferneyhough: Figures et dialogues. Courtot, a former composition student of Ferneyhough, considers parts of the oeuvre from the perspective of Ferneyhough’s interrelated concepts of gesture, figure and texture (discussed later). Courtot’s text is an important resource for establishing the many levels at which Ferneyhough’s conceptual and technical preoccupations intersect.16 Pätzold, Courtot and Toop have all demonstrated that Ferneyhough’s sketch materials are often concerned with concepts as much as parametric calculations, indicating the extent to which the latter evolve in conjunction with expressive instincts, hence Toop’s use of the phrase ‘Prima le parole…’ in the title of his article on the sketches for the Carceri d’Invenzione cycle (1982–1986).17 Carceri is the body of work most thoroughly covered in the scholarly literature, in part due to the comprehensive sketch resources that survive (by no means the case for many works, the materials for which can be rather piecemeal, including scraps such as envelopes and hotel notepaper accumulated on Ferneyhough’s travels). Still other writers take constructions of the composer to task — particularly those fashioned earlier in his career — that fetishize visual aspects of the score and pre-compositional calculation at the cost of musically pertinent detail.18 Both the term ‘New Complexity’ and the critical response to the function of Ferneyhough’s notation have been subject to extensive re-evaluation, and one of the principal aims of this book is to continue this reversal of discourses that have contributed (whether unwittingly or not) to the marginalization of the composer. Drawing on Toop’s work and instructive recent appraisals, it offers a number of fresh perspectives on Ferneyhough’s oeuvre and biography, foregrounding the composer’s vital musicality throughout. It also benefits from a study of the complete sketch materials, including early previously unseen unpublished and withdrawn works.19 The book’s organization takes account of fundamental aspects of Ferneyhough’s music and the discourse surrounding it. Although a chronological approach is doubtless helpful in an assessment of the development of broader themes, it is less appropriate as a guide to the entire oeuvre, which is more readily apprehended in terms of groups of interrelated works not necessarily conceived in proximity to one other. These subsets are formed according to works’ similar formal or instrumental/vocal forces, or because they address common musical-technical problems, enabling a more effective evaluation of chronological progress within groups. Before these headings are discussed further, a contextual overview of the principal issues concerning Ferneyhough’s musical style and influences is worth sketching. Style Ferneyhough’s style cannot be characterized in any single manner: this is the main problem with reductive representations that focus on one dimension largely to the exclusion of others, such as notation, performative virtuosity or the complexity of the rhythmic workings in particular. Ferneyhough has cultivated a personal style that upholds consistency from 5

Brian Ferneyhough

work to work, whilst allowing for stylistic evolution and some substantial changes in approach, depending on the project. Two particular traits might be advanced as agents of consistency throughout his career, offering a framework within which other concerns come and go, or at least rise to particular prominence during certain periods or in certain types of work.20 The first of these is the parametric approach, the very term that resonates with the mid-twentieth-century musical avant-garde. The second is the relationship that Ferneyhough exploits between a given musical duration (a ‘time-space’, as simple as a single bar) and the material that fills it. This allows him to create different densities of material, which manifest as a ‘too-muchness’, forcing the listener to develop strategies for appraisal based on his or her own organizational preferences and instincts. From the experience of ‘too-muchness’ arises sensation, whereby the music evokes an almost physical impact or immediacy.21 Different densities might be heard as a speeding up or slowing down, even where there is no tempo change, pointing to one means by which Ferneyhough prioritizes multi-layered experience.22 Parameters The composer readily acknowledges affinities with the kinds of techniques and principles affirmed in 1950s and 1960s Darmstadt, as well as the earlier Second Viennese School, particularly the music of Anton Webern. Yet he is critical of the arbitrary interrelationships forced upon the parameters in some examples of serialism or post-serial composition. Virtually any qualifiable aspect of musical expression can become a parameter in a Ferneyhough piece, be it conventional (pitch or interval series, or durational patterns) or unconventional (texture-type series, as in the Third String Quartet). However, he cultivates their very independence in order to validate relationships obtaining between them on the basis of qualitative experience rather than quantitative predetermination: ‘I’m not concerned with quantities but with defining consistencies and reflections in variously shaped aspects of a work.’23 Furthermore, he suggests that ‘we subliminally build up a sort of history of [interparametric] correspondences as a piece progresses.’24 In the sketches, Ferneyhough generally lays out a bar-scheme early in the process of working on a new piece, annotating it with patterns indicating where a certain parametric line will be foregrounded, and where it will recede to participate in lower-level operations. Ferneyhough’s stylistic development over the decades can be charted through the observation of parametric action. Broadly speaking, the works of the 1970s are characterized by intensive parametric polyphony, although this is most readily discernible in the solos. The classic example of this is the flute piece Unity Capsule, in which the different means of articulation required of the performer (vocal, key clicks, pitched flute material) are readily audible, and visible in the score. Here, and in contemporaneous scores similarly probing the outer limits of notational saturation (such as Time and Motion Study II for solo ’cello, a piece that Ferneyhough considers to have pushed pessimism to its furthest extent) a third vital 6

Introduction

ingredient of his personal style is palpable:25 expression resulting from extreme limitation.26 The performer is constrained — like a pressure cooker — to render the piece against almost overwhelming demands upon his/her virtuosity. This can result in necessary adjustments to habitual performing techniques, at times requiring a playing or singing style contrary to what the performer perceives to be ‘natural’. In the 1980s, the performer’s actions become less overtly dramatic: instead, a species of rhetoric is established of musical gestures formed of parametric confluence and deconstruction, as in the Carceri d’Invenzione cycle. Invention through limitation is still crucial (as the title of the cycle suggests), but operates less as a constraint upon the performer and more within the material — the flow of gestures — itself: ‘individual gestures were still made up of articulative particles which, in principle, retained the status of free radicals.’27 In the solo violin piece Intermedio alla ciaccona, for example, the underlying chaconne form acts as the delimiting field for Ferneyhough’s invention, which comes across in performance somewhat freer and more ‘optimistic’ than the pieces written ten years earlier. Whereas the first full decade of mature composition (the 1970s) is characterized mainly by works for large forces and solos, his output in the 1990s chiefly comprises small chamber ‘concertos’ that explore the interaction between a solo and ensemble, reconfiguring traditional behaviours and distilling into smaller musical ‘worlds’ — Terrain, La Chute d’Icare, On Stellar Magnitudes — the relationship between music and image previously explored in the context of much larger ‘worlds’, including La terre est un homme and Transit. From the opera Shadowtime onwards it is possible to discern a late(st) style, in which Ferneyhough works with miniature formal sections, often separated by measured silence or static, sustained linking materials. Each miniature raises the principle mentioned above relative to the bar unit to the level of form, demarcating the ‘time-spaces’ or panels within which material is concentrated. Ferneyhough’s renewed interest in large-scale form results in his ‘drifting toward traditional modes of aural perception’, because the listener is able to grasp structural information that was more elusive in earlier works.28 Only in this sense does the music become more comprehensible when compared with the sustained ‘too-muchness’ of the 1970s. The latest forms themselves are nevertheless not at all traditional: this distinction is important. Ferneyhough reflects on his extensive teaching activities over nearly 40 years, just one aspect of his opening-up to a still wider array of encounters with other music, including borrowed materials from earlier repertories:29 In today’s young composers it’s extremely interesting to note that their forms are almost formless. When I look at their scores I often have no idea what to make of them. On the definitely positive side, they have convinced me that the old formal rhetoric no longer works. That’s why I now try to work with tiny sections in juxtaposition […] By varying the tempo, density, instrumentation or timbre I differentiate some of the sections so that they stand completely apart […] I want to attain new types of narrativity in discontinuity.30 7

Brian Ferneyhough

History Ferneyhough’s relationship to musical history is a complex one. From the evidence of the earliest sketches and unpublished compositions, it is necessary to distinguish between the composer who drew on historically established forms — divertimenti, song cycles, sonatas and fugues — in order to learn essential techniques of composition and his alter ego who attended to the smallest perceptible units of sound in each piece because he wanted to create something new and, at that level, unmediatedly graspable.31 His description of first hearing Varèse, as well as his own experiments with instruments before he self-identified as a composer, speak to the immediacy which he has always sought for his music, notwithstanding his reputation for extensive pre-calculation and, according to some critiques, his dogmatic attempts to emulate particular historical figures or polemics.32 Consequently it is not sufficient to identify him as an inheritor of the modernist tradition, to note his classicizing formal tendencies and indebtedness to Schoenberg and Webern, without observing that his own musical materials adopt a somewhat ironic perspective towards such models. His admiration for Schoenberg’s music is evident from the number of works that make either explicit or implicit reference to it; however, much as he might identify with aspects of the latter’s compositional biography, Ferneyhough idealizes neither Webern nor Schoenberg.33 The gestures that pass by so quickly in Ferneyhough’s music are often not dissimilar in morphology to those found in Viennese works of the 1900s, their expressive potential inspired, at least in part, by Webern’s crystalline intensity and Schoenberg’s expressionism;34 it is the speed and concentration of their appearance(s) that results in the difficulty in apprehending them.35 As for other affinities with music history, Ferneyhough notes the importance for his own compositional thinking of seventeenth-century composers such as Monteverdi, Giovanni Gabrieli and Purcell, and cites even earlier influences, such as Thomas Tallis.36 His interest in earlier repertories is felt throughout his oeuvre, from the early Sonatas for String Quartet to the recent works based on material by the Elizabethan composer Christopher Tye, and the undoubtedly Monteverdian resonances in the formal concept of the opera Shadowtime. Music and Meaning Any intention on Ferneyhough’s part to create meaning in his work — an intention which can be inferred from various remarks — is not conceived in terms of a particular school or movement that might be seen to legitimize it, such as the now historical phenomenon of ‘New Complexity’.37 Moreover, in invoking ‘meaning’ Ferneyhough infers no programmatic intention to represent particular emotive states or call upon historically pre-established gestural meanings.38 Rather, his works’ relationships with historical models are intended as a further form of limitation against which his personal musical history is brought into sharper relief. Meaning arises first and foremost from this self-reflective, self-generating  context. 8

Introduction

It is therefore ironic that it should be the string quartets, the group of works that most obviously signals its cognizance of music history, that most readily reveal the musical-genetic imprint of Ferneyhough’s own development. This, he maintains, is [h]istorical not in the sense that we invoke one or another emotion from music history, but that we let it evolve from our own life’s work as composers. That, for me, is what the word ‘historical’ means: the semantics come partly from the fact that the models for things appearing and employed in a particular piece are inserted into the piece from past practice but they are employed on a different structural plane, so that they either act aggressively as figures in the foreground or attain meaning somehow — magnified, watered down or disfigured — in the background as form-giving tendencies.39 The remark that composers (although he ultimately speaks for himself) let history evolve from their own life’s work implies that musical material has its own volition, hence Ferneyhough’s frequent references to its autobiography.40 A case in point is the Fourth String Quartet with soprano (1990–1991), assuredly one of his most iconic compositions due to its specific association with Schoenberg’s Second Quartet. But almost from the outset, the terms in which Ferneyhough investigates the relationship between music and text differ markedly from Schoenberg’s, relating more readily to Ferneyhough’s wider oeuvre, his career-long preoccupation with text-music tensions, and his concept of personal style. Furthermore, the six quartets (taking the Sonatas as the first) form a selfconsistent stylistic arc, from the fragments of the lengthy Sonatas, through shorter intervening works each concerned with enhancing expression in this particular medium, to the most recent Sixth, once again lengthy and bound up with the latest fragment-form in miniature sections. As a subgroup of the oeuvre, the quartets capture essential aspects of Ferneyhough’s creativity and illuminate the importance for him of a specific instrumental combination, recalling his earliest attraction to sound for its own sake (Chapter 6). Although the tradition Ferneyhough invokes in composing his set of quartets is well established, other ‘subsets’ of works within his output likewise exhibit a sufficient internal consistency to warrant similar consideration of their shared stylistic qualities. One such group is formed by the small chamber ‘concertos’ composed in the late 1980s and early 1990s (Chapter 4); another comprises the works for large ensemble and orchestra (Chapter 10). Further chapters are devoted to the pieces for solo instruments (Chapter 3) and smaller chamber works (Chapter 5). Finally, the two nominated cycles, Time and Motion Studies and Carceri d’Invenzione, and the opera Shadowtime each warrant a chapter of their own (Chapters 7, 8 and 9 respectively). Alongside this treatment of the output by genre, broadly conceived, chapters on Ferneyhough’s approach to notation and aesthetics offer perspectives on two of the more contentious aspects of his thinking. The visual effect of a Ferneyhough score — he has referred to deliberately ‘very black’ passages — is undoubtedly important to him.41 The mise-en-page is often planned during the sketch stage of a composition rather than 9

Brian Ferneyhough

(as might be expected) at the end, when a neat or final copy is called for. Concerning his working process Ferneyhough reveals in interview — this is substantiated by the sketches — that I tend to copy out the definitive score (the one later published) step by step with the act of composition itself. For most of my pieces this means there is no rough score as such, merely a vast and unordered convolute of single pages of various sizes and shapes. Copying the score as an integral part of the composition process arose in the first instance from my habit of always writing in ink as opposed to pencil: later I realized that it also allowed me extra time to work through ideas while not interrupting the continuity of creative activity in any violent or arbitrary fashion.42 Since the mid-1990s scores have been generated using computer software, but the fundamental principle remains valid. There is a mutually informative creative flow between composition and notation: the latter is never merely an inadequate representation or transcript of the former, nor an authoritative text intended to control every aspect of performance. Critics who lambast Ferneyhough’s notation, associating it with his supposed intellectualism, rightly sense its deliberate problematization of the performer-score relationship and its provocative nature. However, whilst they perceive the impossibility of meaningful communication between performer and score (regarding the performer as little more than an automaton bound by unreasonable demands), the excess of notation, wrongly construed as a blueprint for a totally accurate performance, is precisely where Ferneyhough himself locates musical communication. He argues that It seems at least conceivable that a thoroughly reformulated approach to notation/ realization might be in a position to throw some light on the essential nature of the ‘work’ (its preconditions, situational validity etc.) as such and, in so doing, allow the very concept of closed form in present-day compositional practice to acquire a renewed esthetic foundation.43 Whereas for Theodor W. Adorno, performance is musical reproduction, for Ferneyhough performance is part of musical production.44 The compositional act does not end when the composer hands over the ‘work’ to performers, but continues in the deliberate ‘psychologizing of virtuosity (its effective transcendence).’45 Likewise, the performance act does not begin with learning the work, but as soon as Ferneyhough initiates a composition. According to the composer, I thus determined to see how far [the attitude of the performer to the text] could be systematically exploited as a contribution to the redefinition of ‘interpretation’ as such, how far the results could be incorporated into the very fabric of the composition, so to speak, as a discrete polyphonic strand.46 10

Introduction

Contrary to the image of a composer seeking to control every aspect of performance — implying that there is a right and a wrong way to play this music — Ferneyhough engages with notation in order that he may continually be surprised by his own music. The rationale for the notation, critical responses and changes in approach throughout his career form the basis for Chapter 2. Inevitably, given Ferneyhough’s propensity for thinking and expressing his ideas in images as well as sound, a consideration of the composer’s aesthetic motivations also permeates the more analytical chapters focused on the works themselves. Ferneyhough makes no attempt to formulate his own aesthetics as a consolidated theory to accompany his composition; instead, he draws on extensive reading, poetry and visual art (the last two being activities he has undertaken himself), often reflecting similarities between a work — for example Piranesi’s Carceri d’Invenzione etchings — and his music in terms of formal structure. Sometimes his aesthetic perspective helps to illuminate aspects of a work; at other times, it is responsible for the very genesis of a piece or group of pieces. Often, ideas that interest him are alighted on in a single work (for example Gertrude Stein’s writing in Trittico per G.S), or appropriated from one medium and used to explicate his musical praxis (as in his attraction to Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the figure, central to the semiologist’s monograph Francis Bacon: Logique de la sensation). Walter Benjamin represents a much longer-term interest, both as a personality and as a thinker: Ferneyhough has spent many years contemplating issues relating to Benjamin’s own philosophical activity, as well as his idiosyncratic character and fate. Benjamin’s ideas form a significant focus in both Chapter 11 (on aesthetic considerations in Ferneyhough’s music and ideas) and the chapter devoted to Shadowtime. Finally, the opening biographical chapter focuses in particular on Ferneyhough’s early life, about which he has tended to be rather reticent until comparatively recently. The reason for this emphasis is two-fold: first, his formative experiences reveal much that is pertinent to his creative personality (a truism, perhaps, but relevant nonetheless); and this in turn sheds light on the juvenilia and unpublished works, which are discussed here for the first time. The biographical chapter also dwells on a number of unfinished or withdrawn works written alongside the early oeuvre, which offer at times surprising alternatives to the consistencies or continuities of the published catalogue. Ferneyhough’s admission that even the scores of his Basel period were copied in ‘copper plate handwriting’ (in order to avoid changing a single note at his mentor Klaus Huber’s suggestion) has no doubt served to reinforce the formidability of his earliest reputation; yet concealed behind this recollection, and the works produced throughout the 1960s and 1970s, are many hidden ‘shadow works’.47 These abandoned pieces, which include several early versions of later published works, cast a rather different perspective on the acknowledged output, and on subsequent constructions of the composer following his emergence onto the New Music scene. That such work-driven considerations intrude so significantly seems appropriate to the biographical sketch of a creative individual ‘who has said that he experiences his own self as a construction of his music, and not the other way round.’48 11

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Notes   1 Brian Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, ed. Richard Toop and James Boros (London: Routledge, 2006), ix. First published Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Press, 1995.   2 Ibid.   3 Note for example a recent, sympathetic review in The Times, reporting on the BBC Total Immersion series devoted to Ferneyhough in February 2011, which states nonetheless that ‘Brian Ferneyhough is still considered a bogeyman of contemporary music.’ http://www. editionpeters.com/modernnewsdetails.php?articleID=IN00564 (accessed January 18, 2013).   4 See Richard Toop, “Four Facets of the ‘The New Complexity’,” Contact 32 (1988): 4–50. Ferneyhough is not one of the four main subjects of Toop’s article, but is identified as a kind of figurehead for the group of composers brought together under the soubriquet ‘New Complexity’.   5 Toop, “Four Facets,” 5.   6 See the “Defend Walter Benjamin Campaign”, http://www.militantesthetix.co.uk/actions/ antishaim/antishad.htm (accessed November 12, 2012).   7 See for example Richard Taruskin, Music in the Late Twentieth Century (New York, NJ: Oxford University Press, 2010). Fifth volume of The Oxford History of Western Music. Taruskin suggests that ‘the notation was significant, even if the music was not’ (476).   8 Roderick Hawkins, “(Mis)understanding complexity from Transit to Toop: ‘New Complexity’ in the British Context” (PhD thesis, University of Leeds, 2010), 42.   9 Thomas Meyer, “‘Wichtig ist, dass sich der Komponist selbst beim Komponieren unkomponiert’: ein Gespräch mit Brian Ferneyhough,” Musik und Ästhetik 11/42 (2007): 61. An unattributed English translation of this interview was provided in the printed programme at the presentation ceremony for Ferneyhough’s Siemens Music Prize, held on May 3, 2007 in the Kammerspiele Theatre, Munich. This translation is used for all quotations from this source, but all page references are to the published German version. 10 See Paul Archbold, “‘Performing Complexity’, a pedagogical resource tracing the Arditti Quartet’s preparations for the première of Brian Ferneyhough Sixth String Quartet.” http://events.sas.ac.uk/uploads/media/Arditti_Ferneyhough_project_documentation.pdf (accessed June 6, 2012). The documentary “Climbing a Mountain: the Arditti String Quartet rehearse Brian Ferneyhough Sixth String Quartet” (2011) is available through iTunes U, https://itunes.apple.com/gb/itunes-u/arditti-quartet/id441504831 (accessed June 6, 2012).   See also Paul Archbold et al., “Brian Ferneyhough: Time and Motion Study II. ‘Electric Chair Music’,” DVD. A documentary and performance (London: Optic Nerve, 2007). 11 Toop remains an important figure for Ferneyhough scholarship, having contributed to more recent publications, including his chapter “Against a Theory of (New) Complexity,” in Contemporary Music: Theoretical and Philosophical Perspectives, ed. Max Paddison and Irène Deliège (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 89–97. He also regularly provides liner notes for CD recordings of Ferneyhough’s music. 12 See Francis Courtot, Brian Ferneyhough: Figures et dialogues (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2009) and Nicolas Darbon, Brian Ferneyhough et la nouvelle complexité: La capture des forces II (Nantes: Éditions Millénaire, 2008). See also Cordula Pätzold, “Aspects of Temporal organization in 12

Introduction

13 14

15 16

17 18 19 20

21

22 23 24 25

Brian Ferneyhough’s ‘Carceri d’Invenzione III’.” Search: Journal for New Music and Culture 8 (2011). http://www.searchnewmusic.org/paetzold.pdf (accessed July 12, 2012). See Cordula Pätzold, “Analyse und Re-Komposition von ‘Superscriptio’,” in ‘Carceri d’Invenzione von Brian Ferneyhough: Kompositionstechnische und höranalytische Aspekte’. (PhD thesis, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, 2002), 23–142. Her approach is similar to Richard Toop’s in his article “Brian Ferneyhough’s Etudes Transcendantales: A Composer’s Diary (Part 1),” EONTA Arts Quarterly 1/1 (1991): 55–89. Here Toop also demonstrates that even at its extremes, Ferneyhough’s abstraction is used in the service of expression. See the discussion of Etudes transcendantales in Chapter 8 of this book. Meyer, “Ein Gespräch mit Brian Ferneyhough,” 52. Courtot’s book is divided into two halves. The first considers the concepts of gesture and figure in relation to the oeuvre, selecting representative works for discussion and analysis. The second half addresses Ferneyhough’s ‘dialogues’ on the arts and philosophy, and the importance of these insights for his works. For example, Courtot points out Ferneyhough’s long-standing interest in presenting ‘worlds’ in a range of compositions that draw on Matta, Brueghel, Piranesi and Flammarion (Courtot, Brian Ferneyhough: Figures et dialogues, 188). Richard Toop, “‘Prima le Parole...’ – on the sketches for Ferneyhough’s Carceri d’Invenzione I–III,” Perspectives of New Music 32/1 (1994): 154–175. See Stuart Paul Duncan, “Re-Complexifying the Function(s) of Notation in the Music of Brian Ferneyhough and the ‘New Complexity’,” Perspectives of New Music 48/1 (2010): 136–172 and Hawkins, “(Mis)understanding complexity.” Ferneyhough’s unpublished works and related sketch-materials have been catalogued by Prof Dr Ulrich Mosch, and are held at the Paul Sacher Stiftung, Basel. They are discussed in this book for the first time. My own PhD dissertation, for example, focused only on the period of Carceri d’Invenzione (early-mid 1980s), during which Ferneyhough became particularly interested in Gilles Deleuze’s monograph on the painter Francis Bacon. Here, Deleuze elaborates a concept of the ‘Figure’, which appealed to Ferneyhough in relation to his own concept of gesture. Although he has talked extensively of gesture since this period — the main subject of Francis Courtot’s monograph on the composer — the extent to which he engaged actively with the Deleuze/Bacon text was greatest for a relatively short time, and reflected in his own essays of the early 1980s. See Lois Fitch, “Brian Ferneyhough: the Logic of the Figure” (PhD thesis, Durham University, 2005). Ferneyhough argues that ‘the “too-muchness” of expression which my work deliberately aims at is the basic presupposition of creative activity, and one has to live with one’s own innate sensations, one’s own convictions, without necessarily negating those of others.’ Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 259. Original emphasis. Ferneyhough refers to ‘structural multi-tracking’ as ‘the simultaneous unfolding and transformation of multiple conflictually interactive “time-line vectors” or local histories.’ See Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 82. Meyer, “Ein Gespräch mit Brian Ferneyhough,” 53. Ibid. Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 213. 13

Brian Ferneyhough

26 27 28 29 30 31

32

33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48

Ibid., 291. Ibid., 387. Meyer, “Ein Gespräch mit Brian Ferneyhough,” 55. For example, the Christopher Tye project, discussed in Chapter 5 on chamber music. Meyer, “Ein Gespräch mit Brian Ferneyhough,” 51–52. The expression ‘unmediatedly graspable’ comes from Ferneyhough’s own description of a Michael Finnissy piano work, but it could equally apply in his own case. See Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 191. Finnissy is, incidentally, the only contemporary about whose music Ferneyhough has written. Their association dates back many years. He recalls that ‘I remember being tremendously impressed by the uncompromising clarity and cleanness of sound, and it was at that moment that composing became my definitive goal in life.’ (Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 235). Richard Taruskin’s critique is among the most recent and most contrarian in its view of Ferneyhough’s quasi-‘Darmstadt blasts’, characterizing his and other composers’ theoretical statements as ‘manifestos’ (Taruskin, Music in the Late Twentieth Century, 475). Ferneyhough, like Schoenberg, considers himself a ‘total autodidact’. Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 210. Ferneyhough also spent time early in his career copying and orchestrating other composers’ music to make a living, as Schoenberg had done in his early years. See Harvey, “Foreword,” Collected Writings, ix. Meyer, “Ein Gespräch mit Brian Ferneyhough,” 55. Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 205. Ferneyhough asks ‘what is musical meaning, if not the revelation of new perspectives according to constantly mutating sets of (musically immanent) rules of play?’ Collected Writings, 41. See similar comments in Ibid., 58, 153, 272, 325, 391, 470, 489. In fact he adopts a polemical stance against what he views as attempts to import meaning into musical works. See Brian Ferneyhough, “Form-Figure-Style: An Intermediate Assessment,” in Collected Writings, 21–28. Meyer, “Ein Gespräch mit Brian Ferneyhough,” 55–56. See Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 25 and 77. Ferneyhough, unpublished sketch materials, La terre est un homme, Paul Sacher Stiftung, Basel, Switzerland, c. 1976–1979. Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 242. Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 3–4. See also Nicholas Cook, “Between Process and Product: Music and/as Performance,” Music Theory Online 7/2 (April 2001) http://www.mtosmt.org/issues/mto.01.7.2/mto.01.7.2.cook. html (accessed January 3, 2012). Ibid., 7. Ibid., 318. Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 211. Fabrice Fitch, Liner Notes, “Shadowtime: A Note on the Opera by Fabrice Fitch,” in Brian Ferneyhough: Shadowtime, Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart, Nieuw Ensemble conducted by Jurjen Hempel, NMC D123, 2006, CD.

14

Chapter 1 Biography: Brian John Peter Ferneyhough (born January 16, 1943).

A

listener hearing the remarkable brass glissando gesture that opens Ferneyhough’s most recent orchestral piece, Plötzlichkeit (2006), is permitted an unwitting glimpse of the early years of its composer, whose recreation time at school was taken up with repairing musical instruments that had lain piled on top of each other, forgotten in a cupboard. His tools were rubber bands and tape, and by means of these rudimentary instruments, on the point of disintegration, he learned the oboe, flute and clarinet.1 When in his mid-60s Ferneyhough purchased a soprano trombone in order to write for it in Plötzlichkeit, he recalled his first ‘hands-on’ experience of a range of disused or obsolete wind and brass instruments, and his preference even then for their idiosyncratic sounds, with some amusement.2 The parlous state of these instruments, a legacy of wartime military bands, is emblematic of the devastated city into which Ferneyhough was born in 1943.3 There are many photographs on the internet and in museums of the immediate aftermath of the Blitz in Coventry, at its worst on the night of November 14, 1940.4 Although some of the debris was cleared, in reality the city recovered little until the rebuilding project begun in the 1950s, of which the new Cathedral, designed by Basil Spence, was the main feature. Although Ferneyhough was not involved in the consecration ceremonies in 1962, he recalls taking part in a sound check performance of a work that begins with a long-held trumpet note (he supposes that it was Wagner’s Rienzi), thus making him among the very first to sound a musical note in the new Cathedral.5 Ferneyhough’s earliest memories are of shopping with his mother in unlit, rubble-filled streets peppered with large fenced-off holes and temporary shops, such as those erected on Broadgate’s east side from 1947. In the event these remained longer than had ever been envisaged (they were finally replaced only in 1990).6 He recalls that, particularly in winter, ‘one was not encouraged to linger in the yellow fog-filled streets. I tended to run most of the route [to band practice]. Whether it was authentically dangerous I don’t know. It certainly felt like it.’7 He grew up in Willenhall, a suburb comprising mostly council housing, an only child whose father was — until the war — a shepherd and his mother a charwoman; both were ‘naturally reclusive’, and neither musically inclined.8 Ferneyhough’s initial interest in music did not originate at home, but at school. His school music teacher, John ‘Jack’ R. Major (who had been head of Coventry’s military music in the years immediately after the war), can be credited with first stimulating Ferneyhough’s attraction to brass instruments, something of an epiphany for the 11-year-old. When Major demonstrated a number of band instruments to new pupils at the Woodlands School, Coventry (now Woodlands Academy),

Brian Ferneyhough

the young Ferneyhough immediately asked to try the cornet, ‘producing a sequence of rather rude sounds’, and soon afterwards (1954) joined the Coventry School of Music Brass Band, a later incarnation of Major’s Air Corps Band.9 He subsequently conducted the band in a performance of his own music (a March, labelled opus 2, no. 1, 1959), which already largely subverts functional harmony, the basis of which he had assimilated by this point, and begun to question.10 The date of the March falls slightly before another occasion when, aged 16, Ferneyhough recalls the ‘dramatic experience’ of hearing an LP of part of Varèse’s Octandre, which he played so obsessively that (by his own account) he wore the record out. According to Ferneyhough ‘I didn’t understand a damned thing about it. I only knew that this was it. This was music.’11 The piece has retained an undoubted influence over Ferneyhough’s subsequent development, most obviously in Terrain (1992, discussed in Chapter 4), scored for the same ensemble, plus violin solo. According to Marc Texier, Ferneyhough’s parents were opposed to his activity in local bands, his mother hoping he would become a schoolmaster, a wish apparently shared by Major, who envisaged Ferneyhough as his own successor.12 Until he approached adulthood, Ferneyhough largely concealed his aspirations from everyone, his father reportedly concerned that his son’s musical activity suggested a wish to climb out of the social class to which he belonged.13 The composer relates his initial literal ‘speechlessness’ upon moving to Germany in the 1970s to censoring himself as a child, during which time he avidly read science fiction. This early love of reading endured, the repertoire of subjects becoming ever more expanded and eclectic.14 The following comments give some insight, perhaps, into his later complex mode of expression in both written and verbal forms: The British class system ensures that the compartmentalization of vocabularic subsets serving to functionally separate various levels of society is well advanced and notably unforgiving, offering little leeway for individual deviation. So it seemed to me at the time, anyway. I remember being so sure that one could only move wholesale from one rigid code to another that I invented several rather elaborate and mutually incompatible languages in an attempt both to provide myself with a temporary inner refuge and to create grammars within which new forms of experience could be enunciated.15 Texier goes so far as to draw an explicit causal link between this mental (and other than his participation in the band, physical) childhood reclusiveness and the later blackness [noirceur] of Ferneyhough’s notation, interpreting the latter as the conquering by the adult of the child’s fear of losing his relationship with music owing to the familial and social pressures placed upon him.16 Seen in this light, the composer’s auto-didacticism reinforced his isolation and the sense of ‘marking time’ until he could pursue his vocation unhindered. Amongst the early unpublished works held at the Paul Sacher Stiftung, Basel, more than one dating from the late 1950s and early 1960s is signed and dated ‘25th December’ or ‘midnight, 1st January’, acknowledging the passing of a year (and thus measuring his own compositional progress) but also signalling that his family’s observance of such festivities was perfunctory and 18

Biography

understated at best.17 Notwithstanding these underwhelming expectations, Ferneyhough was a member, at various points, of numerous ensembles: he first joined the Festival Band around 1954 (before it took that name) playing front-line cornet and deputizing on other instruments as necessary (including euphonium, baritone and latterly flugelhorn, ‘of which there is only one in the standard band formation, thus satisfying my ego, even though it was located in the second row’).18 Another ensemble was the Coventry School of Music Orchestra and, for a period (c. 1964–1965), Ferneyhough conducted the adult orchestra, leading to a concert in Coventry’s Belgrade Theatre with a programme including Sibelius, Beethoven and Mozart.19 The Midland Youth Orchestra, of which Ferneyhough was a member for a number of years into adulthood, represented an opportunity to rehearse his own earliest compositions, including the first of Six Pieces for Large Orchestra.20 In September 1964, he selected players from the orchestra to premiere his Variations for Chamber Orchestra in Birmingham. In that concert, a fellow composition student conducted Webern’s Variations for Orchestra (op. 30), in which Ferneyhough played trumpet; there is no trumpet in Ferneyhough’s own Variations because he had to conduct the performance.21 Like Webern, Ferneyhough appends a coda, and the second variation is an interlude or ‘bridge’ to the third. Ferneyhough’s Variations begin to explore the extension in time of Webernian expressive language that became a main focus of the Sonatas for String Quartet, started not long afterwards, in 1965. Between these orchestral works and the final version of the Sonatas, Ferneyhough’s first distinctively personal compositional ‘voice’ emerges. Anecdotally, he recalls composing large parts of the Sonatas over the Christmas period 1966 at his parents’ home, on a wobbly old card table.22 As might be expected, given his own playing experience in his teenage years and early adulthood, many of Ferneyhough’s earliest compositions prioritize the brass, including his first fully non-tonal work, a Suite for Three Trumpets (1961) and other ‘Stockhausenesque pieces for trumpet and piano which I read through [with Lyndon Thomas, a school friend], much to the silent disapprobation of my long-suffering father.’23 An adult by this stage, and fully committed to a musical future, Ferneyhough appears to have become less anxious to protect and conceal his music in the home environment.24 Ferneyhough’s decision to enter the Birmingham School of Music in 1961 to pursue a trumpet teaching diploma course reflects his anxieties on leaving school; and he describes the reputation he acquired early on there as an anarchist.25 Texier notes Ferneyhough’s metaphor for his experience at Birmingham (akin to ‘Dante’s last circle of hell’) and the composer’s perception that his peers at the time were largely middle-class, rich and passing the time until they inherited.26 This polemical recollection at many years’ distance is emblematic of the extreme ambivalence towards Britain that has persisted throughout his career, and gives an insight into the internal conflict Ferneyhough experienced during this period, alleviated only by his association during his two years at the Birmingham School of Music with the clarinettist Roger Lloyd, who fixed performances of Ferneyhough’s works.27 These included Fanfare, Fantasy and Fugue (three clarinets, 1963–1964),28 Sonatina for Three Clarinets and Bass Clarinet and Variations for Wind Trio (first performed December 1963; 19

Brian Ferneyhough

flute, clarinet and oboe, the latter played by Ferneyhough).29 Lloyd continued his association with the composer after the latter’s move to the Royal Academy of Music, London, and Ferneyhough’s establishment of his Arradon Ensemble in 1967–1968. One of its most notable performances was the premiere of the wind sextet Prometheus in July 1967 at Mahatma Gandhi Hall, London. According to Ferneyhough, ‘it is no exaggeration to say that I would not have been able to pursue the [Arradon Ensemble] venture without [Lloyd’s] performer-finding capabilities; indeed, it ceased being a viable operation when he left to take a position with an orchestra [abroad].’30 But alongside the frustrations experienced during this period (such as the return of the score of Coloratura by the jury of the Society for the Promotion of New Music in 1966 with the advice to re-write it for clarinet instead of oboe,31 or composing in the Woolworth’s basement café in London, the only warm place Ferneyhough could find and stay for hours at a time) there were positive events:32 Lloyd facilitated valuable opportunities to work with first-rate musicians, and Ferneyhough’s earliest published score dates from 1966 when he was 23 (the beginning of a long association with Hinrichsen Edition/Peters Edition in London).33 This is the afore-mentioned Sonatina, one of very few visible ‘tips of the iceberg’ of auto-didactic compositions typical of the output of the 1960s. By the end of his time at the Academy, where he studied composition with Lennox Berkeley and conducting with Maurice Miles, Ferneyhough had given up the trumpet (after a trial with the Midland Light Orchestra, and a performance on fourth trumpet in a CBSO Rite of Spring) and devoted himself entirely to composing, his income supplemented by peripatetic instrumental teaching.34 When he left the UK the only instrument he took with him (whether by choice or out of convenience) was his flute, which features prominently in the solo works of the early 1970s (Cassandra’s Dream Song and Unity Capsule), just as the 1960s had been dominated by compositions for brass and/or wind ensembles. Another reason a cloud hovers over the composer’s memory of the period from 1961 is the onset of medical symptoms that remained undiagnosed, and largely untreated, until 1993. The diagnosis, when it came, was of narcolepsy with cataplexy, the former a severe neurological disorder in which the brain cannot regulate sleep patterns, such that night-time sleep is often disturbed, and the day-time is marred by uncontrollable attacks of somnolence, often with little or no notice. Cataplexy involves muscular weakness, which can lead to total collapse: performers including the Arditti Quartet, with whom Ferneyhough has worked over many years, have witnessed him collapse when overtired. Since stress can trigger cataplexy, Ferneyhough judged it best to restrict his conducting activity (especially after his time at the Royal Academy of Music) rather than risk an untimely attack on stage; he recalls having to take strategic — and furtive — naps whilst a junior school teacher between 1963 and 1965, just to remain functional.35 Medications new to the market in the early 1990s have made it possible for some sufferers of narcolepsy to approximate ‘normal’ sleep patterns: when one considers the undoubted effect that had had on the daily pattern of composing prior to that date (bearing in mind that the condition has been managed effectively for only the last 20 years), it is tempting to speculate as to any evidential trace left in the music itself. 20

Biography

Although Ferneyhough’s descriptions of vivid and intense dreams of completed scores (such as the conjuring up of a ‘fantastic piece […] some sort of crazy Brazilian rain-forest’,36 or the suggestion that a score like La terre est un homme is a distant reflection of such dreams) are linked by the composer to periods where he was not composing much at all, it may well be that his condition plays a part in such imaginings.37 A narcoleptic will enter into the REM phase of sleep much more quickly than is the norm, and may experience hallucinatory states in the transition from sleep to wakefulness and vice versa. Although an evaluation of the precise implications of the condition for Ferneyhough’s creative life seems impossible, something of the tactility of experience and of material that he describes may be perhaps not too fancifully attributed to these vivid experiences, and to the intense working periods of wakefulness in between. Ferneyhough studied at conservatoires in Birmingham and London before moving to Europe in 1968, first to Holland to take up the Mendelssohn scholarship and study with Ton de Leeuw, and swiftly thereafter to the Musikakademie, Basel, Switzerland under Klaus Huber’s tutelage. Thanks to Huber’s practical support, Ferneyhough found, probably for the first time, much-needed time to undertake large-scale works, including Firecycle Beta. Prizes began to accumulate, beginning with Gaudeamus composition awards three years running (1968–1970), an honourable mention for the ambitious Firecycle Beta (second place) in the Italian section of the International Society for Contemporary Music in 1972, and in 1974 the same society’s special prize for best work in all categories for Time and Motion Study III.38 1974 can be described as Ferneyhough’s ‘breakthrough’ year insofar as several pieces were performed at the Royan Festival, a pattern that continued for several years thereafter.39 The support of Harry Halbreich, the festival’s director, in bringing about these performances enabled Ferneyhough dramatically to reduce the time between composition and first performance. As he became established and as his work-rate increased, several pieces were nonetheless abandoned or withdrawn, which reveal alternative paths that might have been taken. In some respects, Opus Null (begun in 1968 and continued at the Basel Musikakademie) contains elements of notations to come in the 1970s, including the ‘looping material’ in boxes (Missa Brevis), the free-pitch notation (Transit) and overloaded, creative note-heads (Time and Motion Study III). Scored for four singer-actors (approximating SATB), winds, doublebass, percussion and keyboards, the piece’s notation begins relatively straightforwardly before tending towards graphic notational symbols divested of any discernible relationship to convention (besides there being two stave-lines, representing the lower and upper vocal range, respectively), with cartoon-like doodles in between. Opus Null takes its name and its text from a poem by Hans Arp, who had died in 1966. It explores structural features seen in later works, including the intervention of new, differently characterized materials upon the main discourse, similar to the ‘inserts’ in Transit. Opus Null includes material upon which the performers are to improvise: rather as in the case of Sieben Sterne for organ, the ‘effort should be made to improvise in as close a manner as possible to the prevailing mood of the surrounding sections.’40 As the composition progresses, a pre-recorded tape part and ‘subsidiary chamber group’ is added to the original instrumentation including 21

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keyboards (celesta, electric organ and piano).41 The score includes the following prefatory note (1969): It is important that at no point should the [wind] quintet or the percussion player evince the slightest interest in the activities of the singers. Ideally, they should act as if they were not even aware of their existence, even though it is obvious that the singers have the highest awareness of, and sensitivity to, the instrumentalists. The singers should come on stage first […] They totally ignore the audience. In contrast, the instrumentalists should affect a typically grave and unanimous ‘classical entrance’ – (unison bow, etc.). At the end of the performance, the singers, obviously growing ‘bored’ with the proceedings, wander off singly, leaving the quintet to finish alone. The percussionist reads a newspaper, legs crossed. He may possibly light a cigarette or eat a sausage. Upon finishing, the quintet and the percussionist (sausage or cigarette in hand) bow gravely, acknowledge applause and walk off.42 Such explicitly theatrical behaviour, an ‘implied “Dadaist” flavour’ derived from Arp’s poem,43 is not associated with any of Ferneyhough’s published scores, but finds an unmistakable echo in the Time and Motion Study cycle, although framed in a completely different aesthetic: Time and Motion Study II recalls Opus Null’s absurdist gestures in the instructions to the ’cellist, and the same can be said of the occasionally bizarre vocal sounds and instructions of Time and Motion Study III. The freedom that study in Basel permitted Ferneyhough unleashed some of the more volatile creative energies repressed during his adolescence, and though certain extreme directions were not pursued, their evidential trace is retained in the published work. The first composition lodged at the Sacher Stiftung is, appropriately enough, a brassheavy Overture dated 1958 (op. 1, no. 1). Later in his career, Ferneyhough refers to pieces as compositional ‘diaries’,44 and in fact the earliest unpublished works written between 1958 and the mid-1960s fulfil this very function, charting the autodidact’s progress very precisely (including perhaps surprising dedications to Hindemith, Berg and others, and the swift transition from tonal to atonal musical language). Ferneyhough’s relative lack of access to major twentieth-century musical resources (scores and recordings) before attending the Birmingham School of Music is documented,45 and his juvenilia act as a diary insofar as his encounter with particular composers and their music is enshrined and reflected in his compositional endeavours from the age of 15. A shift from generic names including ‘Divertimento’, ‘Bagatelles’ (1962–1963), ‘Concerto’ (violin, 1963) and even ‘Symphony’ (in B H major, 1959) to titles that reflect extra-musical concerns, including Metamorphoses on the Origins of Fire (piano, early 1960s), the aforementioned Opus Null (1968–1969) and Emblemata (1975, also piano), echoes that in the published catalogue (from the Sonata for Two Pianos to Epicycle, and so on).46 What is remarkable is the speed of Ferneyhough’s acquired proficiency — given that he had had no training beyond school lessons and what he had learned through performance in the various bands of which he was a member — in styles progressing from common practice harmony, through extended tonality to 22

Biography

quasi-Second Viennese School free atonality, from Varèse-inspired textures to the developments of the mid twentieth-century. Metamorphoses on the Origins of Fire, for example, derives its pianistic and notational style (including the use of colour) from Boulez’s Third Piano Sonata and Stockhausen’s Klavierstück XI.47 Another set of pieces, the Three Little Pieces for Orchestra (1961) employs a Webernesque gestural vocabulary and an internally subdivided tone-row, with each registrally specific note possessing its own dynamic, articulation, and so on. It is not only others’ musical styles that Ferneyhough absorbed on the path to his own compositional maturity, but aesthetic predilections as well, which he then made his own. The first works to reflect the influence of alchemy and mysticism coincide with Ferneyhough’s studies with Huber, whose own attraction to such phenomena forms a major part of his compositional persona.48 Finally, on the subject of abandoned works, while it is striking that their number drops off dramatically after the composer’s initial rise to prominence, the sketches in the Paul Sacher Stiftung contain detailed references to at least one later abandoned piece, Kranichtänze (described by the composer as ‘three in one piece(s) for clarinet, ’cello and piano’, around 1988).49 This partly explains the context for the ‘phantom’ work Kranichtänze II (piano, dated 1997–1998) included in the work-list in the volume of Collected Writings, but never published, performed or mentioned again.50 The same list includes a still more intriguing reference to a work for 22 players, Maisons noires (dated 1992–1998), the object of a commission that was eventually abandoned.51 Huber’s influence enabled Ferneyhough to obtain a teaching position at Freiburg’s Musikhochschule from 1973 until he became principal composition teacher at the Royal Conservatoire at the Hague (1986–1987). In 1987–1988 he emigrated to America upon the offer of a permanent post (for the first time) at the University of California, San Diego, and since 2000 he has held the William H. Bonsall Professorship in Music, Stanford University. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Ferneyhough’s adopted first language, by necessity, was German, but the alienation from his mother tongue was likely a welcome by-product in some respects. His move to the US restored him to the English language, but prompted newer — North American — relationships to the language, particularly that of poets including Ezra Pound, John Ashbery, Jackson Mac Low and most recently Charles Bernstein, the librettist of Shadowtime.52 Nevertheless, he remains an observer of US culture from the outside, looking in upon ‘the current population [which is] ruled by a suffocating sense of nostalgia. Probably that accounts for why the serious arts have such a hard time of it, since the explicitly commerce-driven recycling of minimally distinct cycles of the ‘up-to-date’ picture-postcardizes experience in bite-sized hermetic packages.’53 Since his move to continental Europe in the 1960s, Ferneyhough’s profile and impact as a teacher of composition has been as significant, in its own way, as his compositional output. Despite the attraction or repulsion that his music exerts on later generations of composers, he has always strongly resisted association with any ‘school’, and refuses pointblank to impart the components of his compositional toolbox. His one injunction to any young composer, he says (and this defines his credo as a teacher), is ‘not to be naïve.’54 In addition to his tenured posts (and a one-year visiting Professorship at Harvard University 23

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in 2007–2008), he was from 1984–1996 the composition course co-ordinator at the biennial Darmstädter Ferienkurse für Neue Musik and since 1990 principal composition teacher at the Fondation Royaumont annual composers’ course. In the interval, the association with Darmstadt has resumed, albeit on a different footing. Recent years have seen the award of significant honorific distinctions, such as the Ernst von Siemens Musikpreis in 2007, and most recently an honorary doctorate (from Goldsmiths College, University of London) in 2012. Almost from the outset, however, Ferneyhough has regarded his personal life as being subsumed (for better or worse) within his creative life. The point is tellingly made in the very candid (and by no means self-uncritical) assessment published in the programme note accompanying the Paris production of Shadowtime in 2004. Discussing his attraction to Walter Benjamin, the opera’s subject, as both man and thinker, he explains that I chose [Benjamin] because he seems to me not to have been a dishonest person, whereas many intellectuals in the 20s and 30s sought their own advantage [… and] seem not to have tried to change the situation. Benjamin also was responsible for the moral quagmire of this period, behaving as though nothing should apply to him. So he would go to the Bibliothèque Nationale as the Nazis marched on Paris; but he was then thrown into a camp. There are those who act out of bad faith to protect themselves, and those who, like him, were authentic enough to live out their lack of realism. There is a striking parallel with the contemporary situation… [I chose Benjamin because] he represents the archetype of the intellectual of his time. And I would hope that what I am suggesting regarding him applies to every one of us; for I am no exception. All my life, I have sought to remain outside society, whereas it is the object of my unceasing attention. I removed myself from my social class to go and live in London, then I left London to go abroad, then I left Germany to go to America, and most recently I left the University of San Diego for Stanford University. Most of these changes occurred at a time when I felt myself to have become too engaged in the social mechanism in which I found myself; so I cut loose and left. If I cannot reconcile life and art so as to make something greater, then I am guilty in my own way, like everyone else.55 This has more than a tangential bearing on Ferneyhough’s assertion, mentioned at the end of the Introduction, that he experiences his self as being constructed by his music. It plausibly accounts for the reticence with which he usually greets enquiries about his life; but his attitude also has aesthetic implications, which will be considered  at the very end of this book. Meanwhile, it is to the music that the discussion now turns. Notes   1 Brian Ferneyhough, e-mail message to the author, November 26, 2012.   2 Brian Ferneyhough, e-mail message to the author, November 1, 2012. Around the same time Ferneyhough bought an alto flute in order to work on Sisyphus Redux (2009). 24

Biography

3 Ferneyhough’s school music teacher had formed the Coventry Air Corps Training Band immediately after the Second World War. The band subsequently went through several different incarnations, including the Coventry Boys’ Band, Coventry School of Music Brass Band (until 1957), and after that the Coventry Festival Band. It is now known as the Jaguar Land Rover Band. See the Band’s website, http://www.jaguarlandroverband.com/About_ Us.html (accessed January 12, 2013).    4 Coventry Cathedral tours include an option for the ‘Blitz Museum Experience’.      5 Ferneyhough, e-mail message to the author, November 26, 2012. He also performed in the Cathedral on later occasions, playing first high D trumpet in Bach’s Christmas Oratorio. From 1963–1965 Ferneyhough was one of very few semi-professional trumpet players in the West Midlands.    6 Ferneyhough, e-mail message to the author, November 26, 2012. See Coventry City Council’s website, http://www.coventry.gov.uk/info/2000701/broadgate/1453/broadgate/5 (accessed January 12, 2013).     7 Ferneyhough, e-mail message to the author, November 26, 2012.     8 Ibid. Marc Texier has documented details of Ferneyhough’s immediate family, noting his father’s tendency to doff his cap to a well-dressed doctor he met in the street, and his maternal grandfather’s action that prevented Ferneyhough’s mother pursuing her wish to become a nurse: he burned her books in the oven. See Marc Texier, “Le dernier des modernes,” in Brian Ferneyhough: textes réunis par Peter Szendy, ed. Peter Szendy, 9–25 (Paris: L’Harmattan/IRCAM, 1999). This is a slightly different account from that related by Ferneyhough in an e-mail message to the author (October 31, 2012), in which he recalls his maternal grandmother throwing his mother’s books into the kitchen oven.     9 Ferneyhough, e-mail message to the author, November 26, 2012. Ferneyhough recalls his parents purchasing ‘a distinctly superannuated but playable cornet for £5’ (Ibid.). 10 The score of the March is held at the Paul Sacher Stiftung, Basel in a collection of early incomplete and withdrawn works archived by Prof Dr Ulrich Mosch. Access to these works is restricted; permission to view them in preparation for this book was given by the composer. The early March does not contain conventional harmonic progressions, but positions unrelated chords as neighbours and undermines typical cadential preparations. According to the composer, around the time of this March (and his first encounter with Varèse’s music) he sat at the piano for hours playing ‘the most vile dissonances that [he] could possibly find […] until [he] had worked these ghastly diatonic chords out of [his] head.’ Stephen Harold Riggins, The Pleasures of Time, (Toronto: Insomniac Press, 2003), 136. 11 Riggins, The Pleasures of Time, 136. 12 See Texier, “Le dernier des modernes,” 18. The anecdote relating to Major arises from Ferneyhough, e-mail message to the author, November 26, 2012. 13 Texier, “Le dernier des modernes,” 18. 14 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 465. 15 Ibid. It is tempting to suppose a wryly-conceived link on Ferneyhough’s part between these childhood invented languages and that devised for his opera, Shadowtime (Scene VII), which his own electronically-treated voice can be heard speaking. Like Plötzlichkeit, Finis Terrae or Sisyphus Redux, Shadowtime comments implicitly on the composer’s autobiography.     

25

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16 Texier, “Le dernier des modernes,” 19. 17 Ferneyhough, e-mail message to the author, November 26, 2012. There is a piece entitled Piece for December 25th 1965 (for orchestra) in the Sacher collection. 18 Ibid. Woodlands School opened in 1954. The flugelhorn part in the Ferneyhough’s most recently completed work, Finis Terrae, is another nod to his youth. 19 Ibid. 20 Amongst the Sacher collection there is a folder containing Six Pieces for Large Orchestra (1962–5), the first of which is marked ‘In memoriam Alban Berg’ (giving some indication of the music’s expressive style). Many are incomplete, and some missing altogether from the set. Despite the reference to Berg, the set is likely named after Webern’s own Six Pieces for Large Orchestra (1909–10). 21 Ferneyhough, e-mail message to the author, November 26, 2012. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid. 24 It is intriguing that Ferneyhough continued, even after his career began to be firmly established, to be rather self-deprecating, perhaps a legacy of his private nature as a child and his sensation of ‘disapprobation’. Stephen Riggins reports a disarming conversation at Royan in 1974, in which the composer responded to Riggins’ question which asked why he was so co-operative in interview: ‘[y]ou had enough interest to ask […] People usually don’t. I am a person who likes — I am being quite honest now — who likes the confirmation of being asked [for interviews] because I am always insecure enough to need that….I am a person who will never succeed in things like interviews or press conferences because I always place myself so much publicly in question.’ Riggins, The Pleasures of Time, 136. 25 Ferneyhough, e-mail message to the author, November 29, 2012. He says he was ‘laughed out of court by all and sundry as I had been in school’ (Riggins, The Pleasures of Time, 136). 26 Texier, “Le dernier des modernes,” 19. 27 Since 2010, Roger Lloyd has held the post of chief Executive of Choirs Aotearoa New Zealand, after a long association with various NZ orchestras and before that, as general manager for the Ulster Orchestra Society. 28 Archived as Intrada, Fantasia and Fugue at the Paul Sacher Stiftung. 29 Ferneyhough, Sonatina for 3 Clarinets B H and Bassoon (or Bass Clarinet) (London: Hinrichsen Edition, No. 879, 1966). The work is very different from the rest of Ferneyhough’s published output, exhibiting absolutely none of the features that later came to be ascribed to his complexity: its original or working title ‘Rondino in D’ gives some indication as to its difference. It was a work intended for young, developing musicians written after a request by Hinrichsen Edition/Peters, for an ‘educational’ work or works similar to ABRSM graded examination materials. After completing it, Ferneyhough was passed on to Hans Swarenski, then Director of Peters Edition, who took an interest in the composer and who initiated the composer’s long-standing association with the publisher. A note appended to the autograph score records that it was composed at a holiday camp in Dawlish, Devon. By the time of its publication, a ‘lento espressivo’ movement in the middle of the work, in D minor, was dropped. (Ferneyhough, unpublished sketch materials, Sonatina, Paul Sacher 26

Biography

30 31

32 33

34 35

36 37 38

39

40 41 42

Stiftung, Basel, 1963). It was written and performed in 1963. Robert Worby indicated the original context in which this work arose in conversation with the author. Ferneyhough confirmed this in an e-mail message to the author, March 17, 2013. Ferneyhough, e-mail message to the author, November 29, 2012. This was on account of some particularly high notes in the oboe part. Heinz Holliger premiered the work in 1972 and, as Toop notes, many talented oboists have negotiated the work, with excellent results (Richard Toop, “Brian Ferneyhough,” in Music of the TwentiethCentury Avant-Garde: A Biocritical Sourcebook (Westport, CT.: Greenwood Publishing, 2002), 138. Ferneyhough reports having written Epicycle in a Woolworths café in email message to the author, November 1, 2012. The work is the Sonatina, the context for the publication of which is detailed above. Given Ferneyhough’s recollection of this period in generally negative terms, the association with Hinrichsen/Peters nevertheless came about after Ferneyhough produced the Sonatina at the publisher’s request. After this, and declining to produce any further pieces in this vein, he began his association with Swarenski. The next published work was the Sonatas for String Quartet, 1968. Swarenski reportedly remarked to Richard Toop that ‘I’ve just taken on a young English composer who I think is enormously talented. If this doesn’t work, this is the last time — I won’t waste my time on deaf ears any more.’ The reference is to his frustration at a lack of British interest in Cornelius Cardew’s work. See Toop, “Brian Ferneyhough,” in Music of the Twentieth-Century Avant-Garde, 138–9. Ferneyhough, e-mail message to the author, November 29, 2012. Reportedly, Ferneyhough recalls that all he and Berkeley achieved in lessons was to play Bach duets on the piano. See Riggins, The Pleasures of Time, 136. Ibid. The school was Limbrick Wood Junior School, Coventry, where Ferneyhough taught in the period between the stints at Birmingham and London. During this period he continued his peripatetic instrumental teaching, and for a short period he also worked in a machine tools factory. Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 261. Ibid., 262. At the time of composition, Ferneyhough had no hope of having Firecycle performed, since the resources needed were so complex, including five conductors. He credits Huber for the support that enabled him to pursue this and other large-scale projects regardless (see Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 236). In 1974, Missa Brevis, Cassandra’s Dream Song and Sieben Sterne were performed; in 1975, the Sonatas for String Quartet and Transit (conducted by Ferneyhough); in 1976 Ferneyhough heard Firecycle Beta and Unity Capsule for the first time. Time and Motion Study I was premiered in 1977, the last year the Festival took place. This instruction is taken from the prefatory notes to the unpublished score, archived with the sketch materials for the work at the Paul Sacher Stiftung, Basel. The profile of contributory keyboard instruments is very similar to that in Firecycle Beta, notes for which are mixed in with sketch sheets on Opus Null. Ferneyhough, unpublished sketch materials, Opus Null, Paul Sacher Stiftung, c. 1968. 27

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43 Ibid. 44 See for example Ferneyhough, “Unity Capsule: An Instant Diary,” in Collected Writings, 98–106. 45 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 234. 46 In addition: Lieder (1964), Partita, Fantasia, Sonata Concertante (all 1961–3), Variations (several sets), Suite (1961, for three trumpets mentioned earlier), Sonata da Camera (1964). 47 The aesthetic context for Metamorphoses is the Prometheus myth, which of course Ferneyhough revisited again within a few years, in the eponymous composition for wind sextet (1967). A Quartet for piano, flute, clarinet and percussion (1965) is similarly notated, testifying to a much greater period of experimentation with mobile form than the published catalogue suggests. A receipt for an order for some of John Cage’s scores is included in the miscellaneous sketch materials, and instructions to the pianist in the Quartet, including plucking strings, and some New York School style notation, suggests this influence. 48 Kjell Keller discusses Huber’s attraction to mysticism in Keller, “Impulse aus dem Orient auf Klaus Hubers musikalisches Schaffen,” Musik-Konzepte 137/138, Klaus Huber (Munich: edition text + kritik, 2007): 119–34. Ferneyhough identifies a trait he shares with Huber as ‘a certain very tight structuralism in small movements which were connected together,’ before suggesting that whilst he (Ferneyhough) ‘came from Schoenberg-Webern miniatures’, Huber’s music has gone in the direction of ‘a sort of aesthetic mysticism.’ Riggins, The Pleasures of Time, 137. Ferneyhough suggests that it was not until he met Huber that he was, for the first time, encouraged to continue composing. He also recounts that he did not give Huber opportunities to change details in his compositions, because he presented them in beautiful copperplate handwriting, by which time it was too late for his mentor to suggest amendments (Ibid., 137). 49 Ferneyhough, e-mail message to the author, January 28, 2013. 50 Brian Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 517. 51 Ibid. As the composition of these two pieces straddles the period during which Ferneyhough began to use computer software as an aid to composing, there is no sketch-material relating to either at the Paul Sacher Stiftung. 52 Ibid., 465. 53 Lois Fitch and John Hails, “Failed Time, Successful Time, Shadowtime: An Interview with Brian Ferneyhough,” in Contemporary Music: Theoretical and Philosophical Perspectives, ed. Max Paddison and Irène Deliège (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 329–30. 54 The published interviews contain many references to Ferneyhough’s pedagogical activities. See most notably the extended passage from the interview with Joël Bons in Brian Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 217–27. 55 Brian Ferneyhough, Programme notes, “Shadowtime,” for the Paris production of Shadowtime (Théâtre Nanterre-Amandiers, October 26 and 27, 2004), 7. Translation: Fabrice Fitch.

28

Chapter 2 Notation

My dear fellow, there are in fact only so many notes the ear can hear in the course of an evening. I think I’m right in saying that, aren’t I, Court Composer?1 Peter Shaffer, Amadeus Brian Ferneyhough’s typically tough and complex Lemma-Icon-Epigram for piano […] and Carceri d’Invenzione IIb for flute […] contained too many notes to be admired for anything other than their aggressiveness.2

D

uring the course of his early career Ferneyhough’s name became synonymous for many with an unreasonable level of complexity, specifically in his approach to musical notation. Although this critical tendency abated significantly as his music became more regularly performed and recorded, it continues to hold true today in some quarters. The view that intellectualism is the root cause of ‘too many notes’ underlies many newspaper reviews, reports and musicological commentaries on Ferneyhough’s works. An additional contributory factor was the publication in 1988 of Richard Toop’s now notorious essay ‘Four Facets of the “New Complexity”,’ in which Ferneyhough was presented as the father-figure of the phenomenon (although his close contemporary Michael Finnissy was included in the group of four representatives — the others being James Dillon, Chris Dench and Richard Barrett).3 Toop was (and remains) a strong supporter of Ferneyhough’s music, though the composers themselves resist the epithet that Toop’s essay — not the first to do so — bestowed on them.4 By the time of its publication a narrative had long since emerged, which located the complexity in the notation as a representation of complex generative processes underlying the music. In this way, fundamental differences in compositional approach between the composers were masked. Even though Toop’s article did not discuss notation (beyond observing similarities between the respective densities of the composers’ scores), the focus on notation as a locus of complexity persisted after its publication, as Ferneyhough himself indicates: It would be nice to abandon the use of the term ‘complex’ in the way that the title of this event [the Complexity? Festival, Rotterdam, March 1990] and choice of compositional exemplifications has seemed to define it, since there is little communality of intent or aesthetic position discernible beyond the number of note-heads per page.5

Brian Ferneyhough

The Narrative of Intellectualism Toop’s decision essentially to leave Ferneyhough out of his discussion, the latter’s European residency throughout his early career and up to the year prior to the publication of Toop’s article, and his role as composition course co-ordinator at Darmstadt from 1984 all contribute to Ferneyhough’s reputation as a ‘guru’ to this group of composers, the figurehead of complexity in excelsis.6 Although several New Complexity composers have been criticized in reviews for the arcane programme notes that accompany performances of their works,7 none perhaps has been so constructed in either the press or musicological research as Ferneyhough the ‘philosopher’ — the ‘peculiarly mystifying verbalizer’ — who toys with the reader (and the listener) from a position of intellectual superiority.8 This remark on Carceri II is indicative of the association of Ferneyhough’s supposed intellectualism with the density of his music: ‘Like many another Ferneyhough piece with a fearsome theoretical background (he is such a self-consciously intellectual composer that there’s hardly room for him in Britain), Carceri II is dense but palpably vital.’9 Crucially, such a heavily backhanded compliment points to another tendency in the criticism of Ferneyhough’s work: to ignore the differences between pieces and ‘periods’ in his output, discussed later in this chapter. Though it might be more than reasonable to characterize Time and Motion Study II as ‘fearsomely theoretical’ (in conception, if not in execution),10 it hardly seems appropriate to label any work from the Carceri cycle in this way — as though the whole oeuvre were collapsible into a single journalistic strapline. A recent example of such a strapline, accompanying a critically positive ‘Guide to Brian Ferneyhough’s Music’ by Tom Service in the Guardian On Classical Blog on September 10, 2012, perpetuates this trend: ‘His compositions are the ultimate in complexity. So how to approach the works of this philosophically demanding musician?’11 The blog article initially locates the complexity of Ferneyhough’s music in the notation, but Service goes on to observe, crucially, that ‘even more fundamentally, the notation is a sort of scratching at the surface of what the actual musical work of Lemma-Icon-Epigram might be.’12 Contrast this with a review of Darmstadt 1980 in which Ferneyhough is evaluated on the basis of a talk he gave on the large orchestral work La terre est un homme: ‘was the seduction of his working methods so potent that they became the main attraction, as opposed to consideration of the audible results?’13 Another observation on the part of the same reviewers draws attention to one of the most common tropes in the discourse around New Complexity, and Ferneyhough in particular: inferring from the composer’s presentation that the manifestation of intellectual prowess is the defining feature of his creativity, it is claimed that he and his colleagues saw themselves as the inheritors of the Darmstadt serial tradition and its associated polemics. Hence the reviewers’ conclusion that ‘Ferneyhough’s attitude about musical communication could well epitomize the Darmstadt-European school of thought, where well-articulated concepts brilliantly presented in lectures are valued as end-products in themselves.’14 Richard Taruskin’s perspective is expressed still more trenchantly: ‘[the New-Complexisists’] manifestos, many of them unprintable in a book 32

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like [the Oxford History of Western Music], were worthy successors to the original Darmstadt blasts [...] And their music was at least in appearance, even more complicated.’15 Though not loaded with the inferences of the Darmstadt review quoted above, the idea of a clear lineage between 1950s and 1960s Darmstadt and New Complexity is given currency in the New Grove entry on the latter: The presentation of [the ‘New-Complexisists’] work within the Darmstadt courses was often accompanied by polemical debates whose trenchant modernism echoed that of the postwar serialist composers of the Darmstadt School, and in 1997 Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf went so far as to propose that the composers of the New Complexity be designated the ‘Second Darmstadt School’.16 Ferneyhough’s music undoubtedly shares many affinities with Darmstadt serialism, not least his parametric style. Jonathan Harvey goes so far as to refer to Ferneyhough as an integral serialist, noting that ‘[t]he integral serialists elevated all the parameters to selfsufficient form-making status, but none of them, except Ferneyhough, went on to develop the gestural, expressive independence of the parameters to such a high degree.’17 Harvey adds that [t]here was no ‘jumping in’ in Ferneyhough’s career. Whereas many composers seem to jump from time to time onto a vehicle, little understanding how it got where it was, Ferneyhough evolved, and became progressively more sophisticated within the mainstream of central European thought — that of Schoenberg, Webern, Stockhausen, and Boulez.18 Although absent from Harvey’s appraisal of Ferneyhough, the subtext of many parallels drawn between New Complexity composers and the Darmstadt School focuses on the image of a composer as a controlling intellect, denying the possibility of communication in music (however construed). In 1979, Paul Driver’s review of the premiere of La terre est un homme in Glasgow refers to ‘Brian Ferneyhough’s unashamed 60s constructivism, a doctrinaire world of transcendent complexity and performer-difficulty’ before observing that a ‘[naïve] sincerity is responsible for the impossible vastness of La terre […] one essentially inturned and unbothered about communication.’19 The perception that the music is intended to baffle rather than offer anything meaningful for its listeners extends to the (likewise baffled) performer in several evaluations of Ferneyhough’s music from the 1980s and 1990s.20 Emphasis on the notation (in which Driver explicitly locates ‘performance-difficulty’, arguing that it amounts to ‘infatuation with calligraphy’) limits the performer’s role to that of transmitter rather than interpreter.21 Ferneyhough’s ‘gleeful seizure of advanced serialism’ is considered responsible for these attributes of his music.22 Stuart Paul Duncan argues on the contrary that ‘New Complexity was not only a reaction against New Simplicity, but also a rejection of an integral serialist approach that seeks to 33

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control every musical domain. The complexity of New Complexity therefore derives not from the means of construction, nor the blackness of the page.’23 He suggests that ‘[New Complexity] pieces counter the interpretational (or rather non-interpretational) performance practices espoused under the influence of Stockhausen, Babbitt, and other immediately post-WWII serialists’ and cites Babbitt’s essay ‘The Composer as Specialist’ as evidence of Babbitt’s requirement that performers render the notation with the greatest possible degree of accuracy achievable.24 For Duncan, the complexity in New Complexity resides in the interstices between composer and score, performer and notation, and performer and listener.25 In fact, neither position, be it Ferneyhough’s rejection of supposedly ‘noninterpretational’ performance practices or his embeddedness within a Darmstadt tradition held to have given rise to them, satisfactorily accounts for his particular approach to the roles of the performer, notation or parametric composition. Whilst pointing out that serialism is often an ‘all-purpose scapegoat’ for characterizations of ‘one-dimensional distillations of abstract, material-bound strategies of generation’,26 Ferneyhough is not uncritical of it. One might argue that the perception of a reduced or restricted role for the performer in music produced by the Darmstadt School is less a direct result of Darmstadt composers’ collective attitudes than the ongoing legacy of Schoenberg and Stravinsky’s dismissive statements regarding the performer.27 John Butt characterizes a historical trajectory towards the performer’s subservience as a ‘grand narrative’, the later part stemming from Stravinsky’s belief that the performer need do nothing more than read the notated instructions, to the serialization of dynamic and attack by Messiaen, Babbitt, and Boulez, and, finally, to tape music, in which both performer and notation are subsumed by the recorded medium.28 Several ‘narratives’ collide in the critical literature of the 1980s and 1990s on Ferneyhough and New Complexity in general: Driver, Bouliane and LeBaron invoke Ferneyhough’s ‘gleeful’ and ‘infatuated’ attitude towards complexity, a symptom of the ‘seduction’ of his working methods, implying a deliberate fetishization of notational and performative complexity on the composer’s part. Roger Smalley’s discourse on the progressive increase in notational specificity, and Ferneyhough’s critical assimilation with 1950s and 1960s Darmstadt (even when principles are attributed to the latter which, as with New Complexity, belie diverse praxes) supply two further narrative threads.29 All of these converge to construct Ferneyhough’s notation as deliberately exclusive (of the performer); the main objective of his compositional practice; an assertion of his absolute authority by means of an authoritative ‘text’; and an index of his intellect. The perception of insistence on accuracy in performance attributable to this construct (supported by the sheer volume of notational information on the page) is foremost in a number of critical responses to Ferneyhough’s music. 34

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Fidelity vs. Exactitude: the Performer as Filter Clarinettist Roger Heaton’s appraisal is indicative of the critical responses to Ferneyhough’s notation invoked above: For a performer the major criticism is one of unnecessary rhythmic complexity […] which makes much of this music impossible to play accurately. Therefore we are thrown into an area of approximation and even improvisation on a text whose very nature is to notate in detail and control every aspect of performance.30 The view that this unreasonable — and, importantly, impossible — demand on performers effectively forces the latter into improvising is only a step away from the question often posed by undergraduate students when introduced to Ferneyhough’s music for the first time: ‘if you improvised on this in performance, would anyone know the difference between what you played and the piece as notated’? The music critic Alex Ross comes nearest in print to this assertion: ‘not even the most expert performers can execute such notation precisely [and so] it becomes a kind of planned improvisation, more akin to free-jazz […] a mosh-pit for the mind.’31 Significant here is the ‘either/or’ approach — the extremes, represented by impossible demands on accuracy on the one hand and free-jazz improvisation on the other, leave no third way. In this view, the performer is not only reduced to the status of a passive conduit or automaton rather than a vital alert presence, a formative force within the work, but is assaulted. His or her mind receives a metaphorical pummelling by notational elbows (witness the image of mindless violence invoked by the reference to ‘moshing’),32 and an unsatisfactory improvisation — because measured against the presumed notational ‘standard’ — is the result of this incapacity. Ferneyhough’s response to such criticisms is unequivocal: The criteria for aesthetically adequate performances lie in the extent to which the performer is technically and spiritually able to recognize and embody the demands of fidelity (NOT ‘exactitude’!). It is not a question of 20% or 99% ‘of the notes’; it all depends what is being asked for. The fake issue of ‘unperformability’ is really a red herring. While some composers may not be concerned with practicality, I think that I am not one of them.33 Duncan argues that locating the complexity of New Complexity in the notation leads to a presumption of one-to-one relationships between composer and score, and between score and performer.34 He suggests that demand for performative accuracy, imposed not by the composers but by some performers and critics, simplifies the intentions of the notation.35 It is worth observing that no participant in the one-to-one relationships described in such scenarios is permitted an individual identity: collectivized, and therefore anonymized, the composers are denied their own ‘voice’; the score is objectified as ‘a blackness’; and the performance, an ideal, becomes ‘transparent’ insofar as what is deemed important is the 35

Brian Ferneyhough

conveyance of the complexity as represented in the notation to the (inactive) listener.36 The composer, seen as participant in a ‘great man theory’ of composition, controls the performance. Not only is the performer effectively left out of the equation but so is any consideration of the music as sound. Richard Taruskin’s view is an extreme example of this perspective: ‘the notational detail was significant, even if the music was not; for its intricacy set a benchmark that is never likely to be equalled, let alone surpassed.’37 The wresting of compositional identity from the composers themselves operates at every level of Taruskin’s argument, even collapsing differences between and within individual pieces: as Duncan points out, his selection of a very short, particularly dense parametrically-defined section from Ferneyhough’s Second String Quartet by way of illustration misleadingly suggests that this moment is representative of the level of complexity attendant at any juncture in any given Ferneyhough score.38 Roger Redgate brings practical experience of performing numerous works by ‘New Complexity’ composers to his argument, which is diametrically opposed to Taruskin’s view: I certainly think the notational strategies they use, which are obviously closely related to their individual ideas of what material is and how they compose, are radically different and is something that really separates them. One of the big differences between Ferneyhough and Finnissy is how the notation works when you play it. There are lots of differences but that is a fundamental one to me.39 Ferneyhough’s distinction between fidelity to the score and exactitude in performance lies at the root of his personal approach to the score-performance relationship. He summarizes this as follows: The goal [is] a notation which demands of the performer the formulation of a conscious selection-procedure in respect of the order in which the units of interpretational information contained in the score are surveyed and, as an extension of this choice, a determination of the combination of elements (strata) which are to be assigned preferential status at any given stage of the realization process. The choice made here colors in the most fundamental manner the rehearsal hierarchy of which, in performance, the composition itself is a token.   As an extreme example of this approach: a notation which deliberately sets out to offer a practical surfeit of information at any particular juncture, thus underlining in an even more radical fashion the indissoluble links binding hierarchically (ideologically) grounded selection procedures with the ultimate sonic result. Omitting information (whether voluntarily or involuntarily): is this not the ultimate recognition of priorities?40 The relationships described here between composer, performer and score are explicitly not based on unidirectional, one-to-one correspondences (‘composer-score-performer-listener’) in which the performer reproduces the authoritative text (the score). There are two 36

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‘performers’ — the rehearsal performer and the concert performer, a distinction that captures the effort and proactivity demanded of the realizer. Much as this may be true in many performance scenarios, and of music written by numerous composers, Ferneyhough’s key point suggests that the selection and prioritization procedures enacted on the material by the performer in rehearsal — including omission of detail where necessary — have a fundamental role in determining a sonic result that reflects on the performer him or herself as much as the composer. The ‘work’ therefore is not the authoritative text, but the performerfiltered sound. The performer is more than a transmitter or translator (unless the latter term is intended in Walter Benjamin’s sense, in which translation is a re-production of a work, an exemplar of both fidelity and freedom in relation to the original).41 What Ferneyhough describes is neither a performer enslaved by notation, nor ‘planned improvisation’. The opacity of the notation is designed precisely so it is looked at rather than through, and again the terms in which Benjamin describes the translator’s task suggest themselves. Ferneyhough argues that It is our duty as composers to make the text, the visual aspect of the text and its musical structure, so self-referential in an enriching sense that the performer can find some way of plugging it into his own sensibilities — so that he is not trying simply to give a generally tasteful rendering of some set of noises, or whatever, but that these noises are, in a semantically specific sense, interrelated among themselves in such a way that the performer himself can attempt to take an attitude towards the relationship.42 What happens in between the stages — composition, performance, score — is all-important: this is the fundamental difference from a reductive one-to-one model. The notation is dynamic, a token of the many processes feeding into the act of composition, a filter applied to the labyrinth of possibilities that the composer could have explored.43 It is limiting only in the sense that Ferneyhough considers limitation to be the generator of all artistic expression,44 and the limit- or filter function is the result of the composer’s own struggle to organize his material. This sense of ‘limitation’ can itself be misunderstood, of course. As the soprano Brenda Mitchell (a prominent Ferneyhough performer) observes, ‘it is not the musical difficulty per se from which “many respectable musicians” shy away, but the lack of opportunity to employ the vocal sound in the technical and aesthetic way acquired during years of study.’45 But surely this situation applies to a great deal of music composed in the twentieth century.46 If anything, what Mitchell describes is a lack of accommodation for evolving techniques (in particular, vocal techniques) beyond nineteenth-century ideals in training young musicians who today might expect to engage with extended techniques during portfolio performing careers. Similarly, Ferneyhough’s notation challenges the prevailing approach to rehearsal and learning as a result of the lengthy preparation period required for what may be, relatively speaking, few formal performance opportunities. The enforced acceptance of limitations and what cannot be achieved also runs contrary to performers’ instincts. Resulting concert performances of Ferneyhough’s works can each be 37

Brian Ferneyhough

very different from one another, whilst nevertheless legitimately claiming fidelity to the composer’s vision. During rehearsal, performers engage in deconstructing and reconstructing Ferneyhough’s work: here the ‘work’ is neither the document (score) nor the concert performance, but something less easily definable. Steven Schick’s detailed reflection of the learning process involved in preparing Ferneyhough’s Bone Alphabet for percussion (1991) attests to the interstice between score and performance: far from being controlled by the composer, the performer has a significant input into the creation of the ‘work’. He conceives of a ‘soft phase’ of learning a Ferneyhough piece, which continues past the point at which concert performances have begun: The point of learning difficult complex music for me is in fact to slow down the process of learning. And, in specific, to prolong the very rich period of learning where the piece is still ‘soft.’ […] With me in the case of Bone Alphabet, that gap [from first sight of the score to concert performance] covered about 1200 hours of practice. This extremely prolonged soft phase meant that piece had a lot of time to exert its force on me and the reverse.47 Schick draws attention to the length of practice time taken to prepare a Ferneyhough work: this necessity works against a performer who needs to learn music quickly and perform it regularly to earn money. It also works against the composer, who risks securing few performances given the level of commitment required.48 Nevertheless, Ferneyhough acknowledges that the technical difficulty of the pieces enshrines an ‘in-built defense mechanism against uncommitted performers.’49 In critiquing the argument that the notation requires precision of a mechanical kind, it is important that the pursuit of accuracy is not compromised in performance. Toop perceptively remarks that ‘interpretation consists, to some extent, of different intelligent failures to reproduce a central text.’50 Schick’s use of the term ‘accuracy’ is analogous to Ferneyhough’s ‘fidelity’: opposed to ‘exactitude’ or automatic reproduction, Schick equates it with the total commitment of the performer both mentally and physically. The use of the whole body in performance is a dimension typically absent from critical perspectives that focus on what is considered unnecessary notational complexity, or abstraction:51 It is important to note that in no case are these movements [gestural movements when performing Bone Alphabet] simple afterthoughts. An accurate performance of Bone Alphabet leaves no unused strength or concentration which can be spent for choreographic affectation. Meaningful gesture is the ultimate measure of a committed performance, a kind of Richter Scale of the musical tectonic forces under-lying the composition.52 Finally, by extension, constructions that render the relationship between the performer and the score as transparent treat the listener as passively as the performer. A listener can experience an immediacy or impact of performed material that has nothing to do with considerations of whether all the tuplets have been interpreted accurately, and everything to 38

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do with encountering the ‘tectonic forces’ that Schick describes. Heaton’s claim that ‘because the pieces are impossible, the performer has to fake and to improvise certain sections; players familiar with the style, and probably well practiced through free improvisation, can get away with it’ implies that the listener won’t know any better, denying him/her any proactive contribution to the performance-reception process at all.53 The listener, however, is by no means passive, experiencing in real time what has taken the performer at least months to prepare.54 The concert performance, already a token of those months of rehearsal, brings yet another ‘filter’ into play: restrictive time. One of the listener’s tasks is to interpret the material within an entirely different frame to the performer. According to Schick, ‘if the interpretive skeleton, built up painstakingly during the learning process, is not sufficiently strong to support the weight of the complexities in the score, then the entire piece threatens to collapse into a simple and singularly unappealing mass. How then to retain and project complexity in performance?’55 Retaining and Projecting Complexity in Performance Whilst Schick chooses to see the challenge of concert performance in positive terms, as an ‘explosion’ of energy,56 others have likened the relationship of Ferneyhough’s complexity to the performer’s predicament to a form of sadomasochism.57 Interestingly, what is seen as an opportunity for a performer to exercise personal choice and freedom under the composer’s guidance in some fields of musical creativity (certain forms of indeterminacy) is here characterized as a form of constraint-too-far. Yet there is little substantive difference between a scheme representing the stages — and the two-way fluidity — between inception and reception in Ferneyhough’s music and (some scorebased) indeterminacy: 1. composer ⇔ 2. ‘score’/instructions ⇔ 3. preparation ⇔ 4. performance ⇔ 5. reception Works such as Stockhausen’s Plus-Minus, Cardew’s Octet ’61 for Jasper Johns or Treatise, adopt unconventional notational approaches, but in each of these cases the composer takes care to set rules for interpretation, of which a ‘faithful’ performance must take account. At stage 3, significant ‘recomposition’ can take place, as demonstrated in Christopher Fox’s account of his preparation of Plus-Minus with John Snijders.58 This is absolutely necessary before a [concert] performance can take place, since free improvisation is no more welcome here than in Ferneyhough’s music. Decisions have to be made as to what will be prioritized during this process. The performance is a token of sometimes-extensive preparatory work, and the listener may hear many renditions of a piece that sound very different from one another. In all cases, the composer does not assume absolute control, even though the notation might be highly detailed and accompanied by lengthy prefatory notes. Ferneyhough, 39

Brian Ferneyhough

having on a certain level retained many ‘conventional’ aspects of Western notation, is often evaluated within this tradition, in which the notational sign system has itself become a ‘transparent’ code; this surely accounts for the discourses that attempt to apply a nineteenth-century work-concept to the performance practice of Ferneyhough’s music.59 The unfamiliarity of Cardew’s Treatise presents an opacity, forcing the interpreter to see the notation, to overcome resistance to it and to put into practice the kind of inventiveness that Schick describes in his encounters with Bone Alphabet. Recent years have seen a number of interpreters besides Schick describe their working methods when preparing a Ferneyhough score for performance. Most interestingly, these methods sometimes conflict directly with Ferneyhough’s instructions, both underlining the importance of the interstices between score and performer, and composer and score, and yielding a more nuanced appreciation of Ferneyhough’s concept of ‘fidelity’ than has been explored hitherto. The Arditti Quartet and its leader Irvine Arditti have long been associated with Ferneyhough’s music. They describe a process of recalibrating a Ferneyhough score before sitting down to play it, similar to stage 3 (in the scheme above) in the preparation of some indeterminate scores. Arditti uses the term ‘putting the grass in’ — making pencil strokes in the parts — to describe marking the main beats that fall amidst irrational tuplets.60 Adding the ‘grass’ is carried out, at least in Arditti’s case, with a view to orientating the performer and ensuring the coherence of the ensemble within each bar unit.61 The principle can be extended to ‘re-reading’ certain tempo and metrical relationships on a bar-by-bar basis. By way of illustration, Arditti takes four bars from the Sixth Quartet (bars 85–88), which are recast in the following example: The main tempo here is 50 and we divide these into different units. This becomes a 3/66 bar, so we’ve spread it over 9/32 to be divided in threes — it becomes a 3/66 bar, so 3 beats at 66 instead of 50. Here it goes back to the initial tempo — we’ve just marked it in semiquavers (16th notes) to be 100, which is twice as fast as the 8th notes in the previous bar. Here again we’ve divided 3 beats at 66, then going back to 50. So we are alternating between a tempo of 66 and 50.62

Figure 2.1:  A photograph of Irvine Arditti’s marked-up score of the Sixth String Quartet, bars 85–87.63

40

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Whether the notation has been simplified or not is a moot point; what has taken place is a reworking of the pulse in the four bars, ostensibly making the passage more manageable. There are two ways of interpreting Arditti’s actions. On the one hand his recalibration can be seen as the approach of an individual who is, by virtue of his long association with the composer, thoroughly versed in the music and its workings. Arditti has chosen to prioritize ensemble and the greater palpability of a pulse for the performer, giving more shape and attack to the passage within which sudden registral and dynamic shifts affect the whole ensemble. This approach exemplifies the ‘indeterminacy’ (of a sort) in Ferneyhough’s notation. On the other hand, Arditti’s undertaking to simplify the notation begs the question as to whether it is really Ferneyhough that is being performed any more (and moreover whether he is being ‘faithful’ to the notation, in Ferneyhough’s sense of the term). In both cases, the Arditti Quartet is a ‘filter’ for Ferneyhough’s music,64 but if Arditti’s recasting of material comes from an understanding of the musical morphology acquired through many years of acclimatization to the ‘Ferneyhough style’, it draws just as clearly on skills of musicianship applicable in any repertoire. Does this neutralize the effect of the notation, or exemplify the interstices between score and performer particular to Ferneyhough’s music? Schick describes very similar re-castings of bar-lengths, tempi and pulse, but acknowledges that it contravenes Ferneyhough’s wishes: In rehearsal Ferneyhough clearly expressed his desire that the performer not translate polyrhythmic composites into shifting tempi. He felt that polyrhythms seen as shifting tempi imply a reorientation of the overall metrical point of view. And, of course, there is a big difference between changing meters and changing speeds. Nevertheless, as a stage in the learning process, this technique can be very valuable. Eventually such passages should be heard by the performer in the original tempo.65 Furthermore: An artificial skin of practical considerations must be stretched tightly across the lumps of a living, breathing piece. Performance reinflates the piece, fine tuning its formal gyroscope, revivifying polyphonic structures, and packaging the intellectual energy of the score into meaningful physicality.66 Schick equates concert performance with the opportunity to feed off the tensions between the notational precision (whether the piece is performed from memory or not) and the realtime compression of months of preparation, during which latter the notation might be treated, however specific it appears, as though it were to some degree indeterminate. His view also helps to address the obvious question that reconceiving Ferneyhough’s notation for performance raises: why not notate it like that in the first place?67 Roger Marsh has offered an interpretation of the notation-realization relationship that undertakes its own version of ‘putting the grass in’ but approaches the issue from 41

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the point of view of a listener, transcribing the sounding result of commercially recorded Ferneyhough performances and comparing the transcription with the original notation.68 Several ‘filters’ are consequently in operation: his subjects are Irvine Arditti and the Arditti Quartet performing Intermedio alla ciaccona for solo violin and the Second Quartet, respectively. The Ardittis’ filtering of Ferneyhough’s music in one context is discussed above; Marsh’s transcription is a filter of what he hears, intended to capture his interpretation of sound in signs (and does not necessarily correspond to the Ardittis’ marked-up scores from which they perform). In Marsh’s account the performer is cast as hero, on account of the ‘heroic challenge presented by the rhythmic relationships’,69 and in common with other perspectives discussed earlier, he separates the ‘complex method and presentation’ of New Complexity from ‘a resultant music’, which he argues is not particularly complex, in fact.70 His transcription of a (rhythmically unison) passage from the opening of the Second Quartet leads him to conclude that ‘what you see (rhythmic asymmetry) [in Ferneyhough’s notation] and what you get (bucolic dance) [in the Ardittis’ recording] are actually quite different.’71 Unlike those who read Ferneyhough’s musical text as requiring accuracy in performance, Marsh concludes that it cannot be concerned with this because there would need to be — both in the domain of duration and pitch — a clearer ‘safety margin’. It would need to be possible to identify organized units of pitch and associated rhythmic values (motives) and to perceive the oppositions (variations and transformations) as distinct and meaningful. For this to be possible the compositional procedures and their realization would need to be simplified and the present level of redundancy reduced.72 This explicit evaluation of the music against the lexicon of traditional musical analysis, and topical categories such as dance, is coupled with the conclusion that the discrepancies (as Marsh interprets them) between the notation and the Ardittis’ performance ‘come perilously close to changing the music into something which the composer almost certainly did not intend or predict.’73 Marsh’s reference to the composer’s intentions contrasts with the views of Schick, Duncan and Ferneyhough himself, all of whom suggest that it is precisely the function of the notation to admit the unforeseen in performance. In assessing Ferneyhough’s compositional intentions, Marsh visits intentions of his own on his transcription, which he does not treat as substantively different from a prescriptive notation. According to Duncan, ‘Marsh is not simply transcribing the passage from the recording; he is recomposing it based on his own rationalizing tendencies.’74 The discourse returns squarely to the question of accuracy, which Ferneyhough has never demanded; but Marsh’s perspective does undermine fidelity to the notation, on which Ferneyhough does insist. Given the debates surrounding the matter of notational accuracy and ‘overload’, and the strong feeling expressed by some participants either ‘for’ or ‘against’ Ferneyhough’s approach, his remark that his music supplies notational overload ‘because we have so many musical styles and demands on performers and listeners today that it is better to offer a bit too much information rather than too little’ might seem glib, but it goes to the heart of Ferneyhough’s notational 42

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philosophy,75 which ‘must (should) incorporate […] an implied ideology of its own process of creation.’76 Ferneyhough’s cultivation of a personal style (discussed elsewhere in this book), which values consistency and refinement within and between works, is enabled in part by this notational surfeit, which is not sought for the sake of exactitude in performance, but to specify a ‘precise notation of particular interpretational dimensions.’77 These, consistently applied, create a balance from work to work between the degree of input on the part of the performer and the sustained stylistic identity of the composer himself: ‘it’s true that the momentary conjunction of notational symbols may lead to a consistent problematization of the totalized musical ‘image’, but this is part of the point, if one imagines that the performer has to remain relatively conscious of the need to be always re-evaluating visual, contextual and sonic correlates.’78 Ingenio, the Playful in Ferneyhough’s Notation As implied earlier, there is sometimes no more than a hair’s breadth between a position vehemently opposed to Ferneyhough’s aesthetic and a supportive one. Often, interpretation hinges on a particular word (‘complexity’ being the most common), which can be used to appraise Ferneyhough negatively or positively, depending on context. Recent work reinterprets the critical terms with which Ferneyhough has been received in a more positive light: Hawkins and Duncan, both in the titles of their respective researches and throughout their work, re-evaluate the negative constructions surrounding the term ‘complexity’. John Shearman argues in respect of the term ‘mannerism’, that ‘changing prejudice often inverts the value of words while preserving most of their sense; virtues are turned into vices, artistic qualities become defects.’79 Ferneyhough himself hints at this, recalling that ‘I’ve been called a mannerist composer. I know it was intended as a form of insult at the time, no doubt a learned insult in the eyes of the critics concerned; but in fact, if one examines the meaning of the word “mannerist”, I would have to say that most modern art, including people like James Joyce, is mannerist.’80 Duncan points out that Taruskin also directs his (negative) reaction to notational complexity towards the music of the Ars Subtilior, foregrounding the latter’s ‘artifice and intricate embellishment.’81 The suspicion of ‘artifice’ is likewise implicit in the response to Ferneyhough of Taruskin (and others), but the composer himself sees it as a positive dimension in his work (going some way to explain his association between Joyce and mannerism): ‘one works with a “manner”, a conscious stylistic ambitus […] the actual development of a style within itself, its future possibilities, are also realizable only by conscious reflection on what has already been achieved […] I’m very interested in the idea of ingenio, the idea of intellectual, playful constructivity.’82 Shearman’s view, expressed in relation to visual art, might equally apply to some of the more polemical aspects of Ferneyhough reception: ‘it is time that we stopped saying, for instance, “the trouble with Tasso (or John Lyly) is his artificiality…”, trying to read them as if it were not there.’83 In other cases, Ferneyhough’s own statements can deliberately draw on the same controversial terms as highly critical reviews; only by inflection does he establish the chasm 43

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between his perspective and those opposed to his approach. This lends some of his views a sense of the mischievous, in context (another form of playful constructivity, in effect). As an example, consider the term ‘unplayable’, which takes on one meaning when used to condemn the notation, but a differently nuanced one when Ferneyhough himself employs it quite consciously in relation to Cassandra’s Dream Song (1970).84 He argues that in the piece ‘material has been intentionally so slanted as to present, at times, a literally “unplayable” image.’85 He does this not by including pitches beyond the flute’s range, but by inducing the performer to the technical and expressive prioritizations (self-reflections) discussed above. This approach intensifies throughout the 1970s in particular — in the Time and Motion Study series, Transit and Unity Capsule — as he engages the performer in the ‘“psychologizing” of virtuosity (its effective transcendence) as medium of communication.’86 ‘Polemical faultlines’ emerge, many at the instigation of the composer himself:87 There seems, on the face of it, no convincing reason why the musical effects of as near an approach as possible to this unreachable ideal [of exactitude in realization] should not be investigated. The nearer we come to this ‘absolute zero’ of realization, the more likely it becomes that the essential components of the relationship between the various modes of existence of a composition will emerge, freed from irrelevancies and uncertainties such as serve to disguise their ‘otherness’ in more compromising circumstances.88 There is therefore a degree of agreement between the composer and the critical perspective represented by Heaton et al. regarding Ferneyhough’s notational precision, driving as it does towards an ‘absolute zero’ of realization; but the possibility of the composer’s awareness of the ideology at play appears to be ignored — consciously or otherwise — in the more extreme denunciations of his music. Ferneyhough may be glimpsed sending up some of these criticisms, albeit in the context of his sketch materials; consider for example more than one reference to a ‘black scherzo’ or jottings detailing a ‘very black, very dense’ passage.89 As much as Ferneyhough’s references to ‘blackness’ may be tongue-in-cheek, they are indicative nonetheless of the significance accorded the appearance of the score as an artefact in itself; and as polemical and at odds with the composer himself as Taruskin and others may be in their assertion that complex notation is the sole objective of Ferneyhough’s composition, their critique stems from an awareness of the importance of the visual aspect of the score for its own sake. Ferneyhough’s preface to Cassandra hints at what the sketches reveal more fully: ‘the audible (and visual) degree of difficulty is to be drawn, as an integral structural element, into the fabric of the composition itself.’90 He is, however, more explicit in his discussion of Unity Capsule: Perhaps this is in fact the piece coming closest to a certain sort of ideal, according to which the explosive encounter between the willpower and goal-directed drive of the performer and a visual image resolutely crystal clear in its multiplicity takes shape. The score tries to suggest this linear energic stream by attaching most of the notes and actions 44

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to a continuous beam, interrupted only once in the course of some twenty pages. The piece looks like a futuristic image of a passing high-speed train whilst consistently tangling the performer in immobile thickets of detail. As a result, the performer is moving ahead in a series of frames, each perhaps lasting a fraction of a second; there have been a lot of occasions when I have worked with these insectile freezings and sudden movements — it is one way of transmitting the effect of eyeball-to-eyeball contact with events, of defining their ‘absolute distance’ from the observer.91 The importance of the visual described here sets a benchmark for future works such as La terre est un homme, in which the eponymous Matta painting that inspired the work is more than a superficial reference point for an undefined musical surrealism, contributing something of its visual intensity to the appearance of the densely-notated edifice that remains the biggest and ‘blackest’ landscape of all of Ferneyhough’s scores to date. Although Ferneyhough dismisses fakery, even when undertaken with the best intentions (the attempt ‘to “translate” these complex constellations into “poetic” renderings of approximately the sounds [the performer] thinks should come out’),92 he seems on other occasions to anticipate, not without irony, the critical debate that suggests faking accurate realization is sometimes necessary.93 Both Unity Capsule and Sieben Sterne explore the ‘internal polyphony’ of the performer, the organ piece going so far as to pose the performer the task — in a written instruction — of making indeterminately notated sections resemble the sound of fully prescribed passages.94 At face value, the very notion seems to offer proof positive that Ferneyhough’s complexity can be improvised, and moreover that the composer, often characterized as wilful, leaves himself open to the charge.95 Nevertheless, what begins as a blunt, rather unsubtle tool in Sieben Sterne becomes fundamental to Ferneyhough’s subsequent compositional output, and is increasingly refined as his methods evolve: the principle behind small sections of ‘improvised complexity’ deliberately juxtaposed with small sections of fully notated complexity in Sieben Sterne contributes, in later works, towards the emergence of a larger-scale formal design animated by the tension between the performer’s self-reflective deductions (that must ultimately be distilled into the real time linearity of performance) and the obstacles in the material that rein in that drive.96 Notational ‘Periods’ in Ferneyhough’s Output Of Unity Capsule the composer remarks that ‘there are passages where a positive encrustation of layers occurs, producing, from bar to bar, violently contrasted and slanted sonoric ideograms, “meaning molecules”; often this high level of change in many parameters effectively prevents the performer from “remembering” ahead very far, leaving him in a constant state of “performative surprise”.’97 The key issue here relates to the limitation of proliferation: ‘meaning molecules’ — quite the opposite from the blanket meaninglessness that fakery implies — encode a combination of parametric strategies traced in notational 45

Figure 2.2:  Unity Capsule bars 49–52: ‘thickets’ of material, and the thick black beam (‘a passing high-speed train’).

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bundles, which demand ‘transliteration’ by performers and contextualization by listeners. Ferneyhough regards the process as one of ‘semantic enrichment’ that goes towards defining his personal style.98 A major difference between music of the 1970s and the more recent output since 2000 arises from the emphasis on ‘performative surprise’ in the former, and what could be characterized as ‘listener surprise’ in the latter. In recent works including Les Froissements des Ailes de Gabriel, Plötzlichkeit and Chronos-Aion, the concept of ‘meaning molecules’ that pass by too quickly to be deciphered is raised to a large-scale principle, the composer working with minute formal sections in juxtaposition. The sections themselves may be somewhat less densely notated or layered when compared with scores like Unity Capsule or even works from the subsequent two decades; it is the proximity of sectional contrast and the perceived ‘pile-up’ of fragments that defines the form. As implied above, different notational ‘periods’ may be distinguished in Ferneyhough’s output. Broadly, it is possible to identify three: the first concludes with La terre est un homme (completed in 1979), the second comprises the works composed between La terre and Shadowtime (begun in 1999), and the third begins with the opera itself. Although it may be suggested that the works of the 1970s (as exemplified by Time and Motion Study II or Unity Capsule) constitute one ‘period’ on account of the combination of notational layers and many written instructions in text boxes, the origin of this distinctive notational style lies firmly in the 1960s, even though published pieces dating from that decade look rather less determinedly ‘black’. As if pre-empting a dominant narrative of the 1970s, the Missa Brevis (1966–1969) was identified at the time as ‘unsingable — at least if precision is as important as the meticulous notation implies.’99 The emphasis on the blackness of the scores and the beginning of the association of Ferneyhough’s name with ‘unperformability’ from this period do not, however, imply that all his music was deemed unplayable (he had already formed an association with the music publisher Peters Edition, and some of his music was receiving performances, as mentioned in Chapter 1). Ferneyhough’s sketches serve to dispel many critical assumptions, as well as posing important questions. They do not contain multiple re-workings of material in an effort to consolidate ‘complexity’. In fact, as is discussed elsewhere in this book, the composer habitually produces a neat copy score as he composes, rather than at the end of the process. This suggests that the notation and compositional process develop in parallel (rather than being separable, as some critics have argued). Nevertheless, this can work both ways, since Ferneyhough acknowledges that he absorbs mistakes in calculation and process into the piece once the neat copy is underway. This indicates that notational concerns — the importance of the image — can steer the compositional process, as when he forgets how a process works and has to invent a new one to maintain the surface consistency at a particular juncture in the work.100 Thus Ferneyhough argues that ‘notation […] is nevertheless hardly to be separated, even in principle, from the actual goals which a particular artist has set himself.’101 In his case, one ‘goal’ relates to the mutually informative relationship he perceives between himself, the notation and the performer. The notation must not be, therefore, a one-way system, attempting to predicate the sound arising from performance; it must suggest actions 47

Figure 2.3:  ‘Fantastical Tablature’ in Unity Capsule, bars 37–48. In particular ‘U’ shapes are prominent, at various angles, indicating the normal upwards-facing position of the blowhole and degrees of tilt towards and away from the lips. ‘Diaphragm’ indicates a rapid, repeated accent vibrato, produced by forcing air into the instrument from a tensed diaphragm.

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rather than their results. In the period before 1979–1980, then, Ferneyhough’s notation is a fantastical kind of tablature insofar as it specifies actions. Some examples from Unity Capsule suffice as illustration (Figure 2.3). By 1980, the profusion of written instructions to the performer — in prefatory notes and throughout the score — is reined in considerably, owing to a renewed approach to a gestural musical discourse that causes some of the parametric polyphony evident in Unity Capsule to sink beneath the surface. Ferneyhough discusses his concept of gesture at length in published essays and interviews, concentrating on the compositional phenomenon: a sufficiently defined musical ‘object’ is presented in a piece, before the individual components that comprise it escape this original context, taking on characteristics of their own and reconvene to form new, but related, gestures. The terminological choice is hardly accidental, however, relating amongst other things to the notion of bodily gesture, which can be exploited to the full by the performer, as Schick explains.102 Notation participates in the definition of gesture, visually capturing its directionality, as in the opening of LemmaIcon-Epigram. In the Icon section, the thick single beam joining detached notes reinforces the impression of objects — figures against a ground — that Ferneyhough describes as the sun passing across objects in a landscape, casting shadows.103 The degree of immediacy is greater here than in the ‘tablature’ of the 1970s (despite the re-use of the single beam idea from Unity Capsule): it is no coincidence that from La terre onwards, a large number of works take their titles or formative concepts from visual art or images (Lemma, Carceri, Terrain and La Chute d’Icare). A ‘sound-image’ of Icarus’ beating wings is captured by the sound of the swiftly swooping and rising clarinet in La Chute, but the density of the solo part as notated in comparison with the ensemble at the beginning of the piece ensures that the directional contours of the solo stand out visually as well as aurally (Figure 2.4). The concluding piece of the Carceri cycle, Mnemosyne, employs a notational system of vertical lines between material set out on three independent staves to designate the points at which one line interrupts another in performance, the monophonic bass flute being unable, by definition, to perform three-part polyphony (the notation thus prompting a kind of ironic style brisé).104 The flute’s pitch material becomes increasingly imprisoned by structures in the background tape; the appearance of the vertical lines in the score, invoking prison bars, immediately suggests limitation. Comparison between the expressive instructions in Unity Capsule and Time and Motion Study II, and works written after 1980, reveals a further significant difference. In the flute and ’cello pieces, Ferneyhough includes directions in Italian in amongst the many stipulations in English, but often completes them with an exclamation mark, or more rarely, ‘scare quotes’ (Figure 2.5). This renders them self-consciously ironic and mannered, as though to be more pronounced than usual in effect. In Lemma, by contrast, instructions in Italian are visually unobtrusive and not accompanied by exclamation marks: they are used more conventionally, without irony. The same is true of the clarinet solo in La Chute. The opening notation is significant insofar as there are no expressive indications in words at all: everything that the performer needs is implicit in the contour 49

Figure 2.5:  Time and Motion Study II, Section I.3.i., bars 1–3, examples of performance instructions such as “fantastico”.

Figure 2.4:  La Chute d’Icare, solo clarinet, opening gestures.

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and the dynamic hairpins, which swell and diminish in parallel with the directionality of the line. After the late 1990s, a further stylistic change occurs in Ferneyhough’s music, which is discussed in several other chapters of this book. His latest style is characterized by an openness to ‘other kinds of music, perhaps thanks to [his] extensive teaching activities.’105 This period marks a new stage in his engagement with borrowed materials, which has been consolidated in numerous works, beginning with the plainchant material in Unsichtbare Farben (1998) and the more substantial ‘Tye project’ based on material by Renaissance English composer Christopher Tye. If his earliest works were conceived in relation to a ‘hermetic aesthetic’,106 more recent projects, most notably Shadowtime, lead him to expand his musical language semantically, so that ‘[he] can now present it more simply.’107 There is no specific formula governing this, and it would be unwise to seek to apply the principle across all recent works: in other words, the notational presentation still looks far from simple, but subtle differences do occur. For example there are in the Dum transisset cycle remarkably fewer tuplets than might typically be expected in a Ferneyhough score, and still fewer nested subdivisions (in Movement IV in particular). The composer’s use of tuplets is very localized, often in only one or two instruments at a time, creating local coloration or alteration (to use terms that apply to rhythmic treatment in music of Tye’s period), denoting similar local manipulations of the prevailing metre. Metric modulation creates changes in density and speed of the material, making the presence of multiple tuplets in each bar unnecessary. In this sense, Ferneyhough distils one layer of complexity from the visual presentation: effectively, to borrow Arditti’s term, Ferneyhough has ‘put the grass into’ the score of Dum transisset IV himself. The performer’s challenge is hardly lessened, however: Ferneyhough effects metric modulation so often in the work that the performer has to think constantly on a larger scale, problematizing the area of memory and ‘remembering ahead’ referred to earlier. Before the sixteenth-century local quintuplet passages are occasionally found, but the use of an implied quintuple metre for a piece’s entire duration occurred only in the sixteenth-century: one of the first to use it was Tye (see In Nomine XIII, ‘Trust’). Ferneyhough mimics his predecessor when he shifts the responsibility for metrical changes from local tuplets or ‘alterations’ to metric modulations that cover more substantial segments of the music, and participate primarily in the definition of form. Another example of Ferneyhough’s most recent approach which also affects notation relates to text setting, an area he has consistently problematized throughout his career to the extent that in many works, the text is barely recognizable in performance (if at all), fragmented among musical gestures or phoneticized, rendering it almost impossible to pick out in the score. In Shadowtime, the text setting of Opus Contra Naturam is sometimes left to the pianist’s discretion, the text indicated in boxes above and below the stave. The operatic medium (although Ferneyhough hardly confines himself to its conventions) invites greater clarity in text setting but, if anything, his technique recalls rather ironically the text boxes in his earlier scores, full of instructions in English. Although part of the libretto, the words could also be taken as performance instructions, therefore fulfilling a 51

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Figure 2.6:  Katabasis, bars 61–65, Opus Contra Naturam.

double function in performance. Consider the text/injunction ‘place your bets between the gaps’ from Opus Contra Naturam, in which the pianist plays notes with rests in between as if in illustration of the coinciding text (Figure 2.6). This pianistic texture only features when the text is uttered, and changes again with the appearance of the next phrase (‘it is real’). Ferneyhough’s problematization of notation may be seen as a concrete manifestation of his continuance of the modernist project, alluded to earlier. Because this issue has not only characterized his critical reception from the start, but has continued to be invoked (and, not infrequently, misinterpreted) throughout his career, it has assumed a monolithic aspect that has tended to obscure the lines of development, reversals and circlings back that are typical of most other aspects of any creative artist’s output and career. Witness the assumption that Ferneyhough’s notational practice somehow emerged fully formed, an oversimplification that is clearly dispelled with reference to the sketches and unpublished materials, some of which are contemporaneous with works in the published catalogue. Ferneyhough’s 52

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preoccupation with notation may rightly be seen as central indeed to any discussion of his work, but not for the reasons traditionally adduced. Following from his belief that constraint is a pre-condition of artistic freedom, notation stands at the centre of a series of open-ended transactions that involves composer, performer and listener alike. Post-scriptum: the Computer as an Aid to Composition A further important consideration is Ferneyhough’s use of the computer, first as a means of producing the score, and latterly as an aid to the compositional process. The first computerproduced score is Bone Alphabet, published in 1991, but according to Ross Feller, the String Trio, begun in 1994, was Ferneyhough’s ‘first composition to be completely composed with the computer-assistance of PatchWork, a software program from the Paris-based Institut de Recherché et de Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM).’108 1994 is also the last year that Ferneyhough deposited sketches with the Paul Sacher Stiftung in Basel, heralding a fundamental change in Ferneyhough’s approach when formulating a piece. As Feller notes, ‘sketches’ — the term implies something produced by hand — where they exist, might be on a computer hard-drive, a virtual repository. Has the change from what Toop refers to as the ‘obsessive “corporeality” in the musical language of the mid-1970s’ to ‘a new concern with process, with transformation from one state (or set of states) to another’ after 1980 been replicated in the realm of notation,109 which might be said to be similarly ‘corporeal’ and tactile in the hand-written scores, but which ‘might impart a false, generic sense to the [computerized] score’?110 A computer program can overwrite previous versions of the same file, effectively ‘losing’ the intervening stages or layers of a composition that were previously preserved, albeit rather chaotically, on sheets of paper.111 Feller considers the implications of Ferneyhough’s use of PatchWork, as well as its relationship to Finale (a notation programme developed by Coda Music Technology): PatchWork has enabled Ferneyhough to compose ‘more immediately onto the screen’. The distance from e-sketch to final score has been considerably shortened. With both PatchWork and Finale open he is able to toggle back and forth, from one to the other, in rapid succession. This is akin to multitasking, a term which adequately describes his compositional process, as well as what musicians go through when performing his work.112 There is a notable difference between the appearance of a hand-written score and a computergenerated one, for all that the latter does not compromise on complexity of detail. It raises the fundamental question as to whether the clear relationship between compositional process and notational appearance established in the 1970s is preserved in scores produced twenty years later. Feller answers in the affirmative, observing that ‘[r]ecently [Ferneyhough] has developed approaches whereby Finale files are produced automatically from PatchWork files, and vice-versa. Thus, the intimate connection between notation and compositional 53

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idea […] remains an integral part of his work.’113 But surely the relationship has shifted considerably: one of the most time-consuming features of the hand-produced notation pre1991 involved the calculation in the sketches of the decimal places of all impulses in a pattern in order to work out their relative placement in the finished score (a task taken up by the computer software after 1994). Where the composer might produce a single neat copy of sketch material by hand (as in the two-bar segment preparatory to the Second String Quartet, discussed in Chapter 6), the computer can generate multiple possibilities for a range of parameters with minimal intervention. Ferneyhough concedes that ‘it will be very difficult for anyone approaching [computer-assisted] works in analytical terms to trace the decisions that went into their genesis’,114 not least because, as Feller remarks, use of the computer may have exacerbated Ferneyhough’s propensity to forget the processes that generated material (for which he habitually compensates by inventing new processes in order to carry on composing).115 By Ferneyhough’s own account, the use of technology facilitates rather than inhibits spontaneity in the compositional act because the interactive environment enabled by PatchWork increases his ‘intuitive feel’ for the material by providing ‘enhanced feedback.’116 Whether or not this ‘enhanced feedback’ is lost in translation to Finale notation is for a performer to adduce; in either case, one must evaluate whether the physical evidence of the composer’s hand in the earlier scores, which supports the dialogue he seeks between himself and the performer via the notation, is compromised by the different ‘aura’ or reproducibility of the computerized score. Ultimately, a distinction must surely be made between the notation considered as a document, divorced from its musical content, and its function — to use Duncan’s term — inseparable from both the act of composition and the psychologizing of the performer’s role. Insofar as Ferneyhough’s habit has always been to produce the neat or final score as he composes, the use of the computer has not changed that distinctive trait. The point raised by Ferneyhough himself concerning the absence of sketch material is in a sense validated by the dearth of analytical discussions of the music from the String Trio onwards.117 On the other hand, familiarity with the composer’s working methods as documented in the extant sketches pre-1994 permits a degree of extrapolation: it is hoped that the reader will perceive little or no difference between the discussions of the music either side of the divide, since the basic operations informing the processes themselves have not changed qualitatively.

Notes   1 Peter Shaffer, Amadeus, DVD, Directed by Milos Forman (Warner Home Video, 1997).   2 Stephen Pettitt, “Review of Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival,” The Times, November 26, 1985.   3 Richard Toop, “Four Facets of the ‘New Complexity’,” Contact, 32 (1988): 4–50.   4 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 67. See also Christopher Fox, ‘British Music at Darmstadt 1982–92’, Tempo New Series, 186 (1993), 23. 54

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  5 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 67.   6 Richard Gott refers to Ferneyhough as ‘one of the greatest gurus of British contemporary music’ in the Guardian Newspaper Weekend supplement, February 1996, quoted in Hawkins, “(Mis)understanding complexity,” 36. Paul Driver characterizes him as cutting a ‘commanding figure, indeed [Ferneyhough] is rapidly turning into a cult-figure.’ See Paul Driver, “Musica Nova 1979 Glasgow University,” Tempo New Series 131 (December, 1979): 15.   7 Hawkins, “(Mis)nderstanding complexity,” 42.   8 Meirion Bowen, “Sinfonietta,” Guardian, November 17, 1977, quoted in Hawkins, “(Mis) understanding complexity,” 42. One of the principal theses of Hawkins’ dissertation focuses on the construction of various composers associated with the ‘New Complexity’ in the press and musicological literature.   9 David Murray, “London Sinfonietta/Barbican,” Financial Times, March 26, 1985, quoted in Hawkins, “(Mis)understanding complexity,” 43.   10 Whilst theoretical considerations do obtain in the genesis of the work — the Time and Motion Study concept, and the association with Antonin Artaud’s concept of the Theatre of Cruelty — the work demands complete physical commitment from the performer in its delivery. The final pose of the ’cellist, slumped over the instrument, reinforcing the sheer physicality of the work, is far removed from theory. See the discussion of the work in Chapter 7 of this book.   11 Tom Service, “A Guide to Brian Ferneyhough’s Music,” Guardian On Classical Blog, September 10, 2012, http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/tomserviceblog/2012/sep/10/contemporarymusic-guide-brian-ferneyhough (accessed October 10, 2012). It is worth pointing out that straplines in journalism are not necessarily chosen by the author of the article, but can be decided on by sub-editors. Emphasis added.   12 Ibid.   13 Denys Bouliane and Anne LeBaron, “Darmstadt 1980,” Perspectives of New Music, 19, 1/2 (Autumn, 1980 – Summer, 1981): 426.   14 Ibid., 425. Critic Paul Thermos observes in 1990 that ‘The New Complexity Composers are mostly men (and women?) with at least a strong intellectual self-image and who are extremely proud of their brain.’ Thermos, Questionnaire response, Complexity in Music? An Inquiry into its Nature, Motivation and Performability, ed. Joël Bons (Netherlands: Job Press, 1990), 36–37, quoted in Stuart Paul Duncan, “Re-Complexifying the Function(s) of Notation in the Music of Brian Ferneyhough and the ‘New Complexity’,” Perspectives of New Music 48/1 (2010): 140.   15 Richard Taruskin, Music in the Late Twentieth Century (New York, NJ: Oxford University Press, 2010), 475.   16 Christopher Fox, “New Complexity,” Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online (Oxford University Press), http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/51676 (accessed January 5, 2013).   17 Jonathan Harvey, “Foreword,” Collected Writings, x. Harvey also suggests that ‘Ferneyhough, I think, does not counterpoint his dynamics and timbres (for instance) to articulate quasiserial patterns; they are polyphonically employed in more basic intuitive developments.’ (Ibid.) 55

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  18 Ibid., ix.   19 Paul Driver, “Musica Nova,” 15.   20 See for example, Roger Smalley, “Some Aspects of the Changing Relationship Between Composer and Performer in Contemporary Music,” Journal of the Royal Music Association 96 (1969/1970): 73–84. See also Roger Heaton, “The Performer’s Point of View.” Contact 30 (Spring 1987): 30–33. According to Stuart Paul Duncan, ‘[t]he view that new complexity was fueled by a return to integral-serialist practices, that scores with such large swaths of black notes could only be produced by someone employing a systematized approach, dominated articles on this music during the 1980s and early 1990s.’ (Duncan, “Re-complexifying the Function(s) of Notation,” 140–141.) It should be pointed out that the quotations that Duncan cites in support of this claim do not refer to integral serialism.   21 Driver, “Musica Nova,” 16.   22 Ibid., 15.   23 Duncan, “Re-complexifying the Function(s) of Notation,” 141. New simplicity is briefly discussed in chapter 8.   24 Duncan, “To Infinity and Beyond: A Reflection on Notation, 1980s Darmstadt, and International Approaches to the Music of New Complexity,” Search, Journal for New Music and Culture 7 (Summer 2010): 4–5, http://www.searchnewmusic.org/duncan.pdf (accessed November 3, 2012). Babbitt’s article is also titled “Who Cares if you Listen?” and was published in High Fidelity, 1958. Duncan’s two articles represent the most thoroughgoing consideration of the issue of notation in relation to New Complexity and Ferneyhough. Much of what follows may be read as a dialogue with Duncan’s ideas.   25 Duncan, “Re-complexifying the Function(s) of Notation,” 137.   26 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 22. Ferneyhough’s critique of serialism is explored in interview with Andrew Clements (Ibid., 214–15). He suggests that ‘[s]uch systems as I generally employ are always so constructed as to allow for the ‘quirky’ selection of elements from the total reservoir on a slanted, preferential basis. The idea of taking all elements once in order to guarantee completeness of combinatoriality is totally alien to me. Richness cannot be guaranteed in this way.’ (214).   27 See Nicholas Cook, “Between Process and Product: Music and/as Performance,” Music Theory Online 7/2 (April 2001): [1], http://www.mtosmt.org/issues/mto.01.7.2/mto.01.7.2.cook. html (accessed January 3, 2013).   28 John Butt, “Performance on Paper: Rewriting the Story of Notational Progress,” in Acting on the Past, Historical Performance Across the Disciplines, ed. Mark Franko and Annette Richards (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 2000), 138–139, quoted in Duncan, “To Infinity and Beyond,” 6. Nicholas Cook has suggested that the idea of performance as no more than a reproduction ‘and consequently a subordinate if not actually redundant activity, is built into our very language’ and is therefore endemic to many appraisals of Western Art Music in the widest sense. See Cook, “Between Process and Product,” 2.   29 See Smalley, “Some Aspects of the Changing Relationship,” 73–84. Duncan points out that ‘the allure of this pseudo-scientific approach to performance practice and the ideals of perfecting performance led performers, such as the pianist Roger Smalley, to map out an 56

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evolutionary trajectory tracing the historical increases in notational specificity’ (Duncan, “To Infinity and Beyond,” 6).   30 Roger Heaton, Questionnaire response in Complexity in Music? An Inquiry into its Nature, Motivation and Performability, 26.   31 Alex Ross, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), 522.   32 ‘Dance to rock music in a violent manner involving jumping up and down and deliberately colliding with other dancers.’ Oxford Concise English Dictionary, 10th ed., s.v. “mosh”.   33 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 71. Ferneyhough’s emphasis.   34 Duncan, “Re-complexifying the Function(s) of Notation,” 137.   35 This is implicit in the title of the article itself.   36 Duncan, “Re-complexifying the Function(s) of Notation,” 142. The reactions of Alex Ross, Roger Heaton, Roger Smalley and others to performing Ferneyhough’s notation implicitly invoke the Werktreue ideal (the ideal of authenticity or fidelity to the score). Their critiques suggest that, in their view, the music does not observe the Werktreue-related work-concept sufficiently; in other words, Ferneyhough’s approach is not nineteenth-century enough. John Butt is critical of this historical narrative: ‘[t]he traditional periodization of music history tends to support this view of the fully formed work solidifying in the nineteenth century, and of the composer taking ever more control over the notation of performance directives in the music.’ (See Butt, “Performance on Paper: Rewriting the Story of Notational Progress,” in Acting on the Past, Historical Performance Across the Disciplines, ed. Mark Franko and Annette Richards (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press), 138–139.) Ferneyhough’s own differentiation between exactitude and fidelity conceives of the latter somewhat differently (i.e. not in the Werktreue sense), since it decouples fidelity and accuracy (the transparency of the performer). Ferneyhough locates fidelity in the performer’s ability to access and apply the full range of his or her technical and expressive abilities in a realization of the notation.   37 Taruskin, Music in the Late Twentieth Century, 476.   38 Duncan, “Re-complexifying the Function(s) of Notation,” 145. Duncan observes that the Second Quartet begins with the instruments in unison in many parameters (except pitch) and by bar 105ff (the passage Taruskin uses as an example) the parameters have become highly desynchronized. The page of the Quartet represents the culmination of a process, therefore, not a typical moment in Ferneyhough’s music. Taruskin’s choice (and his explication of it) highlights his treatment of the notation as merely an immediately signifying phenomenon, bearing no longer-term complex consequences for the music. As Christopher Fox points out, the example that Taruskin gives is mislabelled as being from the Third Quartet, by Ferneyhaugh (sic). See Fox, “Past Imperative: The Oxford History of Western Music Volume 5: The Late Twentieth Century by Richard Taruskin,” The Musical Times 146/1893 (Winter, 2005): 107.   39 Roger Redgate, unpublished interview with Roderick Hawkins, quoted in Hawkins, “(Mis) understanding complexity,” 156.   40 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 4–5.   41 See Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zorn (London: Pimlico, 1999), 70–82. Benjamin’s concept of translation is discussed further in Chapter 9. 57

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  42 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 269.   43 Such a labyrinth is presented in the unpublished Metamorphoses on the Origins of Fire for piano, discussed in the Biography, Chapter 1. Notationally, this work resembles Boulez’s Third Piano Sonata, in which explicit choices on the part of the performer are built into a ‘mobile form’. Although these choices and prioritizations are generally considerably subtler in the notation of the published output, the essential premise is comparable, and the feature of Ferneyhough’s notation described here (its status as a token of the many different possibilities that might have been pursued) can be seen as an outgrowth of his earliest compositional practices.   44 Ibid., 291.   45 Brenda Mitchell quoted in Duncan, “Re-complexifying the Function(s) of Notation,” 157. Mitchell’s comment does not necessarily reflect her own views, or represent a critical stance towards Ferneyhough’s music, although Duncan identifies other commentators and performers whose position is undoubtedly expressed in more polemical terms: ‘Since performers such as [Roger] Heaton and other professional absolutists require the realization of notation to be exact and to produce the appearance of both complete mastery and beauty of tone, it is understandable that works of New Complexity were met with resistance by these performers.’ (Ibid.)   46 Helmut Lachenmann’s music is an obvious example.   47 Steven Schick, “A Percussionist’s Search for Models,” Contemporary Music Review 21/1 (2002): 9. Emphasis added.   48 In the video documentary devoted to the performance of Time and Motion Study II, Ferneyhough observes that the choice of title for the cycle is (among other things) an ironic reference to the concept of efficiency in industrial production, of which his own working methods (and those demanded of his performers) are a critique. In another interview he observes that ‘I’ve waited six years now to find a second performer for my bass clarinet piece Time and Motion Study I.’ Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 269.   49 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 269.   50 Ibid.   51 Principally Smalley, Heaton and Driver.   52 Steven Schick, “Developing an interpretive context: learning Brian Ferneyhough’s Bone Alphabet,” Perspectives of New Music 32/1 (1994): 152.   53 Roger Heaton, “The Performer’s Point of View,” Contact 30 (Spring, 1987): 32.   54 Duncan offers an interesting analysis of the composer Roger Marsh’s aural transcriptions of extracts from Ferneyhough scores in recorded performances, which focuses on the listener’s experience of the music. See Duncan, “Re-complexifying the Function(s) of Notation,” 160–163.   55 Schick, “Developing an Interpretative Context,” 133.   56 This tallies with Pierre-Yves Artaud’s reaction to performing Unity Capsule, for solo flute, indicated in the title to his article on the work: “Unity Capsule, une explosion de quinze minutes,” Entretemps 3 (February, 1987): 107–114.   57 See Ivan Hewett, Music: Healing the Rift (London: Continuum, 2003), 140.

58

Notation

  58 Christopher Fox, “Stockhausen’s Plus Minus, More or Less: Written in Sand,” The Musical Times 141/1871 (Summer, 2000): 16–24.   59 See references to Smalley, above. For a survey of Werktreue and the related work-concept, see Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). See chapter 9, “Werktreue: Confirmation and Challenge in Contemporary Movements,” in particular.   60 Irvine Arditti in Paul Archbold et al., “‘Performing Complexity’, a pedagogical resource tracing the Arditti Quartet’s preparations for the première of Brian Ferneyhough Sixth String Quartet,” http://events.sas.ac.uk/uploads/media/Arditti_Ferneyhough_project_ documentation.pdf (accessed June 6, 2012).   61 Ibid.   62 Ibid.   63 Ibid.   64 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 5.   65 Schick, “Developing an Interpretative Context,” 138–140.   66 Ibid.,133.   67 This is a question Irvine Arditti asked Ferneyhough the first time they met, and his attitude subsequently — that Ferneyhough will write as he must and the performers must in turn do as they must — exemplifies the principle that the performer is far from a transparent ‘transmitter’. See Arditti in Archbold et al., “Performing Complexity,” 17.   68 Roger Marsh, “Heroic Motives: Roger Marsh considers the relationship between sign and sound in ‘complex’ music,” The Musical Times 135/1812 (February 1994): 83–86.   69 Ibid., 83.   70 Ibid.   71 Ibid., 85.   72 Ibid., 86.   73 Ibid., 84.   74 Duncan, “Re-complexifying the Function(s) of Notation,” 163. Furthermore, Marsh’s hearing of the passage does not admit that the Ardittis might themselves be ‘recomposing’ as they perform, not only by ‘putting the grass in’, but more fundamentally, by performing Ferneyhough as though it were, say, Beethoven, visiting their own rationalizing tendencies on the score and musical style.   75 See Archbold et al., Brian Ferneyhough: Time and Motion Study II. ‘Electric Chair Music’, (London: Optic Nerve, 2007) DVD.   76 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 4. Emphasis Ferneyhough’s.   77 Ibid., 71.   78 Ibid.   79 John Shearman, Mannerism (Middlesex: Penguin, 1967), 18. Shearman’s principle contention, that mannerism may be viewed trans-historically as the self-consciousness cultivation of style for its own sake, is especially pertinent here.   80 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 259.   81 Duncan, “Re-complexifying the Function(s) of Notation,” 168.

59

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  82 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 259.   83 Shearman, Mannerism, 188. Emphasis added.   84 The question of a score’s playability or unplayability rests, for Marsh, on whether it can be performed accurately or not. See Duncan, “Re-complexifying the Function(s) of Notation,” 159–160.   85 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 5. Ferneyhough’s use of the word ‘image’ is significant insofar as it plays with the very sort of objection that Marsh raises (that as notational image it is complex, but as a piece of music it is not). One can appreciate how performers’ responses can be confused by the belief that because it looks like nineteenth century notation, it is nineteenth century notation, which brings with it the sort of interpretational framework and conceptual associations that Marsh invokes.   86 Ibid., 7.   87 Duncan, “Re-complexifying the Function(s) of Notation,” 142.   88 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 3. ’Cellist Neil Heyde observes that Ferneyhough’s instruction ‘like machine-gun fire’ alongside a rapid repeated note in Time and Motion Study II can never be fulfilled since the notes will never be fast, hard, or loud enough, but interprets this positively, remarking that this leaves an open-ended challenge for the performer. See Heyde in Archbold et al., Brian Ferneyhough: Time and Motion Study II. ‘Electric Chair Music’.   89 Ferneyhough, unpublished sketch materials, La terre est un homme, Paul Sacher Stiftung, Basel, c. 1976–1979. For the reference to ‘Black Scherzo’ see Chapter 3 of this book, on solo works.   90 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 5.   91 Ibid., 325.   92 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 325.   93 See for example Heaton, “The Performer’s Point of View,” 32.   94 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 7.   95 See for example discussion in Hawkins, “(Mis)understanding complexity,” 43–44.   96 Other pieces composed within a few years of Sieben Sterne begin to develop and contextualize small pockets of indeterminate material. In Transit, for example, Ferneyhough instructs that for certain passages in the woodwind (as at ‘Tutti II’), pitch and dynamic are free; in Time and Motion Study II, small boxes in the score above the stave provide the performer with ‘tools’ by which to interpret single pitches (gestures, dynamics and so on), but the order and application of those ‘tools’ is left to the performer’s choosing. These works, and in particular Sieben Sterne hint at Ferneyhough’s engagement with forms of indeterminacy and ‘improvisation’, and their notation, in several withdrawn or incomplete works composed prior to them, or contemporaneously (discussed briefly in Chapter 3).   97 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 325. The reference to ‘sonoric ideograms’ leaves no doubt as to the importance of the appearance of the notation.   98 Thomas Meyer, “Ein Gespräch mit Brian Ferneyhough,” 54–55.   99 Stephen Walsh, “Impressive Contrast,” Observer, February 26, 1978, quoted in Hawkins, “(Mis)understanding complexity,” 51. 100 Ferneyhough remarks that ‘[t]he surface can remain the same while the techniques used to generate that surface change. In fact, that is one of the tenets on which my work is based; 60

Notation

if it were not so, I would not have that possibility of creating polyvalent or multivalent levels of perception of one and the same image.’ (Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 260). Emphasis added. Of all the notational features of Ferneyhough’s music, it is its rhythmic complexity that is most fetishized — unsurprisingly, since it offers the trace of the composer’s abstract working processes (Roger Heaton, quoted earlier, refers to the ‘unnecessary rhythmic complexity’ of Ferneyhough’s scores). Ferneyhough recalls that he sometimes forgets how a process functions and has to reinvent another to ‘graft’ onto it, to maintain surface consistency even where the underlying processes are different. This might be one way of discouraging a listener and reader from too close an inspection of his generative processes (such as those detailed in Cordula Pätzold’s ‘forensic’ analyses of Carceri cycle pieces), but there is plenty of evidence from the sketches to suggest that this is indeed how he works at the ‘surface’. Richard Toop’s essay “Prima le Parole…” offers examples in the same Carceri works, detailing such practices as determining the number of impulses and beats in a given bar based on the length and subdivisions of the previous one, which seems to be a process that arises ‘on the spot’ as a convenient means of settling material for a handful of bars and no more. In short, Ferneyhough does engage in many instances of spur-of-the-moment decision-making (in effect, a form of improvisation itself), and whilst rhythm is the trace of his processual thinking, it can equally become the trace of ‘surface’, spontaneous decisions, subsumed to the overall image mentioned above. It is tempting to infer (from his assertion that he sometimes has to reinvent processes, having forgotten by which means he arrived at a particular configuration of the material) some relationship between these ad hoc  procedures  and Ferneyhough’s narcolepsy and its interruptive effect on his working day, at least prior to its diagnosis and treatment (by which time the composer was in his fifties). For his reflections on ‘losing track’ of processes, and reinventing new ones, see Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 228–229. 101 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 2. 102 This is discussed in detail in Chapter 3 on solo works. 103 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 264. 104 The ‘interruptive polyphony’ is discussed in detail in Chapter 3 on solo works. 105 Meyer, “Ein Gespräch mit Brian Ferneyhough,” 56. 106 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 88. 107 Meyer, “Ein Gespräch mit Brian Ferneyhough,” 51. 108 Ross Feller, “E-sketches: Brian Ferneyhough’s use of computer-assisted compositional tools,” in A Handbook to Twentieth-Century Musical Sketches, ed. Patricia Hall and Friedemann Sallis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 176. 109 Toop, “Brian Ferneyhough,” A Biocritical Sourcebook, 140. 110 Feller, “E-sketches,” 177. 111 Ibid. 112 Ibid., 181–183. 113 Ibid., 177. Feller identifies processes made more efficient by the use of the computer, such as Random Funnelling, which Ferneyhough uses to generate number series to deploy in a range of musical parameters; but he makes the point that these sorts of approaches are as evident in sketches for works composed before the advent of the computer facilitated and refined the process (179). 61

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114 Ferneyhough, cited in Ibid., 178. 115 Feller, “E-sketches,” 181. Ferneyhough’s assertion is backed up by examination of his sketch materials and analysis of the published scores. 116 See Ferneyhough describing his procedural invention using PatchWork in Feller, “E-sketches,” 183. 117 Francis Courtot, Brian Ferneyhough: Figures et dialogues, for example, includes but little discussion of the works since the move to the computer.

62

Chapter 3 The Solo Works: ‘Black Scherzo’1

F

erneyhough has returned to solo works intermittently throughout his career, after a concentrated period in the 1970s that saw the composition of several. His first solo works concentrate on the flute, the only instrument that he took to Europe with him upon leaving the UK in the late 1960s.2 In Unity Capsule he seeks to reveal what he calls the ‘true flute’, liberated from normative expectations.3 He suggests that it undergoes renewed self-definition, freed from conventions of ‘meaning’ not commensurate with its ‘natural borders’.4 Although this implies that absolutes are sought in Ferneyhough’s treatment of the instrument (its ‘true’ and ‘natural’ state), his use of these terms is perhaps better interpreted as an early attempt to formulate his efforts at probing the relationship between performer and instrument — specifically the technical limits of both — that comes to characterize his output as a whole. Ferneyhough has always been interested in borders and border-states, limits, edges and the energy consumed and deployed in crossing them. This approach is pioneered in the first solo flute pieces, Cassandra’s Dream Song (1970) and Unity Capsule (1975–1976). Although rather different in character, both pieces are landmarks in the development of Ferneyhough’s concept of performer as ‘resonator’, ‘filter’ or ‘semi-permeable membrane’.5 It is surely no coincidence that the Carceri d’Invenzione [Prisons of Invention] cycle accords the flute a particularly prominent role: the instrument is the primary means Ferneyhough draws on to define borders and make analogies with the confused lines of perspective in Piranesi’s eponymous etchings. He suggests that ‘[o]ne of the reasons I have been so attracted towards the Piranesi etchings has been their quality of being capable of throwing their perspectival trajectories across the edges of the page into the world outside.’6 The Carceri pieces include three flute solos (Superscriptio for piccolo, Carceri d’Invenzione IIb and Mnemosyne for bass flute and tape),7 which together consolidate themes of borders, their transgression, and the ‘imprisonment’ of performer, instrument or indeed both (imprisonment being a further example of limitation).8 Ferneyhough’s solo works in general focus on the relationship between perceived limitations of the instrument, of a performer’s technique and of notation, without compromising the aesthetic aspirations and rhetorical ambition of larger-scale pieces. Despite their various engagements with wider-ranging concerns of the oeuvre, in a certain sense every solo piece is a ‘unity capsule’: ‘a finite but unbounded expressive world.’9 The flute seems to have offered the greatest potential for Ferneyhough’s problematization of the performer-instrument-notation relationship in his first years in Europe.10 Having

Brian Ferneyhough

played it himself to a high standard, his awareness of possible areas for exploitation in both sonority and technique was considerably developed.11 He notes ‘the [flute’s] ability to offer a high density on a certain number of levels simultaneously, while filtering through the highest degree of unity imaginable – that of a single, monodic instrument.’12 As its title implies, this is best observed in Unity Capsule, in which the performer must negotiate many complex layers of parametric polyphony. These are visible in the score and include microtones, multiphonics, notation of various embouchure positions and key percussion, in addition to a double stave indicating flute materials (upper) and voice actions (lower). These various layers contribute to two ‘macro’ levels of sound production: ‘noise’ and ‘pitched sound’ (or ‘normal’ flute sounds). These levels are contrasted in several other pieces (for example Incipits: viola as ‘pitched’ and rainstick as ‘noise’). In Unity Capsule they serve to reinforce Ferneyhough’s exploration of borders: the vulnerability and potential uncontrollability of the instrument at its limits is revealed at the same time as the repeated use of breath tones and the voice imply its physical unity — its merging into one — with the performer.13 In this sense, the flute as explored in Unity Capsule represents another ‘superinstrument’ in Ferneyhough’s output.14 A performer becomes a filter, insofar as his/her technical ability is deconstructed and reconstructed in the course of learning a piece. Steven Schick’s article on the learning process in Bone Alphabet (1991) presents a performer’s own perspective, explored in Chapter 2, whilst Ferneyhough’s instructions to the pianist preparing Lemma-Icon-Epigram reinforces what the notation already effectively demands: An adequate interpretation of this work presupposes three distinct learning processes: (1) an overview of the (deliberately relatively direct) gestural patterning without regard to exactitude of detail in respect of rhythm; (2) a ‘de-learning’ in which the global structures are abandoned in favour of a concentration upon the rhythmic and expressive import of each individual note […]; (3) the progressive reconstruction of the various gestural units established at the outset on the basis of experience gained during the above two stages of preparation.15 ‘Interference Form’ In an interview in 1991, Ferneyhough remarks that ‘quite recently I evolved the concept of “Interference Form” to express the importance that the intersection and collision of clearly linear structural tendencies have for my way of thinking and feeling musical process.’16 Although it can apply in any kind of work, it is arguably most acutely addressed in the solos. At its most basic level ‘interference’ refers to the requirement that the flautist articulate vocal material and play at the same time, or that the individual singers in Time and Motion Study III have to sing and whistle simultaneously. Such interference is more difficult to achieve with a single performer and a single instrument as limiting field. 66

The Solo Works

What is more, the phenomenon could quickly be subject to the ‘law of diminishing returns’ in a work for larger forces, if applied to each and every instrument.17 According to the composer, interference involves ‘facets of a “fictional polyphony”, not by means of literally polyphonic strands of sound, but rather through what are usually considered “secondary” parametric levels of organization.’18 The term interference form refers to larger-scale organizational techniques, such as the juxtaposition in Unity Capsule of contrasted types of material (texture-types), discussed later in this chapter. In retrospect, the concept ‘interference form’ as it obtains here takes on particular significance in view of Ferneyhough’s latest (after 2000) treatment of form in small abutting fragments (as in Plötzlichkeit, 2006). The texture-types in Unity Capsule form relatively small units, and it is worth noting that much later works in small sections effectively foreground aspects of what Ferneyhough has referred to as form for some 40 years. Some staging posts, such as Kurze Schatten II (1985–1988) for solo guitar, mark the way towards the most recent output, and are discussed below. In Trittico per G.S [Gertrude Stein], a double bass solo (1989), interference form obtains on a large-scale structural level. Ferneyhough composes two concurrent basic rhythmic density layers for the piece. These underlie all the material in the work (pre-composed rhythmic layers are a common aspect of Ferneyhough’s working method, always subject to filter procedures, which give them a meaningful profile in the work and allow the composer to exercise intuition in making the choice of which impulses will ‘survive’ into the work and which will be erased). An excerpt of the basic rhythmic density patterns is reproduced in the Collected Writings, and even a cursory examination of the corresponding bars in the piece confirms that filtering has taken place.19 At the beginning of Trittico, the two rhythmic-density levels are relatively distinct (five impulses against nine), but Ferneyhough incrementally increases the density patterns with each seven-bar cycle through the basic material (there are seven such cycles in total in the first section). By bar 49 — the end of the first section — his basic pre-compositional patterns set 12 impulses against 13, resulting in a greater degree of structural ‘dissonance’.20 This, he argues, amounts to perspective in musical terms: ‘what began as a very clear perspectival distinction has, in the course of some 49 measures, become a state in which the mutual interference of operative levels has become the primary perceptual quality.’21 Elsewhere, when discussing Mnemosyne for bass flute, Ferneyhough uses the term ‘interruptive polyphony’ to characterize a similar phenomenon, which he suggests is ‘ultimately subsumable to the larger category of interference form.’22 Here, in fact, there are literally polyphonic strands of sound, although this presents an obvious problem for the soloist. The same idea occurs in Trittico, and refers to a smaller-scale or local-level interference. Both Mnemosyne and Trittico use up to three staves for notation. Each is to be understood as a separate parametric-processual layer. This is demonstrated very clearly at the beginning of Trittico, in which two layers are presented, the lower stave (higher register) characterized by quiet dynamics and pervasive glissandi, the upper stave (low register) by loud dynamics and exaggerated vibrato (Figure 3.1). 67

Figure 3.1:  Trittico per G.S. bars 1–7.

The Solo Works

In the scores, Ferneyhough denotes the interruption of an event in one layer by another by means of a vertical line joining the two together (as can be seen in Figure 3.1). A horizontal line issuing from the interrupted note, extended until it meets the vertical line that links it with the interrupting note, indicates to the performer that the notated value of the interrupted pitch is not equal to its real value in performance (the interrupting note cuts it short). It is an action notation, a concept that has other practical consequences in Trittico: there are rests and dynamics in brackets or quotation marks in the score (see bar 87 for example), which signify either ‘grammatically necessary’ pauses in one voice (even though the other voice is sounding) or the effort of the dynamic action, not necessarily the resulting amplitude, respectively.23 The events in the lower stave at bar 21 require ‘violent effort’ mfz, fff and ff, but result — according to the composer — in ‘objective mp’ (playing dynamic) because they are finger actions interrupted by accented material in the other stave that could not realistically achieve the stated dynamic level.24 Although it has been argued in the previous chapter that Ferneyhough’s notation is suggestive of a form of indeterminacy, the vertical ‘interruptive’ lines furnish one example of Ferneyhough’s use of notation to determine a performance outcome. He could have notated the two or three staves without the interruptive lines, leaving it to the performer to negotiate precisely where (and how) interruption takes place, resulting in interference of a different (less determinate) order. On another matter of apparent determination, it is surely with tongue in cheek that he refers to ‘objective mp’ in the performance of Trittico: no dynamic value can be fixed absolutely, but mp and mf are by definition still less objectively quantifiable. In reality, the principle, if not the nominal concept — ‘interference form’ — is developed in his earliest published works. It becomes an established concept for Ferneyhough by the late 1980s, but owes its inception to techniques explored specifically in his first solo works. Although the composer is rather critical in retrospect towards his early solo piano pieces, Epigrams (1966) and Three Pieces for Piano (1967), he does acknowledge in respect of the first that ‘I learned a lot from observing where the energic flow of detail collided with the overall structural layout: the multi-layering of much later works has its roots here, perhaps.’25 The reference to energy flow and collision is significant: throughout his career, Ferneyhough locates musical expression on structural seams, fault-lines and boundaries, and never, for example, in traditional development or variation techniques, explaining the instruction poco a poco disintegrandosi verso al fine… accompanying the final section of Trittico.26 This final section most resembles the notation of Mnemosyne, Ferneyhough having developed gestural characters from the outset of Trittico, including the long note followed by a glissando (section one) and the iterated fast notes accompanied by a finger movement at another speed (section two). In section three, events on a subsidiary stave ‘rudely interrupt’ attempts on the first to crescendo through a series of figures (as in bar 79).27 By this stage, the originally successive rhythmic cycles overlap, resulting in the greater visible degree of rhythmic complexity as the solo material is notated over a triple stave for the first time. In the much earlier Cassandra’s Dream Song Ferneyhough draws on contemporary predilections for mobile form, although the performer’s freedom is a constrained one insofar 69

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as the element of choice is in practice rather limited. The piece arguably represents an early manifestation of ‘interference form’ rather than an expression of allegiance to experimental open forms by composers in the previous two decades. Whilst in no work in open form does the notation represent the result required (by definition), Ferneyhough suggests that his score ‘is the attempt to realise the written specifications in practice […] designed to produced the desired (but unnotatable) sound-quality.’28 The piece marks the beginning of Ferneyhough’s experiments with the ‘psychologizing of interpretative reaction’, itself a key component of ‘interference form’, since the notation impinges on the performer’s psychology, often demanding actions contrary to those that come either naturally, from extensive training, or on the basis of historical precedents.29 Ferneyhough unambiguously requests no ‘[b]eautiful’, cultivated performance […]: some of the combinations of actions specified are in any case not literally realizable (certain dynamic groupings) or else lead to complex, partly unpredictable results […]. No attempt should be made to conceal the difficulty of the music by resorting to compromises and inexactitudes (i.e. of rhythm) designed to achieve a superficially more ‘polished’ result. On the contrary, the audible (and visual) degree of difficulty is to be drawn as an integral structural element into the fabric of the composition itself.30 There are two score sheets: sheet one, lines 1–6 and sheet two, lines A–E. 1–6 must be played in order, but one of A–E must be inserted between each numbered line in an order of the performer’s choosing. Ferneyhough suggests that ‘it is clear that abutting different sections to each other from performance to performance leads to highly contrasted confrontations and consequent reappraisals of performative energy distribution’:31 specifically, it is the ‘energy transfer situations’ brought about by the performer’s choice of line order that prefigures what the composer later calls ‘interference form’.32 In other words, a performer can create contrast by choosing two characteristically different lines to be played successively, the second ‘interfering’ with the energy flow of the first. At all times the human dimension, brought to the work by the performer whose technical and psychological limitations are tested and redefined, is drawn into the very form of the piece. The Cassandra myth is also pertinent: according to Greek mythology, Cassandra prophesied the future but, because no one believed her, she was considered mad, and imprisoned. Without presenting a programmatic interpretation directly, the performer might nevertheless infer correspondences between the motif of imprisonment implied by the choice of titular mythical character and the imperative to reckon with Ferneyhough’s notation. Once again the performer assumes the role of a filter: The material has been intentionally slanted as to present, at times, a literally ‘unplayable’ image. The boundary separating the playable from the unplayable has not been defined by resorting to pitches lying outside the range of the flute, or other, equally obvious subterfuges, but has been left undefined, depending for its precise location on the specific abilities of the individual performer.33 70

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Table 3.1: Types of material, Unity Capsule for solo flute. Material Type Description34 α

Predominantly rapid and discontinuous based on permutatory bar-subdivision method

β

Basically long notes with tone colour (interval) differentiation

γ

Concatenation of texture-types, which cannot be ordered under the first two groups. This function of this set is episodic, as none of its members is ever repeated as such.

Unity Capsule develops ‘interference form’ further still. There is no mobile element to the piece, but the formal approach remains focused on energy distribution and transfer between three kinds of material, labelled α, β and γ in the sketches. The global form divides into three sections, themselves subdivided according to a proportional scheme (into a total of nine smaller parts).35 The first two large sections contain a mixture of all three texture-types, whilst the final section contains no episodic material, abutting the contrasted α and β materials and generating a similar ‘energy transfer’ to that in Cassandra between contrasting lines.36 ‘Interference’ is also generated by the extensive written performance instructions, often in boxes throughout the score.37 Although it might be assumed that these instructions are absorbed by the flautist in rehearsal, rather than acting as immediate triggers in performance, they are positioned close to asterisks or arrows embedded amongst note heads, indicating where the instruction becomes relevant. To this extent the text boxes are themselves part of the ‘black’ notation, impressing their presence upon the eye line of the performer no less than the material on the staves. In his sketches, Ferneyhough refers to the piece as a ‘black scherzo’.38 The listener, too, is obliged to move between parametric levels, because bursts of activity capture the attention and disrupt linear logic. There are many similarities between the approach taken here and a year later in the formidable Time and Motion Study II for ’cello and live (electronic) transformation, which manifests the same constraining layers of parametric polyphony as Unity Capsule (including vocal action and many written instructions). Ferneyhough further enhances the ‘theatre’ of performance, effectively imprisoning the ’cellist amidst eight speakers, microphones attached to his/her throat and instrument, and foot pedals. On this occasion the greatest ‘interference’ tension is generated by material fed back at a delay through the speakers which the ’cellist must contend with whilst continuing to produce live sound, itself no less complex for the intrusion of transformed material.39 Time and Motion Study II is addressed in Chapter 7, along with the other pieces in the cycle. The parametric polyphony so evident in solo pieces of the 1970s remains an important generative principle in the 1980s, but its visibility in the score recedes to an extent behind a musical surface in which Ferneyhough explores a concept that has preoccupied him ever since: the gesture. This does not refer to a gesture made by the performer, in the sense that the dramatic removal and return of the flute from and to the lips in Unity Capsule 71

Figure 3.3:  Material β, Unity Capsule, flute.

Figure 3.2:  Material α, Unity Capsule, flute.

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is a gesture, but to a musical event with particular definable characteristics amenable to individual transformation throughout a work. The opening piano figure of Lemma-IconEpigram can be considered a gesture in this sense, with two transformations following it in succession (discussed later in this Chapter). Ferneyhough considers the gesture a kind of ‘object’ that is sufficiently self-consistent and ‘succeeds in defining its own outer boundaries with a reasonable degree of credibility’,40 once again implicitly invoking borders to be crossed and thus interference. Although this stylistic shift towards gestural discourse is explored in detail elsewhere in this book, it is worth noting that the psychological aspect of a performer’s reckoning with Ferneyhough’s notation — a mental sorting, in effect, through the presentation of multiple parametric ‘interfering’ layers — which precipitated physical ingenuity in the 1970s is recast in the following decade. From 1980, the prevalence of the gesture in the musical discourse foregrounds ‘tendential lines of force’,41 and the ‘psychologizing of interpretative reaction’ is generally concentrated in these to the extent that they become graspable for both performer and listener as dynamic shapes. In Lemma, Ferneyhough uses prominent beams running through the middle of the piano stave that serve both the left- and right-hand material (as in bars 1, 5 and 35, the latter shown in Figure 3.4). On other occasions, clearly defined gestural shapes are presented in one hand only by means of similar beaming (as in bars 16–18, right hand). The procedure recalls Unity Capsule, in which a single thick beam joins all actions, although in Lemma its purpose is more specific to a particular gestural definition: the beams signal the importance of rhythmic detail in particular, the graphic effect on the eye — and thus on the performer’s attention to precision — of rests breaking the continuity (as  in bar 5) is enhanced by the beams’ contrastingly black objectivity. The sudden vacillation between left- and right-hand pitches prefigures the very particular notation of ‘interruptive polyphony’ later in the decade, in Trittico and Mnemosyne. Similar psychologizing of rhythmic notation is also a feature in the guitar solo Kurze Schatten II.

Figure 3.4:  Lemma-Icon-Epigram, piano, bar 35.

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In Mnemosyne the bar is an important structural frame of reference against which musical ‘objects’ are projected,42 and thus constitutes another opportunity for performative ‘energy transfer’: The measure thus tends to function for me, firstly, as a space, secondly via the bar-line as the domain of a certain energy quotient suddenly facing the necessity of leaping to a sometimes quite contrasted state. It is not the emphasis on the downbeat which counts, but the feel for what is needed to leap this experiential hurdle to the immediately subsequent situation.43 The return to the flute in the Carceri cycle is significant: it is the instrument through which advances in ‘interference form’ are made. This is reinforced still further in the latest (alto) flute solo Sisyphus Redux (2009), in which the composer invokes the ‘energy transfer situations’ first evolved in Cassandra. Like Cassandra, the mythical figure Sisyphus appeals to Ferneyhough as a symbol of struggle against limitation. In Greek mythology, Sisyphus was condemned to push a rock up a hill in perpetuity; each time he reached the top, it would fall again. Ferneyhough’s score intends to reflect Sisyphus’ predicament, as is made clear in the prefatory remarks: ‘each line of music may be seen as a renewed attempt, by means of cunning stratagems or subtly altered initial conditions, to complete the task imposed by Zeus.’44 Although there is no element of performer choice involved in determining which line is played when, the idea of abutting lines of music manifesting different musical strategies precipitating ‘energy transfer’ is redolent of Cassandra. Throughout the piece there are consistently at least two levels of polyphony, indicated at the beginning by the ‘interruptive polyphony’ notation familiar from Mnemosyne, the only difference here the single, rather than double, stave. Two discrete sets of dynamics and ornament symbols, one for each layer, are given above and below the stave respectively, maintaining the separate identities of the two polyphonic-parametric layers, the upper initially around an E harmonic, which seems to be thwarted at every attempt to sound by a distorting ornament or microtonal pitch inflection, and the lower focused on D and its distortions, which interrupt and are interrupted by the E. Much of this takes place at a generally very low volume, requiring considerable control on the part of the performer, especially on the rare occasions where a one-note interjection is accented ff (Figure 3.5). The second and third systems bear witness to the expansion of registral difference between the two polyphonic layers of material, the third introducing metric modulation from bar to bar (made more difficult to execute because of the short metric value of each bar). Grace notes also ‘interrupt’ with greater frequency in this system, an idea revisited later in the piece (bars 73–79), bringing to bear Ferneyhough’s ‘subtly altered initial conditions’: now, the two layers of ‘interruptive polyphony’ are represented by an altercation between single or short groups of usually accented pitches and long groups of legato grace notes that fill in the registral gaps. A frenetic passage of interruptions and tempo changes at the beginning of the fourth system sets the loud lower layer against the alternately soft and loud upper layer, and the rhythmic 74

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Figure 3.5:  Sisyphus Redux, alto flute, bars 1–2.

material becomes increasingly complex to negotiate. The remainder of this line reveals a further refinement or subtle alteration of the two mutually interruptive layers: Ferneyhough preserves two lines of material, but one is notated on the stave conventionally whilst the other, which indicates vibrato and smorzato in varying speeds, separates off into a layer of graphic notation consolidated by the exclusion of any dynamics besides graphic hairpins (Figure 3.6). The subsequent reappearance of numerous metres suggests that Ferneyhough cycles irregularly through a pre-composed pattern, a technique familiar from his earliest published works. By the end of the piece the notation has expanded to two staves, signalling that a third interruptive layer has been established. This latter is percussive, ‘quasi xilofono’,45 requiring the performer to differentiate still further between conflicting lines of ‘fictive polyphony’ (Figure 3.7).

Figure 3.6:  Sisyphus Redux, alto flute, bar 25, ‘graphic notation’.

75

Figure 3.7:  Sisyphus Redux, alto flute, bars 87–89.

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Sisyphus Redux stands out formally from numerous roughly contemporaneous compositions for larger forces (including Plötzlichkeit, Chronos-Aion and Exordium), all of which are written in tiny sections, whose instrumentation and textures change from section to section. Nevertheless, the concept of beginning a new process with each line resonates with the fundamental formal approach taken in Ferneyhough’s most recent works. Towards the end of Sisyphus, sections smaller than a single line of music do occur (from bar 96 to the end), the texture duly changing with each new fragment, which results in a kind of stretto effect. A similar situation occurs at the conclusion of Trittico, in several small sections separated by double bar-lines. In the preface to Sisyphus, Ferneyhough references Albert Camus’ 1942 essay The Myth of Sisyphus, in which the author suggests that ‘one must imagine Sisyphus happy’, offering the contradictory — absurd (in Camus’ sense of the term) — perspective to Zeus’ curse.46 Furthermore, Camus concludes that ‘the struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart.’47 If ever there was a metaphor for the performer’s task in Ferneyhough’s music, this is it: one can interpret Ferneyhough’s quotation of Camus’ text as a performance instruction for this work, and by extension for all the solo repertoire. The reward is in the effort, not necessarily the end result obtained: in a sense this recalls the composer’s preface to Cassandra, requiring not a beautiful, cultivated tone from the flute and flautist, but no concealment of the difficulty of the music and its edges in performance. Ferneyhough’s concept of self-consistent style is again in evidence here, however different the works might be one from another. Relationships between Music and the Non-musical It is clear from Ferneyhough’s earliest works that the role of the performer is problematized, and this remains one of the fundamental tenets of his output. The organ solo Sieben Sterne is contemporaneous with Cassandra and, like the flute piece, draws on indeterminacy, again within a ‘controlled environment’. The title reflects the seven stars in the right hand of the divine figure in Albrecht Dürer’s painting ‘The Vision of the Seven Candlesticks’ from The  Apocalypse (c. 1496–8) and prefigures the significance of non-musical art forms for Ferneyhough’s compositional practice. The form of Ferneyhough’s piece, in seven sections, is also directly related to the painting. Considering the criticisms made of Ferneyhough for his notational practice (especially in his early career), it is curious — as noted in the previous chapter — that he should choose to instruct the organist to perform the indeterminate passages ‘by striving to make the resultant interpretations resemble the fully written out passages as nearly as possible.’48 It is difficult not to interpret the comment as at least a little provocative. His advice to the performer to write out his/her solution to the six ‘improvised’ passages prior to performance, concentrating on altering one or two parameters each time, initially suggests that the provocation is only superficial, and the composer’s control is maintained, as it were behind the scenes.49 However, the implication that the performer (not necessarily a composer him or herself of course) could or should reproduce 77

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‘Ferneyhough style’ is critically rather risky, for obvious reasons. Undoubtedly the idea is polemical, not to mention rough-hewn, but the real purpose is to bring about another process of ‘psychologization’ and energy transfer, as the performer must react to suddenly very contrasted tensions in his/her relationship to the material. When Ferneyhough suggests that these are ‘self-destructing rules of play’,50 he refers to the performer in the first instance, but surely not a little to his own situation, with a generous dose of irony. Sieben Sterne represents the visible peak of a larger number of contemporaneous compositions that experiment with notation and indeterminacy, almost all of which are either withdrawn or incomplete, and in which Ferneyhough began to consolidate the importance of notation in his compositional aesthetic. Relationship 1: ‘Composition as Explanation’ (Gertrude Stein)51 Ferneyhough’s long-held interest in the relationships between music and non-musical forms or discourses is, like ‘interference form’, reinforced throughout his oeuvre. The solo works are due special attention because they permit an expressive intimacy, which relies on the listener as a resonator as much as the performer. In small chamber ‘concertos’ such as La  Chute d’Icare and Terrain, Ferneyhough deploys the tutti as a form of commentary, contrast or explication of the solo, whereas in a work for one instrument, he foregrounds the relationship between the material and time (as ‘explanation’ through the unfolding of a musical argument) and the listener’s capacity for memory, for making connections, and for long-range formal scanning. As indicated earlier, he also ‘explains’ or deconstructs the instrument itself in the course of a solo piece. Four works will now chiefly be considered according to these perspectives, all of which embody, to a greater or lesser extent, a process of elaboration of (a) musical ‘object(s)’, conceived variously as images (Lemma-Icon-Epigram; Kurze Schatten II), borrowed material (Unsichtbare Farben), and different languages and grammatical units represented by musical texture-types, themselves representing Gertrude Stein’s particular treatment of language (Trittico per G.S.). Ferneyhough is especially interested in the concept of musical-linguistic explication: for all his awareness of the longstanding and complex philosophical-semiotic positions on the relationship between language and (conceptless) music, his creative approach to expression in either medium as both composer and sometime poet yields transferable techniques.52 Simply put, he understands musical unfolding as akin to language, not on the level of meaning but in terms of scansion or discursivity. He favours writers like Stein precisely because embedded in her own concept of language is a notion of sound and its physicality that is amenable to interpretation in the musical domain. Stein sought to remove or lessen the signifying capacity of words, rendering them sound objects — things rather than words — ‘what remains is, on the one hand, a physical compound of sound, tone, rhythm, length, weight, look, shape, thrust or whatever one wishes to call these things, and on the other hand, a meaning, which, abstracted from its carrier, tends to vanish.’53 The appeal to Ferneyhough is 78

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obvious: the ‘interference form’ of Trittico bears witness to the transformation of the instrument, performer and material into a ‘physical compound’ of its own. Ferneyhough explores the ‘energy transfer’ between the linguistic and musical mediums, but also between the ‘orchestral’ aspirations of the material executed on a single instrument only. Ferneyhough’s own poetic writing seeks similar qualities to Stein’s and is always constructed with musical premises in mind — not in a simplistically transferrable manner, but insofar as language allows him to work through problems that present themselves in his musical workings (and vice versa). Trittico is a case in point. Recall the two levels of rhythmic density patterns discussed above: [My texts’] usefulness resides in their balancing function: there are times when I can better ‘think-through’ generative procedures or forms in words rather than music. As such, these exercises serve something of a laboratory function, without ever attempting direct transliteration of the one medium into the other.   One particular concept, that of ‘interference’, is fairly directly carried across, though, in the sense that my texts tend to concentrate on establishing essentially ‘atonal’ relationships between units of significance. Depending on whether I choose units of one syllable or progressively larger units up to entire sentences, of one language or several, of one or more historical phases of a given language, the degree of ‘naturalness’ inhering in the result varies considerably. […] In fact my Trittico per G.S. for solo double bass attempts to rearticulate, in terms of musical technique, some perceptions derived from her writings.54 A distinctly ironic perspective on the concept of ‘composition as explanation’ obtains in the violin solo Unsichtbare Farben [‘Invisible Colours’] (1998), the first piece in Ferneyhough’s output for which the composer acknowledges the use of borrowed material (as distinct from implicit references to other composers’ works, for example Schoenberg in the Fourth String Quartet with voice, or the String Trio). The source in question is the ‘Caput’ melisma, derived from a plainchant antiphon from the Sarum Rite, and used as a basis for polyphonic works by several fifteenth-century composers, including Ockeghem and Obrecht.55 The  work’s title makes no direct reference to this, being instead derived from Marcel Duchamp’s suggestion that a title adds an ‘invisible colour’ to a painting, implying that it shapes the viewers’ response as much as a colour might affect the eye in the image itself.56 Just as Ferneyhough’s scores force the ‘psychologizing’ of notation, Duchamp envisaged painting in which the viewer’s ‘psychologization’ of the title in relation to what was painted was key. The inherently contradictory term ‘invisible colour’ itself added to this. The title does not remain extraneous to the work proper, but becomes as integral as a colour to its form and expression. Ferneyhough’s title takes cognizance of Duchamp’s remark in at least three ways: it refers implicitly to the invisibility in the piece itself of the extensive pre-compositional workings that generate the material; likewise implicitly, it relates to the fissures — absences — created by the progressive erasure of details (the gaps left are quite audible), and fragmentation as the piece unfolds; finally, it refers to the treatment of 79

Figure 3.8:  Caput plainchant embedded in Unsichtbare Farben (solo violin), bars 1–3. The pitch sequences B-D-C-D-B and E-G-D replicate the first eight pitches of the plainchant.

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the borrowed material in the course of the piece. There is again a certain irony here, in that one would have to know what that material is to appreciate its progressive ‘disappearance’ into the recesses of the structure: for a listener unfamiliar with it, the ‘Caput’ melisma, acts as an ‘invisible colour’ in the work. Only the title of Ferneyhough’s composition hints at such a substrate. In itself, and contrary to the pieces of the 1980s for example, the opening material is not gesturally defined so as to imprint itself on the ear: there are moments when fragments of the borrowed plainchant are present; yet the anonymity of the original chant adds another perspective to the concept of invisibility. As the piece progresses, moments of ‘Caput colour’ assert themselves (Figure  3.8). The first significant example occurs in the second bar (although the chant’s pitches are embedded amongst microtones in the very first). A reading of the ‘Caput’ material is given in accented notes, but the performer, listener, or musicologist searching for encrypted references to it throughout will be disappointed (apart from the very beginning).57 It is not the literal play with borrowed material that interests Ferneyhough as much as what this implies and impresses on the performer in preparing the work. The first three bars form an introduction (as though intoning the plainsong). Thereafter, short sections in palindromic metrical patterns reflect the similarly palindromic pitch content in the first unambiguous statement of the chant (B-D-C-D-B, bar 2), hinting at an underlying variation form that becomes increasingly fragmented as the piece progresses. Another play on the title might be suggested: the work is overall less characteristically gestural than say, Intermedio alla ciaccona, and as a consequence is less immediately accessible. Instead of the extrovert character of the other violin solo and works in which a gestural compound is progressively remoulded along parametric lines, Unsichtbare Farben presents the ‘same’ material from different perspectives, by means of an array of contrasting texture-types through which occasional glimpses of returning plainchant material can be heard, although so distorted as to have become virtually ‘invisible’. Bar 150 provides an example: though derived from the plainchant, the pitch content passes by so quickly, in such a high register and so very quietly that the listener hears the texture but not the ‘colours’ that gave rise to it. There is no religious motivation in Ferneyhough’s borrowing of plainsong material. Instead his choice is determined by concrete, practical criteria: there are no rhythms to take account of, nor tonal resonances; finally, this lengthy plainchant melisma, comprising nearly 100 pitches, contains several internal repetitions.58 Further, as alluded to earlier, Caput has a particular compositional pedigree, and as with the much earlier Missa Brevis, Ferneyhough draws on a historically established set of criteria that offers a certain resistance to his techniques.59 Chapter 5, on Ferneyhough’s chamber works, considers further the composer’s relationship to English sources, suggesting that in the pieces drawn from the work of Christopher Tye, he explores aspects of his own cultural heritage and autobiography. In light of the history of the ‘Caput’ plainsong (its journey from anonymity in England to greater profile on the continent), his identification with early English sources in this manner might be seen to originate with Unsichtbare Farben. 81

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Relationship 2: Emblems The Renaissance ‘Emblemum’ or ‘Emblema’ — usually comprising a title, enigmatic Latin verse and a woodcut image — has fascinated Ferneyhough since the mid 1970s, and he has returned repeatedly to its particular formal consequences for music: Emblemata (1975) for solo piano (incomplete and never performed), Lemma-Icon-Epigram, and Kurze-Schatten II (original/working title: Emblems) all address the ‘exegetical’ to different degrees.60 The three components represent different kinds of explanation of a concept in enigmatic or puzzle form, ‘the equivalent of our present day crosswords for highly learned and literate gentlemen.’61 The principal source for emblems is the prolific sixteenth-century writer Andrea Alciati (or Alciato, d. 1550), and Ferneyhough also cites Walter Benjamin’s fascination with the emblem in connection with his own studies.62 In Alciati’s Emblem, the Lemma is a motto, proverb or superscription; the Icon or pictura, an image which generally includes allegorical and alchemical, or hieroglyphic-style symbols; and the Epigram, an explanation in verse of the first two components’ relationship and meaning, and which can only be understood in relation to them. Transferring this form to music produces the aurally distinctive, successive textures of the three main sections in the piano solo Lemma-Icon-Epigram, themselves different perspectives on the ‘same basic area of concern.’63 The ramifications of Ferneyhough’s preoccupation with emblems are felt still more widely in the oeuvre. The first piece in the Carceri d’Invenzione cycle, Superscriptio, is itself arguably related to the Lemma concept (superscription) and is exactly contemporaneous with the piano piece.64 Sketches for a piece provisionally entitled String Set, at which the composer seems to have laboured over several years, also contain formal plans for sectionalization according to the three components of the emblem — here referred to as the rhetorical categories, ‘symbolum’, ‘representatio’ and ‘explicatio’ — to be articulated through tutti, solo and small group textures. A sizeable fragment (the projected opening) of Emblemata survives in the sketches. The piano writing crosses four staves at times (two for each hand) and there are three as standard. As in Lemma, single processual lines of material cross three staves. Emblemata was envisaged, according to sketch projections, as a nine-section work in which the tripartite emblem would be presented in three cycles (three times three) with some superimposition and juxtaposition, including smaller sections within or supplementary to the main nine, disposed in asymmetrical proportions that presented diminished versions of the main proportion structure. The formal scheme is therefore not dissimilar to that used in the contemporaneously composed Unity Capsule, also in nine sections, subdivided according to a proportions scheme replicated on a number of structural levels.65 No technically detailed analysis of Lemma-IconEpigram is presented here: Richard Toop has already published a thorough account of some compositional techniques and concepts used, distilling much information from Ferneyhough’s extensive sketches for the piece.66 However, the piece’s relationship to trends in the solo works and Ferneyhough’s creative vista more generally, is worth considering. One important structural feature of Emblemata is carried across to Lemma, albeit articulated in a different parameter. In the earlier piece Ferneyhough envisaged a texture of unison hands 82

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chords set against fragmented lines and rests, on cycles of repeating rhythmic cell loops; in Lemma, these textural extremes are both present, and the first section of the piece is built up in repeating metrical loops, subject to augmentation and retrogradation with each new cycle.67 This has the effect of rendering the proportional scheme audible for the attentive listener, because it is disposed across larger units than small rhythmic cells; it contributes to a sense of temporal tactility and prepares the ground for the Icon, a study in the sensation of time. Like the Lemma, the Icon is based on metrical loops involving the substitution of so-called ‘irrational’ metres (such as 4/10 or 3/12) for conventional x/8 or x/16 units. This is the first time they feature in Ferneyhough’s output and they create proportional relationships between bar units within a cycle/loop as well as contributing to the overall proportion of one nine-bar cycle relative to the next.68 Emblemata also shares with Lemma certain textures, including sustained chords and tones that characterise the Icon section of the latter, but the sudden textural differentiation (from linearity to verticality) that occurs with the arrival at the Icon is characteristic of the new style of the 1980s in which complex parametric generating processes move ‘underground’ to reveal a more direct, gestural expression on the musical surface, as mentioned earlier.69 This is the single most significant difference between the surviving score excerpts of Emblemata and the published Lemma, the former exemplifying Toop’s characterization of the earlier works’ surface structures, which ‘more or less coincided with the compositional processes that had generated them.’70 By contrast, Toop argues that in Lemma The opening line bears the entire weight of Ferneyhough’s previous compositional experience. […] [The exposition of the opening flourish] in the first line of the piece is a miniature glossary of the composer’s ‘discursive’ processes.71 Although Lemma does not explicitly recalibrate material previously conceived for Emblemata, there is no doubt that the later work represents a reckoning with earlier precepts and the coming-into-being of Ferneyhough’s musical-linguistic thinking. The opening gestures of Lemma are unambiguously directional and processual: the first three tuplets illustrate a ‘line of force’ (12–11–10) as well as the step-by-step transformational processes applied to the material.72 Each successive gesture in the group of three disturbs the relative stability of the first in several ways: the dynamic arc becomes less smooth, more pitches enter in the left hand, the legato of the first is only partially replicated in the second and then overlaps with the third, as though this parameter operates according to a different rate of change, and finally, rests that ‘should’ have fallen between gestures two and three instead fracture the third into two parts. Richard Toop refers to the ‘transcendentalist quasi-improvisation’ of the Lemma section;73 however, in the sketches, Ferneyhough writes that [i]t is imperative to accept that this piece is not meant to sound conventionally improvisatory. The florid quality of the material has been precisely calculated so as to lead imperceptibly towards certain insights of structural and motivic activity, and every 83

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effort should be made to treat each moment as if caught up in many interlocking webs of inference, locking it firmly into place on a number of levels.74 The precision required of the performer aids the listener’s perception of proportional relationships. Despite Ferneyhough’s resistance in general to the concept of an authoritative musical text that demands exactitude from the performer (discussed in detail in Chapter 2), his notes to the pianist in Lemma-Icon-Epigram seem to advocate just that, in stronger terms than the sketch materials (quoted above) suggest. In the published score he writes that ‘“rubato” interpretation of the indicated [rhythmic] values should therefore be rigorously rejected in favour of an attempt to evolve strategies permitting as close an approach as possible to the specificities of the musical text.’75 The score arguably represents a significant refinement of the basic premise of Sieben Sterne a decade earlier. The alternation of freer and highly specific notated passages there is collapsed in Lemma into the psychological conundrum requiring of the performer on the one hand a close rendering of textual specificities, and implying on the other (and through the selfsame, heavily gestural ‘text’) the kind of rubato approach typically associated with the performance of Romantic piano repertory. The visual aspect of the notation (consider in particular the contrary motion gestures that conclude the Lemma section, and the coda-fantasy between bars 83 and 88) seems at odds with the imperative of locking each moment ‘firmly into place’, and is surely deliberately intended to create maximum ‘interference’ in the performer’s mind with the directive contained in the preface.76 The Lemma concentrates on establishing a sense of line or ‘becoming’, rather than motivic identities as such, leading to its being described as ‘pseudo-developmental’ and ‘quasi-motivic’.77 These qualities, in addition to the flirtation with improvisatory character, all reinforce the mysteriousness of the enigmatic superscription. Toop’s choice of words (‘transcendentalist quasi-improvisation’) is perhaps significant, as is Ferneyhough’s characterization of the Lemma as ‘moving imperceptibly towards certain insights of structural and motivic activity.’ Marginalia from the sketches offer a mystical perspective on the piece, in keeping with interests most prominent in Ferneyhough’s works (such as Transit) from the 1970s, and reinforcing the importance of Alciati’s emblems for the piece. They suggest that the Lemma, as a presentation of a mysterious statement, ‘[goes] on a search for “motives” not however explicitly reached’ in a kind of musical form of gnosis, to be interpreted in this context as a search for spiritual knowledge or salvation through inner (self)-reflection or self-realization.78 The applicability of self-realization to Ferneyhough’s performer is obvious. Motives emerge, says Ferneyhough, ‘after a gap’ — a contemplative gap — ‘whose consequences it is the function of the Epigram to consider.’79 The Epigram is an explanation of the two preceding sections, but in seeking within itself the semantic connection between them, it is also a subjective instance: explicatory, yet seeking its own inner epiphany. Echoing the Gnostics’ preference for intuitive, rather than rational, knowledge, Ferneyhough says of the Epigram that ‘it was incumbent on me to adopt a procedure which would not allow me to find an easy answer via systems, and therefore I was working totally unsystematically here.’80 However, he claims that the Epigram ‘fails’ to achieve what it set out to:81 84

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My compositional desires simply didn’t interlock with what I was theoretically setting out to do. After all this research I had carried out over the space of about eight months in producing the piece […] at a certain point the material itself demanded to be redisposed in schematically block-like entities.82 The Icon chords return like ‘prison bars’ at the end of the piece, with little fantasies in between;83 in echoes of Ferneyhough’s treatment of the solo flute in Mnemosyne, whose pitch range is increasingly restricted as the piece unfolds, the pianist performs chords at the centre of the keyboard, as the hands try to disengage and move outwards, only to be forced back to the centre in the final pages, ending on two complementary hexachords, one in each hand. Like the emblem puzzle, the tripartite musical exegesis remains open-ended: significantly, given his return to the concept of the emblem in Kurze Schatten II, Ferneyhough suggests that ‘a shadow piece starts after the end of a piece.’84 Kurze Schatten II comprises seven movements or sections, paired (slow-fast) after the manner of the Baroque suite, the first three having been written in 1983 and the last four (the final movement is an unpaired fantasia) in 1989. The three slow movements have in common polyphonic layered textures and each of the fast movements share analogous forms, being sets of variations on identical basic material. The title translates as ‘Short Shadows’ and according to Ferneyhough ‘there is no Kurze Schatten I: the title is taken from a [set of seven aphoristic texts] by the German cultural philosopher Walter Benjamin.’85 In fact there are two sets of aphorisms by Benjamin, entitled Kurze Schatten I and II respectively, both ending with the same brief fragment: Short Shadows. Toward noon, shadows are no more than the sharp, black edges at the feet of things, preparing to retreat silently, unnoticed, into their burrow, their secret being. Then, in its compressed, cowering fullness, comes the hour of Zarathustra – the thinker in ‘the noon of life,’ in ‘the summer garden.’ For it is knowledge that gives things their sharpest outline, like the sun at its zenith.86 Benjamin’s texts suggest a link with Gnosticism to parallel that which Ferneyhough explores in Lemma. The first aphorism in Kurze Schatten II is titled ‘Secret Signs’, and from the quotation above, Benjamin conceives of a shadow as a ‘secret being’.87 Other connections with the conceptual world of Lemma can be made, particularly the Icon section. In both pieces Ferneyhough invokes a ‘time-sun’,88 interpreting Benjamin’s image as ‘the sun progressively approaching its zenith until, at noon, it beats down from directly overhead, at which moment all shadows disappear, everything becomes just itself.’89 Ferneyhough’s Kurze Schatten II ‘represents’ this time-sun in the realm of the solo guitar’s resonance: the piece begins with four scordatura strings and after each pair of movements, one string is returned to ‘normal’ tuning as the ‘object’ (the instrument) gradually becomes itself, its typical resonance practically restored by the final movement, at least insofar as there are no longer microtonally tuned strings.90 85

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Table 3.2: Kurze Schatten II, Scordatura. Movements 1&2 Movements 3&4 Scordatura strings affected: low E, upper E, B, A (D&G as normal)

Scordatura strings: upper E, B, A (D&G as normal; low E restored — ‘the lower end of the range begins to resonate a little more.’91

Movements 5&6

Movement 7

Scordatura strings: upper E, B (D, G, low E as normal; A restored)

Scordatura strings: B only (D, G, low E, A as normal; upper E restored)

Compare this with the concept behind the Icon, which is based on seven chords drawn from the Lemma section.92 The sketches reveal the extent to which Ferneyhough’s conception of this piece is bound up with the visual. If the guitar is the object in Kurze Schatten II, in the Icon he imagines the chords as objects in a landscape, with the sun passing overhead, causing them to throw shadows.93 The different shadows’ lengths and intensities mark the passing of the sun, and therefore of time. The very beginning of the section could be said to take on an almost physical presence, the chords like sculptures in the context of the work.94 Immediately preceding ‘Icon’, the rapid hemidemisemiquaver flourishes, which characterize the coda/fantasy section that concludes the Lemma, propel the music forward, enhanced by the contrary motion towards registral extremes and the crescendos from p to ffff accompanying each directional figure. The passage is a kind of exercise in gestural transformation ad absurdum. According to Toop, ‘the accumulation of different ways of reformulating the same material, a sort of piling up of sublime tautologies […] necessitates the final Tower of Babel section [bars 83–88].’95 Consequently the arrival at bar 89 on an 8/8 bar with only a semibreve seven-part chord at an extreme ffffff dynamic brings the motion to an abrupt standstill. For the pianist undoubtedly, and arguably for the listener, the effect is physical, the chord like a solid object, its impact reinforced by subsequent, similarly articulated ‘monoliths’. The Icon prioritizes chordal resonance (hence the comparison with the guitar solo).96 Toop implies that Ferneyhough captures something of the ‘time-sun’ in his remark that ‘in fact, the whole of Icon could be regarded as the progressive decay of a fixed structure, and its obliteration by ever more extravagant overgrowths.’97 The texture moves from sustained, resonant chords (long shadows?) towards short, staccati ‘points’ by bar 135 (short ‘black edges at the feet of things’?).98 At the outset, time feels expansive in the sustained and isolated resonance events. However, several features (gradual transformative cycles through rapid figurations including a grace-note texture with sfz accented chords (bars 107–119), the alternation of short, densely polyphonic bar-lengths and longer rest bars (bars 120–134), and finally the ‘points’ from bars 135–142) have the effect of piling resonance upon resonance, an effect enhanced by the silent retaking of chords so as to cast an ever-denser resonance ‘shadow’. Progressively, the Icon presents a surfeit of aural information, which there is too little time to absorb. The pedal is used to great effect, enabling the ‘secret being’ — overtone 86

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resonances — of chords to emerge. The Epigram begins at bar 143, overlapping with the concluding passage of the Icon, hence the desynchronized bar-lengths that persist until the Epigram proper at bar 151. Although all three sections of Lemma-Icon-Epigram purport to offer different perspectives on the same basic phenomenon, the Icon is a miniature exploration of this principle: the same chords are ‘viewed’ from different angles. Take, for example, the first chord of the Icon, bar 89, which is registrally spread so as to create a particular resonance covering three octaves. It is heard again in the right hand at bar 93, compacted within an octave and transposed by a minor sixth.99 Its resonance on this occasion is wholly different. The continued importance of shadows in time, as well as the relationship between this image and Benjamin, is of course revisited and realized on a substantial scale nearly 20 years later in the opera Shadowtime. Kurze Schatten II explores ‘interference form’ once again, the material notated, as in the first movement, over as many as three staves. Each movement encapsulates a particular musical issue or ‘topic’ in miniature,100 and the piece represents a maturation of one of the earliest form-expression problems that Ferneyhough posed himself in Epigrams and Sonatas for String Quartet: how to hold the explosive detail in crystalline separate movements in tension with overarching formal concerns, extended in time.101 This is even more pertinent considering the movements were composed in groups some six years apart and that they do not have to be played contiguously in concert.102 The treatment of time is crucial to maintaining tension throughout the work, and different movements approach the issue from different perspectives. According to the composer, the ‘acoustically restricted universe of the guitar’ nevertheless hosts a musical ‘argument [that] staggers back and forth across the whole gamut of the instrument’s expressive potential in a surrealistically miniaturized time frame.’103 The composer’s claim is an ambitious one — rather like his assertion regarding the ‘true flute’ in his earlier repertoire — since the ‘whole gamut of the instrument’s expressive potential’ is surely continually opened to new possibilities by different composers and performers, not least Ferneyhough’s later guitar concerto, Les Froissements des Ailes de Gabriel, in which he takes the principle of a ‘surrealistically miniaturized time-frame’ to a different level.104 It is the case, however, that each movement approaches the guitar very differently, and overall, as in Trittico, the instrumental ambition in Kurze Schatten II pretends to a scale that is at odds with the medium. The third movement provides one example of this: alternating bars of complex polyphonic material with bar-length rests that allow for resonance to continue to sound undisturbed, it recalls the passage in the Icon (bars 121–134), even though the difference in volume and sustainability of such sounds between piano and guitar is considerable. The composer throws shadows from one movement to another, and within individual sections. The ‘time-sun’ discussed above is perceptible in the treatment of some directly experienced tempo-density relationships. Consider, for example, the second and third movements: in the former, tempo begins fast and progressively decreases to almost 87

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two-thirds its initial value, but as it does so a contrary directionality is established in terms of impulse-density.105 At the beginning, the number of impulses is relatively small, the tuplet ratios fairly standard (5:4, triplets and so on). By the end, the number of impulses has increased, as reflected in the tuplet ratios (11:12, 10:8, 10:6). Although this represents Ferneyhough’s concept of ‘interference form’, arguably the more interesting perspective for the listener is the perceptible change in gestural material between the beginning and end of the piece. The  opening materials feel fast, consolidated by the diverse timbres required in quick succession of the performer (including snap pizzicato, chords and sul tasto). From bar 25, however, this diversity is interrupted, as rapid figures take over the discourse in progressively lower register and quieter dynamic. Because of the greater constancy of timbre, the whole passage sounds like chords annotated with grace note figures, even though not notated this way. Ferneyhough suggests that only the opening permits ‘substantial polyphonic differentiation’, but arguably this is maintained throughout the movement, albeit qualitatively adjusted.106 Towards the end, the listener is able to put mental ‘brackets’ around the ornament-like scurrying pitches, differentiating once again between polyphonic or parametric layers of activity (compare the rapid impulse ‘ornaments’ and the registrally-different chords, for example, bars 34–37). The third movement makes the listener aware of time by means of simple formal symmetry. This is effected in the metrical plan, such that the metre is the same for bars 1 and 28 (the first and last bar) bars 2 and 27, and so on. A series of long-short metre pairs every two bars follows the pattern of sound then rest, respectively. At the midpoint of the movement, Ferneyhough reverses the pairs (now short-long), but retains the pattern sound then rest, resulting in substantial bars of inactivity for the performer. The listener becomes increasingly aware of longer resonating ‘spaces’ in the movement. Once again, Ferneyhough ‘psychologizes’ the performance act, noting that the guitarist will struggle to sit still between forceful bursts of activity.107 One is reminded of Gilles Deleuze’s observation regarding a painting by Francis Bacon, that the contorted figure is doing nothing but sitting still: no external forces act on it, but the deformation — like Bacon’s famous screams — originates from within the body.108 Ferneyhough’s reference to the progressive ‘wiping-over’ of initial figural clarity in the second movement of Kurze Schatten II adds weight to a Bacon-Deleuze reading,109 bringing to mind Bacon’s idiosyncratic painting technique in which details of a figure’s face or body are wiped over with a cloth, creating a degree of abstraction in the image without ruining or compromising its status as a figure. Bacon’s figure thus remains recognizably a figure, but does so, paradoxically, by becoming abstract or non-figural. A possible interpretation of the second movement that takes account of Bacon’s context would be to hear it in light of the brief remarks above concerning its gestures. The initial differentiation between timbres becomes confused in the central E=76 passage as the ‘ornament’ figures begin to ‘wipe them over’ (see, for example, bars 17–24). At the end of the movement, the ornaments themselves become graspable figures. Kurze Schatten II is heavily gestural throughout, bringing to mind certain passages of Benjamin’s Short Shadows II. Benjamin begins the fifth aphorism thus: ‘Distance and Images. 88

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I wonder whether enjoyment of the world of images isn’t fed by a sullen defiance of knowledge.’110 In a certain sense, his words apply to Ferneyhough’s performer, who must enjoy and articulate the gestural ‘images’ in defiance of the difficult techniques required to produce them. The dreamer, suggests Benjamin, wants to see the image, not the fact that ‘in the stones of the castle ruins there is a constant crumbling and crashing.’111 The seventh movement is prescient of Ferneyhough’s later guitar-writing (specifically, Les Froissements and Renvoi/Shards), the tempo changing with every bar, each in effect a tiny gestural fragment, some of which are separated by pauses (either actual silence or sustained sounds, as in the most recent ‘fragment’ pieces). A strident glissando eventually seizes hold of this kaleidoscopic texture, the seventh movement appraising the preceding six as though from a distance, eventually distilling their predominant ‘image’. Ferneyhough instructs the performer to render it ‘as if performing (whilst unconscious) several pieces simultaneously.’112 Benjamin’s text itself becomes a ‘secret sign’, hinting at terms in which Ferneyhough’s piece can be evaluated. Benjamin writes that every view from a distance rebuilds [dreams] again. They spring to life at every bank of clouds, at every lighted window. And the dream appears at its most perfect when [the dreamer] succeeds in removing the sting from movement itself – in translating the gust of wind into a rustling, and the flitting and darting of the birds above his head into a migratory flock. To command nature herself to stand still in this way in the name of faded images is the dreamer’s delight.113 Ferneyhough’s gestures ‘flit and dart’ through the work’s opening movements. Even in respect of the final movement he argues that ‘practically every conventional device of traditional guitar usage may be encountered somewhere in [the seventh] movement in epigrammatic guise.’114 Yet at its conclusion it transforms into a self-consistent image, articulated on a single string. The concept of gesture allows for the creation of unity between player and instrument (redolent of Unity Capsule), insofar as Ferneyhough asks for flesh and fingernail actions to produce specific sonorities. At times the extent of physical actions demanded, such as moving dexterously around the fretboard with the left-hand, works against the performer’s instinct (Ferneyhough calls the fourth movement ‘a study in left hand agility seen as an independent variable’).115 As in Mnemosyne, the player must act against intuition to redefine his/her physical relationship to the instrument, all the while engaged in ‘mental polyphony’:116 this is perhaps most pertinent to the sixth movement, in which ‘normally-produced’ pitches are progressively replaced by natural harmonics.117 Ferneyhough leaves the choice of strings to the performer, posing a conundrum: certain choices involve compromising the agility of the performer’s left hand in order to exact a brilliance of tone from the harmonics; the alternative involves pursuing continuous figuration at the expense of some harmonic colour.118 Consequently, different performances can vary as the result of the performer’s ‘technical and aesthetic choices made during the learning process.’119 89

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The Interpretative Context As indicated earlier, the learning process pertaining to Ferneyhough’s solo percussion piece Bone Alphabet (1991) has been documented by its dedicatee, Steven Schick. The piece embodies many of the issues discussed above, including ‘interference form’, ‘mental polyphony’, gesture and metrical cycles. Different texture-types are allied with particular metrical patterns. After a first ‘draft’ based on the underlying rhythmic matrices from Allgebrah for oboe and small ensemble, Ferneyhough literally cut up the score into fragments and reordered them (they remain separated by double bar lines). Originally, he had set about developing 13 texture-types, most of which are heard more than once in the piece; but by re-ordering them he redistributed their developmental energy into a kaleidoscopic form and a resultant global texture of sudden contrasts, arguably yet another manifestation of ‘interference form’. Nevertheless, traces of his processual, end-orientated thinking survive in the published score: the simplest indication is the withholding of type XIII until the final section (bars 157–158). Type XI is the most frequently used in the work, its appearances tending to increase in length as the work unfolds, such that formally, the piece becomes progressively more stylistically consistent, even though the detail of that particular texturetype or style renders the material ever more fragmented on the local level. A complete itemization of texture-types is listed in Table 3.3, as given in the sketches. They are generally identifiable in the score. A similar table is given in the sketches for the Third String Quartet, for which Ferneyhough produces an inventory of some 23 texture-types, along the lines of Stockhausen’s characterization of each pitch in the Mantra Table 3.3: Bone Alphabet, texture-types. Order120  1

Type I

Material Assignment 2 part reading

 2

XI

 3

VIII

Fragmented treatment

 4

III

 5

II

Tremolos and rapid figures

 6

X

3 part readings

 7

IV

Internally rhythmicized tremolos

 8

XII

Flowing middle-layer figures

 9

IX

Gamut patterns

Combination of any 2 of 3 layers Embedded rhythms

10

VI

4 part readings

11

VII

Canon technique

12

V

13

XIII

Modified measure lengths/compressing materials ‘just grace notes’ 90

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formula. Here the analogy is even more appropriate because Bone Alphabet comprises 13 texture-types (like the mantra), and the developmental techniques applying in each case amount to additive (expanding) and subtractive (contracting) procedures rather than organic generative principles of motivic development, as rejected by Stockhausen in Mantra. In Schick’s detailed explanation, continuity of expression derives from the performer’s interaction with the notation, instrumentation and the learning process. The physical arrangement of the instruments around the performer results in a ‘theatre of the body’ in performance.121 The determination of the seven instruments to be used is left to the performer, although Ferneyhough makes certain stipulations that reduce the choice considerably in practice: the instruments must share similar envelope characteristics and a similar dynamic spectrum, and no two adjacent instruments are to belong to the same ‘family’.122 The ‘theatre of the body’ is an intimate space, the instruments intended to ‘be transport[able] in a single suitcase’,123 and like Unity Capsule or Time and Motion Study II (each in its own way) the body is drawn into the work itself as another parameter. In Bone Alphabet the gesture comes full circle: it is not a question of the performer making theatrical gestures when the opportunity arises, but of the gestures inherent in the piece itself guiding the performer’s action. Schick draws attention to one particular flourish that involves the performer’s whole body in a torque at bar 25, but throughout, Bone Alphabet demands total physical commitment.124 Undeniably, hearing and seeing the piece performed live is the optimal way to appreciate the work: in this sense too it is theatre. Once again, Baconian images of screaming figures encircled by geometric structures might be called to mind by the visual impression of this work in performance. Ferneyhough’s maxim that all invention derives from limitation is given a physical expression in this work. This is further enhanced by the work’s relatively restricted sonic palette, which by definition cannot include large and thus highly resonant instruments, drawing a parallel between this work and the expressive intimacy of Kurze Schatten II.125 Schick describes various ways in which the notation itself poses challenges and limitations upon the rehearsal process, but one feature of the material is particularly striking compared with Ferneyhough’s techniques in other works. It is rare to find successive exact repetitions of small rhythmic units (like ostinati) in his work until the very recent compositions (post Shadowtime). Generally, repeated rhythms are masked by filter processes that eliminate certain impulses and change the profile of a particular rhythmic figure. In Bone Alphabet, the score — in which each of the seven lines represents one instrument — reveals several cases of unfiltered repetitive rhythms. The first section is one example: the rhythms in both the upper and lower lines of material comprise repetitive cells. However, for each cell, the instrumentation is recalibrated such that each sounds different even though it is rhythmically identical with the next. Thus here again, a kind of ‘filter’ process is indeed enacted on the material, but an atypical one, involving not the erasure or tying together of impulses (therefore confined to the rhythmic parameter) but a ‘colour filter’ that in its own way masks repetition (Figure 3.9). 91

Figure 3.9:  Bone Alphabet, solo percussion, bars 1–3, repeated rhythmic patterns.

The Solo Works

The difficulty level of this technique for the performer is considerable: the appearance of repetitions focuses the mind in one direction, whilst the necessity of imposing irregular shifts of instrumental colour onto this causes a fundamental conflict or ‘interference’. In Bone Alphabet Ferneyhough himself interprets the ‘multiple “imperfect” repetition of a single figure’ characterized as ‘“practice sessions”, passages in which the errors and frustrations of a performer’s practice time are composed directly into the musical score itself ’,126 thereby contributing a further aspect to the piece’s theatrical dimension. The reference to theatre essentially resonates with every solo work in Ferneyhough’s catalogue, without casting the individual pieces as representational. Antonin Artaud’s concept of the ‘Theatre of Cruelty’ (explored further in Chapter 7 on the Time and Motion Studies), which arguably underlies Ferneyhough’s aesthetics of performance, is especially relevant to this repertoire because the spotlight is so acutely focused on the individual mind and body. The solo music is highly exposing and uncomfortable insofar as it purposely seeks out the boundaries of instruments’ and performers’ capabilities. It emphasizes physical and mental effort in performance: ‘theatre’ implies a large space, occupied by an individual who must hold the audience’s attention, like those challenged to deliver a lengthy soliloquy in complex verse, alone on the stage. It also implies a theatre of combat, the performer doing battle with the material, emerging with the scars of that encounter (think of the physical energy expenditure indicated by the end of Time and Motion Study II or Unity Capsule, or the hands locked into position at the conclusion of Lemma-Icon-Epigram). As much as the composer talks of ‘recomposing himself ’ with each new work, so too does the performer engage in self-renewal.127 From the evidence of performers themselves, performing Ferneyhough is certainly frustrating, but above all compelling: there is always more to be extracted from the work, and this ensures its continued lure for performers wishing to push themselves further than they thought possible.128

Notes    1 Ferneyhough, unpublished sketch materials, Unity Capsule, Paul Sacher Stiftung, Basel, c. 1975.    2 See discussion in Chapter 1, Biography.    3 Ibid.    4 Ibid.    5 The concept of filters, often amounting to reading one set of materials by means of another, or a rubric of some kind, was first used in the wind sextet Prometheus (1967). Ferneyhough referred to the performer as a ‘semi-permeable membrane’ during a talk on his work Incipits given to undergraduates at Durham University in Winter 1997, prefatory to a performance by Ensemble Exposé. The reference to the performer as ‘resonator’ comes from the sketches for Unity Capsule.    6 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 243. 93

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   7 Carceri IIb, whilst a Carceri piece, is in fact not part of the cycle proper (it is derived from the solo flute part of Carceri IIa for flute and orchestra).    8 These are discussed in greater detail in Chapter 8, on the Carceri cycle. The works explore registral extremes and, in the case of Mnemosyne, demand polyphony from a monophonic instrument, forcing the performer to negotiate the limitations of the flute, and of his/her technique in rendering the material satisfactorily.    9 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 99.   10 Amongst all the solo works there is one instrumental family notably absent: there is no solo for a brass instrument, which is surprising given that these are the first instruments Ferneyhough became involved with in Coventry’s brass bands. Amongst the unpublished works there are many trios but no trumpet solo, for example. This may result from a combination of aesthetic choice (Ferneyhough seemingly prefers to write for brass as part of an ensemble) and the practicalities of professional composition. While no solo brass works have been commissioned, the composer has concentrated his efforts on other instruments for which multiple commissions have been forthcoming, notably flute and strings.   11 See Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 270.   12 Ibid., 99.   13 In the sketches, Ferneyhough writes of the opening of Unity Capsule that from the ‘frontal collision of extreme virtuosity and concentration demanded of the flautist with the partially uncontrollable, but most personal qualities of his instrument there emerges a further level where, in the brief span of this “black scherzo” the limits between the two, between breath tone and spirit may begin to merge into one.’   14 See his reference to the ‘superinstrument’ in the Second String Quartet in Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 119. Although the superinstrument comprises four individuals in the case of the quartet, the term could apply to Unity Capsule on the basis of the fusion of flute and performer’s body.   15 Brian Ferneyhough, “Performance Notes,” Lemma-Icon-Epigram (London: Peters Edition No. 7233, 1982). See also Steven Schick, “Developing an interpretive context: learning Brian Ferneyhough’s Bone Alphabet,” Perspectives of New Music 32/1 (1994): 132–153. It is particularly interesting that Schick discusses the performer’s ‘ownership’ of the rehearsal process — what he calls a ‘soft phase’ of learning — yet here, Ferneyhough appears to set it out in rather prescriptive terms. Nonetheless, Ferneyhough’s assessment of an ‘adequate interpretation’ finds much in common with Schick’s methods as he describes them.   16 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 407.   17 Ibid., 383.   18 Ibid., 135.   19 Ibid., 62.   20 Ibid., 61.   21 Ibid., 62.   22 Ibid., 47.   23 Brian Ferneyhough, unpublished letter to Stefano Scodanibbio (dedicatee of Trittico), held at Paul Sacher Stiftung, Basel, undated. The first performance was March 1990, Zaal De Unie, 94

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Rotterdam. Scodanibbio’s original letter to Ferneyhough, probably written in late 1989/early 1990, which evidently consisted of a response to the piece and queries concerning practical performance matters, is not contained in the file of Ferneyhough’s correspondence, press and academic articles at the Sacher Stiftung.   24 Ibid.   25 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 306.   26 The notation in Trittico and Mnemosyne is another kind of filter, at both the compositional level, demanding that Ferneyhough notate the three layers in a realizable fashion and in performance, the player restricted by the interruptive function of multiple strata and the discrepancy between effort and sounding result detailed above. Ferneyhough argues that ‘the moment of contact between volition and resistance device throws up two things: one, the energy necessary for expression, in musical terms; two, by being forced through the grid or sieve it becomes split up, differentiated into various types of structural function. In contradistinction to this concept, Boulez’s systems (for instance) strike me as being rather tautological, because they base themselves on the multiplication of a basic number of elements, multiplied in various ways.’ (Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 228).   27 Ferneyhough, unpublished sketch materials, Trittico per G.S., Paul Sacher Stiftung, Basel, c. 1989.   28 See Ferneyhough, Performance “Remarks,” Cassandra’s Dream Song (London: Peters Edition No. 7197, 1975).   29 Ferneyhough, “Performance Notes,” Lemma-Icon-Epigram (London: Peters Edition No. 7233, 1982).   30 Ferneyhough, Performance “Remarks,” Cassandra’s Dream Song.   31 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 317.   32 Ibid., 377.   33 Ibid., 5.   34 Ferneyhough, unpublished sketch materials, Unity Capsule.   35 A full account of this and pages from the sketches are reproduced in ‘Unity Capsule: An Instant Diary’, in Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 98–106.   36 The two materials (sheet one and sheet two) in Cassandra are distinguished by their relationship to the pitch ‘A’: sheet one hovers around it whilst sheet two generally avoids it. The two characters in the final section of Unity Capsule emulate a similar fundamental contrast, this time between long notes and discontinuous rapid notes.   37 Pages of the score can be lined up along several music stands, the performer moving along the line as the piece progresses, which adds to the ‘theatre’ of performance and provides the performer with a performance space within which s/he can move energetically. This is equally true of other solos like Unsichtbare Farben for violin.   38 Ferneyhough, unpublished sketch materials, Unity Capsule.   39 There is a subtler form of ‘theatre’ in Unity Capsule: on the first page of the score the performer is instructed to remove the flute from the lips and return it in an abrupt exaggerated fashion. This recurs frequently in the course of the piece, sometimes varied so that the return to the lips must be deliberately slow. See Ferneyhough, Unity Capsule (London: Peters Edition No. 7144, 1975). 95

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  40 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 435.   41 See Ferneyhough’s discussion of ‘lines of force’ in Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 288.   42 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 43. The performer uses a click-track, which marks the downbeat of each bar.   43 Ibid., 378.   44 Ferneyhough, prefatory notes, Sisyphus Redux (London: Peters Edition No. 72065, 2010).   45 Ibid., 4.   46 Ibid., prefatory notes.   47 Ibid.   48 See Brian Ferneyhough, “Notes for Performance,” Sieben Sterne (London: Peters Edition No. 7217, 1978).   49 Ibid. The writing out is redolent of David Tudor’s solutions to Cage’s notations, amongst others.   50 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 216.   51 Gertrude Stein delivered a lecture with this title to the Cambridge Literary Club and Oxford University in Summer 1926. It is re-published in Ulla E. Dydo, ed., A Stein Reader (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 493–503.   52 Ferneyhough’s poetry is discussed in his interview with Jeffrey Stadelman, Collected Writings, 464–509. Elsewhere in the volume, Ferneyhough remarks that ‘Even though I have long written poetic texts, is it, in fact, only since my move to the United States that I have systematically focused on developing large scale poetic structures having close analogical relationships to the sort of thing I try to achieve in my compositions. […] I have no particular pretensions as a poet; I make no attempt to publish these materials’ (Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 427–428). In fact, the interview from which this remark is taken includes a few of these poetic texts, presumably by way of illustration rather than with any implied claim as to their status.   53 Ulla E. Dydo, Gertrude Stein: The Language that Rises (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2003), 16.   54 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 428.   55 The antiphon in question is Venit ad Petrum, whose use was suggested, at Ferneyhough’s request, by Fabrice Fitch (see Paddison & Deliège, Contemporary Music, 324–5). For the edition used by Ferneyhough, see Johannes Ockeghem: Masses and Mass Sections, ed. Jaap van Benthem, I/1 (Utrecht: KVNM, 1994), viii. It is commonly stated that Unsichtbare Farben takes its material from the tenor of Ockeghem’s Mass. Whilst this is technically true, it should be pointed out that Ockeghem himself took over the chant passage in question from an earlier cantus firmus Mass setting, composed c. 1440 by an anonymous English composer, and it is with the latter that the original choice of plainchant originated. That the latest composition to use the chant should emanate from an Englishman whose work was notably influential in continental Europe seems rather appropriate. Be that as it may, there is in fact no direct association with Ockeghem’s setting per se in Ferneyhough’s piece.   56 See John C. Welchman, Invisible Colours: A Visual History of Titles (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 8. 96

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  57 Ferneyhough’s approach contrasts with that of Luigi Nono in the string quartet FragmenteStille, an Diotima (1980), which makes more explicit use of borrowed materials, including a quotation in the viola towards the end from a song tenor (Malheur me bat, c. 1470). Though Malheur me bat is ascribed to Ockeghem in two sources, conflicting ascriptions exist, notably to Johannes Martini and the little-known Abertijne Malcort, who is today regarded as the most likely composer. (Barbara Haggh, “Crispijne and Abertijne: Two Tenors at the Church of St. Niklaas, Brussels,” Music and Letters 76 (1995): 338–9).   58 It is worth noting that in medieval and Renaissance practice, the rhythmicization of a borrowed plainchant used as the basis for polyphony was the prerogative of the composer.   59 This is discussed in Chapter 5.   60 According to Ferneyhough, he first came across the Renaissance emblema in 1976: ‘I was in Venice, I recall, while I was there for the Biennale. […] I spent this time consciously trying to compose a piano piece based on this idea, and couldn’t. I tried very many approaches to it, many textures, and none of them worked. I then abandoned them.’ (Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 264). In fact, the date for Emblemata is given as 1975 in the sketches. It is described as ‘exegetical’ in a programme note (unpublished sketch materials, Emblemata, Paul Sacher Stiftung, Basel, c. 1975). It has never been performed, and the existence of a programme note is probably evidence of Ferneyhough’s tendency to produce them as a means of organizing his thoughts earlier on in the compositional process than one might typically expect.   61 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 263. According to John Manning, ‘Alciato saw these “emblems” as recreative and entertaining: a relief and respite from serious academic work during the holiday period.’ John Manning, The Emblem (London: Reaktion Books, 2002), 38.   62 Ibid., 264.   63 Ibid., 263. In fact, as in Sieben Sterne, the musical form is readily mapped onto the visual image. On this level, at least, Ferneyhough’s formal concept is very straightforward.   64 The Epigram in an Emblem can also be called Subscriptio, the originally intended title for Ferneyhough’s Mnemosyne, the final component of the Carceri cycle (as noted in Chapter 8).   65 Unity Capsule comprises three main sections, each subdivided so that the total of smaller sections is nine in the proportions 4:3:2 (sections 1:2:3 respectively). For more information on the formal scheme in the piece, see Ferneyhough, ‘Unity Capsule: An Instant Diary’, in Collected Writings, 100–102.   66 See Richard Toop, “Brian Ferneyhough’s Lemma-Icon-Epigram,” in Perspectives of New Music 28/2 (1990): 52–100. First published as ‘Lemme-Icône-Epigramme’, Contrechamps 8 (1988): 86–127.   67 According to Toop, Lemma is the first piece to use systematically varied metric cycles. See Toop, “Lemma-Icon-Epigram,” 62.   68 Ibid., 80.   69 Ibid., 64.   70 Ibid.   71 Ibid., 56–57.   72 These directional gestures are prominent throughout the Lemma section of the piece. For example, bar 5 is clearly derived by pitch alteration/transposition from bar 1, likewise bar 8, 11 and so on. Further into the piece, bars 35–36 are derived from bar 1, with similar 97

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tuplet figures (13–12–11). Toop notes that transformation has already begun by the end of the first phrase, a simple transformation table applied initially only to octave registers (See Toop, “Lemma-Icon-Epigram,” 58). In the sketches, Ferneyhough includes a note on octave transposition in the accompaniment, bars 1–3 of Schoenberg’s op. 23, suggesting that the process at the opening of Lemma is derived from his study of the Schoenberg work.   73 Toop, “Lemma-Icon-Epigram,” 78.   74 Ferneyhough, unpublished sketch materials, Lemma-Icon-Epigram, Paul Sacher Stiftung, Basel, c. 1980. Ferneyhough’s emphasis.   75 Ferneyhough, “Performance Notes,” Lemma-Icon-Epigram (London: Peters Edition No. 7233, 1980).   76 Toop refers to the concluding section of the Lemma as ‘the accumulation of different ways of reformulating the same material, a sort of piling up of sublime tautologies, that necessitates the final Tower of Babel section.’ (Toop, “Lemma-Icon-Epigram,” 64).   77 Ibid.   78 Ferneyhough, unpublished sketch materials, Lemma-Icon-Epigram.   79 Ibid. He also refers to the Icon as ‘gnostic manifestation, but in time and as time’ (sketches, Ferneyhough’s emphasis).   80 A remark made in a conversation with Toop, reported in Toop, “Lemma-Icon-Epigram,” 96.   81 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 267.   82 Ferneyhough cited in Toop, “Lemma-Icon-Epigram,” 96.   83 Ferneyhough, unpublished sketch materials, Lemma-Icon-Epigram.   84 Ibid.   85 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 139.   86 Kurze Schatten I was published in the Neue Schweizer Rundschau, November 1929. See Walter Benjamin, “Short Shadows (I),” in Selected Writings 1927–1930, Vol. 2, part 1, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland and Gary Smith, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 268–272. Kurze Schatten II was first published in the Kölnische Zeitung, February 1933. See Walter Benjamin, “Short Shadows (II),” in Selected Writings 1931–1934, Vol. 2, part 2, ed. Michael W. Jennings et al., trans Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 699–702. The quotation given here is taken from “Short Shadows (I),” 272.   87 In ‘Secret Signs’, Benjamin refers to Alfred Schuler, a mystic and Gnostic who was part of Stefan George’s circle (although George was not a member of the ‘Münchener Kosmiker’, for which Schuler was a figurehead). See Robert E. Norton, Secret Germany: Stefan George and his Circle (New York, NJ: Cornell University Press, 2002).   88 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 264.   89 Ibid., 139.   90 Only the B H tuning (the semitone rather than microtone) remains in the final movement.   91 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 140.   92 Between bars 29 and 41. For example, the first two chords of the Icon are drawn from bar 38. In each case, Ferneyhough adds one pitch to each Icon chord that is not present in its original form in the Lemma. 98

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  93 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 264–5. In a conversation reported by Toop, Ferneyhough expands the idea: ‘The idea here was a temporal sun moving across an irregular but fixed landscape, with objects placed in it. The landscape is of course the bar structure; the temporal sun is the ticking (if I want to be over-literal for a moment) of these groups that gradually emerge, and the objects are the chords, which are scrunched up and expanded both in length (growing and getting shorter) and in density (register).... All these things together produce the feeling of an intensely but mysteriously temporal phenomenon.’ (Toop, “Lemma-IconEpigram,” 80). Original ellipsis.   94 See Toop, “Lemma-Icon-Epigram,” 83–85 for a diagram of the chords, and then each as it occurs in the piece, and in each of its transformations. The significance of the number 7 (7 chords in the Icon, 7 movements in Kurze Schatten II) is indicative of Ferneyhough’s apparent obsession with prime numbers. Others are found throughout the oeuvre, but 7 seems a particular favourite (Carceri d’Invenzione comprises 7 works, the opera Shadowtime 7 sections).   95 Toop, “Lemma-Icon-Epigram,” 64.   96 Toop reports that Ferneyhough chose the most resonant ugly ‘aggressively resonant’ chords but claims that they were ‘taken arbitrarily’ from the Lemma and treated as ‘things’ in Icon. (Ibid., 81).   97 Ibid., 86.   98 Toop uses the term ‘points’ to describe the texture, bars 98–106 and 135–143.   99 A D H is added to the transposed chord, the first added note in a sequence that reprises the very first pitches heard in the piece (in bar 1, the first pitch is notated enharmonically as C G). 100 These are described in Ferneyhough’s own essay on the piece. See Ferneyhough, “Kurze Schatten II for Solo Guitar,” Collected Writings, 141. 101 Ferneyhough says apropos of the Carceri cycle ‘I was very interested in the idea of investigating what it means to write pieces in movements; what the idea of unity via diversity might be, in this sense.’ Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 292. The same is true for Kurze Schatten II. 102 Each pair of movements may be performed separately as interludes between other works, provided that the last movement is performed alone as the last item in the concert. The performance of single movements separately is not permitted; the only other possible form for the work is its continuous, integral presentation from beginning to end. 103 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 152 and 150. 104 See Chapter 9 for discussion of Les Froissements in the context of Shadowtime (the guitar piece is Scene II in the opera). Renvoi/Shards: fragments of delay, revision, regeneration for quartertone Guitar and quartertone Vibraphone (2009) is another example of a piece that miniaturizes figures. Ferneyhough describes as a ‘babble’ the opening gestural kaleidoscope. As the piece progresses, certain figurations recur so as to emerge like a clear statement out of the ‘babble’, as the material seeks, in Ferneyhough’s words, ‘a primal state it never started from.’ See Ferneyhough, Renvoi/Shards (London: Peters Edition No. 71992, 2009). 105 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 141–142. 106 Ibid., 141. 107 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 143–144. 99

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108 Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, translated by Daniel W. Smith (London: Continuum, 2003), x. 109 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 142. 110 Benjamin, “Short Shadows (II),” 700. 111 Ibid., 701. 112 Ferneyhough, Kurze Schatten II (London: Peters Edition No. 7311), 22. A similar instruction pertains at the end of the final movement of the Fourth String Quartet (1989–1990), completed not long afterwards, in which the soprano must enunciate a macaronic jumble of words and syllables using the pronunciation appropriate to each. 113 Benjamin, “Short Shadows (II),” 701. Emphasis added. 114 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 150. 115 Ibid., 147. 116 Ibid., 215. 117 Ibid., 149. 118 Ibid., 150. 119 Ibid. 120 This column refers to the order in which the texture-types are introduced in the piece, although some are heard more than once before all types have been introduced (in fact XIII is only introduced at the very end of the piece). The roman numerals arranged I–XIII represent the original order of sections before Ferneyhough cut the work into fragments and re-ordered them. Again, he had inserted repeated textures in between, so even in its first version the 13 texture-types were not simply given one after the other, but with ‘interruptions’. For example, he specified I, II, III, I, IV, II, V, I, VI, VII, I and so on. 121 Ferneyhough quoted in Schick, “Developing an Interpretative Context: learning Brian Ferneyhough’s Bone Alphabet,” Perspectives of New Music 32/1 (1994):137. 122 Brian Ferneyhough, “Performance Notes,” Bone Alphabet (London: Peters Edition No. 7389, 1995), 5. 123 Ibid. 124 Schick, “Developing an Interpretative Context,” 150. 125 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 291. 126 Ibid., 481. 127 See the title of Thomas Meyer’s interview with the composer, in Meyer, “‘Wichtig ist, dass sich der Komponist selbst beim Komponieren unkomponiert’: ein Gespräch mit Brian Ferneyhough”, Musik und Ästhetik 11/42 (2007). 128 See Schick, “Developing an Interpretative Context” and Neil Heyde, Paul Archbold et al., “Brian Ferneyhough: Time and Motion Study II: ‘Electric Chair Music’,” A documentary and performance (London: Optic Nerve, 2007) DVD.

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O

ver the course of the decade 1988–1997, Ferneyhough composed a series of five works for solo instrument with small chamber ensemble: in order of composition, La Chute d’Icare (1988: solo clarinet), Allgebrah (1990–1996: oboe), Terrain (1991–1992: violin), On Stellar Magnitudes (1994: mezzo-soprano) and Incipits (1996: viola and percussion). In each case, the soloist is pitted against and/or supported by an ensemble and ‘sub-ensembles’ within. Ferneyhough resists their being conceived as a ‘set’ of works but reveals that I tend to work on larger groups of pieces very much as I would the internal relationships governing individual works. The fact that I subsume several compositions to the same preliminary ‘group view’ does not imply high levels of ultimate interrelatedness, since my motivating concerns are dependent less on concrete material transference than on a ‘state of mind’ which is itself in a constant process of evolution and redefinition […] I find this sort of loose context infinitely preferable to the serial production of uniquely specific solutions to radically isolated and self-enclosed problems.1

The first four pieces share one such ‘loose context’, insofar as each reflects on an extramusical form of creativity or imagery. Incipits does precisely the opposite, focusing exclusively on a musical ‘problem’: Ferneyhough suggests that there are only limited ways to end a piece, but many more procedures with which to begin one.2 Incipits represents a series of beginnings of processes (seven), none of which are fully worked out before the next commences. Some of the composer’s typical techniques and concepts apply to a wider range of works than are represented in this group. Incipits, for example, makes a particular feature of duets for the two soloists — notably in the coda, for viola and rainstick — drawing together ‘sound’ and ‘noise’ elements. Chapters 6, 7 and 8 consider other works in which counterpoint of ‘sound’ and ‘noise’ is important: these include Time and Motion Study III and the Etudes transcendantales, in which singers also play small percussion instruments, and the Sixth Quartet, which makes extensive use of col legno sounds alongside ‘normal’ bowing. Unity  Capsule for solo flute, discussed in Chapter 3, is another example, pitting pitched flute material against percussive key clicks and vocal articulations. This chapter will take each work in turn, and consider their various interrelationships as well as differences between them. A sixth piece, Flurries (1997), is also discussed here on account of its similarities in formal approach to the five ‘concertos’, and its comparable treatment of smaller soloistic forces in relation to a larger tutti group.

Brian Ferneyhough

Terrain The instrumentation of the ensemble accompanying the violin solo in Terrain is ‘identical to’ that of Edgard Varèse’s Octandre, one of the first modern pieces Ferneyhough recalls having heard.3 According to the composer, Terrain is the payment of a long-standing debt. Octandre was always extremely important to me, for one because it was the first truly modern work I ever heard, for another because I, as a wind player, could immediately appreciate and relate to Varèse’s sonic imagination in that medium. I wrote a lot of quite extended pieces for combinations of wind instruments in the very early ’60s, some of whose textures are all too clearly derivative of Varèsian mannerisms, while unfortunately demonstrating little of his (in)formal acumen. So, once the idea of writing for concertante violin arose, I immediately focused on the vision of a violin/ensemble opposition towards which, apart from textural and processual distinctions, the color and weight of the Octandre combination would make a major contribution.4 Ferneyhough hears in Varèse’s octet a ‘single mass instrument’ that offers rich ‘substrata’ of duos, trios, and so on.5 His perception of an internally differentiated ‘superinstrument’ also applies to aspects of his string quartet output (specifically, the Second), as well as the socalled ‘interference form’ devised for solo instruments, considered in the previous chapter.6 Terrain’s title embeds further inferences, most obviously to geology, supported by notes found amongst Ferneyhough’s sketch materials, some of which are given below. The composer’s use of geological metaphor to conceive of musical textures in the early stages of composing a piece is not exclusive to Terrain, and is indicative of a broader creative stimulus than can be bounded by a single work.7 Nevertheless it is most consistently applied

Figure 4.1:  Terrain, two-part form diagram from the sketches.8

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in Terrain, determining the formal structure as well as the composer’s approach to layering material. In the sketches, Ferneyhough draws a diagram, referring to the work’s form, which comprises two parts (Figure 4.1). ‘Terrain’ is also the title of a poem by A.R. Ammons (on whose poem ‘Flurries’ Ferneyhough also draws in the eponymous chamber work discussed later in this chapter) that meditates on ‘natural forces as a metaphor for the creative process.’9 In addition, Ferneyhough acknowledges the influence of sculptor Robert Smithson (presumably both the latter’s earthworks/land art and essays).10 The earthwork, a kind of landscape architecture, occupies a geological ‘site’ — a terrain — such as the Spiral Jetty (1970) and can be vast enough that a single view of the work in its entirety is impossible. Instead, photographs and drawings must all contribute to the appreciation of the sheer scale of the work. Smithson’s work attempts to take cognizance of so-called ‘geologic time’, outside of human experience because it spans millions of years. According to Smithson, ‘it was John Ruskin who spoke of the “dreadful Hammers” of the geologists, as they destroyed the classical order. The landscape reels back into the millions and millions of years of “geologic time”.’11 ‘Human’ or ‘organic’ time is captured in the manipulation of geological sites (and Smithson’s works) and finally, arising from his fascination with the subterranean, he characterizes ‘historical time’ as ‘the strata of the earth […] a jumbled museum.’12 There is some resonance between the scale of Smithson’s work and aesthetic and Ammons’ ‘Terrain’, which begins with the words, ‘[t]he soul is a region without definite boundaries.’13 Ferneyhough is drawn to the poem’s ‘vision of two worlds, one fecund and living, the other rough-hewn, seemingly motionless, but subject to tremendous subterranean pressures.’14 Arguably, Ferneyhough distils this vision into the contrast in texture between the ebullient solo violin and the slower-moving ensemble.15 A similar juxtaposition between soloist and tutti obtains in La Chute d’Icare, although in that case the image onto which the musical texture may be mapped is that of the falling Icarus against a landscape, discussed below. Ferneyhough identifies and appropriates two types of contrasting time in Smithson and Ammons’ work: what he calls stratified and ‘slippage’ time.16 In geology, slip is the movement of rock either side of a fault line, measured as a displacement vector. What Ferneyhough refers to as a ‘distant reflection’ on Smithson’s concepts is manifest in each of the two halves of Terrain, captured in Figure 4.1 above.17 Although the piece is technically in seven sections, hearing it in two parts makes the textural contrast and different kinds of temporal experience more striking. It is possible to identify ‘strata’ in the solo violin. The two staves at the beginning of the work denote two different rhythmic layers, and pitches in one layer are cut short by interruptions from the other (a technique first seen notated in this way in Mnemosyne (1986)). There are also two types of material in the solo: firstly the interruptive technique just described and secondly rapid, regular flourishes as in bars 5 and 8 which, according to Ross Feller, suggest slips and strata, respectively, the latter dominating in this part of the work.18 The contrasting materials continue to figure in the violin solo well into the work, as for example between bars 67 and 74. Ferneyhough displaces certain pitches in 105

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Table 4.1: Terrain, form. Sections determined by change of instrumentation.

the flourishes into contrasting registers, leading to further stratification, as in bar 73. The texture in the first half of Terrain presents a lively recombination of duos (strata) in addition to the soloist. The first of these, for piccolo and double bass, represents contrasting registers with different colours. The pairing is also effective when later the flute and bass clarinet replace the piccolo and clarinet (especially for extended periods in the second half), and it is tempting to hear the registral lowering as a kind of longrange sedimentation process across the piece. Ferneyhough here reprises the long-range strategy of the Carceri d’Invenzione cycle during which the flute register progressively dips lower and lower (tracing a trajectory from piccolo in the first piece to bass flute in the final work). By contrast, the trumpet-horn duo in Terrain is characterized by close registers and similar colours, whereas the oboe-bassoon pair offers similar colours and different registers.19 Each duo, like the violin solo, consists of two interwoven materials, one unpredictable and the other iterative/regular.20 For the most part, the solo instrument acts as a driving, linear force. At the end of the first half it culminates in gestures that trace a line of force in the solo cadenza (bars 80–95): the initially longer energetic gestural statements become progressively eroded into fragmentary outbursts separated by rests. The cadenza represents the ultimate ‘slip’ between the work’s two halves. The textural change between them is abrupt, yet the linear process of the cadenza simultaneously suggests a transition from one to the next. It is interesting to consider that although the listener may hear this as transition, Ferneyhough composed the second half of the work first: both the detail of this cadenza and the opening solo were determined after the ‘slippage time’ section was complete.21 The piece’s second half begins in a completely contrasting manner relative to the first (bar 97ff.): the violin drops out for seven bars, exposing a rich ‘subterranean’ ensemble texture that forms a single consolidated layer (a reflection of the ‘mass instrument’ concept). What were linear, lively strategies in the first half become vertical ones in the second. In the first half, simple impulse patterns in the ensemble underscore the soloist’s materials (as in bars 58–66), which look and sound unadorned, similar to those seen in Ferneyhough’s sketches before they become encrusted and ‘sedimented’ in rhythmic 106

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subdivisions, pitch constellations, rests and texture-types. This passage is as direct an expression of the stratification principle as the previous, highly differentiated duos. The violin’s succession of tuplets (–11–) enhances its linear character. By contrast, in the second half, strata are replaced by ‘faults’, as for example between bars 148 and 160. Here, ensemble instruments with sustained pitches act as ‘fault lines’, but occasional outbursts in the clarinet, bassoon, trombone and double bass (bars 152–154) disrupt or ‘stress’ the steady ‘rock’. From bar 119, not only is there a new tempo and an incremental change (either rallentando or accelerando) for every bar unit, but at bar 119 itself, every instrument is subject to a tuplet specifying  x impulses in the time of 11.22 These are stacked vertically in the ensemble, whereas by contrast, between bars 58 and 66 in the first half ‘strata’ the solo violin rhythmic material offers a linear succession of bar-length tuplets all specifying 11 impulses.23 In bars 112, 114, 115 and 118 all the ensemble instruments participate in a held chord at the same dynamic, which acts as momentary stasis amidst an otherwise agitated texture, recalling Ferneyhough’s characterization of the second of Ammons’ worlds: ‘rough-hewn, seemingly motionless, but subject to tremendous subterranean pressures.’ At these moments the violin is at its most active, out of kilter with the ensemble, suggesting ‘slippage time’: the violin becomes in effect the ‘slip’, the measure of the movement of rock either side of an ensemble fault line. From bar 97, a series of eight-bar segments begins (variation segments) with the same metrical pattern,24 interrupted by single bar ‘interventions’ (further ‘slips’) at bars 127, 130, 134 and 141, during which the ensemble becomes suddenly animated. After the unaccompanied solos at the beginning and the midpoint of the work, a third violin cadenza begins at bar 140 as rapid regular ‘strata’ flourishes reassert themselves (see bars 147 and 150), recalling similar ‘strata’ material in the opening violin cadenza (bars 5 and 8). These intensify in the solo from bars 193 and 197, in preparation for a final contest between strata (violin) and faults (ensemble): the violin explores registral displacement and a range of texture-types as it did at the very beginning of the piece (in bar 5 for example), whilst the ensemble consolidates the ‘single mass instrument’ effect. The violin has the last word, a rapid registral plunge which, given the similarities in the relationship between solo and ensemble between this work and La Chute d’Icare, is a neat inversion of the latter’s closing gesture, a rapid ascent in the solo clarinet. On Stellar Magnitudes The next piece of the series to be completed looks away from earthworks towards stellar constellations. Where Terrain takes its instrumentation from Octandre, that of On Stellar Magnitudes references Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, which is intriguing because a decade earlier, during the composition of Etudes transcendantales, Ferneyhough had declared himself ‘tired of the “Pierrot Lunaire” ensemble sound, with the clarinet – the rather white sound.’25 107

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But besides the fact that it is often a commission that determines a work’s instrumentation, it is surely significant that On Stellar Magnitudes was composed between the Fourth String Quartet and the String Trio, both of which are overt responses to two other iconic Schoenberg pieces.26 The ensemble and form are nonetheless treated very differently from Pierrot: Ferneyhough’s texts are not individual (nor any of them substantial) poems, but together comprise a totality that is internally subdivided into nonsense aphorisms arising from the first letter of each of 17 star names taken in alphabetical order. The musical form follows suit: On Stellar Magnitudes is cast as a single movement with discernible internally organized events, in contrast with Pierrot, whose 21 poems are parsed into three groups of seven short, self-contained pieces. According to Robin Freeman, a talk on Pierrot Lunaire given by Ferneyhough at the Fondation Royaumont and published that same year in its journal, gives some insight into the composer’s strategies in On Stellar Magnitudes.27 Here, Ferneyhough has no qualms about the ensemble sonority, suggesting that instrumental colour is as important to Schoenberg as interval structure. In his view, colour arises from the lack of hierarchy in the instrumentation, which permits registral crossing and Klangfarbenideen.28 This principle can be extended to On Stellar Magnitudes: examples include the section ‘Hamel’ (bars 91–102) which begins lugubriously with bass clarinet, very low register piano and the voice in its lower range, and then brightens within a few bars to a piccolo and violin duo. Unlike the Fourth Quartet and the Etudes, the text of On Stellar Magnitudes is of Ferneyhough’s own, rather Lewis Carollesque, devising, ‘[n]othing to do then with the symbolist tableaux of Schoenberg’s Pierrot, one of the most exquisite examples in music and words, however “belated” of fin de siècle l’art pour l’art.’29 Ferneyhough’s text exudes gnomic and macaronic sections named after first- and second-magnitude stars, whose words spell out the star name in acrostic. According to the composer this process-driven textual generation removes the limitations that Ferneyhough perceives in much text-setting: ‘overly restrictive narrative conventions’, ‘madrigalisms’ or other ‘explicit text-music parallels’.30 In fact, it is arguable that these do persist on occasion: Freeman observes of the setting of ‘Nunki’ (one of the brief texts in On Stellar Magnitudes) ‘[e]ach word may thus be treated as an episode in itself within the literary microstructure to which it belongs. There is no ‘anti’-logic in all this. The goal is figuration at its most ductile, able to spin round on a single syllable: the spirit without the letter of Monteverdi for this closing 20th century.’31 Whereas his earlier works with voice have drawn upon chamber music idioms and the intimacy of the setting, On Stellar Magnitudes presents a series of ephemeral, often unstable states, which, though frequently overlapping or interfering with another in differing degrees, resemble tiny operatic scenes whose characters are defined by individual combinations of voice and instruments.32 Presciently, Freeman suggests that the work is ‘the next step on the way […] to a first stage work’, because Ferneyhough takes as his subject matter the grandeur and immensity of stellar objects, but concentrates his reflections into miniature poetic verses. He emulates this in musical terms, condensing the rhetorical power of opera into miniature dramatic scenes.33 It is ironic, in view of Freeman’s comments, that Ferneyhough’s opera Shadowtime — the subject of Chapter 9 of this book — contains very little by way of ‘traditional’ solo operatic 108

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vocal material, intense though the vocal treatment may be. (‘Traditional’ here refers to the declamatory soloistic singing style; more of this obtains in On Stellar Magnitudes and the Fourth Quartet than in the opera, which features a considerable incidence of spoken text, ensemble singing, and an entire scene without any voices at all.)34 Thus, the promise of opera that Freeman divines in On Stellar Magnitudes was ultimately to be fulfilled, but not at all in the manner he might have foreseen. The presentation of many little operatic ‘scenes’ approaches a comparable aesthetic to the many tiny sections of Ferneyhough’s most recent works, including a similar concentration on gestural vitality in each moment and sudden contrasts between neighbouring vignettes. Ferneyhough directs that [c]hanges of mood and texture should be instantaneous, with no perceptible transition. Part of the drama of the work depends on the unstable and mutable relationship gradually established between the vocal materials and the initially more ‘objective’ instrumental discourse. Fundamental ambiguity and momentary, seemingly arbitrary interaction are thus of the essence, and should on no account be glossed over in the interest of a superficially more seamless dramatic flow.35 Broadly, the form follows a trajectory from a relatively stable material (once the whole ensemble enters) in long phrases to a highly differentiated individuation of each participant, in shorter, fragmented ostinato figures. At the outset, the piano is the main protagonist, its material ‘tense and uneasy, as if trying to make sense out of chaos.’36 Its material (particularly the high register figurations in the right hand) suggests a sky scattered with stars. Although Ferneyhough is overtly dismissive of ‘madrigalisms’ (by which he means the musical ‘illustration’ or word-painting of a small passage in the text), implying that he rejects musical forms of representation altogether, it is remarkable on how many occasions his musical figurations seem to offer a ‘narrative’ of sorts. (This idea is revisited in relation to La Chute d’Icare, discussed below.) When the ensemble (minus the voice) enters at bar 16 it largely comprises extended pitches with fluctuations, giving an impression of stasis that is maintained throughout the exposition until the very end, when it tends towards counterpoint. At bar 43, the piano is silent for the first time and the ’cello initiates a violent solo as the remaining instruments acquire distinctive gestural profiles, complementing a vocal texture often characterized by glissandi. Initially, the beginning of each miniature ‘verse’ is marked by a change in ensemble texture, as at bar 51 (‘Bellatrix’, recitative-like) or 57 (‘Deneb’).37 However, the synchronization is progressively undermined in order to prevent too sectionalized a presentation of the materials: the new piano and flute duo from bar 58 purposely enters at a delay in ‘Deneb’ after the quartet of clarinet, violin, voice and ’cello, and continues over the boundary into the next verse ‘Elnath’ at bar 64, reinforcing the interpenetration of scenes that is underway. The voice at ‘Elnath’ adopts an instrumental character in extended glissandi, preparing the ground for the forthcoming prominent gestural shapes adopted by various members of the ensemble. 109

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By bar 72, instrumental characters and alliances are becoming firmly established (the rhythmic and gestural synchronicity between the violin and ’cello forms one such partnership). As the tendency is established towards ever-greater stratification of the ensemble, Ferneyhough explores reduced textures, which can themselves be heard like scene changes in a dramatic work. The passages ‘Gide’ and ‘Hamel’ (bars 86–94) demonstrate an entirely different vocal approach when compared with the previously declamatory style. Repeated pitches, separated by rests, recall the concluding passage of the Etudes transcendantales, in which the vocal part is eroded and ultimately stripped back to the speaking voice, as though marking its fundamental incompatibility with musical expression (this is discussed in Chapter 8). Here, however, the aesthetic aims are more reminiscent of those of the Fourth Quartet, in parts of which the animated instrumental activity impinges on the vocal material, colouring it and threatening to subsume the voice entirely within its own concerns.38 The ‘colouring’ effect of the instruments provides the vocal material with an expressive power beyond its own rather pared-down delivery after its entrance at bar 87. A lengthy instrumental interlude follows, consolidating a new ensemble sound predicated on registral contrast, drawing on doubling instruments (flute to piccolo and clarinet to bass clarinet). The individual character of each instrument is explored anew, progressively differentiating the ensemble into ever more tenuous, sometimes barely audible gestural fragments. A piccolo and bass clarinet duo heralds textural instability, and even though the flute and clarinet are restored from bar 119, the exaggeration of individuated gestures continues as the dramatization of roles intensifies. Consider the voice from bar 120, by turns in conversation with, or set against, the violin. The latter emerges as a confident soloist imitating the glissandi so characteristic of the vocal writing so far, from bar 117.39 Just as Ferneyhough had earlier invoked the concept of Sprachähnlichkeit [speech-likeness] in relation to the expressive world of Schoenberg’s Second Quartet, implying that the instrumental gestures there approach the quality of verbal expression (something he attempts to reflect on in his own Fourth Quartet, as addressed in Chapter 11), he perceives a similar phenomenon in ‘Der Kranke Mond’ from Pierrot.40 Taking this as indicative of the speech-like quality Ferneyhough seeks in On Stellar Magnitudes, Freeman identifies the moment at the beginning of ‘Mirfak’ (bar 120) as a ‘fleeting and fantastic bit of Ferneyhoughian dialogue’, referring as much to the instrumental lines as the vocal part, if not more so: ‘it is the violin that must “speak out” if the effect is to come off.’41 At the beginning of ‘Nunki’ (bar 129), the tendency towards fragmentation of materials noted above intensifies until the end of the work. From bar 129, just as in an operatic plot in which allegiances are forged, broken and renegotiated, the instruments fall into pairs, save the piano, a lone ‘colour’ since the very opening and which here introduces ostinato figures that progressively ensnare the entire ensemble. Between bars 129 and 135, the right hand progresses bar to bar in the ratio 9:8:7 (bars 129–131), then 8:9:10:9:8 (bars 132–133). The density of both right- and left- hand figures at the start (bar 129) dwindles by the end (bar 135). Ferneyhough uses the tuplet subdivisions to effect a certain 110

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directionality or local line of force in the piano part, despite its essentially repetitious figures: from here to the end of the work, he instigates a longer-range escalation of the dramatic discourse. A gestural ‘stretto’ begins, prompted by the piano ‘fan’ figures (bar 145ff.); these are complemented by similar figures in inversion in the flute-clarinet pair (bars 162–165). The remainder of the piece comes to define what Ferneyhough calls a line of (destructive) figural force, which leaves its trace in the material:42 the ensemble ends trapped in little ostinato repetitive patterns. The voice bears particular witness to this, its earlier melismas now broken into isolated micro-gestures (from bar 159ff.) and a largely syllabic setting that complements the percussive action of the instruments. Whereas the violin participated in ‘speech’, conversing with the voice in ‘Mirfak’, from bar 169 its glissando-heavy soloistic texture returns, but now locked into a repetitive rhythmic pattern in which some impulses are replaced by rests. The ’cello (bars 171–172) also ‘stalls’ in a retrogradable rhythmic pattern and tremolo figures, and an ‘elegante’ clarinet solo begins at bar 168, but it too becomes embroiled in a repetitive rhythmic pattern. As soon as the clarinet dwindles to ppp after a final attempt at asserting itself the flute takes over with rhythmically repetitive figures that begin ppp but end even more quietly, pppp a bar later, at bar 172 (Figure 4.2). Each of the patterns identified in Figure 4.2 prefigures the ensemble ostinato texture from bar 173. If the violin was previously Sprachähnlich, its col legno balz. figures here mark its lack of speech-likeness. The piano is absent, forming a complement with the opening solo. This is the piece’s penultimate passage (bars 173–176), and its ordered, cyclical material appears to fulfil the original piano instruction ‘to make sense out of chaos’ as though the performance direction had been a dramatic plotline underlining the entire work; yet the final, wistful-sounding texture (bar 177ff.) is a total contrast, incorporating pauses, sustained tones, harmonics and decreasing tempo. The soprano’s final words ‘unmewed by itself ’ seem reflective, as though commenting on this final undoing of ordered texture:43 Ferneyhough’s avowed avoidance of assumptions regarding text-music relationships notwithstanding, the meaning of the final passage (ironically clear despite the non-existence of the word ‘unmewed’) is surely a fine example of word painting. Indeed, Freeman draws attention to the ‘whimsy in the closing words of the cycle.’44 La Chute d’Icare The foregoing discussion of On Stellar Magnitudes concludes with the suggestion that Ferneyhough’s claim to be ‘freed […] from reliance on […] overt “madrigalisms” (explicit text-music parallels)’ may only be partially upheld: certainly, he does not rely on these, but neither does his setting preclude overt parallels of this sort.45 Ferneyhough himself refers to On Stellar Magnitudes as ‘moving from the pianistic evocation of undifferentiated star fields to the “magical” enunciation of successive star names.’46 Likewise, his purely instrumental music does not preclude parallels of a sort between his work and the images referred 111

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to in titles. The same might be observed of the relationship between the music of the Carceri d’Invenzione cycle (discussed in Chapter 8) and the etchings by Giambattista Piranesi from which it takes its name (note its representations of wide spaces, confused perspectives, and so on). The title of La Chute d’Icare relates to a painting attributed to Pieter Brueghel the Elder, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (c.1558), and may also implicitly acknowledge Auden’s poem Musée des Beaux Arts (1938), itself a simultaneous reflection on the Brueghel and on a society approaching World War II. Both painting and poem observe the tragedy of Icarus’ fall, his wax wings having melted in the heat of the sun; but in both, the event is marginalized. Brueghel foregrounds a contemporary agricultural scene by a seascape, with a ship in the middle distance (implying the importance of trade and commerce), whilst Icarus’ legs and a small splash in the ocean go unnoticed both by the figures in the painting (and by all but the keenest observer). Auden in his turn observes that In Brueghel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.47 According to Ferneyhough (apropos of no particular work), text should be regarded in an ‘emblematic light […] as something radiating out into the musical discourse, infusing it with connective energy, rather than as a semantically circumscribed statement requiring finite compositional exegesis. In any case “meaning” has many aspects, most of all in poetry.’48 This view arguably applies regardless of whether the work in question actually sets a text or not; La Chute can be said to form a relationship with both a text and an image, the sentiments of which may contribute fundamentally to the musical expression (whether the composer’s explicit intention, or the listener’s inference). Unlike Brueghel or Auden, Ferneyhough does not marginalize Icarus’ fall in his title, and this, along with the clarinet figures at the beginning of the piece, has led to the suggestion that, whilst Ferneyhough is not a modern proponent of programme music, his solo clarinet might represent the protagonist’s flailing towards his final fall (particularly in the cadenza towards the end of the work).49 Although it is unusual for the composer to invoke any kind of explicit narrative (not that this necessarily follows from image), he flirts with the idea here, as indicated by his subtitle ‘Little Serenade of Disappearance’.50 The first section sets the clarinet against a slower-moving ensemble. The clarinet’s gestures are based on a falling and ascending mode represented in its entirety in the opening downward and upward sweep. Thereafter it is treated to some tuplet distortions 112

Figure 4.2:  On Stellar Magnitudes, bars 169–172.

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with numerous inserted rests, but is essentially reiterated until a new section begins (bar 8). The  ensemble’s opening pitches are in fact exactly those of the clarinet, but unfold at different rates of change, a process which Ferneyhough uses often (and calls ‘prolational canon’) but usually in a less obvious manner, either recessed in the musical texture or as a generative procedure for rhythmic schemes not detectably presented in the music.51 Here, this unfolding can be traced in the ensemble well into the work’s second section. Recalling the ‘single mass instrument’ idea in Terrain, there are numerous duos — usually established on the basis of textural and rhythmic patterns — in the course of the piece: flute-oboe, vibraphone/marimba-piano and violin-’cello.52 The clarinet becomes involved in these texture duos, as in the passage between bars 30 and 36 (Figure 4.3). As with On Stellar Magnitudes, Ferneyhough implements directional ‘lines of force’ at strategic moments — another substrate in the ‘single mass instrument’ — represented by the progressive erosion of the string gesture (also bars 30–36). The sketch materials permit insights into La Chute d’Icare’s underlying structural premises, bearing witness to a largescale, deeply recessed ‘interference form’ involving a triple-layer rhythmic and metrical (bar-length) pattern. Ferneyhough introduces the pattern three times in the course of the work, layering the entries in staggered fashion, like the ‘faults’ in Terrain (Figure 4.4). The piece concludes one bar after the end of layer 1 (completed in bar 171), truncating layers 2 and 3. All three layers are identical in terms of their rhythms and bar-lengths. Once the second layer enters, Ferneyhough decides which takes precedence in determining the bar-lengths, rhythmic patterns and tempo in the piece: for example at bar 37 (entrance of layer 2), layer 1 continues to determine bar-lengths, but layer 2 controls tempo; the rhythmic material from this point onwards is a composite of both layers. Once two (and from bar 130, three) layers are in competition with each other, Ferneyhough devises yet another layer (called the ‘conjoint layer’), a compound of all others, by lining up the desynchronized layers as in figure 4.5. The conjoint layer is characterized by smaller bar-lengths than are present in the main layer material. Layer 3 is used for the first time at bar 130 (the start of the clarinet cadenza) where it determines bar-lengths and, because all layers are identical (but their entries staggered) the first seven bar-lengths of the piece (entrance of layer 1) are identical to the first seven bar-lengths of the clarinet cadenza (entrance of layer 3). The rhythms in the clarinet cadenza, however, result from the combination of all the layers together, as shown in an example from Ferneyhough’s sketches (Figure 4.6). The rhythmic traces of this combinative process may clearly be seen in the score: the 7:5 tuplet from layer one is the first subdivision in the cadenza; the 5:3 tuplet derives from the

Figure 4.3:  La Chute d’Icare, subdivision of the wind trio between two textures, bars 30–36.53

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Figure 4.4:  Basic disposition of underlying rhythmic-metric layers, La Chute d’Icare.

conjoint layer (fourth bar); finally the 11:12 from layer two completes the first bar of the cadenza: Ferneyhough alters the rhythmic layout of bar 130 so that no impulses stray over the bar-line into the clarinet solo. From bar 143 the conjoint layer (conjoining all three layers) determines the bar-lengths, and after the first 4/8 bar, the metrical values become noticeably smaller (see bars 144–150). From here to the end of the piece the rate of change of the metrical layers that rise to the surface results in a highly fragmented reading or scanning across the layers of the basic material. Textural changes correspond with the points at which a different metrical layer comes to the foreground (Table 4.2). Ferneyhough takes advantage of the points at which the conjoint layer dominates to create an unstable, heterogeneous texture: see, by way of illustration, bars 111–129. Knowledge of the background metrical procedure explains certain occurrences in the piece: after a lengthy ‘conjoint layer’ section (bars 74–104) during which fragmentation of the material is highlighted by frequent ensemble changes and isolated gestures (see alto flute and cor anglais), layer 1 returns to the foreground for the first time (since bar 73) at bar 105 and, as though to mark this moment, Ferneyhough reinstates the clarinet’s opening falling mode, once, subito fff. Rare moments of ‘unison strategy’ like those between bars 50 and 73, at which stage layer 1 is dominant, reflect the passages of greatest processual fluidity, and contrast with the fragmentary strategies exhibited towards the end.54 Despite the identical (if staggered) nature of the three primary rhythmic-metrical layers, Ferneyhough ensures maximum textural stability when layer 1 is dominant, tending towards extreme instability when layer 3 and especially the ‘conjoint layer’ is prioritized.

Figure 4.5:  Calculation of the ‘conjoint layer’, La Chute d’Icare, bars 70–82.

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Figure 4.6a:  Rhythmic composite of all layers, La Chute d’Icare, bars 130–131.

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Figure 4.6b:  La Chute d’Icare, bar 130, solo clarinet.

For all its complexity, the background procedures and the generation of a ‘conjoint layer’ gives rise to a larger-scale formal ‘conjunctio’ of the fragmentary material and the fluidly processual.55 His use of this term in the sketches to describe the ultimate formal tensions and their conjunction at the end of the work (all layers rising rapidly to the surface one after the other from the re-entry of the ensemble after the cadenza, bar 147) echoes his invocation of the alchemical conjunctio oppositorum in relation to Lemma-Icon-Epigram (discussed in Chapter 11).56 The ensemble, invoking Auden’s ‘ships [that] sail calmly on’ in the early part of the work (reflecting the form of Brueghel’s painting, which keeps Icarus’ instability in the background), is itself marginalized by the cadenza. There, Ferneyhough trains his lens on the fall itself: the marginal event becomes the main focus. François Nicolas draws special attention to a single moment in the piece — the staggered re-entry of the ensemble after the cadenza — which he interprets as a critical juncture on account of the regular staccato in the piccolo. This, he suggests, renders time sensible, as the piccolo’s regularity is measured against the wayward clarinet.57 He suggests that this moment captures a listener unawares, and a shift in perception takes place: it is tempting to pursue the analogy with Icarus’ fall and infer that ‘real’ time reasserts itself here — hence the instruction pedantico to the piccolo player — in opposition to the ‘fall time’ of the cadenza. The effect is repeated with each subsequent instrumental entry: the violin is also subject to regular rapid staccatissimo, followed at some distance by the ’cello (bar 162), piano (bar 163) and oboe (bar 164). The material is at its Table 4.2: Prioritized layers, bar 151–end, La Chute d’Icare.

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most unstable in the final bars: mordent trills are heard in every instrument, and the clarinet is reduced to microtonal ornaments, once again marking its difference with the ensemble (as the only instrument in La Chute d’Icare to employ inflectional microtones). As in all the pieces in this group, changes within the ensemble (typically by recombination into sub-ensembles) coincide with significant junctures in the discourse. In La Chute, sudden reductions of texture signal ‘layer activity’: the strings drop out temporarily at bar 37, as the second metrical layer enters. Between bars 69 and 73 the clarinet is silent for the only time in the piece: its re-entry, and the subsequent reduced instrumental forces at 74, marks the first use of ‘conjoint’ layer metres. Each textural reduction also precipitates a change in the wind instruments, on this occasion from flute and clarinet to alto flute and cor anglais. When full texture is resumed, a bass flute replaces the alto at bar 103. The next textural reduction is the cadenza (layer three begins), after which piccolo and oboe resume. The sinking register throughout the work conveys another kind of fall, and like Terrain, La Chute finishes with a solo gesture after the ensemble finishes playing. The moment is strikingly humorous, and perhaps explains the piece’s subtitle: imagine the noise made when something disappears under water, sending bubbles to the surface, and recall the tiny legs in Brueghel’s painting, about to sink out of view. Allgebrah ‘Allgebrah’ is a term given by the Swiss artist Adolf Wölfli to the ‘music’ in writing. As a schizophrenic imprisoned for sexual offences in early adulthood, Wölfli spent the remainder of his life in an asylum, mostly in solitary confinement, and began to produce drawings and poems.58 His drawings often contain an idiosyncratic musical notation, from which he would play on a paper trumpet (the only ‘instrument’ available to him in prison).59 Although he has never hinted as much himself, Ferneyhough’s choice of oboe for the solo instrument amidst an ensemble comprising nine solo strings may be an oblique reference to Wölfli’s makeshift instrument: in a photograph on the Wölfli Foundation website, the artist is holding a paper trumpet, which looks a little like an oboe in shape and length.60 One might imagine that of all the wind instruments, the oboe comes closest in timbre to the sound the paper trumpet is capable of making. Allgebrah is the most substantial of the group of works discussed in this chapter, but in contradistinction to the others, its protagonist is only rarely ‘soloistic’ in its behaviour. At  times it becomes so enveloped within the string ensemble as to be barely audible. Allgebrah does however share formal and textural approaches with its stable-mates: readily identifiable strata overlap throughout the course of the work. At the start, the upper strings form one layer and the lower strings another, very different in sound (glissando harmonics). Throughout, the strings introduce particular textures in staggered form, from highest instrument to lowest, as at bars 147–148, in which the intervallic sonorities produced accompany and accentuate the prevailing rallentando highly 118

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effectively. This is not to suggest that the oboe is never set against the ensemble: there are passages where it begins to assert itself, although these tend to be relatively short-lived. One example is at bar 78, in which its rhythmic assurance (‘in modo retorico’) soon loses momentum (‘perdendosi’, bar 85). The sudden changes in the oboe’s character in this section are inflected with different forms of ‘speech-like’ human expression (retorico, inciso, esitante, intimo). Ferneyhough creates shifting states, from gloomy (there is a wholesale change of mood at bars 12–18, and again attrition at 55–60, which so contrasts with the opening as to give the impression of linear energies suddenly becoming caught in molasses) to hyper-expressionistic (bars 63–67 and 95–100) and almost anxious, insistent rhythms (see bars 43–51 and 221–222). In the last case, identical repeating rhythmic cells, as many as the bar-length will allow, characterize a number of bars in the piece, though they rarely transgress the bar line. From the very beginning, the listener is launched straight into material better resembling the middle of a piece. This does not represent the same strategy as in the opening gesture of La Chute d’Icare: despite Ferneyhough’s acknowledgement that this is already fully formed,61 the contrast between the immediately repetitive nature of the clarinet solo and the unflustered ensemble comes across with striking, ordered boldness. Such a sense of control and measure is lacking as Allgebrah bursts into sound. In place of stability, there remains the threat, frequently carried out, that other such bursts from the whole or part of the ensemble will interrupt the discourse. Resembling the ‘interventions’ that occur in Terrain, single-bar ruptures occur as in bars 71, 77, 88 and 110, introducing rapid repetitive figures, accented impulses, and suddenly very loud dynamics into a slower-moving (and quieter) surrounding texture. In their disruptive intent these interventions also resemble those typical of the large ensemble works from the 1970s, discussed in Chapter 10. A more sustained burst at bars 43–44 is rhythmically highly controlled, as the ostinato in the oboe and upper strings (bar 43) and the symmetrical impulse pattern in the next bar attest. The relative lack of tuplets is noticeable here, as are the straightforward rhythms (by Ferneyhough’s standards): this is a regular occurrence, found in reasonably extended passages (for example the viola part, bars  42–51). As in the contemporary String Trio (1995), discussed in Chapter 6, Ferneyhough treats instruments as soloists at certain points, and subsequently ‘amplifies’ their textures in the ensemble; a similar process occurs in Allgebrah, in which the remainder of the ensemble acts ‘as uncontrollable echo chamber, picking up, amplifying and unpredictably prolonging minute features in the oboe’s flickering discourse.’62 One example is the multiphonic required of the oboe in the section beginning at bar 190. This sforzando sound, heard as percussive against the ensemble, is taken up by the strings and extended into rhythmic figures calling for analogously percussive sounds (see bars 198–206). The piece ends with a solo cadenza that revisits earlier figures and texturetypes in a highly fragmented manner. The extreme contrast between adjacent dynamic and expressive markings (subito agitandosi followed by subito delicato) maintains the piece’s instability to the conclusion. 119

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Incipits In music, the term ‘incipit’ is today more readily associated with editions of medieval and Renaissance music, in which the first few opening notes of a musical section, given in original clefs and notational values, precedes the modern transcription proper. Although his interest in music of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is well documented,63 there is no suggestion that Ferneyhough is calling upon this repertoire. His programme note explains his rationale for the work: It has been said that, although there are manifold ways of beginning a piece of music, the number of strategies for bringing it to a conclusion is severely limited. In this spirit, I have composed a work consisting mostly of beginnings, in that each of the seven sections brusquely enunciates a new set of postulates, often before the preceding material has been fully worked out.64 As in Terrain, the seven sections are primarily articulated by changes of instrumentation, and in Incipits there is a symmetry to the resulting scheme: Table 4.3: Instrumentation by section, Incipits. viola and percussion

bb. 1–19

viola, percussion and strings

bb. 20–49

viola and percussion

bb. 50–65

[viola, percussion], strings, wind (high)

bb. 66–10565

viola and percussion

bb. 106–124

viola, percussion, strings, wind (low)

bb. 125–145

viola and rainstick

bb. 145–152

The motivation for Incipits is indicative of Ferneyhough’s way of thinking: however much he may bring images, texts and other influences to bear on his compositional praxis (including his particular approach to theorizing), his challenges are always of a fundamentally intra-musical kind. In the ‘group’ of works represented in this chapter, which draw on such non-musical sources as Smithson’s huge earthworks, stellar constellations and a Brueghel masterpiece, Incipits serves as a reminder of the essentially musical ‘craft’ in which Ferneyhough is engaged: nevertheless, it is difficult as a listener not to put constructions on certain rhetorically expressed gestures. In effect, Incipits is a piece-size rendering of the smaller-scale rubrics and puzzles found in sketches for numerous works (there are many ‘notes to self ’ amongst preparatory materials: ‘nested tuplets – how to avoid extraneous notes at bar-line?’).66 Incipits is playful, with an eclectic mix of fleeting vignettes (like the ‘folk fiddle’ at bars 17–18, the sudden ‘meccanico’ duo at bar 132, or the exaggerated ascending-descending gesture in the viola at the start of bar 55). Different opening strategies 120

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are set out with each change of ensemble, from the quiet, almost apologetic entrance of the ‘ripieno’ strings at bar 20 to the ensemble’s energetic initial tutti at bar 66, which effectively bursts in upon the second duo.67 Table 4.4 suggests some of the processes at work in the seven sections. The extremely quiet ending of the coda signals that the conclusion does not fully discharge the energy accrued either within the seven incipits or in the piece’s more latent (but significant and continuous) formal accumulation of energy, which spills over from one section into the next: once again, this is a symptom of the ‘lines of force’ that cut across sections, most obviously in gestures such as the two low wind instruments’ increasingly percussion-like sounds at the end of section 6, heralding the arrival of the coda with rainstick. Postscript: Flurries (1997) The works discussed so far in this chapter share many features with Ferneyhough’s other chamber works, but some recurring approaches to material suggest that, considered together, the features of one will illuminate salient issues in respect of another. From this standpoint, the chamber work Flurries (1997) belongs in this ‘group’, although it is not a concerto even to the degree that the others might be said to be. Composed immediately after the last of these, it shares with them the strategy of sectional division into instrumental subgroupings, including extended solo passages. Like Terrain, it takes its name from an eponymous poem by A.R. Ammons, the last line of which prefaces the published score: ‘… but motion underlines meaning with meaning’. Alessandro Melchiorre suggests that ‘Ferneyhough feels very close to the American poet, perhaps because he sees parallels between [his own views and] the therapeutic, cognitive and ethical functions that appear in Ammons’ statements about poetry: “Poetry leads us to the unstructured sources of our beings, to the unknown, and returns us to our rational structural selves refreshed”.’68 Formally, the piece unfolds a series of recombinations of the ensemble. An initial section comprises three duos, each based on a particular formal principle: the first (violin and ’cello) offers what Ferneyhough calls ‘double cyclic re-readings’,69 which draw on a cyclic principle that can be traced in his music as early as Epicycle and the Missa Brevis. Until the dramatic appearance of the clarinet (bar 34), one might be dealing with the incipit of a work belonging to an entirely different genre (on the evidence of, say, Ferneyhough’s string quartets, which often contain extended solos or duos). The second section, which overlaps slightly with the first, is a set of variations and quodlibet for clarinet and piano (on a presumed ‘theme’ between bars 34 and 37). A final duo, for the atypically paired piccolo and horn, is described as march/fantasy, a similarly atypical pairing. This last duo is short: the strings soon rejoin the texture with contrasting characteristic material articulated as ‘noise’ elements in the form of glissandi, col legno, gettato, tasto and so on. The successive duos, each adopting a formal type with semantic associations, seem to bear out Ferneyhough’s choice of Ammons’ quotation. The motion 121

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Table 4.4: Section-by-section characteristics, Incipits.

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from duo to duo undermines the deliberately invoked ‘meanings’ (march and fantasy, for example) with meaning of its own: the energetic activity in the duos becomes increasingly fragmented into highly characteristic gestures or flurries, the extremes of register threequarters of the way through the work already prefigured in the piccolo-horn combination. Once the full ensemble resumes, a very loosely defined canon ensues before Ferneyhough establishes an antiphonal texture between two trios — the winds and strings/piano — again redolent of his textural approach in earlier works such as Prometheus. A hocket-like dialogue emerges (see for example winds bar 87ff. or strings, bars 116–118) and the last part of the work comprises the gradual breakdown of the ensemble until a fragmented ’cello cadenza brings an understated close that could not be more different from the ebullient duo to which it belonged at the start.

Notes   1 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 459–60.   2 Ferneyhough, Liner Notes, Brian Ferneyhough, Ensemble SurPlus, Composers’ Art Label/ SWR cal-13013, 2002, CD.   3 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 436. His recollection of hearing Varèse’s work, aged 15 or 16, is detailed in Ibid., 235. It  is ironic that Ferneyhough chooses a violin solo in the work, given the connection with Varèse. As Richard Toop points out, ‘it was Varèse who proclaimed that “the violin does not express our times”.’ See Richard Toop, “Short shadows and natural forces,” Liner Notes, Brian Ferneyhough 2: Fourth String Quartet et al., Audivis Montaigne MO782029, 1996, CD. Ferneyhough also specifies doubling instruments, albeit used in reduced texture sections. The ‘Varèse ensemble’ is reserved for the densely notated tutti passages, with the exception of the less dense tutti bars 147–160, which replaces the flute with the piccolo.   4 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 438. Some of the very early works for wind instruments referred to here are discussed in the biography (Chapter 1).   5 Ibid. The composer refers to the ‘wealth of possible sub-ensembles and an impressively cutting “bite” when employed as a single mass instrument.’   6 Ibid., 119.   7 In the sketches for Carceri d’Invenzione III, Ferneyhough quotes the sculptor Robert Smithson: ‘One’s mind and the earth are in a constant state of erosion, mental rivers wear away abstract banks, brain waves undermine cliffs of thought, ideas decompose into stones of unknowing, and the conceptual crystallisations break apart into deposits of gritty reason.   Vast moving faculties occur in this geological miasma, and they move in the most physical way. This movement seems motionless, yet it crushes the landscape of logic under glacial reveries. This slow flowage makes one conscious of the turbidity of thinking. Slump, debris slides, avalanches all take place within the cracking limits of the brain. The entire body is pulled into the cerebral sediment, where particles and fragments make themselves known as solid consciousness. A bleached and fractured world surrounds the artist. To organise this 123

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mass of corrosion into patterns, grids, and subdivisions is an aesthetic process which has scarcely been touched.’ See Smithson, The Writings of Robert Smithson, ed. Nancy Holt (New York, NJ: New York University Press, 1979), 82. As Toop points out, the note ‘comes into its own many years later as a conceptual backdrop for Terrain.’ See Toop, “‘Prima le Parole...’ – on the sketches for Ferneyhough’s Carceri d’Invenzione I–III,” 154–175. Toop notes the recurrence of the terms ‘stratification’ and ‘embedding’ in the sketches for the Carceri cycle and the frequency of the composer’s use of ‘sedimentation’ in programme notes for works including Time and Motion Study II and the Second String Quartet. (Ibid., 174). The terms appear in the Collected Writings: ‘strata’ appears often, as when the composer describes the piling up of layers in Time and Motion Study II (Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 109).   8 Ferneyhough, unpublished sketch materials, Terrain, Paul Sacher Stiftung, Basel, c. 1991.   9 Ferneyhough, quoted in Richard Toop, Liner Notes, “Short shadows and natural forces,” Brian Ferneyhough 2: Fourth String Quartet et al., Audivis Montaigne MO782029, 1996, CD. 10 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 436. 11 Robert Smithson, Robert Smithson: the Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1996), 105. 12 Robert Smithson, quoted in Gary Shapiro, Robert Smithson and Art After Babel (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1995), 160. 13 A. R. Ammons, “Terrain,” quoted in Ross A. Feller, “Slippage and Strata in Brian Ferneyhough’s ‘Terrain’,” Ex tempore 9/2 (1999): 83. 14 Feller, “Slippage and Strata,” 83. 15 Feller argues that ‘Like Varèse, Ferneyhough is carving out a slow moving pitch space through repetition and the utilization of pitch materials that surround a primary pitch space.’ (Ibid., 90). 16 Ibid., 87. Feller reports that Ferneyhough made this comment in a telephone call. 17 Ferneyhough quoted in Feller, “Slippage and Strata,” 82. 18 Feller, “Slippage and Strata,” 87. Ferneyhough’s interruptive technique might provide a musical analogue for Ammons’ use of the colon in his poem ‘Terrain’. It can be seen to interrupt the verse frequently:   The soul is a region without definite boundaries.   it is not certain a prairie   can exhaust it   or a range enclose it:   it floats (self-adjusting) like the continental mass.   where it towers most   extending its deepest mantling base   (exactly proportional):   does not flow all one way: there is a divide:   river systems thrown like winter tree-shadows   against the hills: branches, runs, high lakes:   stagnant lily-marshes:   See A. R. Ammons, Expressions of Sea Level (Ohio: State University Press, 1963), 12. 19 Ferneyhough makes a note of the three duo colour-register permutations in the unpublished sketches for Terrain. 124

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20 Ibid. 21 Ferneyhough recalls that ‘Refining the pre-compositional processes involved in Terrain, it just happened that a useful level of definition was arrived at for the second half of the piece first. I’d sketched out the entire form […] fairly rapidly, and it was the progressive growth of this momentum which brought supplementary ideas into play as I approached the end. So that’s where I started. It was quite interesting to approach the opening violin solo from that perspective, rather than allowing everything that follows to emerge, as it were, from it. It’s lucky for us that time is reversible, at least during the compositional act.’ (Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 441). 22 It is a moot point whether it is appropriate to infer that the tempo change in every bar, as well as the accompanying rall. or accel. is to be interpreted as non-linear. In a sense, the process could be heard as a linear one of a different order to those in the first half of the piece. However, the frequent tempo changes imply that a new process begins with each bar (this is reinforced by the bar-length diminuendi applied in each instrument), marking the difference between this strategy and those undertaken in the first half. 23 Feller, “Slippage and Strata,” 111. The general pattern here in the second half, for this section from bar 97, is to have bar length (usually) subdivisions piled up on top of each other. 24 From bar 97, the metrical pattern is as given below. Between bars 104 and 110 it is interrupted by a mini cadenza, but resumes at bar 111, then 119, then 128. There is an abbreviated form lasting only three bars, from bar 135, and again from bar 138.   3 4 [5] 5 7 3 5 6   8 8 [16] 8 16 8 16 8 25 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 294. 26 The Fourth Quartet, to be discussed in Chapters 6 and 11, is scored for string quartet and soprano. The soprano participates in two of the four movements, although unlike Schoenberg’s Second Quartet, in which the soprano joins the quartet in the final two movements, Ferneyhough reserves the singer for the second and fourth. In his essay on the Fourth Quartet, Ferneyhough draws the reader’s attention to correspondences and differences between aspects of his and Schoenberg’s quartets. These include the treatment of the texts (text-setting), and the approach to expression and form. See Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 153–164. Ferneyhough’s String Trio is also discussed in Chapter 6. 27 Robin Freeman, “Retuning the Skies: Ferneyhough’s ‘On Stellar Magnitudes’,” Tempo New Series 191 (1994): 34–37. Ferneyhough’s presentation is published as Brian Ferneyhough, “Pierrot lunaire pour les temps presents/d’après une conference et un texte de Brian Ferneyhough,” trans. Karim Haddad, Voix nouvelles (Royaumont, 1994): 4–5. 28 Freeman, “Retuning the Skies,” 35. 29 Ibid., 34. 30 Ferneyhough, Liner Notes, Brian Ferneyhough: Prometheus, La Chute d’Icare, On Stellar Magnitudes, Superscriptio, Carceri d’Invenzione III, Accord Una Corda 205772, 1996, CD. 31 Freeman, “Retuning the Skies,” 34. It is ironic that Ferneyhough invokes the term ‘madrigalisms’ as a means of typifying an approach to text-setting that his music rejects, since he spent time studying Monteverdi’s madrigals before writing the Etudes transcendantales. See Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 362. 125

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32 Ferneyhough, Liner Notes, Brian Ferneyhough, Accord Una Corda 205772. 33 Freeman, “Retuning the Skies,” 34. 34 Ferneyhough’s particular approach to the operatic genre and its conventions in Shadowtime is addressed in detail in Chapters 9 and 11. In certain parts of the opera — specifically Scene V, the Pools of Darkness (11 Interrogations) — the vocal style, interaction of the characters and explicit references to historical musical styles tend towards parody of the operatic genre. 35 Ferneyhough, “Performance Notes,” On Stellar Magnitudes (London: Peters Edition No. 7420, 1995). 36 Ibid., 8. 37 Verse titles are given, although the actual text set at the points indicated is the first line of the corresponding verse, so at bar 57 ‘Deneb’ the text reads ‘De-Laminated…’ 38 This is most relevant in the second movement of Ferneyhough’s Fourth Quartet, in which no vocal impulse is articulated that is not simultaneously ‘given’ by the ensemble. Once again, this is discussed in Chapter 6. 39 See the direction to the vocalist in the score, bar 120: ‘as if conversing with/against the violin.’ In bar 121, the voice is ‘prim, commanding’ whereas the violin material develops in intensity, leading to several layers of glissando as though it has ‘tied itself in knots’ by bars 127–128. 40 See Ferneyhough’s essay on his Fourth Quartet, Collected Writings, 153–164. For the reference to Pierrot, see Freeman, “Retuning the Skies,” 35. 41 Ibid. 42 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 387. The concepts of the figure and force are discussed in detail in Chapter 11 on Ferneyhough’s aesthetics. 43 The pauses between the final four bars, through which notes are sustained, prefigure the use of the same idea between miniature fragments in Ferneyhough’s most recent works, including Plötzlichkeit, discussed in Chapter 10. 44 Freeman, “Retuning the Skies,” 35. 45 Ferneyhough, Liner Notes, Brian Ferneyhough, Accord Una Corda 205772. 46 Ibid. 47 W. H. Auden, Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (New York, NJ: Vintage Books, 1991), 179. 48 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 343. 49 Richard Toop, Liner Notes, “Concerto, que me veux-tu?” Brian Ferneyhough: Terrain, No time (at all), La Chute d’Icare, Incipits, Les Froissements d’Ailes de Gabriel, Kairos 0013072KAI, 2010, CD. 50 Ferneyhough, Liner Notes, Brian Ferneyhough, Accord Una Corda 205772. 51 See discussion of prolational processes in the Sixth Quartet, during which Ferneyhough recalls that La Chute begins with prolation, which he interprets broadly to mean that the instruments play essentially the same materials but at different rates (so the clarinet is much faster, in this case, than any ensemble member). Paul Archbold, “‘Performing Complexity’, a pedagogical resource tracing the Arditti Quartet’s preparations for the première of Brian Ferneyhough Sixth String Quartet,” http://events.sas.ac.uk/uploads/media/Arditti_ Ferneyhough_project_documentation.pdf (accessed June 6, 2012). The Sixth Quartet, and the composer’s use of prolation, is discussed in Chapter 6. 126

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52 It is worth noting the importance of duo textures in all of the pieces discussed in this chapter so far (and elsewhere in the output). They are often ruptured by an interventional force (such as the piccolo and bass clarinet pair, interrupted by the ‘discourteous’ violin [“scortese”] at bar 117, On Stellar Magnitudes). The number of pieces that include ‘subgroups’ of duos, especially in the period covered in this chapter (late 1980s and 1990s) suggests that this textural approach is meaningful, perhaps as a recasting (particular to the chamber music) of the ‘interference form’ or ‘interruptive polyphony’ discussed in Chapter 3 in relation to the solo repertoire. 53 Ferneyhough, unpublished sketch materials, La Chute d’Icare, Paul Sacher Stiftung, Basel, c. 1987–1988. 54 Ferneyhough, unpublished sketch materials, La Chute d’Icare, c. 1987–1988. 55 Ibid. 56 This was a term Ferneyhough used a lot, particularly around 1979–1980 (when composing La terre est un homme and Lemma), at the peak of his interest in alchemical studies. It is probably no more, on occasion, than a useful phrase to describe the bringing together of two opposites, although there is other evidence from the sketches that the term holds deeper meaning in Lemma, at least. See Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 213 and 497. 57 François Nicolas, “Une écoute à l’oeuvre: d’un moment favori dans La Chute d’Icare,” Brian Ferneyhough: texts réunis par Peter Szendy (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1999): 35. 58 These are discussed on the Wölfli Foundation website, http://www.adolfwoelfli.ch/index. php?c=e&level=17&sublevel=0 (accessed September 30, 2012). 59 Ibid. 60 See “Adolf Wölfli (1864–1930): Biography,” http://www.adolfwoelfli.ch/index.php?c=e&level= 2&sublevel=0 (accessed September 30, 2012). 61 See Archbold, “Performing Complexity,” 50. 62 Ferneyhough, “Allgebrah (1996),” http://www.editionpeters.com/resources/0001/stock/pdf/ allgebrah.pdf (accessed September 30, 2012). 63 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 247. 64 Ferneyhough, “Incipits (1996),” http://www.editionpeters.com/resources/0001/stock/pdf/ incipits.pdf (accessed September 30, 2012). 65 Note the viola and percussion are absent for a substantial section in the middle of the piece (about 25 bars), which is similar, structurally, to the (albeit brief) absence of the violin for seven bars in the middle of Terrain. 66 Ferneyhough, unpublished sketch materials, La Chute d’Icare, c. 1987–1988. There are no sketches available for Allgebrah, Incipits or On Stellar Magnitudes. 67 Another ruptured duo, following a pattern observed in a previous note. 68 Alessandro Melchiorre, Liner Notes, “Ferneyhough, a lexicon,” Brian Ferneyhough: Chamber Music, Ensemble Recherche, Stradivarius STR 33694, 2005, CD. Ammons is quoted in Melchiorre’s statement. Melchiorre quotes Ferneyhough’s remark: ‘[w]hat is music and what is it for? Art in general seems to be a basic quality of being human. One might as well ask “why breathe?” As to what it’s for: off the cuff I can only suggest that it serves to keep the tenuous lines of communication open between different areas of ourselves.’ (Ibid.) 69 Ibid. The term is Ferneyhough’s own for the form of the first section of the work. 127

Chapter 5 Chamber Music

T

he works discussed in this chapter are collected together on the basis of the smallto-medium chamber forces for which they were composed. Within this generic category more specific ones emerge, including the pieces recently arising from Ferneyhough’s continuing Christopher Tye project, for example, or one-off occasional works. In one case, that of Funérailles (for seven strings and harp, 1969–1977), a work creates its own category: that of a double presentation of the ‘same’ work. Two subcategories that technically fall within the chamber music category are addressed elsewhere in this book, owing to the specific configuration of issues that arise in relation to them: these are the String Quartets and the ‘concertos’ for soloist and small ensemble. Other chamber works are discussed in the context of the cycles to which they belong (Time and Motion Studies, Carceri d’Invenzione, Shadowtime). The taxonomical approach to the oeuvre reveals periods of intense concentration on chamber music, and one period in which the composer was preoccupied by other forms: Funérailles is the only chamber work completed during the 1970s, a decade which saw Ferneyhough concentrate on solo writing and works for large forces.1 Funérailles might as a result be viewed as a work of transition, reflecting on some of the stylistic issues of the 1970s in the chamber medium. At the same time, in its explicit rereading of previously composed materials, it stands as the sole published witness to an entire period of Ferneyhough’s output during which a number of works were carried through to significant stages of completion before being abandoned and, in not a few cases, reprised at an interval of years. In some instances, the initial title or project was also abandoned, and it is only with reference to the sketch material that the connection can be traced. These glimpses of the ‘hidden’ Ferneyhough are a key aspect of this chapter. Re-reading and the Sense of Self: Funérailles, Missa Brevis, Two Marian Motets The notion of re-reading more generally (either of oneself or of another composer’s materials) is another overarching consideration that pertains to the works considered in this chapter, albeit in varying degrees. Funérailles (1969–1980) remains the only example in the published output of double presentation, in which an earlier version is allowed to stand alongside a later, revised one. This is reflected in the piece’s exceptional performance context: both Funérailles I and II must be performed in the same concert, but never back-to-back (hence the instruction ‘non attacca!’ at the end of the first), and neither can be programmed without the other. The two versions are neither two movements of a single work nor

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two separate pieces. As well as being indicative of Ferneyhough’s evolving style over the 1970s, Funérailles provides a window onto the composer’s self-reflective critique, the second version representing a ‘re-reading’ of the first, although this does not imply that Ferneyhough considers it the better work. In apparently definitive terms, he maintains that [t]he piece isn’t at all autobiographical, because it’s not the autobiographical, extant, flesh and blood me, with his experiences, that is being investigated. It is simply the artist making artistic decisions, or judging already-made artistic decisions from a new artistic standpoint, at the moment of recomposition. I’m involved with the raison d’être of the creative act, rather than the person doing the creating. It just happened to be me doing it, but the same process could have been carried out by somebody else.2 He observes that ‘I was very much concerned, in the second version at least, with creatively observing the way I actually went about composing. In one sense the second version is a concretization of the act of composing.’3 In connection with Funérailles, Ferneyhough relates his fascination with the microcosmic organization of marching soldiers who, from a great distance, ‘seemed almost like ants.’4 In this sense, although its title immediately calls to mind the funereal, the piece itself reflects on rituals of all kinds. Ferneyhough plays on the double meaning of ‘observing a ritual’: he both ‘observes’ — follows — self-imposed compositional constraints in producing a second version, and reflects on his creative approach as spectator. The title also suggests a relationship of some kind with Franz Liszt’s eponymous work for solo piano, although the composer gives no indication what that relationship might be (‘I don’t know why — I’m not particularly fond of his music’).5 The evocation of distant bells in Liszt’s piece, purportedly composed to commemorate those lost in the Hungarian uprising of 1848, was perhaps in Ferneyhough’s mind as he attempted to create a sense that ‘there is a sort of veil between the sound and the ear which makes us feel “somewhere else”.’6 Another important connection that has been partly hidden from view brings into play another thread running through this chapter: Ferneyhough’s abiding interest in English music, albeit not the English tradition of his direct musical forebears. Funérailles I was written in the late 1960s, during which Ferneyhough had been working on a piece called String Set, which was neither completed nor published. In the sketches for this, the composer refers to a solo string trio and a tutti string group, as well as a harpsichord or cembalo.7 Although the harp replaces the harpsichord in Funérailles, it is likely that String Set was at least genetically related to it. In all likelihood it represents an early draft of what was to become Funérailles I. Ferneyhough describes String Set as an introverted piece with a deliberately neutral title, ‘intended to point towards a possible “historicization” of the material.’8 This may be a reference to the suites (sometimes called ‘Consort Setts for ye violls’) by composers such as William Lawes (1602–1645). The title of Ferneyhough’s String Set and of another unpublished Chamber Set (1964, including wind instruments) implies familiarity with the Jacobean tradition, and hints strongly at its possible influence 132

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on Ferneyhough’s own chamber music. Although the strings are muted in Funérailles because Ferneyhough seeks a distant sonority ‘less […] the atmosphere of mourning […] than the solemn, slowed-down pace typical of such ceremonies’,9 it is also tempting to interpret the use of mutes as a nod to the softer timbre of the consort of viols. Funérailles, in common with many works from the late 1960s and 1970s (as well as much consort music of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries), establishes an antiphonal principle between two groups: a solo trio and a tutti quartet, the harp mediating between them and elevated to a more soloistic role in version II, where it participates in duos with lower string instruments and performs an unaccompanied solo at the midpoint. The tutti quartet (violin, viola, ’cello, double bass) makes three appearances, demarcating sections of the work between which are soloistic ‘cadenzas’ in the concertante trio/harp group. The quartet’s role is predominantly timbral and linear, sometimes amplifying tiny trio gestures, and transforming relatively lengthy, self-consistent phrases in Version I into fragmented, isolated gestures in Version II. Near the end of the piece, the members of the string quartet take up percussion instruments — first two, then three and four, performing a precise but sparsely populated rhythmic period — as counterpoint to the virtuosic, if at times scarcely audible, trio. The latter is characterized by ‘microactivities’, the clearest examples of which occur at the beginning and end of the work. The end of Version II takes up a feature of Ferneyhough’s writing that he has used again and again — the infinitesimally quiet, al niente ending — and extends it over a period of many bars, as though the level of detail required of the performers were inversely proportional to its declining audibility. The 9/8 bar (marked ‘G.P.’) that concludes Version II and balances the nine second pause at the beginning of Version I is as much a part of the material of the piece as the ‘black’ bars — encrusted with complex notation — that precede it. To produce Version II, Ferneyhough performed a series of operations upon Version I. He explains that: I constructed a grid which I then overlaid on the score of Version One, already completed. This grid separated the material into small, independent frames, completely decontextualizing it, in effect. […]   I then took each isolated frame and investigated its autonomous properties very carefully, trying to establish what seemed to me to be the most significant characteristics of that fragment and — equally important — my own current attitude towards them. […] Working with givens possessing an amazing will of their own led to the production of an uncharacteristically unprestructured discourse; I was compelled to invent moment-bymoment strategies to accommodate what I was in the process of discovering.10 The beginning of Version II is a clear example of this, Ferneyhough having ‘isolated’ the first four bars of Version I with his grid. These are then mined for potential, which yields considerably more material than the earlier version contained. Sections Ia–Ie, Version II, some 22 bars, represent intensive re-readings of the smallest details, new material and repetitions, particularly of textural ‘events’. Compare the openings of both pieces (Figure 5.1). 133

Figure 5.1:  Funérailles, beginnings of both Version I and Version II for comparison.

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The emphasis on the ‘will’ of the material itself (and the expression of surprise at its strength) is a recurrent feature in Ferneyhough’s discussions of his relationship to his music. A further level of observance enacted in Funérailles therefore refers to the versions’ own interrelationship, the extent to which each ‘observes’ the other across the distance of a concert programme. In  Version II, Ferneyhough includes several passages of music in quotation marks. The natural assumption is that these are direct quotations from Version I; they are not, but the ‘quoted’ material derives from specific sections of Version I, drawing on similar pitch material and gestural content, and elevating previously secondary features to prominence. Thus, bars 34–38 of Version II quote material from bars 10–15 in Version I, suggesting that in this case, Version II is ‘observing’ Version I, and re-presents it. However, the performance instruction implies that it is the material from Version I material that ‘observes’, or even intrudes on, Version II, in a manner redolent of the interruptions/ interventions that characterize many other Ferneyhough pieces. In the prefatory notes to the score, he stipulates that ‘“quotation” material [is] to be performed in such a manner that it sounds like music played at a normal volume, but as if heard in the distance, i.e. a clearly different tone quality from that employed in other quiet passages.’11 Despite the temporal separation between the two versions of Funérailles in concert, the two are suddenly brought into simultaneity as though Version I is being performed at the same time, but physically at some distance from  the performance of Version II, into which it makes its incursion, interrupting the musical processes underway in Version II. But which is commenting on which? According to Peter Rosser, ‘on the one hand, [Version II] is the result of a destructive act, a pulling apart of existing material, with disjunction given structural import. On the other, the organicism of the original is recreated through instructions to the performers.’12 Funérailles performs one final act of observation: it acts as a marker of Ferneyhough’s longterm interest in Benjaminian concepts. This is later made more explicit in works including Lemma-Icon-Epigram, Kurze Schatten II and Shadowtime, but it is in ‘Funérailles that we see the introduction of several distinctly Benjaminian tropes that would come to individuate Ferneyhough philosophically, stylistically and intellectually within (or  against) the established and, arguably, already ageing central European musical avant-garde that emerged out of Darmstadt in the 1950s.’13 Insofar as Benjamin himself was an avid collector of tiny objects, Funérailles acts as a record, or collection, of Ferneyhough’s own ‘creative archaeology’ carried out over a number of years, with Version II a response to Version I, and Funérailles itself in relation to earlier incarnations, including String Set.14 The ‘quotation materials’ — small fragments from Funérailles I, cited in Funérailles II, considered above — become Benjaminian collected ‘tiny objects’ within Ferneyhough’s second version. Running exactly parallel to the campaigns of work on String Set and its presumed successor, Funérailles I, the Missa Brevis represents another instance of re-reading in Ferneyhough’s output, though in its case the situation is in a sense more normative of compositional practice generally, in that a multi-movement work originates over a period of a few years, with each component being gradually re-worked as the cycle progresses. A Kyrie and Gloria survive from 1966, which eventually became the basis of the Missa Brevis. By 1969, when 135

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the work was completed, some key structural considerations had evolved: Ferneyhough’s deployment of three antiphonal groups of four soloists places this work alongside Firecycle Beta and Epicycle, which also use antiphonal forces (albeit much larger, the latter including an ensemble of soloists). The disjecta membra of the Kyrie, present in the original, are thus further centrifugally separated by their dispersal in ‘space’ through the three vocal groups. The composer’s career-long problematization of the relationship between music and text can be traced to this early work. The text itself — monolithic and ‘untouchable’ — allows the composer to ‘direct the music, as it were, against the semantic level’,15 another manifestation of his maxim ‘that all invention comes from restriction.’16 The mass treats voices atypically for the genre: according to the composer, ‘the Missa occupies something approaching a key position in my output, since it is here that, for the first time, I set out to integrate the degree of performative difficulty into the repertoire of articulational possibilities then available to me.’17 These possibilities include numerous local-level indeterminate notations, such as in the looping structures in the Agnus Dei, which draw on three simultaneous independent tempi, prefiguring the multiple conductors in Firecycle and similar, albeit still more complex, loops in Transit.18 Like other works whose composition also followed that of the Missa, including Sieben Sterne and Cassandra’s Dream Song, it permits local level freedom of interpretation ‘exclusively for the realization of specific, clearly-defined psycho-interpretational conditions.’19 Although Ferneyhough does not draw on liturgical forms as an expression of faith, he does subtly play on the spiritual pedigree of the Mass in conjunction with the demands made of the performer: My unceasing concern was the shaping of the work as the locus of ‘totalized action’, even though it should be emphasized that such a concept lies far from the world of music theater. The action that I envisage was, and remains, spiritually interiorized.20 In the work’s final gesture, one of the sopranos is instructed to sustain a pitch at the highest part of her range for as long as possible (redolent of the conclusion of Unity Capsule, in which the flautist must continue to press keys even when his/her final breath has expired). Elsewhere, towards the conclusion of the Gloria, notation that only designates relative pitch for choir II (the singers must select pitches ‘more or less “out of tune”’ in relation to choirs I and III, such as quartertones) again prefigures the works with voice composed over the years immediately following.21 These techniques and functions of the notation are not present in the sketches for the earliest mass sections composed. The three antiphonal choirs may be considered a structural ordering device imposed on the earliest versions of the Kyrie and Gloria — ‘pre-composed material’ in effect — in order to contain and organize the isolated fragments. Before deciding upon an antiphonal structure, Ferneyhough had arranged the voices in the score so that all sopranos were grouped, all altos and so on. At the beginning of the published Gloria, all voices of the same type sing similar rhythms, enabling the text to be delivered synchronously between them, a vestige of the incomplete 1966 version. However, the continued intensification of the antiphonal principle throughout the work culminates in the three separate tempi noted above (one per choir) in the Agnus Dei, and the allocation of particular textures, registers and ‘colours’ 136

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to specific voices and choirs, a practice common to many of Ferneyhough’s pieces composed in the subsequent decade (and indeed, ever since). The Missa is one of the first works to explore the inversely proportional ratio between the amount of notational information and the (restrictive) ‘time-space’ within which it is to be articulated. The short Kyrie text is treated to the melismatic fragmentation expected in a mass setting; traditionally, the Gloria is set syllabically, being a significantly longer text. Instead, Ferneyhough increases notational and textural density, beginning to superimpose parts of the text, a tendency consolidated in the Sanctus and the Agnus, in which the antiphonal units collapse into twelve fully independent solo voices. In the same year in which the first drafts of the Missa Brevis were produced (1966), Ferneyhough also worked on the Two Marian Motets, which were eventually published in 2005 (revised, 2002). Here is yet another instance of Ferneyhough ‘creatively observing’ himself, though this time, at a far greater chronological remove than was the case in Funérailles. Further, whereas the two versions of Funérailles deliberately reflect the lapse of time and the nature of the compositional and (re-) working process between 1969 and 1980, the Two Marian Motets tend to conceal the much greater gap (both chronological and stylistic) separating the initial versions from their eventual publication. It says something for Ferneyhough’s opinion of these pieces that he was unwilling, at such a distance, to ‘consign [them] to the brutally terminal drawer of history.’22 There is in point of fact relatively little difference between the published scores and the earliest versions. The settings combine largely homophonic setting in the chorus with solo lines that overlap slightly at the beginnings and ends of sections. At the end of the Alma Redemptoris Mater, the separation of each syllable in the chorus by a rest (bars 70ff.) recalls a technique used in the cantus firmus of another work Ferneyhough greatly admires, Monteverdi’s Sonata Sopra Sancta Maria from the 1610 Vespers.23 The original Ave Gloriosa Mater Salvatoris was scored for soprano and alto solo with chorus. In his published ‘re-reading’ of it, Ferneyhough has simply broken what were four main chorus lines (SATB) into eight, and recast them rhythmically so that, for example, the single tenor line of the original is re-distributed between two, with the note-values halved but the original tempi and sectionalization retained. The second motet, Alma Redemptoris Mater, is published exactly as it was written in 1966. There is some (minimal) rhythmic complexification of the 1966 Ave Gloriosa, such as the passage that underlies the soprano solo (bars 60 to 67), but in general the notational and rhythmic presentation are less complex than much of Ferneyhough’s output, a feature in common with more recent works, beginning with the opera.24 This leads to a curious sense that the Two Marian Motets is a ‘late’ work, akin to moments in The Doctrine of Similarity from Shadowtime in style: although the vocal timbres are different, Ave Gloriosa recalls the text-setting technique in ‘Cannot Cross’ (canon III), in which different voices each contribute in succession a syllable or word towards a complete sentence. Perhaps the impression that the Motets is a ‘late’ work is testament to the persuasive power of context (since it is a ‘recent’ work within the published catalogue), but equally possibly it reveals something more fundamental about Ferneyhough’s latest style: it is unlikely that he could have published these Motets alongside works in the 1970s or 1980s, because  their notational differences alone would have been so marked. 137

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Their notational style is more typical of works composed after 2000. Significantly, the sketch materials preserve a fragment of an abandoned re-reading of the first motet, dated c. 1970.25 Here, the notation is very different in the chorus parts, commensurate with passages in the Missa Brevis (completed the previous year) but also incorporating indeterminate notation stipulating pitches and approximate durations only.26 Ferneyhough has inserted grace notes, which ‘complexify’ the appearance of the notation. Another setting follows, undated, which again increases the degree of notational complexity, with glissandi again being introduced as well as percussion to be performed by members of the vocal ensemble. The appearance of this score and its contents both suggest a date in the early 1970s, prefatory to such works as Time and Motion Study III and Transit, both of which also marry voices with percussion, and of course exhibit highly complex notation. Paradoxically perhaps, a return to this style in 2002 would have appeared too regressive a move; ignoring these intervening attempts, Ferneyhough revisited his original efforts in part because his attitude to notational complexity had changed most dramatically — he himself has noted that recently, ideas are presented comparatively more simply — since the formidable exemplars of the 1970s;27 and because he acknowledges yet another English influence in the 1966 compositions, preserved in the 2002 versions: ‘unlike many of my approximate contemporaries I was not extensively exposed to the British choral tradition at a formative age. In my late teens I encountered Dunstable and Tallis, and it was this latter — in particular through his Lamentations — who, in retrospect, clearly had some influence on my first attempts at choral writing.’28 Indeed, in Tallis’ Lamentations, single voices will often ‘be out of alignment with the rest at the beginnings and ends of phrases.’29 Ferneyhough acknowledges that the task of reproducing the works in 2002 was ‘a fascinating exercise in influence spotting’, noting that ‘there is also arguably some residual trace of the “contenance angloise” of Dunstable in the harmonic underpinnings of both motets’ (both use the diminished seventh chord).30 One reason why Ferneyhough has left these youthful works effectively to ‘speak for themselves’ is arguably because they consolidate his own contenance angloise, which has been a more visible feature of the published output in recent years; the 1970s — the years in which attempts were made to recast the works — is probably the decade in which Ferneyhough’s ambivalence towards the country of his birth tended most towards outright rejection. A final speculative perspective on the composer’s ‘autobiography’ from this early stage in his life is offered by the presence of two Latin words, ‘Camera Principis’, inscribed on the front of the original neat copies of the Marian Motets, in 1966 (to which Ferneyhough has later added ‘code word’ in brackets).31 Meaning ‘the Prince’s chamber’, the term is the motto of the City of Coventry, Ferneyhough’s birthplace, appearing on its coat of arms (purportedly representing its connection with the Black Prince in the fourteenth century).32 A room in St. Mary’s Guildhall, Coventry is known as the ‘Prince’s Chamber’, and the great hall in the same building contains a famous tapestry in six sections, three to the lower tier and three to the upper. The tapestry forms a triptych, representing Henry VI and his consort Queen Margaret in the outer panels, and the Virgin Mary in the lower central panel. This latter opens onto the upper tier, in which there are heavenly angels representing 138

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‘St. Mary in Glory’. Whether Ferneyhough ever saw this is a moot point, but the Two Marian Motets were entered for a competition in Birmingham, and the code word relates not to any property inherent in the work but to Ferneyhough himself: it was the identity under which he submitted his work to the competition jury.33 The ‘Tye Project’ and a Sense of Englishness: In nomine, O Lux, Dum transisset I–IV The subject of Ferneyhough’s Englishness is again brought to the fore in his recent engagement with the music of the Elizabethan composer Christopher Tye (c.1505–c.1572): to date, the ‘Tye project’ (an informal title only occasionally used by the composer, albeit with no cyclical intent) includes the four movement Dum transisset string quartet, an In nomine a 3 for wind trio, Joan of Arc’s ‘Palimpsestic Chorale’ from Shadowtime and O Lux for wind and string ensemble. This group of works also formulates the question of (re-)reading in a different way, since here its object is the music of another composer, a manner of working from which Ferneyhough appeared to hold himself aloof until the late 1990s. But among the earliest withdrawn materials held at the Sacher Stiftung is a transcription and arrangement of a William Byrd In nomine, part of an incomplete set of Three Pieces of William Byrd (1963). Not only is Ferneyhough’s recent exploration of ‘borrowed material’ representative of a career-long interest in Renaissance repertory, but the engagement with specifically English composers including Byrd and Tye suggests an attempt to claim for himself an English tradition,34 given that he acknowledges little empathy with ‘the onward-rolling, “roots-seeking” tendencies of the neo-medievalists’, presumably Britten, Finzi et al.35 If Ferneyhough’s engagement with Tye can be read, in part, as an identification with his Englishness, then the choice of such early exemplars may represent another ‘concretization of the act of composing’, a ‘creative observance’ of himself as English composer, even of the ‘extant, flesh and blood’ Ferneyhough: his practice is at least tinged with a sense of autobiography, albeit as an act of recuperation of a personally ‘acceptable’ heritage at some considerable historical remove (or, so to speak, a safe distance) from his immediate one. Tye’s instrumental works (usually played on viols) include over twenty In nomines, five pieces with motet titles (of which O Lux is one), and four settings of Dum transisset. Ferneyhough’s approach to the borrowed material is different in each case, sometimes drawing on the structure of Tye’s work as opposed to the detail of the material. The In nomine a 3 emulates Tye’s contrapuntal and rhythmic complexity. The composition of In nomines became popular in the sixteenth-century. The origin of the tradition is John Taverner’s Missa Gloria Tibi Trinitas, a section of which (setting the phrase ‘In nomine domini’) was often extracted and played as a short instrumental piece. As was typical, the mass was based on a cantus firmus, and it is this melody that forms the basis of In nomine compositions, essentially polyphonic fantasies on the plainchant excerpt, heard in the ‘mean’ (second-highest) voice in the relevant section of Taverner’s ‘Benedictus’. Tye’s In nomines usually have a subtitle, embodying a biblical or other devotional reference. 139

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In Ferneyhough’s piece, the clarinet intones the plainchant incipit, which is then intervallically compressed and re-read in the opening trio material. Ferneyhough’s form is built on a principle of repetition. He divides his In nomine into two equal halves (12 bars each), the second of which re-reads the first. The texture periodically settles on a root position triad (as, for example F–A–C at bars 4, 12 and 20) at which junctures Tye’s original sound-world cuts through the microtonal complexity, however fleetingly. It is also audible in the descending quavers, albeit distorted in register, in bars 11 and 23.36 Ferneyhough’s O Lux is more obviously modelled on the eponymous work by Tye. Scored for ten instruments (five wind, five strings), Ferneyhough maps the structure of Tye’s O Lux onto his, bar for bar. Until bar 20 (coinciding with a cadence in the model), the Tye pitch material only features in the wind ensemble, the strings embellishing it microtonally and texturally (Figure 5.2). After bar 20, both strings and wind participate in a close parody, by Ferneyhough’s standards, of Tye’s material:37 Ferneyhough takes over its polyphony wholesale, albeit subjecting it to rhythmic, textural and registral distortion such that stylistically (if not in terms of fundamental pitch and harmonic content) the piece is unambiguously Ferneyhough. Nevertheless, periodically the harmonic world of Tye’s model is suddenly audibly present. Tye’s piece also includes numerous imitative entries at short distance, many beginning with three repeated notes, in staggered order; Ferneyhough’s treatment of string entries in the first 20 bars implicitly refers to this, each voice typically delayed by an incrementally longer rest after the first violin, which begins on the first beat of the bar (Figure 5.3).38 Tye composed four untexted five-part settings of the plainchant Dum transisset Sabbatum [‘When the Sabbath had passed’], a responsory for the Nocturn of the eve of Easter. As with In nomine, many of Tye’s contemporaries set Dum transisset; contemporaries of Ferneyhough who have set the text include Jonathan Harvey.39 Following Tye, Ferneyhough’s work is purely instrumental, based on the Sarum plainsong.40 According to the editor of Tye’s instrumental music, ‘[Tye’s] four works comprise an especially interesting group because of their clearly defined sections, set off by single vertical lines through the staff in each part, accompanied in some instances by internal “fermata” signs.’41 This is reflected in Ferneyhough’s approach to the first of his own settings — ‘Reliquary’ — which is also structured in short clearly defined sections, separated by double bar lines, each section subject to metric modulation relative to the previous one (perhaps a perspective on Tye’s fermata-like signs, particular to each section). Grace note figures are ‘relics’ of Tye’s Dum transisset I, contained by the main material — the ‘reliquary’ — which though unrelated to Tye, is typical of Ferneyhough’s gestural writing for string quartet.42 The titles of Ferneyhough’s movements are highly evocative, which betokens a more direct, even playful, manner than is typically associated with him. Rather like the recent Plötzlichkeit [‘Suddenness’], these titles relate to the composer’s structural approach, providing a starting point for the listener. At the same time, the playfulness of their titles signals the same quality in the pieces themselves, whose materials come close to ‘illustration’ in musical terms.43 ‘Totentanz’ is an effective description of the array of texture-types and playing techniques in the second movement, recalling Ferneyhough’s ‘black scherzo’ epithet used to describe other works in the sketches,44 and inspired by frescoes of death dancing 140

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Figure 5.2:  O Lux, bars 13–16, Tye material (wind) and embellishment (strings).

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Figure 5.3:  O Lux, bars 10–12, strings.

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on Church walls.45 Into this deliberately grotesque ‘darkness’ occasional ‘light’ penetrates in the form of Tye’s own material. The title of the third movement, ‘Shadows’, resonates with one of the composer’s longest-standing preoccupations, repeatedly explored in relation to Shadowtime in particular (as well as in other Benjamin-inspired works). The strings are muted and distant-sounding, ending ppppp, so that the opening of the following movement (‘fff sord. via’) is as shocking as the removal of mutes towards the end of Funérailles I and II, which is, like ‘Shadows’, a ‘veiled’ piece. In the latter, shadows of Tye’s material, subject to extreme distortion, contribute to an examination of the limits of audibility, its intangible fragments always on the point of disappearing. Figure 5.4 illustrates Ferneyhough’s treatment of his model.

Figure 5.4a:  Christopher Tye, opening of Dum transisset III a 5.46

Figure 5.4b:  Ferneyhough Dum transisset, third movement, ‘Shadows’. Glimpses of Tye material.47

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The fourth movement, ‘Contrafacta’, invokes the practice whereby a new text is substituted for the original one in medieval and Renaissance music, without substantial change to the music.48 The title is curious in view of the lack of text in Ferneyhough’s settings, but probably refers (ironically) to the composer’s ‘contrafacting’ new material into the existing plainchant, which he recalls having found unmemorable in itself.49 ‘Contrafacta’ begins with a rhythmic unison — an occasional feature of Tye’s Dum transisset settings — and with the instruments in pitch unison, each line compressed into a range of less than a perfect fourth (C G to F), with most neighbouring pitches a semitone apart. The even rhythm and repetitive pitch content are suggestive of Ferneyhough’s ‘modified plainchant’, not least when the propensity for reiterated pitches and repeating patterns in the original is taken into account. This texture recurs throughout the work, although not as emphatically as at the outset. The idea is developed with each return, and there are moments in which, save for a few registral and pitch modifications, the original plainsong is prominent, as at bar 19 (Figure 5.5b).

Figure 5.5a:  Dum transisset: first 32 pitches of Sarum plainsong.

Figure 5.5b:  Ferneyhough, Dum transisset, fourth movement, ‘Contrafacta’, bar 19.

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Occasional Works Throughout his career, Ferneyhough has composed a number of small-scale occasional pieces, and although these tend to be conceived as standalone entities, they point to important facets of the larger-scale works, some revealing fundamental stylistic tendencies in nuce, others reflecting on or prefiguring directions taken in Ferneyhough’s career. A  number of the works are miniatures. His Fanfare for Klaus Huber (1987), for two percussionists, lasts barely 55 seconds in performance, but its ramifications for the slightly later percussion solo Bone Alphabet (1991) are significant. Like the later piece, Fanfare leaves the choice of instruments to the discretion of the performers, prescribing only a short decay and differentiation in register, from high to low. The performers are challenged to create a number of unique sounds that cannot be repeated in the piece, identified for each player on the lower stave. Proportional relationships are important, both from bar to bar (the composer drawing once again on so-called irrational metres such as 3/20 or 4/12) affecting the density of particular bars relative to others, despite the tempo remaining constant, and in the relationship between the two players’ materials, such that one will often be subject to tuplet subdivisions where the other will not. Although rhythmic patterns and their recombination and variation are sustained over a much longer duration in Bone Alphabet, the sectionalization of Fanfare is characteristic of that underlying Bone Alphabet, which consists of a number of predefined sections that were reordered to produce a definitive score. Amongst his earliest published works, the Four Miniatures for flute and piano (1965) explore the relationship between two forces, initiating Ferneyhough’s ‘employment of diverse notational conventions in different formal and expressive contexts’ in the 1970s.50 The notation of the interrelationship between flute and piano changes section-by-section, allowing for a considerable degree of flexibility in performance. Some passages are without metronome markings or metre, leaving the instruments essentially uncoordinated, yet each is expected to pay attention to the rhythmically precise figures in its own part. The final section pushes this idea the furthest, according the responsibility for the resolution of the moment-to-moment dialogue and consequently the shape of the work to the performers. Other early works, including Coloratura (1966) for oboe and piano, also make a formal feature of the difference between two forces, bringing them together periodically to comment on one another. Another, albeit later, miniature is relevant here: the Café de la Mort Subite is the famous brewery tap for the eponymous line of lambic beers brewed in Brussels. The beer and the café take their name from the fact that stockbrokers at the local bourse (Exchange) would meet there and play cards. When the traders received word that they were urgently needed, they would curtail the card game by going to sudden death (mort subite). Ferneyhough’s piece Mort Subite (1990) for piccolo, piano, clarinet and vibraphone with click tracks is predicated on the same principle of ‘sudden death’, dividing the ensemble into two pairs each performing its own rhythmic layer, coordinated by click tracks.51 The first layer (piccolo and piano) is notated using regular metres (5/8, 3/8 and so on); the second (clarinet and vibraphone) 145

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uses so-called irrational metres (for example 5/10, 4/12). In cycling each layer through phases, coincidences between the pairs result in the emergence of ‘macrorhythm’.52 Despite its brevity, Mort subite incorporates levels of rhythmic and processual complexity found in much larger-scale works, and a rare instance of a comprehensive analysis by Ferneyhough himself aids appreciation of details — including filter processes that involve tying impulses in a given pattern together to generate new values — from which more general principles of the composer’s rhythmic approach may be extrapolated.53 Adagissimo (1983) for string quartet, a contribution to Sir Michael Tippett’s eightieth birthday celebrations, reinterprets part of the rhythmic matrix from the orchestral work La terre est un homme (notwithstanding the apparent discrepancy between the larger work’s monolithic nature and the concentrated miniature form of Adagissimo). Whereas the quartet pieces Dum transisset and the more recent Exordium (2008) exemplify Ferneyhough’s latest style, the composer himself regards Adagissimo as a ‘return to the miniature form in order to reconsider [his] initial point of departure.’54 Earlier miniatures provide a useful context when assessing the significance of a work as diminutive as Adagissimo (which lasts under two minutes in performance), for although its materials are highly evolved compared with those of the earliest works, the same demand is prioritized from a performance perspective: the two pairs of string players must negotiate playing together whilst maintaining the individual character(s) of their own materials, which is further differentiated by the use of quartertones in the violins, and of inflectional microtones in the viola and ’cello. The sharp contrast between the material of the two pairs of instruments is a result of complex prolational processes which are very audible, texturally speaking. Overall, the texture resembles that of an isorhythmic motet, with slower moving lower voices moving in longer durational values.55 Indeed, the first two bars resemble the sort of reduced-voice incipit that characterizes the beginnings of isorhythmic periods in the works of Dunstable and others, and the return of gestures such as those outlined at the beginning — chord, glissando, harmonic — on numerous occasions suggests the melodic color typical of medieval isorhythm forms. (None of these three texture-types appear in the lower voices.) The difference in microtonal language between the pairs is a subtle instance of the use of notational conventions to enhance an expressive context: the visual appearance alone of the little arrowheads on the accidentals in the lower voices, compounded by their longer phrases, is suggestive of a yearning character, a strategy explored much later, and in much greater depth in the Sixth Quartet of 2010.56 Also worth noting is the difference in expressive markings and dynamics between upper and lower duos: the dynamic envelopes in the lower instruments tend to be longer (as in the gradual crescendo from bar 15–18, ’cello), and the Italian performance instructions include affetuoso and cantabile, in contrast to the more technical indications in the violins. As an example of a work in which prolational processes are explicitly worked into the texture, Adagissimo also looks forward to works including La Chute d’Icare and much later string quartet music, namely, Dum transisset, the Sixth Quartet and Exordium. 146

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Exordium, composed as a tribute to Elliott Carter on his hundredth birthday, exemplifies in miniature Ferneyhough’s latest approach to musical form in tiny sections, each designated by a roman numeral in the score.57 As has just been mentioned, Exordium employs prolational techniques as one of a number of transformational ploys applied to a fundamental unison idea, which extends beyond the rhythmic, dynamic and articulation unison of the Second String Quartet to incorporate pitch as well. This is highly unusual in Ferneyhough’s music: there are two extended passages where a single line of music is provided with the instruction tutti i quattro (bars 31–37 and 63–66). This texture demands that four players think as one, perfecting rhythmic and pitch synchronicity, despite the presence of inflectional microtones in the unison material. An inflected tone is a rather different proposition on the ’cello than on a violin, and achieving unison in such passages is virtually impossible, not least because the very concept of inflection builds in a degree of flexibility. They are purposely not notated as measured eighth-tones. The resulting sound is tense and slightly flawed, complementing the glassy harmonics that dominate the piece. After the first unison fragment, Ferneyhough differentiates between the instruments by adjusting the values in one or more parameters (in fragment II, he subtly alters a few pitches, in III pitches and rhythm, and so on). Prolational processes audibly occur in fragment XIII, in which the first violin’s material is given at slower rates of unfolding in the remaining instruments. Significant parts of the work — apart from a handful of attempts on the part of the ’cello to ‘escape’ with loud, rapid gestures in contrast to the other instruments’ relative inactivity (as in fragments XVI, XXIV and XLI) — deliberately explore the limits of audibility, evoking the quieter, other-worldly passages in the Fifth Quartet, which also prioritizes a recurring texture in harmonics. However small the sections, each has its own gestural shape: the work’s structure — as the juxtaposition of numerous little fragments — transmits itself readily to the listener, but makes no sense or continuity: in Ferneyhough words, ‘in common with many medieval grimoires and books of spells, Exordium elevates the non-sequitur to a formal principle […] the work might thus be seen as a special case of “sympathetic magic”.’58 Despite Ferneyhough’s avowals throughout his career that his music conveys neither narratives nor emotional states, there is an eeriness about the sound-world of Exordium suggestive of dark, magical fantasy. The difficulty arises for the listener in the rate of change of the fragments, and how one assimilates them into a larger context. Ideas from the beginning return (for example the rapidly ascending then descending glissando gesture in fragment I returns at XIV), but this can hardly be interpreted as long-range formal thinking in itself, since the fragment form foregrounds the ‘moment’ at the expense of a sense of continuity obtaining between them. Exordium is closest in formal conception to the Sixth Quartet, although important differences are attributable to their difference of scale: in order to sustain the Sixth over some 40 minutes, longer-term ‘middleground’ procedures are invoked, contributing to an impression of greater freedom in comparison with previous quartets.59 Although Ferneyhough does briefly use unison playing in the Sixth, its occurrence within this freer sound-world gives the impression of a contextually expressive texture-type rather than a main recurring structural feature (as in Exordium, in 147

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which expression arises from the dual constraints of unison playing and the sectionalized form). The gestures that constitute the respective fragments, and which strain against the constraints, are seductively direct, each possessing a graspable physiognomy, but the listener barely has time to register one before the next, often contradictory, fragment is underway. Examples include VIII and XXXII, the latter characterized by descending glissandi taken to an extreme in the ’cello, the figural definition in the upper instruments giving way to a minimalist line, as though in an abstract painting. Provisional Bookends: Prometheus and Liber Scintillarum The two pieces considered last bookend the current chamber output to date, being composed at a distance of some forty-five years, although beyond this artificial distinction they share some notable features, not least by virtue of their instrumentation. Prometheus (1967) for wind sextet was originally conceived as an instrumental ‘motet’ (an intriguing notion in itself) scored for wind quintet and dated January–April 1965. The sextet contains most of the original ‘motet’, but includes new material such as extended solos and re-readings. The final version’s only ‘borrowed material’ amounts to self-borrowing from the earlier quintet. This concluded with a tutti, and a further attempt was made in late 1967 to recast the final solo as a tutti, although this was evidently rejected. The work is only one of several for wind and/or brass composed in the mid-1960s, many of which were never completed or published. The instrumentation draws on the composer’s experience of playing different instruments in a marching band during his youth in Coventry, and the resulting performance opportunities then available to him. (Ferneyhough reflects on his band experience recently in his highly inventive treatment of the brass in the orchestral piece, Plötzlichkeit, as mentioned in Chapter 1.) Along with several works from the same period (the Missa Brevis, the Two Marian Motets, Firecycle Beta) and indeed the much later orchestral piece just mentioned, Prometheus exemplifies its composer’s use of liturgical musical forms and structures (albeit  often obliquely: there is a parallel with Boulez’s occasional use of such liturgical titles, such as Anthèmes or Répons, again with no intended religious connotations). As mentioned earlier in connection with the Missa Brevis, such long-established forms offer a type of resistance to the composer. As in Firecycle Beta, in which sections are named ‘Alleluia’, ‘Sequence’ or ‘Amen’, Ferneyhough treats liturgical forms as means of classifying compositional procedures, rather than with any intended religious or liturgical purpose. In  keeping with Prometheus’ original motet form, he constructs cantus firmi as limiting devices around which material is built. Other forms — for example those predicated on organic ideals — which are, relatively speaking, more recent historical phenomena and come loaded with a different kind of semantic legacy and aesthetic, could not offer the composer that same degree of resistance. Prometheus is also significant for being the first example that Ferneyhough cites of his use of ‘primitive filtering operations.’60 The substantial pre-compositional material, which includes 148

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the aforementioned cantus firmi, rhythmic rows and sequences of dynamics, ensures that ‘by choosing one alternative in each instance [of compositional decision] I was already limiting the field of meaningful choices in respect of subsequent operations.’61 The work reflects what Ferneyhough calls ‘an intense interest, around 1966/7, in exploring the implications inherent in the question of predetermination versus spontaneity in musical composition’,62 though in reality this interest extended well into the 1980s, and is a defining preoccupation of the Carceri cycle.63 The cantus firmi motifs in Prometheus are clearly identifiable in the work’s initial stages. Cantus firmus A (as it is labelled in the sketches) is a combination of the flute and bassoon lines, bars 1–4; cantus firmus B is stated in the clarinet and cor anglais, also bars 1–4 (in both cases the single line is split between two instruments). These are found, usually ornamented or obscured by variation, throughout the piece (bars 15–16, cor anglais or bar 19, flute include reappearances of B and A respectively). There are three further cantus firmi, which Ferneyhough also labels ‘seminal motifs’ in the sketches: the first occurs in bars 15–17 (clarinet), the second in bars 17–18 (bassoon) and the last in bars 18–20 (also bassoon). Again, recurrences are plentiful, as for example in bar 22 (‘seminal motif 1’, clarinet) and later in the piece (‘seminal motif 1’, bassoon, bars 250–251). It is worth noting that Ferneyhough had initially planned a ‘twin’ piece, Prometheus Beta,64 and although the notion was never followed up, it casts light on the two-version form of Funérailles, completed a decade or so later.65 Be that as it may, the mythical figure of Prometheus typifies Ferneyhough’s early artistic preoccupations (with Heraclitus in particular), relating to the regenerative, world-creating power of fire as metaphor for the self-renewing, cyclical nature of the musical work (as in the slightly later Firecycle Beta): a score copy used for the first performance on July 4, 1967 includes the exclamation ‘this is the cycle of fire!’ on the cover.66 The sketches from the same period contain a written note to the effect that the Prometheus myth was ‘a stimulus of great significance from the point of view of my own composition’,67 suggesting that self-observation in the process of writing music, simultaneously understood as self-creation through the work, and doubtless a legacy of his auto-didacticism, has been fundamental to his praxis since the beginning. That this preoccupation has remained with him since is clear from a remark in one of his most recent interviews, in which he suggests that ‘the important thing is for the composer to recompose himself in the act of composition. To do that he has to enrich, alter and realign himself beforehand, and that is only possible with certain consistencies in his inner make-up.’68 Prometheus is arguably one of the first works in which this aspiration is raised to a structural principle. It falls into three sections separated by solo cadenzas (a third cadenza completes the work), exemplifying the cyclical nature of the formal structure and recalling similar solo threads linking tutti in the Sonatas for String Quartet and numerous other works (some composed much later, such as Flurries). The three tutti sections — each a series of loose variations, the third section itself a variation of the first, and the second a ‘free fantasia’ — are labelled ‘chorales’ in the sketch materials, and one which the composer recalls writing in the anteroom of the Royal Academy of Music, London, emerges out of the polyphonic texture in its original form (bars 190ff.) as a series of richly orchestrated chords, the more effective for the complete textural contrast 149

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with surrounding material.69 Each instrument is generally accorded its own figurations and developmental procedures throughout, but for this short passage prior to the final solo, the ensemble exudes a self-consistent sonority built around the cantus firmi, the resulting dissonances causing the chords to beat with intensity. Ferneyhough’s most recently premiered chamber work at the time of writing is Liber Scintillarum (2012) for six players, three winds (clarinet, oboe, flute) and three strings (violin, viola, ’cello). If Exordium is conceived on the basis of a medieval Grimoire, Liber evokes a wholly different text, at the opposite end of the spectrum: ecstatic revelation rather than black magic (though it is worth noting that to the medieval mind these would have been regarded as two sides of the same coin rather than diametrical opposites). Compiled by a monk known as Defensor in the late seventh century, the Liber Scintillarum [Book of Sparks] consists of proverbs extracted from the Bible and collected together in a single volume. The attraction of such a concept is obvious, bearing in mind Ferneyhough’s recent treatment of form in many miniature sections, and the resulting composition aspires to present musical ‘sparks’, although the composer also sees the work as contributing to a series including earlier pieces — Incipits and Flurries, for example, discussed in Chapter 4 — characterized as ‘involuntary scherzos by reason of the sometimes imperiously wayward or unpredictable demands made […] by the material during the course of composition.’70 Underlying the composition is a pre-composed rhythmic matrix of phenomenal complexity in as many as twenty layers, often involving multiple stacked tuplets far exceeding any such nestings in published works. In Liber Scintillarum, these are generally filtered and presented in a slightly less complex fashion, although there remain many difficult ratio subdivisions for performers to negotiate. Echoing the extraction of biblical proverbs in the Liber Scintillarum, Ferneyhough extracts layers from his matrix to supply material for the small sections of the work, sometimes deploying only a few of the twenty possible layers, and at other times ‘scanning’ or ‘sweeping over’ all of them.71 The latter situation seems to arise nearer the beginning of the piece, where the sections are longer, and the transition from texture to texture smoother than after the work’s midpoint. The rather lugubrious texture, slower tempo and quieter dynamic at bar 19 for several bars, despite the inclusion of many different ‘micro’ textures such as glissando and gettato, creates a linearity that suggests this is a passage in which Ferneyhough ‘scans’ the layers. Aside from rhythm, other parameters — in particular, the gestural, articulational and dynamic character of the work — result from Ferneyhough’s moment-to-moment responses to the possibilities suggested by his particular reading of the matrix and materials in the immediate vicinity of the particular juncture in question. Consequently there are few large-scale formal markers, although those familiar with works such as Flurries, or indeed Prometheus, will recognize the typically antiphonal treatment of the ensemble in places — the two timbrally distinct trios — and the appearance of brief passages in reduced texture (for example bars 134–146 for strings only, antiphonal pairs from bar 115 and wind duos bars 189–190 and 207–208). The only solo ‘cadenza’ occurs in the bass clarinet between bars 208–11, although there are short soloistic passages earlier in the piece in which the remainder of the ensemble takes a clearly secondary role (for example 150

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Figure 5.6a:  Liber Scintillarum, pre-compositional rhythmic matrix, bar 6.

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Figure 5.6b:  Liber Scintillarum, flute, bar 6.

the flute at bar 39). Approximately at the piece’s midpoint, a structural closure of sorts initiates new (reduced) texture and the insertion of pauses between sections, including some that are ‘coloured’ by material sustained from one section to the next.72 Here, textural changes are more abrupt from moment to moment, suggesting that Ferneyhough selects a few layers from the matrix, before moving onto a new configuration. The section at bars 96–114 summarizes the gesture types up until that point, its texture comprising small blocks involving subsets of the total ensemble, of which some sound successively and others simultaneously. In the following section (bar 115 ff.), two of the wind instruments are exchanged for their lower relatives (oboe for English horn and clarinet for bass clarinet), recalling the progressively lower flute register in the Carceri cycle. Two recurring figural types are broadly defined as repetitive rhythmic figurations and lyrical statements, perhaps hinting at the precepts underlying two types of time, one strictly measured and one not — Chronos and Aion respectively — the basic concepts for another recent piece (Chronos-Aion 2008), discussed in detail in Chapter 10. Occasionally the rhythmic figures in Liber Scintillarum take the form of ostinati, but often Ferneyhough slightly reconfigures the internal repetitions in a gesture or inserts rests where notes are expected, resulting in a greater challenge for the performer, a skewed form of Chronos (as in the violin, bars 109–110 and oboe 127).73 Some gestures are distinguished by three identical-ratio tuplets of different lengths stacked at one end of the figure, accompanied by a dynamic swell or accent (for example the final part of bar 219 (English horn), or bars 207 and 211 (bass clarinet)). This concentrates tension in one area of a gesture, setting off the sparks — scintillae — of the title. One particularly striking passage — in which both trios engage in a rare exploration of shared materials — begins at bar 149, and revisits a repeated pitch idea from earlier in the piece. Such strings of repeated pitches are atypical in Ferneyhough’s music, giving a surface impression of simplicity despite being treated to complex rhythmic subdivisions that are difficult to coordinate in performance (recalling the central problem for performers in Exordium). Towards the end of the piece, the antiphonal potential is consolidated in the final exposé of extended linear materials in the winds and directional, regular pizzicato gestures in the strings. 152

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Notes   1 It may be that Ferneyhough was not being commissioned by chamber groups at the time, so that his attentions were focused elsewhere; it is also true that the majority of works written throughout the 1960s, many of which were never published, were for small chamber groups, and that conversely both solo and orchestral writing is underrepresented in that period, accounting perhaps in part for the subsequent redress.   2 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 274.   3 Ibid., 329.   4 Ibid., 330.   5 Ibid., 273. Funérailles is not the only work in Ferneyhough’s oeuvre to have used a title from Liszt’s works; the Etudes transcendantales (1982–1985) is another. This does beg the question whether there is more to the Lisztian connection than Ferneyhough’s professed bafflement indicates. He says in response to an interviewer’s question that he has ‘always had this certain “thing” with Liszt’ […] I once considered calling a piece Les préludes.’ (Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 273).   6 Ibid., 331.   7 The sketches for String Set are not archived separately, unlike those relating to most other incomplete or withdrawn works. Some are found in the respective folders with sketches for Funérailles, Time and Motion Study II and Epicycle, indicating the length of time over which Ferneyhough worked on the piece. Although there is no definitive evidence that String Set is an earlier version of Funérailles, it is reasonable to infer this from details in the sketches. Another incomplete ‘work’, Chamber Set of 1964 might also have been a version of the same or similar ideas, incorporating non-string instruments. In a letter preserved in the sketches and written in 1977, ostensibly devoted to a discussion of Time and Motion Study I, Ferneyhough refers at some length to a piece he was working on at the time (to be scored for violin, viola and ’cello, horn and trombone, bass flute and bass clarinet, guitar and harp). He describes its musical ‘fabric at one and the same time detailed and intense but also withdrawn, as if being executed “behind a veil”. […] I searched for a word, but could only find a very unsatisfactory one — sadness, passivity too.’ He adds that the veiled effect would result from muted brass, low register and the strings in harmonics or muted throughout. Although the instrumentation is very different from that of Funérailles, the terms of its characterization are strikingly similar. It may be that what is described is an intermediary stage, perhaps an initial attempt at defining what was to become Funérailles II. What relationship with Funérailles I was intended (if any) can only be guessed at, although the glimpse of the composer’s working methods, in which several distinct impulses may lie behind an eventually completed piece, is a fascinating one. (The intended recipient of this letter is named only as ‘Harry’: it may be inferred from a passing remark that this is Harry Halbreich.)   8 Ferneyhough, unpublished sketch materials, Funérailles, Paul Sacher Stiftung, Basel, c. 1969–1977.   9 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 331. 10 Ibid., 329–330. 11 Brian Ferneyhough, Funérailles version II (London: Peters Edition, No. 7224, 1980), 29. Original emphasis. 153

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12 Peter Rosser, “Brian Ferneyhough and the ‘Avant-garde experience’: Benjaminian tropes in ‘Funérailles’,” Perspectives of New Music 48/2 (2010): 124. 13 Rosser, “Brian Ferneyhough and the Avant-garde Experience,” 116. 14 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 329. 15 Ibid., 90. 16 Ibid., 132. 17 Ibid., 92. 18 See the inserts in Transit, or Vocal Model I. 19 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 92. 20 Ibid. 21 Brian Ferneyhough, Missa Brevis (London: Peters Edition, No. 7125, 1969), 23. 22 Brian Ferneyhough, Liner Notes, Brian Ferneyhough: Choral Music, BBC Singers, Lontano, Métier msv28501, 2007, CD. Not long afterwards he sent a neat copy of his withdrawn First String Quartet to the Paul Sacher Stiftung in Basel in 2011 (the withdrawn First Quartet is discussed in Chapter 6). 23 Ferneyhough refers to his esteem for this work in Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 338. 24 This is touched upon in Chapter 2 of this book, on Ferneyhough’s notation. He suggests that his notation is presented less complexly than earlier in his career because his musical language has expanded semantically, a consequence of engaging with the opera genre. He cites the scale of Shadowtime as a reason for this necessary semantic expansion, but at the same time upholds the idea that opera relates to the world more directly than other genres (insofar as his opera is ‘about’ Walter Benjamin and initially, at least, his real-life experiences, the composer’s approach bears out his view). Works subsequent to the opera, whilst no less rigorously composed than those 40 years earlier, and fundamentally no less musically complex, consolidate the approach to notation taken in Shadowtime. This is discussed elsewhere in this book (Chapters 2 and 10 in particular) in relation to works composed after 2000. See also Meyer, “Ein Gespräch mit Brian Ferneyhough,” 51. 25 Ferneyhough added the date 1970 and a question mark at the time he prepared the unpublished/withdrawn materials to send to the Sacher Stiftung in the early 1990s. 26 See the Benedictus, for example, bars 14, 17–18. 27 Meyer, “Ein Gespräch mit Brian Ferneyhough,” 51. 28 Brian Ferneyhough, Liner Notes, Brian Ferneyhough: Choral Music, BBC Singers, Lontano. Métier msv28501, 2007, CD. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid. 31 Ferneyhough, unpublished sketch materials, Two Marian Motets, Paul Sacher Stiftung, Basel, c. 1966. 32 See “St. Mary’s Guildhall, Coventry’s Best Kept Medieval Secret,” http://www.stmarysguildhall. co.uk/download/downloads/id/7/visitor_leaflet (accessed October 20, 2012). 33 Brian Ferneyhough, personal communication, November 26, 2012. He recalls that he was reasonably confident that no one else from Coventry would be amongst the entrants, hence his choice of ‘code word’. 34 Elsewhere, Ferneyhough identifies amongst his significant points of reference the English composers Thomas Tallis, John Dunstable, Henry Purcell and William Lawes. See 154

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35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56

Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 139 and 427. The question of Ferneyhough’s Englishness is discussed in Fabrice Fitch, “Brian Ferneyhough and the Prima Prattica,” unpublished paper read at Brian Ferneyhough: A Symposium, Institute of Music Research, University of London, Senate House, London, February 23, 2011. Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 206. A propos of this remark, Ferneyhough further explains: ‘Not that I objected in principle to this approach — just that their tradition was not mine, since the English heritage never seeped through to my level of existence’ (Ibid.) A ‘window’ is typically opened onto Tye’s music in the 3/8 bars. The term ‘parody’ is here used in the sense of direct modelling, following its use in discussions of Renaissance repertoire. Up to bar 20, the winds use Tye’s pitch material, and the strings’ material is derived from Tye’s rhythms. Harvey’s motet of that name for unaccompanied SATB choir dates from 1995. The Use of Salisbury [latin Sarum] was established by the Bishop of Salisbury in the 11th century and was used throughout most of England, Wales, Ireland and later Scotland. Robert Weidner, ed., Christopher Tye: The Instrumental Music, Recent Researches in the Music of the Renaissance, Vol. III (AR Editions, 1997), xi. Ferneyhough, Programme notes, “Dum Transisset,” http://www.music21c.org/pdfs/ArdittiQuartet_program-notes.pdf (accessed January 7, 2013). There are numerous examples of what might be called musical ‘illustration’ in Ferneyhough’s works, in spite of his avowed rejection of it, in relation to his music. For example, in Chapter 2, and example from the clarinet solo in La Chute d’Icare is given; in Chapter 8, aspects of word-painting are discussed in relation to the Etudes transcendantales. See Chapter 3 on the solo works in this book for further detail. Ferneyhough, Programme notes, “Dum Transisset”. The transcription of the plainchant (Figure 5a) and Tye’s polyphony are taken from Weidner, ed., Christopher Tye: The Instrumental Music. Compare the pitch patterns, for example, in Tye’s highest voice with Ferneyhough’s violin 1. Robert Falck and Martin Picker, “Contrafactum,” Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online, Oxford University Press, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/06361. Ferneyhough, “Dum transisset,” Programme Notes, http://www.music21c.org/pdfs/ArdittiQuartet_program-notes.pdf (accessed January 7, 2013). Ibid. The piece was composed for the Nieuw Ensemble on the occasion of their tenth anniversary. Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 56. Ibid., 56–60. Ibid., 303. See Fabrice Fitch, “Prima Prattica”. This stratified texture resembles that of Song 5 of the Etudes. Interestingly, in rehearsal with student performers at the Royal Northern College of Music (Manchester) in February 2011, the composer instructed the violist and ’cellist to interpret the notated inflectional microtones in their parts as eighth-tones, perhaps reflecting Ferneyhough’s more frequent use of eighth-tones in the intervening years (as in the clarinet part of La Chute d’Icare of 1988). This re-thinking of the material is telling, given the 155

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57 58 59 60 61 62 63

64 65

66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73

qualitative difference set up in the notation between an inflectional and a precise microtonal usage, corresponding to the character of the two strata, the violins hard-edged and angular, the lower instruments languid and lyrical. Possibly Ferneyhough wished to prevent the lower pair from being imprecise in their interpretation of these inflectional pitch-values. This approach to form will be considered at greater length in Chapters 9 (Shadowtime) and 10 (Orchestral). Ferneyhough, Exordium (London: Peters Edition No. 71045, 2008). Paul Archbold et al., “Performing Complexity,” 62. Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 308. Ibid., 308. Ferneyhough, Prometheus (London: Peters Edition), http://www.editionpeters.com/ resources/0001/stock/pdf/prometheus.pdf (accessed December 14, 2012). The Carceri d’Invenzione Cycle is essentially predicated on the opposition between the ‘automatic’ and the ‘informal’ (terms taken from the sketches for the constituent works, the latter presumably drawing on Adorno’s term ‘informelle’ from his 1961 essay), in other words the pre-compositional and process-driven on the one hand and the spontaneous, contextuallydependent generation of material on the other. The discussion of two extremes — one of music generated by spontaneous compositional acts and the other, total abstraction — in Ferneyhough’s essay “Form-Figure-Style: An Intermediate Assessment”, echoes Adorno’s own essay. Ferneyhough’s dates from 1982 and is contemporaneous with the composition of elements of the Carceri cycle. See Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 21–28. Ferneyhough refers to the ‘twin’ in Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 309. It is given its name, Prometheus Beta in the sketches (Ferneyhough, unpublished sketch materials, Prometheus, Paul Sacher Stiftung Basel, c. 1967). It is likely that the works would not have been recognizably twinned, however, save for their use of the same instrumental ensemble, since Ferneyhough planned for the second work to have ‘absolutely contrasting characteristics’ relative to the first. (Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 309). He follows a similar objective in the Third String Quartet 20 years later, generating two very different movements from the same precompositional matrix. The score used for the first performance at the Mahatma Gandhi Hall, London is now retained with the sketches for Prometheus at the Paul Sacher Stiftung, Basel. Ferneyhough, unpublished sketch materials, Prometheus, Paul Sacher Stiftung, Basel, c. 1967. Thomas Meyer, “Ein Gespräch mit Brian Ferneyhough,” 54. Brian Ferneyhough, personal communication, November 26, 2012. The reference to the ‘free fantasia’ (the second tutti section) is found in the sketches for Prometheus. Ferneyhough, Programme notes, “Liber Scintillarum,” http://internationales-musikinstitut. de/index.php?view=details&id=485%3Arecherche-hoeren-ii&pop=1&tmpl=component& option=com_eventlist&lang=de (accessed November 30, 2012). Ibid. Similar pauses between sections are found in Plötzlichkeit and Chronos-Aion, discussed in Chapter 10 on works for orchestra and large ensemble. At the opposite extreme there are some bars with no tuplets and just semiquavers, representing a simple material in the context of Ferneyhough’s general oeuvre, as for example at bar 185. 156

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T

he String Quartet holds a special place in Ferneyhough’s oeuvre. To date there are six in total, including a first, unpublished quartet in five movements (1963).1 Its place within the sequence was filled a few years later by the Sonatas for String Quartet (1967), after which the traditional nomenclature applies. The unofficial status of the Sonatas as a ‘First Quartet’ is worth mentioning because of the clear distinction that Ferneyhough has subsequently made between the string quartets proper, which resonate with the history of the genre, and other pieces for two violins, viola and ’cello, which bear individual titles: Adagissimo (1983), Exordium (2008) and Dum transisset I–IV (2007), which have been discussed in Chapter 5. Owing to Ferneyhough’s return to the quartet at more-or-less regular intervals, they typically exhibit formal characteristics related to the oeuvre more generally at any given time (for example the many small sections in the Sixth Quartet, which are typical of his style after 2000).2 Nonetheless, the quartets form a self-consistent set exploring a specific instrumental combination with its own particular pedigree. Like many composers, Ferneyhough emphasizes the quartet’s unique qualities, reflecting on its effectiveness as a ‘subtle medium for the expression of social relationships […] the old image of four civilized people talking to each other in terms that would not have been unfamiliar to philosophers of the Enlightenment.’3 Important consequences arise from this, in Ferneyhough’s view: he turns on its head the quartet’s pedigree association with elitism, arguing that its ‘autochthonous linguistic generation […] this very self-sufficiency of it […] makes it much more open to receiving imprints/impressions from the world’, which may be treated in a sophisticated and useful fashion (unlike music that capitulates to market trends).4 Using the example of Charles Ives’ Second Quartet, Ferneyhough acknowledges that the view of the quartet as a model of civilized behaviour in contemporary life is ‘somewhat absurd’; yet he maintains that it ‘is inherently imbricated with what we understand human relationships to be on a highly evolved level.’5 This human dimension is critical for Ferneyhough, and is manifest in his own quartets in a new way with each exemplar. It also correlates with his career-long preoccupation with the relationship between music and text, music and language, and music as language. Whilst not unaware of the extensive discourse around the subject (or the potential pitfalls attending uncritical assumptions concerning the language-likeness of music), he regards the genre as being particularly suited to the exploration of relationships between these different forms of human expression on account of its peculiar qualities and history. This view is most obviously espoused in the Fourth Quartet which, like Schoenberg’s Second, includes voice: from one perspective this trait

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undermines its claim to be a string quartet at all;6 from another it merely serves to make explicit what has been implicit throughout Ferneyhough’s quartets — and in his view many others’ — all along. The composition of the quartets is spread across Ferneyhough’s career, notwithstanding a substantial break of 15 years between the Fourth and Fifth.7 More than any other format for which he has composed, the resultant ‘self-tradition’ of quartet writing — in part enabled by the long-term collaboration of the Arditti Quartet — provides a window onto Ferneyhough’s development as a composer more generally.8 In both technique and ambition they amount to one of the most substantial bodies within his output. The set is self-consistent, forming a stylistic arc from the Sonatas to the Sixth Quartet. Though composed at more than forty years’ distance, these employ complementary fragment forms, though beyond the conceptual similarity there is nevertheless a great difference in practice. The composition of the String Trio in 1995 goes some way towards closing the gap already alluded to between the Fourth and Fifth Quartets (respectively 1990 and 2005–2006). Although like many composers, Ferneyhough considers the string trio a very different compositional proposition from the quartet, his only contribution to the genre (barring the miniature Streichtrio, 1994) deliberately flirts with his strategies for quartet-writing and, like its nearest quartet contemporary (the  Fourth), it looks back to major proponents of the genre (Schoenberg and Webern) earlier in the century. Accordingly, the Trio is considered in this chapter, the discussion of the quartets providing the best context within which to appraise it, if not entirely comfortably: at times, the trio evinces such linear, developmental impetus that it could be mistaken for a quartet; at others, its easy, serenade-like lyricism vitiates fruitfully against their intense argumentation.9 Sonatas for String Quartet (1967) The Sonatas for String Quartet began as five separate movements, each in a standard ‘classical’ form (episodic, standard variations, ABA form, and so on). The movements were to have been loosely related to each other, in the manner of Purcell’s Fantasias. Not for the last time, however, Ferneyhough judged that the resulting forms would offer more nuanced expressive possibilities if cut into smaller sections, linked together by newly composed material. There results a Webernian tension between the (brief) segments and their intensely expressive content, the substantial length of the overall structure only reinforcing the expressive potential of the moment. Arguably, Ferneyhough’s later concern with the ‘too-muchness’ of material in any given time slice originates here. The date of the work is given as 1967, but the original movements had been composed as early as mid-1965. Those 12–18 months were crucial; many works from 1965 have never been published, but the decision to fragment the forms and compose new material around them — to contextualize and comment on segments, in the manner of a medieval gloss — betokens a new-found compositional assuredness from which Ferneyhough’s 160

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capacity for self-reflection emerged. He cites Webern and Gabrieli as stylistic antecedents, seeking means of extending the expressive density of the Viennese composer’s pre-1914 miniatures towards longer structures.10 As one commentator has put it, Ferneyhough’s work is a ‘microcosm in spirit, but a macrocosm in size.’11 In common with other works of the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Sonatas absorbs an antiphonal principle into its structure, here an antiphony of fragments for full quartet balanced with a sense of continuous transformation, via solos and reduced texture, one to the next: according to the composer, this and the suddenness of textural and dynamic contrast is a response to Gabrieli’s Sonata Pian’ e Forte.12 Retaining the plural in the title, despite the collapse of the different Sonatas into a discontinuous continuity of twenty-four sections, preserves in turn the link with Purcell. The fragments of the original sonatas are redistributed: for example, what was the fourth sonata (a standard variation form) is now presented in three non-consecutive sections — λ, ν and ρ — in which the variation of material is clearly discernible. Section µ, which intervenes between λ and ν, is a gloss or cadenza: its character becomes more ebullient, and the pausa ad libitum on the first note of µ confers an improvisatory nuance upon what follows, reinforced by the periodic addition of a second violin to the solo. Towards its conclusion, the two lower instruments underpin the ornamented violin lines. As in the contemporary Prometheus, Ferneyhough intersperses other cadenzas throughout, respectively near the beginning (ς), middle (µ) and end (σ). This strategy establishes a sense of large-scale formal structure within which the listener can assimilate smaller details, including miniature sections that are gesturally discrete in relation to the immediately surrounding material (as at π, separated from the succeeding segment by a  pause). It is worth noting that the Sixth Quartet — of comparable overall duration to the Sonatas, and comprising many miniature panels — also contains three soloistic cadenzas, and thus a macro-formal structure. The long-range symmetries stretching across the set of quartets do not end there: the Sonatas conclude, as they began, with the same solo ’cello harmonic, having maintained throughout a tension between fragmentation and consistency by continually re-presenting and extending material, and by reiterating the opening chord. (Also, the tonality is revisited at η, χ and during ι.) In the Sixth Quartet, a fundamental harmonic idea (an augmented triad) is likewise explored throughout many texturally contrasted sections. Nevertheless, the obvious differences that emerge between the two quartets are also significant: the essential unity and clarity of form and expression in the Sonatas is already questioned in the Second Quartet, and by the time that the Sixth was composed, generative formal procedures have been deeply submerged beneath layers of activity closer to the musical surface. Furthermore, in the Sixth Quartet the fundamental harmony is obscured by inclusion of inflectional microtones that either lean towards or pull away from the core triadic pitches.13 The notation of the Sonatas is not nearly as complex in appearance as the scores produced just three or four years later. There are nevertheless some touches, such as section υ, that are both simply notated and yet expressively as full of information for the performer — the notation in breves, redolent of the Sonata’s Baroque models — as the complex ‘overnotation’ 161

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in later works. The range of contrasting texture-types (in the Second and Third Quartets), and the tension between pitched sound and ‘noise’ (the  end of the Second and Sixth Quartets), find their origins in the Sonatas.14 At the beginning of the Sonatas, for example, all four instruments announce different texture-types (harmonics in the ’cello, pizz. sul tasto in the viola, arco quasi sul pont. in the second violin, and harmonics leading to glissando in the first), drawing attention to Ferneyhough’s prioritization of gestural contrasts that recurs in the explosive opening of the Second Quartet twelve years later. Throughout the Sonatas, the ethereal sonority of harmonics returns, but often situated amidst percussively conceived materials including col legno battuto, and fingernail and snap pizzicati, as in bars 235–242 in section θ. A final point concerns Ferneyhough’s sensitivity to instrumental group colour. His stated ambivalence towards musical word-painting or ‘illustration’ belies some richly expressive passages, such as that beginning at the fragment π, in relatively low, dark register (marked Notturnamente), which proceeds to ρ, and from a calm chordal passage into the closing polyphonic material of the section, in high register, marked Sereno e chiaro, the whole episode a transfigured night. Second Quartet (1980) The passage of 13 years between the Sonatas and the Second Quartet accounts for the significant stylistic differences between them. However, the only chamber work composed in the intervening years was Funérailles, so the evolution in style over more than a decade is not a result of any specific efforts in the medium of small ensemble works.15 It is possible to extrapolate wider conclusions about shifts in Ferneyhough’s style and aesthetic from 1980, which are discussed in some detail in Chapter 8. They have a bearing on the Second Quartet insofar as the concept of gesture, and the audible structural organization of material according to the differentiation of texture-types, is a prominent aspect of pieces written early in the new decade, notably Lemma-Icon-Epigram. In contrast to the lengthy Sonatas, the Second Quartet is relatively short (approximately 11 minutes in performance), Ferneyhough perceiving the latter as subject to ‘temporal contraction’ and suggesting that ‘the material needs to establish its presence right at the outset.’16 It does so emphatically: particular, distinctive texture-types dominate its opening section (discussed in detail below), emphasizing the contrast between silence and bursts of sound, and as the other instruments join the first violin one by one, the material is presented (highly unusually in Ferneyhough’s music) in rhythmic unison. The strong profile of the opening materials enables the listener to pursue what Ferneyhough terms ‘lines of force’,17 the development and reconfiguration of the initial ideas. This is a shared feature with other works composed in the same period, and marks a difference with pieces of the 1970s in which the many polyphonic layers of parametric action are visible and audible at the musical surface. Although the music is no less complex than in the previous decade, in the Second Quartet these have sunk deeper, permitting the gestural dynamic to occupy 162

String Quartet Table 6.1:  Formal sections, Second Quartet.

the foreground and become palpable in the aural experience of the work. Essentially, Ferneyhough is concerned with the ‘depth organisation’ that ‘throws out the surface, giv[ing] it richness.’18 At the start of the work the bar unit is significant, as so often in Ferneyhough’s music: there are three distinct types of material (including the silences), each of which lasts a bar at a time. At a higher structural level are six sections, themselves contrasted with one another, each distinguished by its own set of ‘audible global texturetypes.’19 The six sections are identified in Table 6.1. The three materials that constitute the first section include silence (expressed as a bar’s rest) that is progressively coloured with harmonically indefinite sounds like glissandi; main material, based on pre-composed rhythmic ‘loops’,20 which is episodic and characterized by the rhythmic unison referred to earlier; and secondary material, in ‘miniature fantas[ies]’, which accumulates in density.21 The next section is wholly different: the unison is replaced by four independent, linear trajectories engaged in complex polyphony, within which texture — at least initially — there are no rests at all. Ferneyhough’s published essay on the quartet focuses on gestural expression in the first section and the deep generative mechanisms of the fourth. Towards the end of the latter (bar 121ff.), the nodal density of gestural material is also manifest in the blackness of the notation. Ferneyhough refers to this passage in the sketches as a ‘Devil’s scherzo’ – very black. Glissandi ‘take over attempts’ merge into extremely rapid repeated note figurations on and around glissandi (see orchestral piece).22 In contrast to the Sonatas, the notation of the Second Quartet is considerably more complex, but it varies in intensity over the course of the piece, assisting the performers’ perception of the gestural flow (glissando ‘take over attempts’ in the material itself offer their own implicit performance directions). The concept of gesture refers specifically to musical events whose particular parametric constitution or profile lends them sufficient weight in the musical argument to capture the attention of performers and listeners alike. Over the piece’s duration, the parametric components of the gesture are transformed, leading to the configuration of new gestures, and so on. The Second Quartet is arguably the clearest example of the process in Ferneyhough’s music from this period, and perhaps for this 163

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reason one of his most approachable and outgoing pieces: the unison gestures — unison, that is, in all parameters except pitch — are gradually characterized by other parametric differences. Comparing the duo at bar 17 with bar 25, slight variations in dynamics have appeared between the two instruments’ materials. The subtle progressive changes of envelope in each bar of the main material invite a performance that exaggerates the differences, enhancing their expressive effect. The secondary material is also subject to gestural transformation in every parametric detail, notwithstanding their resulting ‘fantasy’ character. Ferneyhough often works with abstract, unformed pre-compositional material (whether chains of rhythmic cycles and impulses, pitch reservoirs, or series of texturetypes) to which ‘filters’ or ‘sieves’ are applied in order that the material acquires tendencies — a motivation — of its own. Consider the first entry of secondary material at bar 6: Ferneyhough takes the first seven pitches and applies a ‘modulatory unit’ that generates seven ensuing pitch patterns (Figure 6.1). The first system in Figure 6.1 gives the first seven pitches in bar 6 (the register is that allocated in Ferneyhough’s sketches, different from the piece). The next seven pitches, also beginning on B H, are calculated by subtracting the interval between the first two notes in the original unit from the interval between the first two notes in the modulatory unit (so a major third minus a semitone gives a minor third, for the first interval in the derived pitches).23 Other filters are applied to this material at its second appearance (bar 10), so that by means of these self-enclosed transformational processes it gradually acquires its own distinctive profile in the context of the opening of the piece. A tripartite scheme is established for the secondary materials. Bar 10 is itself derived in character from bar 6: first, there are legato rapid regular notes; second, an asymmetrical ascending figure in dotted hemidemisemiquavers (the augmentation of a similar figuration in bar 6); third, staccato repeated notes conclude the statement. These characteristics are present (and  progressively enhanced by means of glissandi, tremolos or harmonics) wherever the secondary material appears (see bars 18, 22, 24, 38, 42 and so on). Glissandi are ultimately present in all three materials, albeit inflected differently in each case: they are, variously, a bold presence in main material; an ‘impoverished’ sound that colours

Figure 6.1:  Secondary material, application of the ‘modulatory unit’.

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silences; and an ornament between two close pitches, enhancing the impression of fantasy in the secondary material.24 Tempo markings are also formative in the definition of gestures, and like the minute decoupling processes that undermine the initial unison texture, these must be observed with great attention by the performers. Initially, Ferneyhough appears to stipulate approximate values, but this is less important than the relationships obtaining between them: statements of the main material alternate between =70 and =56, whilst secondary material is faster at =82. Silence only ever follows main material, and is therefore subject to the tempo of the preceding bar. Despite the presence of the increasingly complex and melismatic secondary material in the first section, any rubato tendency within these bars is checked and prevented from proliferating by the sudden contrast (with ensuing unison material and its tempo change). In section 2, by contrast, a new tempo is introduced and sustained until the very end, except for a few rallentandi and expressive markings (‘irato e tumultuoso’ and ‘subito più intimo’), which together imply greater fluidity. The performer is bound to observe with the greatest possible accuracy the relationships between tempi, so that when the unison idea reappears in section four (bar 123) like memory traces, the associated tempo helps establish its identity. (This is particularly important in the final section, which conspicuously returns to earlier materials (bar 149ff.)). The short section 5 is built up of eight layers of material (four glissando layers — or main material — and four levels of secondary events), resulting in a wide array of miniature gestures and texture-types, which emphasizes the four parts’ individuality, In bar 138, for example, there are three such secondary events. The quartet’s striking opening gambit — the build-up from solo violin to full quartet texture — gives rise to Ferneyhough’s concept of the ‘superinstrument’,25 a single entity differentiated into four parts rather than four individuals comprising an ensemble. The conclusion of the piece revisits this idea: once again, types of material are clearly differentiated clearly. Silent bars reappear (see bar 150 and 152, the latter ‘coloured’ by what Ferneyhough calls Abwesenheit materials, glissando sul tasto) and the main unison idea returns (from bar 149).26 At bar 157, Ferneyhough introduces glissando harmonics, a variation of the double-stop glissandi that characterize the main material from bar 5. This is introduced in staggered fashion, at two-bar intervals from bar 157 (violin 1) to 163 (’cello). The work’s conclusion therefore throws the ambiguity between the glissandi in the main material and those employed as a means of colouring silence (‘sub-material’ in effect) into sharp relief.27 The ‘superinstrument’ concept sheds an intriguing light on two bars of completed material found in the sketches, previously discussed by Alessandro Melchiorre,28 that may represent an intended opening of the work. Significantly, this dense, explosive tutti is preserved in Ferneyhough’s copperplate hand, as though for publication (Figure 6.2).29 Although these two bars do not appear in the piece as such, neither were they abandoned. Whatever role was conceived for them originally (something that cannot be determined with any degree of certainty), Ferneyhough clearly took the decision to mine them for material as exhaustively as possible. Their ramifications can be observed for much of the 165

Figure. 6.2:  Two complete bars of tutti material, sketch materials for Second Quartet.30

String Quartet

work’s opening section. The redistribution of their constituent materials reveals the extent to which Ferneyhough is concerned less with individual lines than the gestural impact of the ‘superinstrument’: comparison between the two-bar incipit (if such it is) and the first section demonstrates that material from the ’cello part of the fragment furnishes the material for the violin solo (bar 9). According to Ferneyhough himself, the Second Quartet is ‘about silence […] that deliberate absence at the center of musical experience which exists in order that the listening subject may encounter itself there.’ 31 Although the programme note from which this statement is taken is typically abstruse, it reveals Ferneyhough’s concern with the self-reflexivity of the musical experience: the many layers of material, configured as gestures, present a labyrinth requiring no specific path be followed (the ‘deliberate absence’) other than that determined by the listener him or herself. By invoking the ‘listening subject’ in the programme note for the Second Quartet, he effectively demands the same of the listener as he typically requires of the performer: how might a listener reflect, prioritize and assimilate the different levels of activity in the quartet? The undeniably fragmented opening of the work leads to evaluation of those fragments, first in their immediate context and then through longer-range ‘scanning’ for similar gestures elsewhere in the section. An effective performance, one that enhances the breakdown of the unison idea, also offers the listener the opportunity to evaluate both discontinuity and linear force in the initial section of the piece. But when placed abruptly next to the following section, the mosaic-like nature of the first might in retrospect seem to be one unified extreme.32 When Ferneyhough argues that the ‘labyrinthine path over which the approach [to the core of the work] is made attempts to suggest a number of possible implications at one and the same time’,33 these are the kinds of listening experiences he hopes to induce. Third Quartet (1986–1987) During the period separating the composition of the Second and Third Quartets, the composer was almost entirely preoccupied with the Carceri d’Invenzione cycle, which is similarly concerned with gesture. Formally and in other ways, however, the Third Quartet is very different from its predecessor. In its final form it comprises two movements, purposely contrasted to the extent that one is the negative of the other. The second movement contains a number of solo and reduced sections and elaborates long-term linear processes, whereas the first is consistently tutti, a concatenation of pithy texture-types and gestural transformation. The metrical structure of the two movements is also mirrored, such that reading the first movement’s bar-lengths backwards and subtracting 1/8 from every value yields the metrical scheme for the second (reading forwards). This symmetrical feature is (typically) masked by the interpolation, towards the end of the second movement, of the torso of a projected third movement (bars 59–102), which uses the irrational bar-lengths first deployed in Lemma-Icon-Epigram.34 Both surviving movements consist of short sections that are metrically non-retrogradable. According to Ferneyhough, the rationale for 167

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Table 6.2: Itemization of texture-types, Third Quartet, first movement.

the work involved the creation of two dissimilar movements from the same extensive precompositional matrix (consisting of metrical cycles and the like); this explanation takes no account of the fragmentary torso, however, and may have been arrived at only when composition had advanced to such a stage that the two-movement form was assured.35 Altogether, 23 texture-types comprise the first movement, an inventory of which is given in Table 6.2.36 Many of these are readily identifiable in the score, although in a few cases a little detective work is required, owing to their brevity and their sounding simultaneously with others. The  first 13 are given, in order, before repeating types are 168

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reintroduced; types 14–23 are each stated — sometimes more than once — before bar 62, approximately two-thirds of the way through the movement, at which point Ferneyhough retrogrades the pattern and substitutes number 23 for number one, 22 for two and so on. Types 1–13 are stated by the beginning of bar 7; the final five bars of the movement contain types 11–23, but since the last two bars are entirely occupied with type 23, the compression of the remaining 12 types into the three previous bars results in an extreme density. The increased turnover of texture-types after bar 62 is due to the ratio of 2:1 arising from the axis of formal symmetry in that bar. Texture-types undergo transformations or formal alliances with similar types, leading to gestural clusters. These alliances are already suggested by the explicit inter-referencing of a few types (for example 6 and 8, or 2 and 16), although some might more accurately be described as gestures on their own terms. For example, for type 17, Ferneyhough indicates an expressive quality supplementary to the essential textural information. The short section beginning at bar 15 is dominated by type 16 in (contextually) drawn-out statements (such as the ’cello, bars 15–18) and briefer verticalized, internally differentiated appearances (as in  the second half of bar 21 with the violins and ’cello; the viola plays type 17 at bar 21–23). These sections are shown in Figure 6.3. Amongst the sketch materials is a single sheet of Ferneyhough’s notes on Stockhausen’s Mantra: the sheet neither refers to the Third Quartet, nor is there any other mention of Mantra in the remainder of the Third Quartet bundle, suggesting that the notes might simply have been left over from Ferneyhough’s teaching activities, and not specifically preparatory to the composition of the quartet. It is, however, tempting to speculate that encountering Mantra again — regardless of the occasion — stimulated particular compositional ideas: there are persuasive arguments for Mantra-like procedures in Ferneyhough’s quartet. The classification of 23 texture-types immediately brings Stockhausen’s 13 characteristics of the Mantra to mind. Ferneyhough’s decision to set out his first 13 texture-types in order before permitting recurrence in the first movement is particularly significant in this context. Stockhausen’s concern with the Mantra is to do with mirroring and symmetry, and Ferneyhough establishes this as the primary formal principle in his quartet on numerous levels, as described above. Stockhausen argues that the Mantra is not developed or varied in a classical sense, but he expanded and consolidated in terms of its constituent components;37 Ferneyhough’s approach is broader, in that his basic material is a series of Gestalten rather than a pitch series, but he avoids traditional variation in favour of ‘pulverizing’ the textures.38 Despite the clear affinities between the gestural language of the Second and Third Quartets, Ferneyhough’s emphasis in the former on the presence of the material from the very first is not replicated in the latter. The Third Quartet is a darker, more pessimistic piece. Whereas the first section of the Second Quartet acquires a unity when contrasted with the subsequent section, as previously mentioned, no such link obtains between the two movements of the Third. The scherzo-like character of the second movement enhances the perception of gestures turned in on themselves in the first movement, but there any perception of unity is 169

Figure. 6.3:  Third Quartet, bars 15–17 and 21–23.

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lacking. Unlike the outgoing, extrovert gestures of the Second Quartet, which are grasped in an arc, those of the Third are like shells emptied of energy, an impression reinforced by the extremely quiet chorale ending of the first movement.39 In the corner of one of the sketch sheets Ferneyhough writes: Empty, cold and desolate. Echoing spaces. Fearful and Exposed. (Like turning a painting round and seeing only dirty, featureless canvas and a primitive wood frame).40 Although the annotation does not explicitly refer to the first movement, it can reasonably be taken to do so; in any case, the contrast with the experience of the Second Quartet is obvious. Nevertheless, the explosion of the second movement ffff violin solo immediately declares its difference from the first. Ferneyhough uses register to differentiate the gestures that make up the solo, preparing the ground for subsequent sections and the entrance of the other members of the quartet. The higher-pitched, directional gestures are taken up in the ensuing violin duo, which assumes the guise of a kind of caccia or competition between them. The ostinato in bar 4 is an oddity in this context, the contrast between the texture-types in the solo recalling the structuring principle of the first movement. Full quartet texture is only established in bar 18, the lower instruments hinting for a short while at isorhythmic procedures, in longer note values than those of the upper parts. As previously suggested in connection to metrical layout, the second movement rereads the first in retrograde order, although this typically entails the extraction of unused rhythmic configurations from identical pre-compositional materials, and therefore renders a search for other signs of the procedure rather futile. Unsurprisingly, the clearest recollections come in the form of texture-types such as the chorale marked quasi recitativo at bars 56–58, which conjures memories of the very end of the first movement. A  formal model for the second movement is retained in the sketches, but is amended in practice (Figure 6.4). The sectional nature of the plan, the soloistic interludes and the conclusion have all been retained, although the position of the two interludes has been exchanged in the piece itself (bars 9–18 and 43–53). The slow-fast pairs indicated (sections a–d) are not readily perceptible as such, and it is doubtful whether they were ever intended to be demarcated on the basis

Figure 6.4: Formal Scheme, Third Quartet, second movement.

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of tempo alone; in the sketches, Ferneyhough characterizes ‘slow’ and ‘fast’ materials rather according to their textural attributes. His description of ‘violent low long note gestures in varying combinations’ in slow sections definitively places bars 18–27 in that category.41 Section e represents the fragment of the envisaged third movement: any alternation of slow and fast in this section depends not on tempo change but on the use of local irrational metres and bar-length tuplet subdivisions, which conspire to create proportional relationships between materials. The function of the interludes is to appraise material already heard (so that from bar 9, the second violin re-evaluates the registral gaps in its opening solo, and the fourth bar of the section — bar 12 — is occupied by ostinato material, recalling bar 4). The conclusion mirrors the movement’s opening by tapering to a rhapsodic solo viola punctuated by remnants of earlier materials, like ‘broken clockwork’ intended to echo the overall impression of the first movement.42 Though not foregrounded as one of the piece’s key considerations, time becomes important in the perception of gesture. Having begun to explore gestural material in the Second Quartet, Ferneyhough deepens the texture-gesturefigure relationship in the Third and Fourth. The sketches contain short but useful definitions of each: Texture = recognizably consistent quality field Gesture = semantically energized emotive signifier Figure = conglomerate of potentially independent formal markers [parameters].43 According to these definitions, the silences in the Second Quartet are clearly defined gestures, and the unisons, with their potential for parametric deconstruction, are figures. In the Third Quartet, the first movement explores textures and their contextualization in gestures, but arguably suppresses the figural because there are no long-term consequences at a deep structural level of parametric reconfiguration of the types. The movement is something of a montage, accounting for the perception of hollowed-out gestural language. The second movement — a negative of the first in this sense as well — does pursue figural implications of its gestures. It has been mentioned that bar 4 is markedly different from its surroundings, the pp dynamic making certain of it. The tuplet material includes rapid figurations that frequently return to the same pitch (Figure 6.5a). On subsequent appearances, this material is parametrically reconfigured: it gets progressively louder, the tuplets more complex, its registral range expands, the statements grow longer such that they outgrow a single bar, and finally the regularity of the subdivisions is undone. This pattern fulfils Ferneyhough’s attempt to present an object (the original idea) on the musical surface, while ensuring that its long-term impact on, and contextualization within, the structure is pursued. Initially behaving in the manner of an ‘intervention’ upon a main material — a common feature in Ferneyhough’s works from the 1970s in particular — the tuplet figures begin to dominate the texture in all four instruments (bars 39–43 represent an outgrowth of the idea, and bars 54–55 a further takeover bid), the material transformed

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Figure 6.5a:  Third Quartet, second movement, bar 4, violin 2.

Figure 6.5b:  Third Quartet, second movement, bar 21, violin 2.

so that returns to repeating pitches are explicitly avoided in the sweeping gestural contours (Figure 6.6). After this point, wherever the regular tuplets occur, they do so having merged with such characteristics of the main material as are represented in bars 1–3: they thus exhibit a generally high register and no repeated pitches, having become coloured by multiple microtones, which are absent in the first appearances of ostinato material at bars 4, 12, 17, 21 and 25–26 (but present in the transformed material at bars 54–55, 72 and 94). Ferneyhough argues that ‘one way of achieving “depth perspective” will be to seek procedural modalities amenable to being transferred at will from one point of observation in the field to one or more others.’44 Fourth Quartet (1990) The Fourth Quartet interprets the idea of offering multiple vantage-points on the same material differently. The ‘material’ in this case is the relationship between language and music, which is represented in two of its movements by the addition of a texted soprano line, and in the remaining two movements by highly gestural writing that explores the languagelike expressivity of music on its own terms. Notwithstanding the clear intention to write a companion piece to be performed alongside Schoenberg’s Second Quartet, Ferneyhough’s original seven-movement plan for the Fourth Quartet surely reflects another landmark of the genre, Beethoven’s opus 131 in CG minor. The final four-movement structure, which might be taken to refer to Schoenberg, was therefore settled on at a later stage. Whilst recognizing the particular confluence of musical, personal and historical factors that Schoenberg’s quartet represents,45 Ferneyhough set himself ‘the task of examining, one more time, how, and if, the phenomenon of verbal language and the essentially processual nature 174

Figure 6.6:  Third Quartet, second movement bars 54–55.

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of much recent musical composition could be coaxed into some kind of Einklang, some mutually illuminating co-existence:’46 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 fervour of the text.47 At the particular moment of composition of his Second Quartet (1908), Schoenberg was still just about able to draw on historically established assumptions concerning the interrelationship between text and music (assumptions that reached their height in the nineteenth-century) whilst at the same time ushering in a new musical era of which he became the figurehead.48 Ferneyhough ‘imagine[s] Schoenberg pushing the Beethoven closure [in this genre] one step further and thus closing-off that specific option for our time’,49 and turns his attentions instead to pressing issues arising in recent composition of his own time: ‘I set up each movement with a view to examining how much the particular linear, narrative, expressive or processual-developmental assumptions which seem to divide various types of present-day music from one another hold good. In fact, they are still capable of being brought together, and if there had to be a ‘theme’ for my quartet, I suppose that is the one I would underline.’50 Much of Ferneyhough’s music is driven by processes, whether as applied to pre-compositional material (itself often processually determined) when selecting impulses for the piece itself, or as pertaining to the treatment of selected material, for example cycling it through several rhythmic loops (as in his Second Quartet). At first glance, the emphasis on processual thinking would seem to create a distance between this music and poetic language, but Ferneyhough argues that ‘music is a form of thinking, and thinking can be verbalized.’51 Asked whether difficulty is a form of communication, he reflects that Clearly it is, at least to the extent that is it perceived as such, and is thus distinguished from alternative modes of organization. There is a particular texture or grain to the slowness of comprehension traversed by the mercurial scanning beam of speculation which is not reproducible in any other way. The disjunct nature of Mallarmé’s sonnet structure is a good example of this, as are (in their very different ways) the energetic semantic weavings of Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons or the endlessly drawn out repetitions of her later texts […] in Mallarmé, as in the more aphoristic Stein, complexity resides in the sensation of instantaneity provided by (unspoken) elision, 176

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the latter tendency pitting momentary flourishings of memory against the endlessly deferred expansion of semantic space.52 Ferneyhough is attentive to the semantic effects of process (for example Stein’s repetitions) and has himself written texts aspiring to similar properties.53 The choice of Jackson Mac Low’s Words nd Ends from Ez for the text of the Fourth Quartet arises from this processual thinking: some of the techniques Mac Low employs resonate with Ferneyhough’s musical approach, including re-readings of material and the application of filters or sieves. Mac Low reads — ‘filters’ — Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos according to what he terms a diastic method, a chance procedure that involves using the letters of Pound’s full name to select words from the Cantos containing the same letters (and in the same positions within words as they occur in the name). The appeal of such a text to Ferneyhough lies in the lack of semantic baggage resulting from the procedure.54 This ensures that no ‘madrigalisms’ — by which he means, presumably, the kind of word-painting characterizing that genre — creep into the new work, since the text is already a deconstructed one, the more so for the Pound’s own macaronic approach, incorporating various living or dead languages and ideograms into the Cantos.55 In the first and third movements (without voice), Ferneyhough investigates the gestural object and its semantic extendibility in time. This is most clearly discernible at the beginning of the piece, although the subtext of the first movement effectively echoes Schoenberg’s ‘grind to a halt’ in his quartet, reflecting the long-term unsustainability of the ‘programmatically linear/developmental stance.’56 He begins with a simple idea — a repeating pitch articulated rapidly on alternate strings, which is then decorated with glissandi, microtones and so on, underscored by a pattern of rhythmic phases lasting a few bars each (Figure 6.7). The basic rhythmic patterns, worked out in advance, do not incorporate the figurations applied to particular impulses to create the glissando gestures, so that although the gesture is contextualized differently on each appearance, the logic behind these superficial transformations remains almost deliberately transparent and didactic, such that no sense of a linear dynamic emerges. The third movement recalls procedures in the first movement of the Third Quartet, insofar as Ferneyhough again devises a list of characteristic texture-types that are presented and recombined in passages of full and reduced texture. There are clear intersecting lines, as in the lengthy viola solo in bars 7–13, which continues linearly despite several short, verticalized gestures in the rest of the ensemble. As the solo collides with the other instruments’ material, it takes on their characteristics (glissando, bars 12–13) and is eventually assimilated (bar 14), whilst another solo takes over in the second violin. Ferneyhough suggests that by force of will the discontinuous gestures are welded together to give an impression of organic continuity where there is none underlying.57 Thus, although individually the gestures are expressive and possessed of strong identities, any perceived narrative is deceptive. Throughout the texture, whether full or reduced, a solo instrument, like the viola in the example given (or, more rarely, a pair), is distinguished from the harmonic 177

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Figure 6.7:  Fourth Quartet, first movement, bars 1–7, repeating pitch gesture.

context provided by the remaining instruments, in order to sustain what Ferneyhough calls the ‘group recitative movement.’58 There is an underlying playfulness behind Ferneyhough’s rather tongue-in-cheek textless ‘recitative’ and the range of texture-types and ‘narrative’ evinced in the movement. As in the first movement, Ferneyhough works from the musical surface inwards. In the two vocal movements, the opposite is true: the quartet and vocal materials are subject to extensive pre-compositional planning, governed by parametrically defined processes. However, Ferneyhough’s emphasis on the processual nature of recent 178

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music (which differentiates his task from the set of circumstances affecting Schoenberg) ought not be taken to imply a structuralist view of its potential relationship to text. In the sketches, he observes that The utilization of so-called ‘parametric composition’ does not lead to a mechanized, stiffly formalized concept of form or process: quite the opposite in fact. The theory of complex states in the natural sciences emphasizes the in principle unpredictable and unstable event-chains which are generated by the intersection and mutual interference of only a very small number of initial variables.59 Once again, Ferneyhough invokes the notion of complexity in a discipline other than his own, and implies that the musical situation might be analogous. This is borne out in the quartet’s second movement, which comprises a number of sections (A–H), separated by pauses. The material is taken from a pre-composed rhythmic reservoire of several layers; the voice part was subsequently derived from it, and in its own way it resembles Mac Low’s diastic method: by picking out certain impulses the voice privileges and re-proposes them.60 Whilst the voice part arises entirely from these pre-determined processes, its very ‘alien’ presence in the quartet ensures that the impulses selected for it become suffused with expressive significance in performance. Section G presents the pre-composed rhythmic structure in the score: the ‘theoretical’ impulses become a reality in performance. The form of the movement consolidates the emphasis on local expressive unpredictability, and might be viewed as a distant precursor to the fragmented form of the more recent Sixth Quartet. Ferneyhough abandoned the projected continuous movement and cut it into eight miniature sections. Each successive tranche seems to propose the relationship between the voice and quartet anew. He nevertheless maintains the intended trajectory, such that the movement becomes increasingly melodic and linear (F–H) after a middle section containing ostinato, harmonic and rhythmic figures (D, E).61 The final movement is Ferneyhough’s attempt to secure the Einklang he seeks; ironically, the voice and quartet coincide for only six bars. Instead, they ‘meet’ as processually governed equals; the expressive impact of this meeting arises as the soprano seeks ‘to juggle things around very quickly, trying to grab back the exploding fragments of expression and glue them back together, which means that a lot of cracks will still be apparent.’62 The movement begins with an implicit acknowledgement of the significance of Schoenberg’s own finale, all instruments articulating a contrapuntal texture high in their respective registers. Furthermore, the entry of the voice is delayed well into the movement, and when it comes, its statements are punctuated by rising string gestures that recall the end of the second movement, until the quartet becomes silent. Ferneyhough refers to the ‘story line’ of four independent instruments, each pursuing its own course, invoking Charles Ives’ Second Quartet.63 Once again, materials are treated parametrically: ‘the entire quartet presentation is processually defined; that is, register, density of events, 179

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even the global nature of dynamics, are all cycled through essentially linear, evolutive processes which emphasize tendency of transformation over time at the expense of local definition of texture.’64 However, the voice — alone for most of its contribution to the movement — is no longer bound to the instruments for its material. As its material comes to resemble Ferneyhough’s most formidable monodic instrumental writing (the threestave ‘interruptive polyphony’ in Mnemosyne), the instrumental quartet, for its part, concludes the work in rhythmic unison as a single eloquent voice or ‘superinstrument’ (recalling the Second Quartet). Shards of vocal material to be performed ‘distorted, as if with various foreign accents’ hint at Pound’s multi-language texts filtering through. The fourth movement would thus appear to bear out Ferneyhough’s objective, his ‘theme’ for his quartet stated above. Broadly, movements 1 and 3 are concerned with probing the possibility of musical narrative and linear development, but Ferneyhough re-reads the first movement in order to produce the processually-defined fourth: though seeming nothing like each other, they are in fact ‘genetically’ related. The fourth represents a very complex re-subdivision of first-movement material. The example below gives the first few bars of a relatively simple rhythmic sketch. The profile is that of the first movement (compare its first two bars with those in the sketch, given in Figure 6.8a), but the metrical pattern belongs to the fourth (Figure 6.8b). As the extracts quoted from it demonstrate, Ferneyhough’s article on his Fourth Quartet touches upon (and sometimes uses interchangeably) two distinct areas of discourse, the first relating to the proposed Einklang between instrumental process and vocal gesture, the second arising from his appropriation of the term Sprachähnlichkeit — the ‘speechlikeness’, or ‘speech-resemblance’ of music — as another term for what he seeks to achieve. Attendant on the latter is a considerable historical, theoretical and aesthetic context that does not really serve Ferneyhough’s objectives in the quartet. He invokes it merely to suggest that music can approach speech-like qualities in its own right (as Beethoven once intimated with his performance instruction, ‘con una certa espressione parlante’).65 In the end, the Fourth Quartet is less concerned with historical concepts and models than with its place in Ferneyhough’s evolving personal style, both in relation to the quartet medium and the wider oeuvre. The techniques applied to the vocal material follow those of the Etudes transcendantales (see for example the similar processual treatment of the text in the final Song 9, which prefigures that in the quartet), whilst the subsequent On Stellar Magnitudes takes the notion of expressive intensity further still. The long gap before he returned to the string quartet genre — and, when he did, with a very different approach to form — is also significant, as he himself suggests at the end of the essay on the Fourth: My central concern throughout was to utilize the opportunity given by the medium to seek out and perhaps extend my own outer boundaries in both [instrumental process and vocal gesture] with an eye to preparing the ground for other compositions with perhaps quite different balances of interest.66 180

Figure 6.8a:  Shared rhythmic basis of first and fourth movements, Fourth Quartet.

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Figure 6.8b:  Opening of fourth movement, for comparison with Figure 6.7.

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String Trio (1995) During the 1990s Ferneyhough’s attentions turned away from the string quartet towards the series of works for solo instrument and small ensemble discussed in Chapter 4; and as that decade drew to a close, the opera Shadowtime became his principal preoccupation. Only the String Trio, composed in this interval, approaches concerns specific to the quartets, the textures tending to a similar degree of complexity and possessing the quality of sounding as though more instruments are involved than actually are. This is all the more pertinent to the trio, a genre in which the exposure of the three instruments — differentiated as they are in register — is often conducive to sparer textures. In fact this trio is not the first time that Ferneyhough has engaged with the string trio genre. Notes in the sketches suggest that one either existed or was in planning stages as early as 1965, intended to take the following form, conforming to structural ideas typical of a number of early works until well into the 1970s (verses, interludes and fantasias each evoke associations with works including Transit and the Sonatas for String Quartet): Verse I Cadenza I (viola) Fantasia I Verse 2 Interlude Fantasia 2 Cadenza 2 (’cello) Elegy Cadenza 3 (violin) Fantasia 3 Verse 3 The presence of solo cadenzas, and the idea of differently characterized sections, are taken up in the Trio published 30 years later, but there is no evidence that the latter takes over any of the material conceived in the 1960s.67 The opening of the String Trio flirts with sparseness, sounding deliberately tenuous, but  the subsequent consolidation of the solo material in the full ensemble creates ambiguity from the start. As has been observed, the exploration of solo, duo and trio textures is a regular occurrence in Ferneyhough’s quartets; although contextualized differently, the conveying of harmonic richness with fewer resources than the full quartet ensemble is a challenge with which Ferneyhough was already well acquainted. As a genre, the string trio possesses a much less established pedigree than the quartet (and fewer exemplars by which it might have gained one), notwithstanding prominent twentiethcentury instances — Ferneyhough cites the ‘totally autobiographical, cutting quality’ of Schoenberg’s in particular — and notable earlier manifestations (Beethoven’s, for 183

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example).68 Ferneyhough’s Trio tends towards the deployment of parametric processes with all the rigour typical of his quartets whilst disarming the listener with its directness of expression. The Trio comprises four sections, echoing the four movements of a seventeenth-century sonata almost as though they were ruins in the Romantics’ sense. Fragments of fugue or rondo poke through the surface like found objects. The classicizing approach to form is hardly unusual in Ferneyhough’s output, although the impression is inevitably skewed: the gradual accumulation of a series of ‘interventions’ disturbs the work’s sectionalization, until the end of the work consists of a chain of them, which intervene only on each other. The first section contains three solos, for viola, violin and ’cello, respectively. Of all of Ferneyhough’s works, the String Trio makes possible a reasonable grasp of the structure at first listening because each solo establishes the character of its instrument in turn (the viola, timid and fragile; the violin energetic; the ’cello, lyrical). A solo is immediately followed by its tutti ‘amplification’, which additionally capitalizes on a formal function that ‘belongs’ to each respective instrument.69 The viola, fragile though it is, establishes a harmonic space, the ’cello a melodic one. These amplifications, themselves divided into subsections which explore the — by now typical — texture-types (glissandi, grace-note groups and so on), broadly adopt the temperament of the relevant solo. The notion of amplification, which is particularly discernible in the instrumental behaviour following a solo exposition, addresses the inherent problem of the instruments’ registral exposure at the level of form. The last of these amplifications (the ’cello-dominated section) is interrupted by a first series of three interventions that introduce inflectional micro-intervals. The second section (from bar 128) is a series of variations ‘in search of a theme’ in a consistently brisk tempo that is internally manipulated by small-scale metric modulations (which effects a form of written-out rubato).70 Once again, a brief intervention follows, articulating tiny microtonal pitch fluctuations. The notion of an absent ‘theme’ retraces Ferneyhough’s preoccupation with the experience of absence, a main concern of the Second Quartet and redolent too of the many references throughout his career to the ‘shadows’ cast by objects (recall the absent resonance of the guitar at the outset of Kurze Schatten II, owing to the generalized scordatura). The third section is as desolate as its opening expressive indication implies: largo desolato, surely a nod to Berg’s Lyric Suite. Parts of this section, from bar 190ff, strikingly adumbrate the composer’s most recent essays in fragment form (e.g. Exordium, and the Sixth Quartet), including tiny two-bar sections separated from each other by a double bar and a few seconds’ pause (see bars 204–205, 206–207 and 208–209). Here Ferneyhough’s obsession with musical time and its ‘tactility’ is palpable, not least because the experience of it is diametrically opposite to that of the second section. Several textural features, including a return to those of the opening viola solo, some brief but effective unison rhythm  — shades of the ‘superinstrument’ idea, this time perhaps ironically — and an arresting intervention IV (bar  221) permit the listener to withdraw from the ‘flow’ of musical discourse (here  momentarily suspended) and assess the music as though 184

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objectively. The intervention seems to take the section’s fragmented nature to a further extreme, as though a mechanical clock were winding down, each four- or five-second silence anticipating whether or not the final tick has been heard. Taken together, the course of sections two and three is not dissimilar to the first two sections of LemmaIcon-Epigram, even though the means employed show obvious differences: section 2 is energized and linear, like the Lemma, whilst the largo desolato of section 3 recalls the isolated objects of the Icon. Section 3 presents multiple perspectives on material derived from the opening viola solo, which fixes pitches in certain registers, lending it a static quality. In Section 3, Ferneyhough re-reads that pitch material numerous times, applying filters and transformational processes. One short section (bars 197–198) makes a feature of locking pitches into specific registers, imparting a sense of directionality. The violin and ’cello materials ascend (the registration of pitches corresponding with those in the viola solo, Section 1, including the final climactic violin CG, the highest pitch in the solo), whilst the viola ascends for one bar, then descends. At the start of Section 3, dyads and harmonics in all three instruments re-state and transform those of the original viola material. In the fourth section (bar 232 ff.), several five-bar segments ensue, each comprising the same five bar-lengths in rotation, with evident correspondences between all the 7/16 bars, and so on. (This is an example of a classical form remnant — the rondo — surfacing for a short time, the scherzo element chiefly suggested by pervasive glissandi). There are correspondences (the long glissandi and 7/16 metre) between bars 232 and 241 (Table 6.3 and Figure 6.9). The same combination of a long glissando and 7/16 metre reappears in the violin at bar 245, having previously occurred in both the ’cello (bar 232) and viola (bar 242). Thereafter, bar 249 again features the treble register of bar 232 in all three instruments, and finally, bar 253 restates and ornaments pitch material from bar 232 (most obviously in the violin). Each return of the same bar-length signals a variation or re-reading of its previous appearance, resulting in a textural densification that contrasts with the chordal nature of Intervention III/2 (bar 257). The final intervention (I/3, bar 277) is ambiguous because extended in time, and it concludes the piece, which confers on it the status of final movement in its own right. The texture here is overtaken by previously subversive sounds, a complement to the fragile viola at the start of the work: the wood of the bow is prominent. This prefigures the course of the Sixth Quartet, in which similarly secondary, deliberately ‘undefined’ sound elements come to the fore later in the discourse. The Trio concludes quietly, fading to nothing (as do the Sonatas and the Second, Fourth and Sixth quartets, Table 6.3:  Correspondences between bars 232 and 241, String Trio: note the transfer of the tuplets between instruments, and the complexification of tuplets between violin (232) and ’cello (241). See Figures 6.9a and 6.9b for bars 232 and 241. 185

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Figure 6.9a:  String Trio, bar 232.

whilst the Fifth ends with ppp harmonics). The recurrence of silent endings suggests the works’ provisional status, or possibly denotes the fragmentary in Friedrich Schlegel’s sense: each fragment has its particular self-consistent unity and wholeness, but remains fragmentary insofar as it relates, through opposition, to other fragments.71 The opposed gestural expression of the Second and Third Quartets might be contextualized in this way. Although none of Ferneyhough’s quartets (nor the Trio) can be called fragmentary on account of their size, the principle of their quasi-Schlegelian interrelationship, so to speak, is perhaps consolidated in Ferneyhough’s reference to the Fourth Quartet as ‘a momentary stay in the onward thrust of research.’72 In effect, Ferneyhough leaves open the possibility for the continuation of the conversation between the four rational individuals (to borrow Goethe’s well-worn adage),73 but the Trio should not be discounted from this trend simply because it lacks a fourth participant. The self-effacement of the musical discourse (where classical convention demands a typical concluding flourish) dispenses with this particular feature of the traditional form. 186

Figure 6.9b:  String Trio, bars 240–241.

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Fifth and Sixth Quartets (2005/2010) It was not until 2005 that a Fifth Quartet was finally completed, quickly followed by two ‘satellite’ works for same ensemble (Dum transisset I–IV and Exordium) and the Sixth Quartet in 2009/10. The primary concerns shared by the two latest additions to the core quartet group are with form and harmony: if Ferneyhough had tended towards classicizing formal models in earlier quartets, these are here dispensed with; yet in the most recent quartets (the Sixth especially) his approach to harmony explicitly plays with properties of extended tonality, leading performers to remark on its pseudo-Mahlerian expressive ambit.74 The Fifth and Sixth Quartets give the impression of a composer so comfortable in the medium that the works offer a new expressive directness, enhanced by his equally long-established association with the Arditti Quartet, which has premiered all the works since the Second Quartet onwards. In a documentary made in 2010–2011 recording the rehearsal process for the Sixth, certain exchanges stand out because they reveal something previously less explicit in Ferneyhough’s style (though it seems likely that the documentary medium should reveal this kind of information more directly, if more superficially, than the scores or essays). He indicates — almost as a performance direction — that bars 92–101 ‘come[s] from the fourth movement of the Schoenberg Second Quartet, the duo.’75 This does not indicate that material has been borrowed, quoted directly or is treated parenthetically in the music, nor even necessarily that these were the main instigators of locally significant situations. But the fact that he goes so far as to mention specific junctures of another composer’s work suggests that, at least expressively, its impact is important to him, however minimal or passing in relation to the sum of all of the quartet’s gestures. This very fact marks a distance from Ferneyhough’s polemic of the 1980s against the importation of emotive signifiers from an extant work or tradition into a new one (his motivation being to reflect on and establish his own vision of a personal style). In his view, the use of such signifiers was intended to invoke the meaning attendant on their original context, thus disturbing the integrity of the new work’s inner logic.76 The later quartets emerge at some considerable distance from this: whereas in the 1980s Ferneyhough seems consistently to have defined his personal style (at least in part) by what it was not, in the works composed after 2000 the notion becomes imbricated with Ferneyhough’s biography, insofar as it addresses (among other external stimuli) aspects of his Englishness and a greater openness to a plurality of experiences in his work.77 Examples of Ferneyhough’s expressive ambit in the Sixth Quartet include his reference to the short, regular glissando ostinato figures from the second of Stravinsky’s Three Pieces for String Quartet, by which he conveys to the performer how to articulate the second violin part in bars 72–73.78 A final nod to another monument in the genre, mentioned earlier — Ives’ Second Quartet — is implicit from bar 136 testardamente [stubbornly], which bears the caption ‘with great difficulty, like climbing a mountain’ in the documentation accompanying the rehearsal video.79 Such prompts have been used for years in rehearsals with musicians 188

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but where such information has generally remained concealed from public view, the documentary presents a side to the composer firmly at odds with his earlier type-casting as an aloof intellectual.80 Ferneyhough has recently observed that his teaching activities and the trends he has observed in the compositions of his students — particularly their attitudes towards musical form — have led him to re-evaluate his own formal precepts.81 In both the Fifth and Sixth Quartets, he utilizes what might be called ‘hyperform’: in the former, several variation forms are simultaneously piled on top of one another rather than being presented successively; in the latter, it is the notion of interrelated sections that is critiqued, for the successive sections are so numerous, and some so short, as to be hardly perceptible in their own right: see bars  40–46). Furthermore, these sections may themselves be superimposed, resulting in extreme density of material. In the Fifth Quartet, traces of this superimposition are discernible towards the beginning and end of the piece; in the middle, what is at first tentatively graspable disappears from view as the material becomes so compacted that the intersecting variation forms squash and distort each other. By the end of the work, elements re-emerge that bear a clearly recognizable relationship to the beginning. At bar 19, for example, the return of the original tempo (immediately preceded by a general pause) signals the beginning of a second cyclic variation (assuming the first 18 bars to constitute the first). In both cases, then, the fourth bar (bars 4 and 22) is a 5/16 general pause, followed by a tempo change and a reduction in texture. With the Tempo primo of bar 37, a third variation begins, once again preceded by a pause, and with a silent fourth bar in 5/16 (this time barring the transgression on the part of the ’cello, which continues in the manner of a basso continuo supporting the contrapuntal dialogue in the violins). Previously, the texture had reduced to a duo in the fifth bar of each ‘variation’ (see bars 5 and 23), but the ’cello remains here as a third element. Bar 40 recalls the bars of silence in the Second Quartet into which strayed impoverished sounds that ‘coloured’ it, but the resemblance is superficial: the ’cello seems out of step with the violins, signalling that the formal over-layering has begun. From bar 37, another 18-bar unit unfolds, and a new section is heralded by the reduction in texture to a solo violin. From this point the structural markers identified so far become either harder to identify or else dislocated, so that any hope of tracing a basic variation template is lost. Thus, whilst bar 58 clearly relates to bar 5, for example, and bar 66 to bar 1, the link between them is little more than trace evidence of a rapidly sinking and contracting compound variation structure. This impression is reinforced by the regular appearance of multiplemetre bars, which imply not additive procedures but the opposite — a collapse of perhaps several simultaneous metrical schemes into a constrictive bar scheme. Towards the end of the piece (from bar 191) the original tempo, = 73, followed five bars later by = 91.25, reemerges along with general pause bars, suggesting a resurfacing of earlier forces, and the glassy harmonic-dominated texture first heard at the very start of the piece becomes allpervasive. (In fact, it returns periodically, a rare tangible clue of the work’s fundamental formal procedure). 189

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Figure 6.10a:  Fifth Quartet, violin 1, bars 182–183: ‘almost unison’ and ‘almost octave’ gestures.

Figure 6.10b:  Fifth Quartet, violin 2, bar 186.

Characteristic gestures, including the frequent return of harmonics, violent snap pizzicato and rapid staccato (by now firmly established in Ferneyhough’s expressive language) dominate particular passages, leading to sharp contrasts in affect between neighbouring sections, approaching those explored in the orchestral works written contemporaneously, and in the Sixth Quartet. At the beginning, Ferneyhough establishes some core pitches and satellite microtonal neighbour notes (the core pitches are B, G/ GG and D). This leads to several concentrated passages later in the piece in which the pitch material is dominated by ‘almost octaves’ (like texture-type 5 in the Third Quartet) or ‘almost unisons’, articulated in many different ways, often by means of the texturetypes identified above. A  telling example is the veritable ‘car-crash’ of near-unisons at bar 175ff, prepared by a strongly rhythmic ’cello solo that could not be more different from the harmonic other-worldliness of the rest. The double note-heads indicate the same pitch must be realised simultaneously on two strings, which in practice will result in tiny differences; the surrounding material here emphasizes repeated notes. Later in the same section, the principle is extended so that one of the two pitches must be articulated as a harmonic, and added to this, a glissando slide follows across what is often an ‘almost octave’ interval (Figure 6.10). The figure is transformed still further with double-stop glissandi microtonal trills and then contrary motion glissandi exploring close microtonal intervals (Figure 6.11). The only section of the Fifth Quartet to employ inflectional microtones begins at bar 137, a violin solo supported by sustained harmonics, resulting in a texture redolent almost of magic realism in relation to its surroundings. The presence of these inflections renders the harmonic worlds of both the Fifth and Sixth similar in this regard to that of the Trio (though all of these arguably relate back to the defining formal characteristic of material in Adagissimo). 190

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Figure 6.11:  Fifth Quartet, transformation of ‘almost unison’ figure, violin 2, bars 187–188.

They are present from the outset in the Sixth Quartet, whose harmonic language revolves around an augmented triad tonality and its micro-intervallic ‘colourings’, so much so that this becomes one of the work‘s fundamental organizing principles, invoking additional properties established by the use of tonal residues (including the very concept of harmonic resolution and a skewed take on the function of the leading note). At the very end of the piece, an arrival is attempted on the augmented triad BH, D, FG. This goal is finally reached in the penultimate bar (see ’cello and viola), but without the violins’ co-operation and, in the final bar, efforts at resolution are frustrated, the target pitches ultimately a ‘near miss’ and delivered at such a low volume as to be barely audible. A lingering sense of late Romantic Sehnsucht remains, prompting Ferneyhough’s uncharacteristically louche description of the passage (bars 359–360) in rehearsal with the Ardittis as ‘wet dreams of Mahler.’82 Habitually, Ferneyhough maps out a work’s bar-structure early in the compositional process, and in the Sixth Quartet this principle applies in a different way. Invoking what he calls the ‘sausage slicer technique’,83 the composer explains that the length of each little section is as predetermined as is its rhythmic content, but little else, so that he is forced to react from section to section to such local constraints as present themselves. There arises as a consequence a significant tension between figurations and processes lasting but a single section, and middleground procedures that adopt a longer-term outlook, but which must fight to establish themselves across sectional boundaries (owing to the often radical characteristic changes between adjacent sections).84 The instruments each take on a character that differentiates them from the others: each pursues its own processes, which evolve at different rates, and for different durations. Which takes precedence, and which should be curtailed or transformed, is part of the composer’s process of decision-making at the level of local (that is, not pre-compositional) planning. One strategy for listening to the Sixth Quartet is to recognize these characters, and to recognize their moments of prominence as ‘soloists’.85 The characterization of the instruments and their soloistic behaviour recalls a fundamental principle of the String Trio.86 The Sixth Quartet once again bears witness to the importance to Ferneyhough of the palpability of time: small, predetermined ‘slices’ delineate one level of duration, whilst superimposed tendential middleground processes imply another. The very beginning of the piece is indicative of such a superimposition of layers: the viola plays regularly spaced individual pizzicato impulses, like a timekeeper, whilst the ’cello is clearly playing 191

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to a different set of rules, elaborating linear material that progressively ascends in register well into the piece (bar 39) and through at least one definitive sectional marker (bar 21).87 The violins play secondary material col legno, emphasizing the contrast so often drawn in Ferneyhough’s music between ‘normal’ pitch articulation (’cello) and secondary, subversive ‘noise’ elements. Although Ferneyhough’s concept of gesture has by this stage been long established, best represented by his succinct definition given earlier — that of a semantically energized emotive signifier — this quartet foregrounds the human aspect of gesture to a greater extent. The composer likens the second violin’s timekeeping role to a heartbeat, and if taken as such, the material bypasses the mechanism of signification and takes on a somatic immediacy, appealing directly to the listener. The regular ‘Stravinskian’ glissandi (referred to above) represent a transformation of this basic principle, and others are discernible: the testardamente passage (bar 136) calls forth accented, laboured rhythms in the second violin, opened out to encompass the entire ensemble, which engage in several guises of the ‘Stravinsky’ gliss until around bar 159.88 At bar 246, the second ensemble reprises the heartbeat gesture as the former secondary material — col legno tratto — gains traction. At last, it attains the status of primary material in its own right in the closing stages of the work (see bars 347ff.). The unison ‘superinstrument’ first developed in the Second Quartet is emphatically recalled by the unison passage — now including pitch — that begins at bar 236, a test (for  the performers) of the capacities of human gesturality. Such material contains repetitive figurations whose rhythmic profile is subtly adjusted from one moment to the next. It is an extreme version of a texture-type increasingly seen in Ferneyhough’s latest music, in which unison rhythmic ostinati occur in multiple voices. At first glance these give the impression that the musical surface has been simplified compared to the scores of the 1970s for instance, which foregrounded parametric polyphony in an uncompromising fashion.89 However, this apparent simplicity results in no less work for the performer, because Ferneyhough’s new project of working with tiny formal slices exacerbates the ‘micrological’ tendency, whereby the smallest possible unit of articulation is now subject to a ‘micro-gesturalization’ that rivals solo works like Unity Capsule, demanding of the ensemble a comparable degree of virtuosity. Postscript: a Note on the First String Quartet (1963) Whilst completing the Sixth Quartet (2011), Ferneyhough typeset his withdrawn First String Quartet (1963) and sent it to the Paul Sacher Stiftung in Basel. Exceptionally among the unpublished juvenilia, it is not only complete, but has received a partial performance as noted earlier.90 Though cut (unsurprisingly) from an entirely different cloth to the Sixth, the composer’s decision to preserve and archive it, concurrent with the composition of his most recent work in the genre, might prompt speculation that at least some of the Sixth Quartet’s

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directness of expression (if little else) is prefigured in the First. The work comprises four movements. There is none of the notational complexity that characterizes music written only two years later (or, in a few years more, a still different order of complexity), and none of the frequent (often bar-to-bar) changes of metre and barring found in the Sonatas. It betokens the rapidity of Ferneyhough’s compositional development. The first movement emphasizes long, arching lyrical lines, contrasted with rhythmically insistent repetitive figures, which come to dominate the texture by the third, scherzo movement, a modified sonata form with A and B themes, transition, development and recapitulation. These three movements chart a learning process, their harmony is heavily influenced by early twentieth-century exemplars (notably those of the Second Viennese School). The final movement is short and begins with a fugue, with brief instances of the prolational technique that later becomes such a characteristic feature in his quartet music (and elsewhere).91 The final movement represents a marked advanced in comparison with the first three: the material is more concentrated and expressively economical, which accounts for Ferneyhough’s decision to sanction its performance in 1992. The precedent for the development and consolidation of personal style and self-reflexivity in the context of an individual work — a feature of all subsequent quartets — is already set here. Notes   1 The fourth movement of this first quartet was performed in 1992 at Royaumont by the Arditti String Quartet. (Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 275).   2 The occasional pieces for string quartet are discussed in Chapter 5.   3 Paul Archbold, “Performing Complexity,” 53.   4 Ibid.   5 Ibid.   6 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 153.   7 Francis Courtot also pays close attention to the string quartets (particularly the Second to Fourth) in his book, reproducing certain sketch materials and using them as the basis for analytical insight. See Francis Courtot, Brian Ferneyhough: Figures et dialogues. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2009. Sketch materials for the first four quartets are archived at the Paul Sacher Stiftung, Basel, revealing the composer’s characteristic use of pitch and rhythmic filter devices, some of which are considered in this chapter.   8 Archbold, “Performing Complexity,” 54.   9 Brian Ferneyhough, Programme Notes, Brian Ferneyhough Chamber Music, Ensemble Recherche, Stradivarius STR 33694, 2005, CD. 10 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 311. 11 Stéphane Goldet, “Brian Ferneyhough: Sontas for String Quartet, Quatuor no. 2,” Quatuors du 20ème siècle (Paris: IRCAM and Arles: Actes Sud, 1989): 118. My translation.

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12 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 311. 13 It is not so much these pitches as identities that interests Ferneyhough as the tendency expressed through their implied directionality. 14 Goldet, “Sonatas for String Quartet, Quatuor no. 2,” 119. 15 There is no evidence from the sketch materials that Ferneyhough worked on other chamber works during this period, besides the incomplete and never published Opus Null (1968), at the very beginning of the ‘window’ between the Sonatas and the Second Quartet. Opus Null is mentioned in Chapter 1. There is (somewhat confusingly, given the subsequent titles of works) an incipit of a Second String Quartet in the restricted-access sketches, dated 1967. The small amount of material bears no relation to any of the published string quartets, and must therefore be assumed to have been abandoned, although the presence of some microtonal materials in the sketch, including inflectional detail, prompts speculation as to whether Ferneyhough looked back on or recalled this incipit when conceiving the Fifth or Sixth Quartets, both of which contain inflectional microtones. From the evidence of the Two Marian Motets, published in 2005, it is known that Ferneyhough revisited old pieces from 1966 retaining his original conception with but a few small changes. It is therefore conceivable that he did so again in this instance, but too little material survives from this abandoned 1967 Second String Quartet to admit of clearer identification. The piecemeal content of some of the restricted-access sketch materials from the early period strongly suggests that much has been lost. 16 Ferneyhough, unpublished sketch materials, Second String Quartet, Paul Sacher Stiftung, Basel c. 1980. 17 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 288. 18 Ferneyhough, unpublished sketch materials, Second Quartet, c. 1980. 19 Ibid. 20 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 122. 21 Ibid. 22 Ferneyhough, unpublished sketch materials, Second Quartet, c. 1980. The orchestral piece referred to is La terre est un homme, completed as he began composing the quartet. 23 The second derived interval, a descending perfect 4th, is again calculated by subtracting the smaller interval (this time interval two — the major second — in the modulatory unit, from the second interval in the original unit (a perfect 5th)). This procedure continues until all seven pitches (pitches 8–14 in bar 6) have been derived. For the following set of seven pitches, beginning again on BH, Ferneyhough carries out the same procedure, using the derived unit and the modulatory unit, but beginning from the second interval in the modulatory unit and the first in the derived unit. 24 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 122. 25 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 119. He also designates ‘superinstruments’ in the sketch materials for La terre est un homme, referring to the colour groups to which each instrument belongs (see discussion in Chapter 10). 26 Ferneyhough’s handwriting is unclear. The word he uses is either Abwesenleit or Abwesenheit. Abwesenheit is more likely, meaning absence, failure to appear or the state of not being present. Abwesenleit means in absentia. The reference is from Ferneyhough, unpublished sketch materials, Second Quartet, c. 1980. 194

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27 Compare this use of ‘submaterial’ to what Ferneyhough calls ‘anti-material’ in La terre est un homme (see Chapter 10). A number of strategies in common between the Second Quartet and the orchestral work arise from the composition of each having overlapped. Despite the considerable difference in the instrumental means employed in each work, these shared techniques and concepts point to fundamental compositional concerns at the turn of the decade (1970s–1980s), a time of change in Ferneyhough’s notational and gestural style. 28 Alessandro Melchiorre, “Les labyrinthes de Ferneyhough: a propos du Deuxième Quatuor et de Lemma-Icon-Epigram,” Entretemps 3 (February 1987): 69–88. 29 Whilst this is not the only work for which it is possible to find such an abandoned fragment amongst the sketch materials, it is also the case that Ferneyhough has not retained all such ‘neat drafts’. He recalls that ‘at the outset of Firecycle Beta I composed a worked-out score page for full orchestra, complete in every detail. After acting as the quarry from which all other elements and relationships were ultimately derived, this was made inaccessible by burning.’ (Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 434). 30 The example is reproduced from Melchiorre, “Les Labyrinthes de Ferneyhough,” 71. 31 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 117. 32 Ferneyhough, unpublished sketch materials, Second Quartet, c. 1980. 33 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 117. 34 The existence of this projected third movement is documented in the sketch material for this work. 35 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 489. The work was finished only just prior to its first performance: Ferneyhough describes the experience of copying pages in one room whilst the Arditti Quartet rehearsed those already completed in the same room. (Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 371–2). 36 Ferneyhough, unpublished sketch materials, Third String Quartet, Paul Sacher Stiftung, Basel, c. 1986–1987. 37 Jonathan Cott, Stockhausen: Conversations with the Composer (London: Picador/Pan Books, 1974), 217. 38 Ferneyhough refers to ‘motivic pulverization’ in the sketches. Both the sheer number of texture-types and the formal retrograde two-thirds of the way through the movement enable this, the tiny fragments of motives or texture-types in the final bars of the first movement exemplifying ‘pulverization’ in relation to its more expansive opening bars. See Ferneyhough, unpublished sketch materials, Third Quartet, c. 1986–1987. 39 In his biography of Ferneyhough for Peters’ website, Fabrice Fitch suggests that the Third Quartet ‘seems to turn the material of the Second inside-out.’ See F. Fitch, “Ferneyhough, Brian,” http://www.editionpeters.com/modern.php?composer=FERNEYHOUGH&moder n=1 (accessed October 14, 2012). 40 Ferneyhough, unpublished sketch materials, Third Quartet, c. 1986–1987. The rhythmic pre-compositional material for the first movement of the quartet is found on the reverse of the sheet. 41 Ferneyhough, unpublished sketch materials, Third Quartet, c. 1986–1987. 42 Ibid. 43 Ibid. 195

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44 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 38. 45 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 163. See Bryan R. Simms, “‘My Dear Hagerl’: SelfRepresentation in Schoenberg’s String Quartet No. 2.” 19th Century Music 26/3 (Spring 2003): 258–277. Simms considers Schoenberg’s motivations for introducing text and a soprano into his quartet, and offers perspectives on the significance of the work. 46 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 155. 47 Ibid., 154. 48 See Albrecht Wellmer, “On Music and Language,” in Identity and Difference: Essays on Music, Language, Time, ed. Peter Dejans (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2004): 71–132. 49 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 154. 50 Ibid., 158. 51 Ibid., 156. 52 Ibid., 69. 53 See his interview with Jeffrey Stadelman, “Leaps and Circuits to Trail: a Conversation on the Texts and Music with Jeffrey Stadelman,” Collected Writings, 464–509. Ferneyhough has also written text for his works On Stellar Magnitudes and Opus Contra Naturam. 54 But it is also interesting that it allows Ferneyhough to envelop an element of chance in his work. 55 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 362. 56 Ibid., 160. 57 Ibid., 164. 58 Ferneyhough, unpublished sketch materials, Fourth String Quartet, Paul Sacher Stiftung, Basel, c. 1989–90. 59 Ibid. 60 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings., 158. 61 Ferneyhough, unpublished sketch materials, Fourth Quartet, c. 1989–90. 62 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 160. 63 Ibid. See also Paul Archbold et. al., “Performing Complexity.” Ferneyhough mentions the Ives, not for the last time — he does so again in relation to his own Sixth Quartet, discussed below. 64 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 160. 65 From the Seven Bagatelles for piano, op. 33, No. 6. 66 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 164. 67 The notes on the early String Trio, dated 1965, are archived with unpublished sketch materials for Epicycle, Paul Sacher Stiftung, Basel, 1968. It is possible that some of the ideas or even materials intended for this Trio were ultimately subsumed into Funérailles, because of references in the sketches to a larger scale work conceived around elements of the Trio (1965) material, but extended to a more extensive body of instruments. Funérailles, having been so long in the making, appears to have gone through several different stages and incarnations, tracing a possible lineage from trio to a work provisionally entitled Labyrinth, String Set and finally Funérailles I (and later II). This is conjecture, however, based on piecing together scraps of sketch material scattered throughout folders of material on numerous works dating from the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s. 196

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68 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 274. 69 Alessandro Melchiorre, Liner Notes, “Ferneyhough: a Lexicon,” Brian Ferneyhough chamber works, Ensemble Recherche, Stradivarius STR 33694, 2005, CD. 70 Ibid. 71 According to Schlegel, ‘even the greatest system is still a fragment.’ Berthold Hoeckner observes that ‘inasmuch as the idea of the absolute can be reduced to a fragment, the fragment may in turn aspire, again, to the absolute. Thus Schlegel also defined that ‘[a] fragment, like a small work of art, has to be entirely isolated from the surrounding world and be complete in itself, like a hedgehog.’ Schlegel quoted in Berthold Hoeckner, Programming the Absolute; Nineteenth-Century German Music and the Hermeneutics of the Moment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 6. 72 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 164. 73 Goethe, quoted in Christina Bashford, “The String Quartet and Society,” in The Cambridge Companion to the String Quartet, ed. Robin Stowell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 4. The quotation is from Goethe in a letter to C.F. Zelter, November 9, 1829. 74 See comments by Lucas Fels and Irvine Arditti in Paul Archbold, “Performing Complexity,” 23, 63. 75 Ibid., 24. 76 This polemic is discussed in detail in Chapter 8. 77 The stylistic plurality of aspects of Shadowtime, for example, are discussed in detail in Chapter 9. 78 Paul Archbold, “Performing Complexity,” 19. 79 Ibid., 14. 80 Although it is of course speculative to draw biographical inferences from this, the composer’s recollection of having concealed his musical intentions from those around him as a child and adolescent, and his early studies at the Birmingham School of Music for a teaching diploma (rather than a composition qualification), suggest that such type-casting, as distasteful as he may have found it, at least offered him a certain ‘safe distance’ from which to operate. Recall his comment, in the early interview with Stephen Riggins (quoted in Chapter 1): ‘[I like] the confirmation of being asked [for interviews] because I am always insecure enough to need that.’ (Riggins, The Pleasures of Time, 136). Forty years later, he feels able to say in interview with Thomas Meyer that he has nothing to prove any more, dissolving at least some of his former reticence (Meyer, “Ein Gespräch mit Brian Ferneyhough,” 57). 81 Meyer, “Ein Gespräch mit Brian Ferneyhough,” 51. 82 Archbold et al., “Performing Complexity,” 25. 83 Ibid., 47. 84 Ibid., 49. 85 From bar 165 the first violin is clearly a soloist despite the gestural interventions of the lower instruments (bars 172–184) and an attempt by the second violin and viola to mark time (bars 180–182). It frees itself from these constraints, and its subsequent, true solo both summarizes textures already expounded and prepares those to come, before being reabsorbed into the ensemble (bar 207ff.). 86 Elliott Carter’s Second String Quartet also allocates an individual character to each instrument. 197

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87 Carter’s Second Quartet also treats one instrument as a ‘timekeeper’, whilst the ’cello material accelerates or decelerates against it. 88 See viola bars 154–157; violin 1 bars 157–158 and so on. 89 Meyer, “Ein Gespräch mit Brian Ferneyhough,” 51. 90 Ferneyhough produced the score using Finale music notation software and sent it to the Paul Sacher Stiftung on the 5 May, 2011. 91 The fourth movement, viola and violin 2, bars 20–22.

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Chapter 7 Time and Motion Study Cycle

T

he three works discussed in this chapter constitute the first of three progressively larger-scale cycles undertaken by Ferneyhough (the second and third being Carceri d’Invenzione and Shadowtime). The three constituents of the Time and Motion Study cycle (hereafter TMS I, II and III, respectively) are standalone works, but share certain compositional principles as well as a common conceptual basis — that of the industrial time and motion study. TMS I for solo bass clarinet was first conceived in 1971 but subsequently re-written (the new version was published in 1976–1977); TMS II for ’cello and live electronic transformation was written in the interval, between 1973 and 1976; and within that period, Ferneyhough composed TMS III, dated 1974, for sixteen solo voices with percussion and electronic amplification. Taken individually, the three works share many techniques and concepts with other works in the oeuvre. TMS I and II might also have been discussed in detail in Chapter 3 (on solo works), whilst TMS III relates to another group of works including Epicycle and the Missa Brevis, which involve the antiphonal deployment of a single instrumental ‘type’ (in the case of both the Missa and TMS III, the voice). The importance of these lateral relationships should be borne in mind, but the cycle compels a consideration of the whole as much as its formidable parts, despite the fact that the panels are typically performed separately and that TMS II has had the greater profile and the more sustained performance history of the three, as well as attracting the most critical interest from musicologists.1 Although composed out of order, the three trace a sequential relationship with a rather straightforward structural expansion at its core. According to the composer: It was my aim to allow each individual work to stand independently on its own terms, but it was also my hope that a perception of the mode of interlocking employed to fix the pieces in place would enhance their singularities into a coherent design of a higher order. In Time and Motion Study, this dimension is provided, on the most immediate level, by the principle of expansion. The action begins by concentrating on a sole performer, expanding immediately to focus on a single instrumentalist locked into a web of technology. Finally, it embraces a large group of individuals, whose vocal actions are supplemented by percussion and spatially redistributed by appropriately located loudspeakers.2 There are further lines of progression obtaining through the cycle. TMS I is the most expressively direct of the three and, compared with the others, admits of relatively simple

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formal perceptions at the surface level. Although it uses no electronic transformation of materials, the overtly restrictive and framing functions of the medium as used in TMS II and III is emulated ‘subcutaneously’ (at the compositional level) in TMS I through a grid of proportional relationships by means of which Ferneyhough re-read the first, unpublished version of the piece, some detail of which is given below. The composer characterizes the expressive world of the first version as ‘wild rigour and bleakness’, likening his experience when writing the second version to ‘composing a monologue out of a Greek tragedy.’3 The ’cello piece transforms the ‘wild rigour’ of TMS I into overt aggression — ‘the utmost imaginable degree of violence’ — whilst the final panel might be seen,4 the composer suggests, ‘if not exactly as a morality play, then at least as an “allegoric action”.’5 The cycle’s expressive contexts originate in the concept enshrined in the title, the industrial ‘time and motion study’, wherein a workforce (in a factory or office environment, for example) is subject to observation of its efficiency relative to productive output: the time taken to perform a task is measured against the motion necessary to complete it. Businesses that commission such studies hope to gauge efficiency and to identify means of refining processes, thereby increasing productivity and consequently, profit margins. Richard Barrett notes that the ‘dehumanization’ associated with such activity in the workplace does not automatically imply that Ferneyhough visits a similar ‘dehumanization’ on his performer: in other words, Ferneyhough’s pieces are not a kind of aptitude or efficiency test for the performers.6 Barrett argues that ‘the difference, of course, is that here the tasks are voluntarily carried out in the service of something other than generating surplus value.’7 Certainly, the notion of efficiency is built into all of Ferneyhough’s scores — every one a ‘time and motion study’ — to the extent that each piece demands of its performer(s) that they confront and render the attendant notational surfeit and that the listener, by extension, presented with material in a given time-frame, register the resulting density of information to the best of his/her ability. As a result, performer and listener experience musical expression physically, their whole body mobilized. In a letter dating from the period of the cycle’s composition, Ferneyhough writes that he understands ‘the essence of artistic activity as the fusion of all possible human capacities. Why not have a music which is at one and the same time experience per se and theoretical formulation, rethinking of “normality” as a form of philosophical activity?’8 Ferneyhough nevertheless finds the tension between the industrial metaphor — the ‘quest for maximum efficiency […] pursued by means of “programming” these motions to such an extent that the worker’s conscious mind (being by nature “inefficient”) and initiative are removed as far as possible from the process’ — and the intense creative effort on the part of the musical performer itself highly productive.9 There is a constant and deliberate ambiguity in play: he does indeed ‘dehumanize’ the performer to the extent that in each of the three pieces, s/he is part of a ‘super-organism’, comprising body, instrument and performance environment. He argues in respect of TMS I that: 202

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As in Antonin Artaud’s ‘Theatre of Cruelty’, each area of the work calls forth resonances from different parts of the total organism performer/instrument/context. This, for me, is ‘drama in music’.10 Perhaps the concept of the ‘superinstrument’, which cuts across a broad spectrum of Ferneyhough’s output, finds its origin in this thinking.11 Taking the principle further still, Martin Iddon has suggested that the relationship between vocalizing ’cellist and live electronics in TMS II ‘is actually one of a combined cyborg identity’, a post-organic ‘being’ redolent of Deleuze and Guattari’s desiring-machines.12 Deleuze’s and Guattari’s concept of the ‘Body without Organs’, itself derived from Artaud’s thinking, is opposed to the organism as an organized body:13 in the Theatre of Cruelty the actor’s body becomes the site for expression, rather than the language that s/he speaks (or the actions s/he performs). Text is subverted in favour of a ‘language’ located somewhere between thought and gesture. The extraordinary physical demands made of the actor engage the audience in its turn physically, rather than logically, in the performance: all participants (including the audience) experience extreme emotional states. In such a context the actor is valued less for an ability to orate Shakespearean soliloquy than to put his/her lung capacity to different, unconventional ends: to gasp, whisper and gulp Artaud’s particular glottal ‘language’. Deleuze attributes Artaud’s perception of the body to his schizophrenia and consequent ‘altered state’, like the protagonist of William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, from which Deleuze quotes: ‘we could seal up nose and mouth. Fill in the stomach, make an air hole direct into the lungs where it should have been in the first place.’14 All of this resonates particularly with TMS III, in which sixteen singers gasp and perform other atypical vocal actions, at one point being instructed to perform ‘like the sound of a single giant lung.’15 This piece also recalls Artaud’s theatre in the sheer volume of stage/performance instructions: no action is without several meanings, and the score presents a formidable learning challenge to those undertaking it. This is equally true for the soloist in TMS II: it is fitting that the text used for the piece’s vocalized section is an English translation from Artaud’s Le Pèse-nerfs [The Nerve Scales] (discussed in detail below).16 For all the large-scale friction between the industrial model and Artaud’s thought, the two share one fundamental aim, albeit approached from diametrically opposite positions. As Barrett suggests, the removal or suppression of the conscious mind in the workplace is desirable according to the efficiency model, (leading, one infers, to the automatic compliance of the well-drilled worker’s subconscious); Artaud also seeks to stimulate the subconscious mind, provoking responses to the theatre that are normally inaccessible. Both these incompatible approaches are demanded of Ferneyhough’s performer: ‘because performers of this piece [TMS II] are required to master and reproduce information of extreme complexity […] they must invest all their energy in order to approach an adequate interpretation.’17 The performer is left physically spent in Artaud’s theatre, the factory, and Ferneyhough’s pieces. But ultimately, the utopian vision of industrial efficiency fails: in TMS III, initial order and allegiances between the singers dissolve. According to Ferneyhough, ‘I envisaged this as standing for the end of the line product of the tendency 203

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of the individual to develop distinctive traits at the expense of the group activity by which he is initially defined’ (hence TMS III’s characterization as an ‘allegorical action’).18 Time and Motion Study I It seems unlikely that the first version of the piece, for B H clarinet, composed in 1971 had as its basis the ‘time and motion study’ concept that it later acquired upon its subsequent revision and incorporation into the eponymous triptych.19 What Barrett calls the obsessive detail of the notation in the published work suggests a ‘desire to integrate the concept of efficiency as applied to the relationship between performer, notation and realisation more explicitly into the fabric of the material and its organisation than is perhaps customary.’20 Version I, composed in the same period as Cassandra’s Dream Song, contains mobile elements and, from the evidence of surviving materials, would have taken a form not dissimilar to that of the piece for solo flute: it comprises one sheet with five numbered lines of music, and there are indications that a second sheet (with materials designated α, β, γ and δ) was intended to complement it.21 The incomplete Version I becomes a ‘given’ or ‘found’ material upon which the published version (that is, TMS I) is built. Comparing them side by side yields little specific insight,22 however, since Ferneyhough deliberately avoided simply reconfiguring Version I according to what he regarded as a compromise, blending the old with newer ideas some six years later, and with two other pieces of the cycle having been completed in the interval.23 Any ‘archaeology’ on the part of the musicologist meaning to uncover a ‘lost’ Version I from study of Version II is therefore comparatively fruitless, since TMS I largely obscures the configurations of its source, if not — as mentioned earlier — its expressive world.24 Few obvious traces remain: section II of the published score begins with the same rhythmic material as the original line 2 from 1971, and the importance of the low written G is common to both (although the trills are added to Version II; in fact, the early unpublished version begins with a long, low G marked non vibrato in total contrast to the opening of Version II). Much of the information detailing how Ferneyhough approached the composition of the published TMS I is gleaned from a copy of a private letter, archived with the first version, addressed to ‘Harry’ (presumably Halbreich), in which the composer describes processes and methods by which he generated materials for TMS I, Version II. Ferneyhough argues that one of the principal challenges in re-composing the piece was precisely to resist some of the aesthetic and theoretical considerations that had arisen in the last two pieces in the series, in order to preserve the directness of version I.25 He began by imposing a proportional scheme over Version I, according to which the ‘remains of the original [could] be situated relative to one another.’26 This goes some way towards making TMS I the ‘odd one out’ in the cycle — not only does it lack the overt theatricality of its companions, but the energies it does possess are more material-bound, implosive rather than explosive — indicative perhaps of the gestural style that would shortly emerge and dominate Ferneyhough’s style after 1980. (By the time TMS I was finally completed in 1977, the gestural style that characterizes 204

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Lemma-Icon-Epigram was only three years away). The relatively simple additive procedure in the trill tuplets represents as straightforwardly directional a gesture as seen in the opening of the piano piece: the first trill in TMS I is initially at a regular speed, with ten impulses to the quaver, but accelerates incrementally 10-11-12-13-14 and down again. This feature returns with each appearance of the figure, its momentum offset by irregular accented notes.27 The opposition between the furious lengthy trills and more expansive, irregular gestures is readily audible from the outset. Initially there is no mediation between them, but over the course of the work Ferneyhough explores motion from one to another. Contrary to Ferneyhough’s stated intentions, the piece does seem to mature expressively in certain respects between its two versions: the abundance of creative performance instructions so typical of TMS II and III, which are present in Version I, are absent in the published version.28 Although the latter does participate in the Artaud-derived conception of the others, insofar as it subjects its performer to some uncomfortable conditions, it does so in subtler fashion (where Version I does so more overtly).29 Ferneyhough describes Version II as ‘the application, in various roles, of the proportions inherent in the Fibonacci series (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13…). […] The further course of the 9-minute work is made up of the violent filtering of the energies thus liberated through the dexterity and bodily flexibility of the performer.’30 The primary proportions used to generate version II are three short series all derived from the Lucas series (a close relative of its Fibonacci counterpart). The second example below shows the first six values of the Lucas series proper, whilst the addition or subtraction of a value of 1 from the corresponding integer in the Lucas series determines the two flanking series: i) 1 2 3 6 10 17 ii) 1 3 4 7 11 18 (Lucas series) iii) 1 4 5 8 12 19 These proportions series determine numerous parameters in addition to the accented impulses at the start of the work, noted above (which follow the pattern 18-11-7-4-3-1, which denotes the number of impulses between each accent). Thus, the number of notes in each appearance of an irregular gesture (β) that punctuates a regular trill (a) in section I is calculated according to Lucas ratios and those derivatives given above (Table 7.1). Table 7.1:  Number of notes in each appearance of the irregular gesture β, Time and Motion Study I.

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Figure 7.1:  Time and Motion Study I, original pitch row.

The original pitch row, first heard in full in the first system of the piece is similarly derived from Lucas proportions, as follows: 3–1=2 4–3=1 7–4=3 11–7=4 18–11=7 Row = 2–1–3–4–7

The sketches provide a subsidiary microtonal pitch series, which is also found in the piece interleaved with the original.31 The subsidiary series begins with the G–AH trill at the end of the first system (Figure 7.2a), and the interleaved form is used at the beginning of the fourth system (Figure 7.2b). This grid is imposed (‘from above’) onto the given materials of Version I, suggestive of a certain distance from the self-motivation of gestural material towards its own destruction that is discernible in Lemma-Icon-Epigram and other works from the 1980s, discussed in Chapters 6 and 8. But Ferneyhough does hint at its imminent conceptualization: ‘the original concept/piece [Version I] actually succeeds in preserving its discrete identity better by assenting to its own dissolution. It thus becomes its own survivor.’32 This statement is of interest, considering the fact that until very recently, only Ferneyhough had first-hand knowledge of the first version.33 The terms in which he expresses himself convey his grasp of a self-consistent Version I that can never be accessed by performers or listeners of the published Version II; but even a close study of the unpublished first version does not indicate how it came to be dissolved within the published version (the limited information Ferneyhough provides concerning his use of the ‘grid’ is insufficient to replicate his processes). He also refers to ‘the difference which is neither one version nor the other’:34 for the composer, TMS I

Figure 7.2a:  Time and Motion Study I, subsidiary series 1.

Figure 7.2b:  Time and Motion Study I, subsidiary series 2.

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will always amount to a form of musical palimpsest, he alone having knowledge of the original ‘text’ and its subsequent overwriting. As with other solo pieces of this period, Ferneyhough refers to the conception of polyphony in relation to a monophonic instrument, by which he means that each parameter has its own process(es), expanded in time, sometimes requiring a performer to negotiate several layers of independent processes visible in the score, at once. This occurs, for example, at the third system of section II, where trill figures are given according to one rhythmic pattern whilst counterpointed against an accented fluttertongue texture articulating another rhythm and dynamic profile, as in Figure 7.3.35 The subjectivity of time becomes apparent to the listener because Ferneyhough hints at a variations structure, allowing the ear to grasp recurrent ideas (principally the extended trill) and measure temporal compression or extension against them. A comparison between the piece’s four sections (particularly II and IV) reveals much in common between them, particularly the opening gesture in each case. This is clearly derived from the rapid trill material, but the effect is one of temporal attenuation, reinforced for the performer by the passage immediately preceding, requiring circular breathing and precise control of ‘interior’ articulations,36 which function here (in the absence of an actual text) like Artaud’s glottal language. Elsewhere, the performer is tested psychologically and physically: wide intervallic leaps characterize the irregular gestural materials (marked espansivo, as though to reinforce the point, as in the third system of the score). These are harder to negotiate at speed, and Ferneyhough tests the performer’s agility by introducing grace-notes, harmonics and rests into this material (all usually with additional articulation requirements) by filtering out impulses. The grace-notes are initially an outgrowth of the trill figure (see Figure 7.4), but gradually acquire a mediating role between the trill and expansive leaping gestures (see Figure 7.5). Version I includes numerous prompts to hum or draw breath violently. At the end of Version I a single pitch — marked ‘towards timelessness’ — is held for as long as possible, whilst breath noise increases. Ferneyhough preserves this ‘timelessness’ in the published version’s senza tempo ending, the piece concluding along similar lines to Unity Capsule, wherein the performer, breath spent, continues to move fingers on the keys even after all sound has ceased. Time and Motion Study II The central panel of the triptych has tested the principle of efficiency in ways that Ferneyhough must have anticipated to a certain extent, even if he could not imagine the exact means by which technological advancement would alter future performances of the work. Although one typically associates the concept of ‘authentic performance practice’ with much older music, twentieth-century material increasingly invites research in this field, not least because of the advent — and continual refinement — of recording technologies in the last hundred years. Whereas the original work calls for three assistants to operate the equipment required, recent performances have replaced the cumbersome and superseded technology with a 207

Figure 7.4:  Time and Motion Study I, grace notes as outgrowth of initial trill figure, section I, ninth system.

Figure 7.3:  Time and Motion Study I, polyphonic parametric processes visible in the score, section II, third system.

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Figure 7.5:  Time and Motion Study I, contrasting gestures (trill, leaping figures and grace notes), end of seventh system.

single individual managing the live transformation by means of a MaxMSP patch.37 Undoubtedly this makes the piece more ‘portable’ and realizable, but it raises aesthetic questions in relation to the ‘theatrical’ conception of the original.38 The quotation marks here are deliberate, for Ferneyhough’s intentions in this respect are deliberately ambiguous themselves: the piece’s original subtitle, Electric Chair Music, was withdrawn, but the presence of assistants fixing microphones to the body of the ’cellist and the instrument, before flicking switches on electronic equipment, was sufficiently suggestive that the abandoned rubric was superfluous in any case.39 The scaling-down of the equipment that has occurred due to progress over time ultimately focuses the attention on the soloist, perhaps transforming some of the original physically oppressive environment into a psychological constriction that benefits performance and offers new expressive possibilities (as seen in the video performance of the work by Neil Heyde and Paul Archbold). Nonetheless, the sense of a ritual action being performed on the person of the (initially passive) ’cellist is arguably lost to an extent in these more recent realizations. But even though the latent (or not so latent) sadism of the situation is attenuated,40 the visceral impact of the performance remains. Where TMS I offers hope of transcendence, TMS II is the cycle’s dark heart, its own moments of transcendence ultimately negated in a final gesture of oppressive bleakness. Nowhere has Ferneyhough offered a more pessimistic conclusion to the challenges he sets himself or his music. According to the composer, the work is ‘concerned with memory — how memory sieves, colours and shuffles the avalanche of sense impressions which the brain registers.’41 The electronic ‘circuit’, becomes emblematic of memories intruding on the now (the live material), insofar as specific segments of live ’cello material are selected, distorted and reintroduced at a delay. The memories do not appear in an ordered fashion, but suddenly and disordered, forcing the ’cellist to negotiate the demands of the score as well as the loud material issuing from one or more speakers (there are eight in total). The conflict between memory and the present prefigures themes that become important to the opera Shadowtime 30 years 209

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later. Ferneyhough argues that ‘the place of performance [is] the point of confrontation for objectively measurable systems and subjective obscuration, erosion and eradication’;42 in associating the memory (subjective) function with the role of the electronics he confers on the latter human qualities, whilst at times the ’cellist must perform nonhuman movements, exemplified in the instruction ‘with sudden extremes of stillness and mobility, as can be observed in certain insects (i.e. preying mantis).’43 Notwithstanding these insect-like gestures, a further ‘subjective obscuration’ obtains in the ’cellist’s relationship to the notation alone, particularly the physical demands that must be met in order to render the piece satisfactorily. The performer’s feet, throat, palms, nails and various parts of the fingers are called upon, and the ’cello itself becomes an array of exotic instruments, including guitar, mandolin, zarb [a kind of drum] and piano.44 On occasion, action on each of the four strings is notated separately (as at Adagio Maestoso, page 5), and later the added vocal layer (not forgetting the constant attention to the foot pedals and feedback sounds) creates further pressure on the increasingly ‘imprisoned’ ’cellist. In formal terms, Ferneyhough makes a distinction between objectively calculated (quantifiable) process and subjectively (intuitively) determined gestural material with looser pre-compositional stipulations. He alternates ‘parts’ and ‘sequences’ — these are clearly labelled in the score — the latter comprising up to six distinct gestural types per sequence. The gesture types, and their order of appearance in each sequence as stipulated in the sketches is given below: Table 7.2:  Gesture types and occurrence in sequences, Time and Motion Study II.

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Originally the composer envisaged a much longer piece including 24 sequences and seven parts, but this is curtailed in the final version, with nine sequences to five parts, the general tendency of the work moving from homogeneity between part and sequence to violent contrast. At first, the part material — based on rhythmic formulae in perpetual variation — dominates. It is carved into small units, which are initially texturally demarcated so as to render them aurally similar to the gesture types of the sequences. The small units are readily distinguishable at the beginning of the piece, which is characterized by a clear alternation between tremolo and glissando figures.45 Sequences act as ‘commentaries’, each gestural type being subject to its own development or variation procedures. This is quite audible, as in the case of type four (chords), heard in Sequences Ia, Ib and 2, each time elongated as Ferneyhough devises diverse means of motion from chord to chord.46 In the second half (where the voice enters, page 12), it is the sequences that dictate — characterized by rapid changes in texture — and the confrontation between part and sequence is at its most extreme. As sequences accumulate (4–8), the gestures pile up on top of each other — as well as in the voice — compounding the ’cellist’s frantic attempts to differentiate their established identities in the time allowed him/her.47 Throughout the work, frequent rests in the ’cello part (though not always silent in real terms, as feedback continues or resonance is held through) represent an opportunity for stillness before frenetic motion is resumed. This is most pronounced at the beginning, but recalled near the end. Part IV is preceded by erratic movement and ‘freezing up’ (conclusion of sequence 8), then a 12 second pause before building from motionlessness towards mania confined to the low register and ultimately within a whole-tone pitch range. ‘Violent, jerky actions: like muscle spasms’ replace any gestural (human) content (contrast this with the gestural density and registral extremes in sequence 9, which intervenes in part IV and concludes ‘suddenly serene’). If TMS I is a composer’s ‘time and motion study’ (in the sense that the composer subjects himself to self-observation of his working processes on a pre-existent material, with a view to producing the final object), then TMS II is the performer’s: like Artaud’s actor, the ’cellist must assume awkward physical positions, reconfigure typical [playing] techniques and respond to stimuli. Artaud used bright lighting to visit discomfort on his actor; Ferneyhough’s electronics perform a similar function, not least in the passage entailing live reaction to electronic signals (part III). Elements of indeterminacy are built in to the notation (dynamics and articulation, in boxes), the only ‘weapon’ with which the performer can ‘voice’ resistance ‘in the face of the vast ballooning of superfluous “memory shards” hemming him in.’48 When even these are taken away and replaced with spectral harmonics, there results a certain inevitability about the introduction of the Artaud text from Le Pèsenerfs (Ferneyhough’s text is a phonetic version of the English translation below): I am the witness, the only witness of myself The faculty of hindsight, or suddenly railing against our thoughts. This substance is the standard of a void which does not know itself. 211

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Then, two lines are interlaced: Do you know what suspended sensitivity is, this sort of tremendous vitality… [not continued]/ Finding oneself in a state of extreme shock, enlightened by unreality… [not continued]49 The reason Ferneyhough gives for removing the subtitle — that it would ‘be far too explicit for the final interpretational approach’ — reinforces the view of TMS II as a work in which the sensations of the performer are paramount, and it is these — not the ‘story’ of an execution — that make an impact on the listener (who nonetheless benefits most when s/he is also a viewer).50 Time and Motion Study III TMS III is the epitome of Ferneyhough’s researches into polyphony for monophonic sound sources (each of sixteen solo voices). In the solo repertoire the flute exemplifies this approach: pieces such as Cassandra and Unity Capsule arose because the composer realized that ‘many different articulation levels can be superimposed on the basic sound production technique’,51 and he applies this principle to the individual voices in TMS III. A ‘base’ sound is stipulated (pitched, unvoiced, nasal) and modified (by a hand cupped over the mouth, indrawn breath rather than exhaling and phonetic characters added). In other words, a number of filters are applied to the ‘base’.52 Each voice is also electro-acoustically amplified. The phonetic text is so thoroughly obscured by the vocal activity and musical processes as to be deprived of immediate semantic resonance, a strategy common to virtually all of Ferneyhough’s text-setting. Instead, the musical notation itself acquires a sculpted quality, as Ferneyhough devises supplementary means of supplying the performers information both in the note-head and the stem.53 In respect of its notational profile, indeed, TMS III is no less striking than its ’cello counterpart, with its profusion of ‘stage directions’, atypical note shapes and phonetic text. Its acoustic image is as exotic, the sounds emitted by the singers frequently verging on the equivocal. If TMS II represents an extreme of pessimism in Ferneyhough’s output, TMS III probably qualifies similarly in the realm of sheer weirdness. It might be viewed as exceptional in this regard, were it not for the existence of Opus Null, one of the withdrawn pieces on which Ferneyhough worked early in the same decade (previously discussed in the biographical Chapter 1), whose stage instructions call on the ensembles to execute a series of surreal actions. Although the grotesqueness of TMS III resides principally in the extra-musical associations of the sounds prescribed, these may legitimately be regarded as trace elements of Ferneyhough’s interest in an aesthetic realm that is otherwise hidden from view. Indeed, the context offered by Opus Null suggests that the humorous implications of these vocal emissions is not only intentional, but deliberately plays on the expectations of a high-modernist audience: how else to interpret the contrast between the complexity of the notation and the occasionally primitive utterances it prescribes? 212

Figure 7.6a:  Time and Motion Study III, example of notation, bars 1–4.

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Figure 7.6b:  Time and Motion Study III, excerpt from prefatory performance instructions.

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The piece owes the most of the three Time and Motion Studies to avant-garde precedents, including Stockhausen’s Stimmung (1968) and Gesang der Jünglinge (1955–1956), and Ligeti’s Aventures/Nouvelles Aventures (1962/5). Ferneyhough’s singers also play percussion instruments (as in Etudes transcendantales and the Thirteen Canons from Shadowtime), echoing such (roughly contemporary) examples as Helmut Lachenmann’s Les Consolations I (1967–1968). As in TMS II, there is ambiguity in the primary opposition ‘separating the human being from the machine’54 (Ferneyhough takes inspiration from Duchamp’s The Large Glass, and it is tempting to ‘read’ TMS III’s invocation of a surreal sound-world in its light, not least by analogy with the ‘bachelor machine’).55 Like its solo ’cello counterpart, TMS III uses electro-acoustic transformation in addition to vocal amplification: a tape loop is introduced towards the end, recording material from the choir and reproducing it in ‘dehumanized’ fashion; however, according to Ferneyhough, the centrally controlled overall volume ‘was intentionally left unnotated, whereby the electro-acoustic dimension is accorded a certain “human” flexibility.’56 This is significant, because the sheer notational saturation in all other areas of sound production — in other words, the live or human material — attains a ‘computer-like precision and engagement.’57 The percussion acquires a mediatory role: each performer plays an instrument, the sounds elongating as the voices make the transition, across the work, from various atypical vocalizations towards conventional sung tones.58 It is left unclear whether the instruments are conceived as an extension to the body of the performer, or whether the singer, deprived of his/her usual vehicle for self-expression, imitates the sound of the percussion. At the beginning of the work, every voice is allied to a higher, ‘collective’ voice, one of four choirs, each of which is allocated its own material and associated developmental strategies. Each choir is positioned at one corner of the performance space, making use of the antiphonal possibilities for sound exchange. The four distinct ‘lines of thought’ are quite audible. TMS III examines the types of musical movement possible between the choirs as their initial hermetic detachment from one another — analogous with Duchamp’s Bride and Bachelors, perhaps — is eroded: a singer belonging to one choir might begin to imitate the material of another, forming a temporary allegiance.59 In the sketches, Ferneyhough suggests that each choir’s processes and material types infect the others’,60 once again hinting at a social model while maintaining that ‘in undertaking this task it was never in the least my intention to “set” or mirror specific social or philosophical states of affairs: the composition itself always had priority.’61 As much as Ferneyhough may profess himself to be uninterested in music as politics, the piece undoubtedly invites interpretation along the allegorical lines suggested earlier, as an ironic comment on modern society (as, in a different way, does TMS II). Ferneyhough’s self-identification as a ‘very apolitical man’ is also difficult to reconcile with some of his comments on TMS III.62 In the sketches, the composer refers to Lévi-Strauss’ Le Cru et Le Cuit [The Raw and the Cooked], reflecting that: The nonhumanizing potential of the cultural (the cooked), whereby the raw (man) is processed into the technological must be countered by cultural articulation on other 215

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levels. The ironic conjunction of the commercial world of the factory (together with its associated constellation of values) and the technologically-nurtured ‘uselessness’ of the artwork according to these same criteria is not entirely unintentional.63 As the choir’s ‘societies’ break down, autonomous individuals emerge, embroiled in a huge polyphonic ‘sound carpet’ (at the start of Part III).64 Whilst Ferneyhough suggests that each voice is by now itself a composite of five separate parametric processes, the listener understands the new texture as motion in relation to the earlier context. The relative duration of this passage (pages 29–33), although not technically very different from Part II (pages 23–28) or the ‘loss of group morale’ section of Part I (T–V, pages 18–22),65 seems considerably more compressed than those surrounding it. Maximum diversity or motion in the sound is experienced within the short time-frame, testing the efficiency of the ear as much as the performers’ ability to bring under control the microscopic level of musical detail whilst teetering ‘on the purest peak of violence.’66 The apparent calm reached in its aftermath, when all choirs sing held chords with internal (mostly glissando) articulations, belies the intense dissonance of competing parametric demands taking place in each performer’s mind.67 This phenomenon — the psychologization of virtuosity — comes closest to the experience of a soloist performing a Ferneyhough work. Whilst the composer emphasizes the importance of the performers’ appreciation of almost identical compositional principles underlying the three sections of part III,68 each of which is realized differently, his instructions concerning the very end of the work direct the performers to focus on the listener’s experience. The ‘conceptual polyphony’ in which the performer is engaged becomes the listener’s physical reality: ‘the baroque decorative effect required is to be realized by an audible emphasis upon the single parametric strands (dynamic, tone production, phonetic content etc.) which are, in their turn, heard as non-functional “micro personalities”.’69 Although the placement of speakers around the venue for TMS II results to an extent in the listener being enveloped in the ‘theatre’ of performance, the acoustic space remains primarily the ’cellist’s arena, the electronic ‘cage’ (Ferneyhough’s term) firmly enclosing the soloist.70 In TMS III, by contrast, the positioning of the choirs and electronic equipment ensures the listener’s absorption inside the ‘frame’ (Figure 7.7).

Figure 7.7:  Time and Motion Study III, disposition of the performers in the concert space.71

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From this it follows that if TMS I is the composer’s time and motion study and TMS II the performer’s, TMS III completes the triptych with reference to the listener who, as part of the performance space and the work’s ‘society’, comes to evaluate the musical movement referred to earlier, experiencing it physically as much as conceptually, and forming his/her own allegiances with different lines to navigate through the piece. As in Artaud’s theatre, the audience responds to and matches the actors’ compelling, if at times tormented, presence. Notes   1 See for example Martin Iddon, “On the Entropy Circuit: Brian Ferneyhough’s ‘Time and Motion Study II’,” Contemporary Music Review 25, 1/2 (Routledge, 2006): 93–105. See also Paul Archbold, Neil Heyde and Colin Still, Brian Ferneyhough: Time and Motion Study II: Electric Chair Music, A documentary and performance (London: Optic Nerve, 2007) DVD.   2 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 112.   3 Brian Ferneyhough, “Letter to Harry [Halbreich?]”, in unpublished sketch materials and correspondence, Paul Sacher Stiftung, Basel. Letter dated Berlin March 3 and 14, 1977.   4 This is given as a performance instruction at the very end of the work. See Brian Ferneyhough, Time and Motion Study II (London: Peters Edition No. 7223), page 19.   5 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 93.   6 Richard Barrett, Liner Notes, Brian Ferneyhough: Solo Works, Elision Ensemble, Etcetera KTC 1206, 1998, CD.   7 Ibid.   8 Ferneyhough, “Letter to Harry [Halbreich?]”, 1977. Ferneyhough’s emphasis.   9 Barrett, Liner Notes, Brian Ferneyhough: Solo Works, 1998. 10 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 113. 11 Ibid., 119. 12 Iddon, “On the Entropy Circuit”, 93. 13 Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel W. Smith (London: Continuum, 2003), 44. 14 Ibid., 47. 15 Ferneyhough, Time and Motion Study III (London: Peters Edition, No. 7148), 26. The singers are frequently required to perform apparently incompatible actions, such as whistling and singing at the same time. 16 Antonin Artaud, Le Pèse-nerfs (Paris: Leibovitz, 1925). 17 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 110–111. 18 Ibid., 356. 19 There is no title on the autograph score. 20 Ferneyhough quoted in Barrett, Liner Notes, Brian Ferneyhough: Solo Works. 21 Ferneyhough, unpublished sketch materials, Time and Motion Study I, Paul Sacher Stiftung, Basel, 1971. 217

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22 The comparison presented here is the first that has been possible because Ferneyhough’s juvenilia is embargoed at the Paul Sacher Stiftung. I was able to view these materials, including Version I of TMS I between April and May 2012 by kind permission of the composer and Prof Dr Ulrich Mosch. 23 Ferneyhough, “Letter to Harry [Halbreich?]”, 1977. Only three years after the completion of Version II, Ferneyhough was content for the first and second versions of Funérailles to be published together, so that performers and others could evaluate for themselves how aspects of the first version are reconsidered by a second version at some remove (although neither is a standalone ‘work’; both must be performed in the same concert). 24 Ferneyhough states in the ‘Notes for Performance’ prefatory to the published score of Time and Motion Study I that ‘during the process of recomposition no attempt was made to recapture the spirit of the original’ (see Ferneyhough, “Notes for Performance,” Time and Motion Study I (London: Peters Edition No. 7216, 1977). Presumably he refers to the originally intended open form, because his letter to Harry Halbreich explicitly acknowledges that although new processes differ radically from the older ‘from the point of view of their mechanical quality’, they refuse ‘to interfere with the expressive repertoire of the original.’ (Ferneyhough, “Letter to Harry [Halbreich?]”, 1977). 25 Ferneyhough, “Letter to Harry [Halbreich?]”, 1977. 26 Ibid. 27 The choice of impulses to be accented is governed by the terms of the Lucas series. 28 Some examples from Time and Motion Study I, Version I, include ‘Lentissimo, with unearthly brilliance!’, ‘Increasingly agitated, but with an inner transcendent radiance’, ‘Aggressive, bordering on the vulgar’ and ‘Like the unfolding of a natural law.’ All found in Ferneyhough, Time and Motion Study I, Version I, in unpublished sketch materials, Paul Sacher Stiftung, Basel, 1971. Version II retains only hints of these, such as ‘with utmost violence’ (similar, but muted in comparison with the more strident ‘with the utmost imaginable degree of violence’ from TMS II). 29 For example, the low register passage beginning in the penultimate system of page 2 (between the symbols * and **, respectively) ‘is to be played in one breath and with no breaks or retonguings whatsoever.’ (Ferneyhough, Time and Motion Study I, page 2). This passage resembles the very opening of the original Version I, which also demanded transition between timbres on the same held pitch. 30 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 113. 31 Ferneyhough, “Time and Motion Study I: A partial discussion of compositional principles”, in unpublished sketch materials and correspondence, Time and Motion Study I, Paul Sacher Stiftung, c. 1977. This may have been a paper prepared for a presentation to composers or students. 32 Ferneyhough, “Letter to Harry [Halbreich?]”, 1977. Ferneyhough’s emphasis. 33 As mentioned above, I saw these materials in April 2012, and Ferneyhough’s archivist, Prof Dr Ulrich Mosch, has also viewed and catalogued them at the Paul Sacher Stiftung. 34 Ibid. 35 A note in the preface to the score instructs that in such cases, the elements in the secondary layer, which are always notated below the stave, should be interpolated into the longer notes 218

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36

37 38

39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46

47 48 49 50

within the stave, but without interrupting the sound flow. See Ferneyhough, “Notes for Performance,” Time and Motion Study I. The piece is not measured in bars, therefore all references to the score give the section number and the relevant system. Ferneyhough’s note reads ‘The entire passage enclosed by the long slur to be played in one breath. All “interior” articulations are to be executed without interrupting air flow.’ See Ferneyhough, Time and Motion Study I (London: Peters Edition, No. 7216, 1977), 6. Emphases Ferneyhough’s. See in particular Paul Archbold et al., Brian Ferneyhough: Time and Motion Study II: ‘Electric Chair Music’, A documentary and performance (Optic Nerve, 2007), DVD. Besides the originally intended, but withdrawn, sub-title, there are notes in the sketches for the work that refer to ‘execution customs of the Spanish and American varieties [and] Frankenstein monsters….’ Here, Ferneyhough also refers to the electronic equipment surrounding the ’cellist as a cage (Ferneyhough, unpublished sketch materials, Time and Motion Study II, Paul Sacher Stiftung, Basel, c. 1973–1976). Ferneyhough readily acknowledges the original subtitle, so the fact that it was ‘officially’ withdrawn becomes irrelevant: it is still there, ‘sous rature’ (see Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 215). Ferneyhough refers to the experience of TMS II as a ‘sadomasochistic rollicking’ in Paul Archbold et al., Time and Motion Study II: Electric Chair Music. Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 113. Ibid., 107. The ’cellist Neil Heyde makes a comment to this effect in Archbold et al. Time and Motion Study II: ‘Electric Chair Music’, 2007, DVD. See Ferneyhough, Time and Motion Study II (London: Peters Edition No. 7223, 1978), 5 for the original performance instruction. Brian Ferneyhough and Claudy Malherbe, “Dossier de Brian Ferneyhough: Time and Motion Study: étude de temps et de mouvement,” Cahier Musique 2 (1981): 18. See Part I.1.i, ii, and iii; Part I.2.i, ii; Part I.3.i, ii, iii. Type 4 is first seen in bar 8 (type 3 in bar 7 and type 6 in bar 9) in sequence Ia. Type 4 also occurs at the very beginning of sequence Ib (followed by types 3 and 6 respectively). Sequence II begins with type 3 (final system, page 5), then 6 (final system, page 5) before type 4 returns in the 3/8 bar, first system, page 6 of the score. The same developmental tendency pertains to gesture type 2, which is transformed between its appearances in sequence IV and VII (the latter begins at E= 36, final system, page 14). From sequence VII onwards the gestures become superimposed, as in a stretto effect, piling glissando on top of tremolo, for example (see in particular page 15). Sequence VIII begins at E=48. Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 110. Antonin Artaud, “The Nerve Meter,” in Antonin Artaud: Selected Writings, ed. Susan Sontag, trans. Helen Weaver (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1976), 79–85. Ferneyhough copies selected lines into the sketches, although his exact source for the translation is unclear. Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 215. See the discussion of the relationship between this work and the figures in paintings by Francis Bacon in Chapter 11. As mentioned above, the subtitle for TMS II, though removed, is still widely known, and Ferneyhough is content for 219

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51 52

53 54 55

56 57 58 59 60 61

62

this to be the case, going so far as to say that the ’cellist ‘is certainly tortured throughout’ (Collected Writings, 216). Given some of the performance instructions within the score (relating to ‘utmost imaginable [degrees] of violence’, ‘homicidal aggression’, and so on), it seems curious that Ferneyhough should think these explicit instructions any less likely to influence the interpretational approach than his subtitle. Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 351. Ibid. The phonetic text is derived from a number of sources including Marlowe’s (Doctor Faustus), the names of philosophers, artists and those who proposed flawed theories of the music of the spheres (a particular interest of the composer’s in the 1970s, affecting mainly his works for large ensemble and orchestra such as Firecycle Beta). The names include (but are not limited to) Plato, Leibniz, Pythagoras, Boethius, Vitruv, Villard de Honnecourt and Johannes Kepler. Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 97. Ibid., 93. ‘The Large Glass’ is another name for Duchamp’s ‘The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even’, a glass sculpture he worked on over a decade up to 1923. Its rather organic upper panel depicts a bride, and the lower panel depicts the bachelors, and a kind of angular, unorganic machine. See ‘The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) 1915– 1923, reconstruction by Richard Hamilton 1965–6’, http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/ duchamp-the-bride-stripped-bare-by-her-bachelors-even-the-large-glass-t02011 (accessed January 3, 2013). Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 93. Ibid. Ibid., 96. There are perhaps echoes of the man-machine allegiance in TMS II in this, particularly in the notion of ‘infection’ that Ferneyhough describes. Ferneyhough, unpublished sketch materials, Time and Motion Study III, Paul Sacher Stiftung, 1974. Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 97. Judging by the opening of his Aesthetic Theory, Adorno might argue that the social aspect of Ferneyhough’s material is the composition itself. Art remains irrevocably autonomous, but Adorno writes that ‘the autonomy it achieved, after having freed itself from cultic function and its images, was nourished by the idea of humanity.’ With particular relevance to the Lévi-Strauss quotation given above, Adorno continues that ‘[a]s society became ever less a human one, this autonomy was shattered.’ (Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann (London: Continuum, 2004), 1). Ferneyhough has said that ‘I’m a very apolitical man. That’s a bit scandalous, but my art has always kept me busy. […] But when we conceive of politics in general as dealing with other people in a limited space, then works of art as such can play a sizeable role, whether in changing the awareness of particular people, or in keeping options open that can be made fruitful on a larger scale when the times are ripe.’ Ferneyhough as quoted in Meyer, “Ein Gespräch mit Brian Ferneyhough,” 62.

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63 Ferneyhough, “Choir Piece,” unpublished sketch materials, Time and Motion Study III, Paul Sacher Stiftung, c. 1974. Several typed notes for various works are found in the sketches that take the form of draft programme notes. It is common for Ferneyhough to prepare these long in advance of the work’s completion, not with a view to using them for a performance but in order to help shape his ideas during the composition process itself. This example is filed amongst rough sketch materials for the work, suggesting it was produced at an early stage of planning. 64 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 96. 65 According to Ferneyhough’s prefatory note to the score, ‘the entire passage in Choir IV here is to be interpreted as a collection of various manifestations of loss of “group morale”.’ (Ferneyhough, “Further Remarks on particular passages,” Time and Motion Study III). 66 Ferneyhough, Time and Motion Study III, page 29. (This is the beginning of part III). 67 Ibid., 38. 68 See Ferneyhough, “Concerning the performance of Part III of the score,” Time and Motion Study III. 69 Ibid. 70 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 108, 394. 71 From Ferneyhough, prefatory notes, Time and Motion Study III. .

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Chapter 8 Carceri d’Invenzione: Style and Invention

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he completion in 1986 of the Carceri d’Invenzione cycle [Dungeons of Invention or Imaginary Prisons] marks the approximate midpoint of Ferneyhough’s career to date. It also represents his most substantial project until the completion of Shadowtime in 2006. It comprises seven works — each also programmable as a standalone piece — in the following order:              

Superscriptio (solo piccolo) 1980–1981 Carceri d’Invenzione I (for ensemble) 1982 Intermedio alla ciaccona (solo violin) 1986 Carceri d’Invenzione II (solo flute and chamber orchestra) 1984–19851 Etudes transcendantales (flute, oboe, soprano, harpsichord, ’cello) 1982–1985 Carceri d’Invenzione III (fifteen wind instruments and percussion) 1986 Mnemosyne (bass flute and pre recorded tape) 1986.2

The title is taken from the eponymous collection of etchings by Giambattista (Giovanni Battista) Piranesi (1720–1778).3 However, early sketch materials dated December 1980 suggest that the provisional title of Carceri d’Invenzione I was ‘City of the Sun’, after the allegorical work by Tommaso Campanella (1568–1639) in which a Genoese Sea Captain recounts the story of his travels to a fantastical theocratic city surrounded by seven circular walls, named after the planets. The seven walls may possibly have suggested the idea of a seven-work cycle; at any rate, the eight chord structures (not seven!) on which the entire cycle is based were devised under this title (according to a leaf from the sketchbook, ‘City of the Sun: Symmetrical Chord Structures’).4 In fact, of the eight chords, four are intervallically symmetrical and four asymmetrical (Figure 8.1). The formal plan for Carceri I was reasonably well advanced before its title was changed. A diagram (Figure 8.2) and the annotation ‘“spiral”: a certain number of units refer back to a particular “world”’ earlier in the piece suggest that at this point,5 the formal plan owed

Figure 8.1:  Carceri d’Invenzione cycle, eight generative chords, four symmetrical (S) and four asymmetrical (AS).

Brian Ferneyhough

Figure 8.2:  Spiral form diagram from the sketches for Carceri d’Invenzione I.7

something to Campanella’s exploration of a ‘world’ in his work, in which the Sea Captain explains that [The city] is so built that if the first circle were stormed, it would of necessity entail a double amount of energy to storm the second; still more to storm the third; and in each succeeding case the strength and energy would have to be doubled; so that he who wishes to capture that city must, as it were, storm it seven times.6 Asked directly about this ‘working’ title by Richard Toop in interview, Ferneyhough bypasses the question, describing instead how he came upon Piranesi’s images: At the time I rediscovered these pictures, I was working on the piece Superscriptio, which as you know is the only part of the cycle that doesn’t use the same fundamental material as all the other pieces — this group of eight chords. It’s very typical of my work that often I start in one direction, thinking that I’ve worked out all the basic ideas and criteria for the production of a particular piece, and then I suddenly realize that perhaps one of the secret, subliminal functions of the piece is to suggest something beyond itself, something in which it also partakes. So it was only while composing Superscriptio, and coming across the synchronism of rediscovering the Piranesi pictures that the idea of a cycle came to mind. It certainly wasn’t that I saw the Piranesi pictures and thought, Ah yes, this sequence of pictures could produce a piece of music.8 Several important issues arise from this: the Carceri cycle did not emerge as a fully-formed concept which Ferneyhough then elaborated; it was an accretive process, in which intersecting images and experiences of non-musical sources gradually brought about not only the definitive title, but its most important implication: The only reason I used the title at all was that it seemed very apposite in describing my central concerns; that is, that all expression in art in some way derives from limitation. You can only act freely in a meaningful fashion if you are in a particular space which has been to some extent mapped out previously. And this seemed to lock in closely with the things which my Piranesi interpretations had suggested to me.9 226

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It is nevertheless true, that similar ideas of ‘limitation’ could arise from engagement with Campanella’s text (for example his description of overcoming the city walls). From this it may be inferred that the choice of title Carceri d’Invenzione arose from not one but several motivations, aside from the one to which Ferneyhough admits, not least a degree of representation of Piranesi’s imaginary spaces in the music.10 Campanella’s philosophical text of 1602 has more in common with the alchemical sources and world-images on which Ferneyhough had drawn consistently in the 1970s. It is possible that the shift in title and associated imagery also reflects a desire to move beyond the explicit alchemical speculations evoked in Transit, for example. Piranesi’s images appeal to Ferneyhough in a number of ways, resonating for instance with his conception of the performer as ‘imprisoned’ by notational demands. The multiple, conflicting and ultimately fantastical lines of perspective in Piranesi’s Carceri, which seem to continue beyond the edge of the page,11 are a literal illustration of the composer’s preoccupation with situations of limitation — of instrumental register, performer-technique and psychology — and with ‘energy transfers’ across borders between one musical state and the next.12 Unusually for him, Ferneyhough is particularly concerned in this cycle with repetition of material (whether literal, distorted, or reinterpreted) on both the local and large scale. This constitutes a further level of self-imposed limitation, which also has implications for the performer, as discussed below. As a composite of numerous repeating modules, Carceri II is the clearest example of an inherently repetitive structure.13 Although depth-perspective has long existed in visual art, for Ferneyhough the concept offers specifically musical possibilities, particularly for the presentation of multiple perspectives on the same phenomenon.14 This takes on a temporal dimension, the perception of various rates of ‘time-flow’ at different levels of the discourse (for example, sequences of bars including proportionally faster or slower ‘irrational’ metres, or bar-length tuplet subdivisions) emulating Piranesi’s layering of visual space. Writing about the Etudes transcendantales, Roger Redgate remarks that The movements of the cycle explore different levels of metric organization, already set up in Superscriptio, including the use of irrational bar lengths (3/10, 5/12 etc.) which form an important aspect of the work structure defined and shaped by pre-organizational variation techniques. This is an important compositional strategy which should not be dismissed as some kind of surface embellishment or tempo change. Since these patterns are a product of ‘pre-compositional’ organization they form an essential foundation for temporal distribution, overall rhythmic impetus and the shaping of the fundamental gestural nature of the work.15 These comments could equally apply to any piece of the cycle, for example Carceri III, whose formal structure is predicated on different levels of metrical, tempo and rhythmic organization. That this piece is placed immediately after the Etudes is significant, since as the cycle gathers momentum towards its conclusion, the issue of temporal distribution and its 227

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effect upon the listener is increasingly foregrounded and fundamental to the works’ expressive ambition, reaching its apogee in the concluding piece, Mnemosyne. The seven works were not composed in order, but broadly, those performed towards the end of the cycle were written last. Throughout the six-year period of its composition, Ferneyhough worked on several pieces at once, including some that do not form part of the cycle which are considered below. The later Carceri pieces therefore manifest an accretion of contextual detail such that ‘an “archaeological” approach to listening [encourages] the speculative ear to create its own categories of perception.’16 Mnemosyne, whose very title suggests its relationship to previous works in the cycle, casts both semantic and structural perspectives on what has gone before, not least because it is the only piece to reveal the cycle’s pitch material — the eight chords — in its pristine, unfiltered state. In this, and also in its ‘memory’ of Intermedio specifically, the bass flute work is ‘archaeological’: both pieces are derived from the same basic rhythmic substructure, but their respective characters — Intermedio, energized and improvisatory, Mnemosyne lugubrious and subterranean — are wholly contrasted. From the performer’s perspective Mnemosyne also exploits memory’s capacity to negotiate the formidable complexity of notational information in learning the piece, which is characterized by three simultaneous strata governed by Ferneyhough’s principle of ‘interruptive polyphony.’ The monophonic flute (a ‘unity capsule’) is constrained to filter and render polyphonic material.17 Ferneyhough suggests that another kind of limitation is probed here: No monophonic instrument is going to be able to perform all materials on all three lines. With a piano this doesn’t matter: there’s the possibility of distributing three voices among two hands. It is interesting that what comes naturally to a keyboard player encounters tremendous resistance in the minds of (say) woodwind soloists, who are not accustomed to freeing-up the ‘natural’ relationship between hands, or hand and embouchure.18 This is by no means the only piece in the cycle to challenge the performer’s memory capacity (or indeed the listener’s). The discussion of Carceri II, below, will suggest that the piece relies on and frustrates the performer’s capacity for memory in equal measure, deriving its expressive range in part from the tension between repeated, distorted and new materials. Ferneyhough applies the principle of ‘unity via diversity’ that had previously occupied him in relation to single pieces in several movements across a whole cycle of discrete pieces, as well as within individual works.19 Present in all pieces except Intermedio, the flute is a unifying force, beginning with the piccolo and descending progressively to the bass flute in Mnemosyne. Reflecting both Ferneyhough’s concept of perspective and the importance of consolidating the diverse components of the cycle, the Etudes transcendantales are envisaged as a miniature cyclewithin-a-cycle, comprising nine songs. To the final song a coda is appended that is itself ‘archaeological’ in respect of the preceding song cycle. Ferneyhough initially intended to subdivide his song cycle into three groups of three, each beginning with an ‘automatic’ piece 228

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and ending with an ‘informal’ one. The Carceri cycle as a whole was similarly envisaged as moving along a spectrum from the ‘automatic’ to the ‘informal’, the opening Superscriptio standing for the former tendency, and Mnemosyne, which involves a greater freedom of compositional decision-making, standing for the latter.20 Although this plan was not, ultimately, strictly adhered to in the Etudes, and only partially in the Carceri overall, the projected contrast between two opposite modes of working (both as regards the generation of material and the implementation of musical processes) indicates the extent to which fundamental questions of musical style and expression posed themselves from 1980 onwards. A self-consistent style becomes the ‘space’ that delimits both the opposition between extremes of pre-compositional calculation and context-dependent local invention and their meaningful interaction.21 Essays written by the composer during this period indicate the extent to which these questions were uppermost in his mind, and the context from which they arose.22 On the other hand, an examination of the sketches provides an insight into the precise relationship of these concepts to the compositional process: a comparison of scores with the composer’s published writings alone often leaves more questions than it answers, particularly because of Ferneyhough’s sometimes gnomic writing style. Those encountering Ferneyhough’s music might legitimately enquire as to the degree of relevance of the conceptual discourse around the works: how does he apply such thinking? The sketches provide at least partial answers: they contain numerous notes on ‘informal’ and ‘automatic’ principles, style, continuity and references to other works in the cycle, indicating the level of interrelationship obtaining between them and the extent to which given concepts were in the composer’s mind even as he committed notes to the score. Table 8.1 gives just one example. Table 8.1:  Carceri d’Invenzione cycle, ‘ladder’ of automatic/informal interactional possibilities.23

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Ferneyhough now begins to formulate a vision of personal style,24 which emerges in part from his own critique of contemporary approaches. His somewhat polemical reflection on then current compositional concerns is set out in the 1982 essay ‘Form-Figure-Style: An Intermediate Assessment’. His references to extremes of ‘automatic’ and ‘informal’ modes of composition in relation to Carceri are as much a (slightly ironic) perspective on contemporary musical discourses as an attempt to establish a personal stylistic ambit. It is worth noting that the Carceri cycle coincides with and consolidates fundamental stylistic concerns pertinent to the period after 1980, which marks a decisive turning-point in Ferneyhough’s approach to parametric/polyphonic writing. Whereas the scores from the previous decade privilege a polyphony of parametric activity, a de/re-construction of instrument and performance technique, from 1980 onwards, this feature sinks below the surface, which is occupied by a gestural texture: it is now different types of material that interrupt each other, and which the composer de/re-constructs according to dynamic processes.25 The complexity is no less in evidence however: three pieces in the Carceri cycle use up to four levels of nested tuplets.26 The Second String Quartet (1980) is a fine example of the tendency to gestural expression. Superscriptio also manifests clearly differentiated materials including the opening ascending gestures and later iterative textures and grace-note figures. Gesture is understood first and foremost as characteristically defined musical material(s); the resonance with the notion of bodily gesture — and, in musical terms, the performative gesture — is deliberate, but this is secondary to material-immanent concerns. Roger Redgate expresses the change in Ferneyhough’s style succinctly, and in the clearest terms: The late seventies and early eighties, however, saw a change in the gestural nature of Ferneyhough’s music. The surface structures developed a rather more ‘traditional’, direct intentionality quite different from the complex multilayered thinking with which he had become associated. This is not to say that the compositions themselves became any less complex, rather there seemed to be a shift in focus and nature of the musical ‘material’ defined by such parametric thinking into more immediately assimilable gestural entities.27 An obvious consequence of this transition from a polyphony of actions (best exemplified by the different lines of vocal/key/lip/breath or vocal/’cello/foot-pedal actions in Unity Capsule and Time and Motion Study II, respectively) is the considerable reduction of written textual instructions characteristically enshrined in capsule-like boxes in the scores, as discussed in Chapter 2. It is interesting, given Ferneyhough’s particular and recurrent attention to the relationship between words and music, that in absorbing the spirit of the rubrics that characterize his early scores, gestural material is left to ‘speak for itself ’, nowhere more concertedly than in the Carceri cycle. In the Etudes (and, only a few years later, the Fourth Quartet) the gestural character of the music is deliberately brought into a tense relationship with verbal language, Ferneyhough exploring the rhetorical capacity of both musical and verbal forms of expression. It can hardly be coincidental that, in pushing deconstructed parametric polyphony ‘back’ behind surface gestural material, Ferneyhough was able to focus on developing a rationale for 230

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musical style more consistently than before. Most obviously, he had become by that stage an established composer, and was sufficiently distanced from the difficult early 1970s (when he struggled to secure performances) to contemplate his relative prominence in New Music with a sense of responsibility. He was a significant figure at Darmstadt and was soon to become composition course co-ordinator (from 1984). Tellingly, from this point on, there survive no substantially complete or draft scores that have either been withheld or withdrawn, in contrast to the previous two decades, which include several, and stylistically rather diverse ones at that. There may be several reasons for this renewed sense of optimism, and a desire for stylistic advancement, not least the question ‘where to now?’ after Time and Motion Study II: Ferneyhough had pushed the solo medium as far as he was able in that particular direction. His self-confessed desire to ‘rise up’ from the composition of the ’cello piece is telling in this respect.28 Despite the Piranesian ‘prisons’, constant discussion of forms of limitation, and the confession to Richard Toop (regarding the Etudes’ somewhat morbid subject matter) of his sudden awareness of advancing age (‘one suddenly starts thinking about things one didn’t think about before!’) the music after 1980 is less black than previously, largely owing to this refinement of gestural discourse.29 As has just been mentioned, Ferneyhough’s concentrated attention on personal stylistic preoccupations in the early 1980s coincided with a period of intense debate on questions of musical style more generally. He was one of three keynote speakers at Darmstadt 1980: the others were Wolfgang Rihm and Gérard Griséy, the latter the only one to receive broadly positive critical comment.30 Here Ferneyhough encountered — not for the first time, given his residence in Germany — the aesthetic views of the Neue Einfachheit, of which Rihm was the figurehead.31 The young composers who aligned themselves in the 1970s with a desire to reclaim for music an expressive dimension that they considered post-war constructivism to have abandoned created music that purposely drew to a certain extent on handed-down gestures (mostly from the Romantic and post-Romantic period) in an effort to communicate directly with the listener.32 Alongside their compositional endeavours, these composers made public statements against which Ferneyhough adopted a polemical stance, dismissing them as (among other things) ‘vacuous ex cathedra pronouncements.’33 His conceptualization of ‘gesture’ must therefore be seen in the light of this polemic, and certain stylistic functions that the term purports to uphold in his music emerge similarly from his critique of this particular contemporary position. Principal among these functions is the acknowledgement that a gesture must be as ‘immediately’ expressive as possible in musical terms, which clearly chimes with the Neue Einfachheit vision.34 But Ferneyhough emphasizes what he considers the differences between Neue Einfachheit gesture and his own through his insistence that the gesture must impact longer term on the musical discourse rather than act as an imported signifier ‘which exhausts itself in the violent flare of its own emergence.’35 Ferneyhough’s music is clearly more than reactionary critique: recalling his emphasis on personal style, it is important to realize that his polemic is not an attempt to make claims for all new composition, nor to jettison stylistic plurality (the overtones of Adorno’s late essay ‘Vers une musique informelle’ in the opening of Ferneyhough’s own from 1982 notwithstanding). His stylistic turn from 1980 is as much precipitated by concerns 231

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immanent to his own musical development — not least the numerous commissions that resulted in Carceri, which underlined the need to evolve an approach to medium-sized ensemble writing — as by contemporaneous debates within New Music. The role of gesture in Carceri will be elaborated below, but a particularly notable feature is the use of texturetypes within the ensemble, either for individual instruments or for particular (often rather atypical) sub-groups, by which means lines stand out against a background, increasing their ‘presence’ in the manner that most emulates Piranesi’s images.36 This represents an evolution of the principle of ‘colour-groups’ that Ferneyhough deployed in large ensemble works of the previous decade. The importance of texture in relation to gesture cannot be overstated: it is the principal means by which the listener gains access to the gestural discourse in Ferneyhough’s music and, consequently, engages with the composer’s style. Before considering each piece in greater detail, it is worth noting that the analytical coverage of the Carceri cycle is by far the most extensive of all published studies of Ferneyhough’s music. This is hardly surprising, insofar as the Carceri sketches are, of the collection currently held in the Paul Sacher Stiftung, Basel (relating to most works composed before the mid 1990s) the most comprehensive and complete. Drawing on this extensive resource, Cordula Pätzold has produced as exhaustive an analysis as possible of the seven works in the cycle, amounting to a dissertation of some 500 pages in length and other studies (including a complete ‘recomposition’ of Superscriptio that details the composer’s procedures in their entirety).37 Pätzold reproduces virtually the complete sketch materials pertinent to the cycle, contextualizing her findings in relation to Piranesi’s Carceri and Ferneyhough’s own essays. Such a level of detail is clearly impossible to replicate in the present study; consequently, the observations offered here are intended to complement pre-existing analyses (including those by Richard Toop). Carceri d’Invenzione I, IIa and III At around ten and a half minutes, Carceri III is the shortest of the three pieces. It was intended to be about double the length, but pressures of time necessitated the abandonment of a third part. Richard Toop points out that ‘initially, Ferneyhough had predicted that the Etudes would last about 18 minutes, this being part of a broad strategy in which the component parts of the cycle would get longer and longer. […] In actual fact, the Etudes finished off with a duration just under 30 minutes’,38 and this, combined with the relative brevity of Carceri III, undermines this particular intended manifestation of the accretive tendency initially envisaged. However it is not their actual durations that interests Ferneyhough, but the extent to which they permit an increasing awareness of ‘temporal tactility’ as the cycle progresses.39 The ensemble pieces form a triptych — Ferneyhough confirms that ‘I saw this as being a I–II–III relationship’ — principally on account of a progressively refined approach to metre and tempo relationships on both the large and local scale.40 In the ‘foreground’, the pervasive use of so-called ‘irrational metres’ creates local proportional relationships: 232

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2/10 signifies a bar composed of two beats, each of which is equal to one tenth of a semibreve. All such ‘irrational’ metres stand either in triplet or quintuplet relationship to the basic metre, and are thus proportionately faster than the latter (1/10+ 1/8 x 0.8). The new beat may be determined by working out what proportion of the current beat should be subtracted. Metronome markings always apply to normal quaver values, even when the first bar to which they apply has an ‘irrational’ metre.41 In the ‘background’, Ferneyhough creates temporal layers that enact larger-scale proportional relationships, not so that the experience of time becomes ‘faster and faster, but denser and denser’,42 in line with his belief that it is not the speed but the density of information that affects the listener’s perception of time: The challenge, of course, is to specify objects which suggest such a high degree of internal coherence that the listening ear is necessarily twisted at an angle towards a structured awareness of the insufficiency built into the dimensions of time-space within which the object is located. As a result, the time frame itself becomes rather ‘gluey’; it stands apart and offers relentless resistance to linear energies.43 In Carceri I, a series of increasingly lengthy tutti ‘interventions’ irrupts into the main material in a new irrational metre; in Carceri II, the two horns engage in ‘overlapping dual metric patterns’, introducing two distinct tempo levels;44 and in Carceri III, this process goes a step beyond, articulating a ‘triple irregular metronome’45 (triple large-scale metre) by means of distinct impulse patterns which each ‘trigger’ types of activity in the ensemble. Mnemosyne pushes the principle further still, there being as many as six independent rhythmic structures in operation at any one moment, distilled into between one and three polyphonic lines of material (conveyed in the notation), each representing an independent rhythmic process analogous to the three levels in Carceri III.46 All three pieces share pitch material. The sequence of eight chords is ‘(initially) not understood as rows with fixed intervallic/melodic content, but as reservoirs for selectional (homologous) processing of GESTALTEN.’47 A filter using the row from Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron determines the ordering of pitches (see Figure 8.3a). This process represents one of the most consistently applied filter systems in Ferneyhough’s oeuvre, and is additionally used to fix transpositions and microtonal versions of the Carceri chords.48 The order in which the pitches of Ferneyhough’s Carceri chords (see Figure 8.1) appear in Schoenberg’s row determines their order in various passages of Carceri I.49 Figure 8.3a illustrates the basic process. The pitch material would become too repetitive if Schoenberg’s basic row alone were used. Therefore Ferneyhough makes a table of all 12 (chromatic) transpositions of Schoenberg’s row, in addition to 12 inversions, 12 retrogrades and 12 retrograde inversions. Each different transposition makes possible new orderings of each chord. Additionally, a chord can be filtered multiple times by different versions of the row: a compound filter, in effect. This 233

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Figure 8.3a:  Order for chord AS1 ‘fixed’ by Schoenberg’s tone row.

Figure 8.3b:  The four inversions of Schoenberg’s row used by Ferneyhough for clarinet material, bars 90–94, labelled Sch 3 (inversion), Sch4 (inv), Sch5 (inv) and Sch6 (inv) in the sketches.

Figure 8.3c:  Derivation of clarinet material using Schoenberg filter method.

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Figure 8.3d:  Carceri d’Invenzione I, clarinet, bars 89–94.

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Table 8.2:  Carceri d’Invenzione I, part I, occurrence of tutti interventions.

is precisely what happens to the clarinet pitches from bar 90–94 (Figure 8.3d). The pitch material is a sequence of chords AS1, AS2, AS3 and AS4, although each has been transposed. The chords are filtered by inversions of the Schoenberg row twice each (Figure 8.3c). The form of Carceri I falls into two main parts. What Ferneyhough calls the work’s central axis (which is not actually centrally placed, but falls well within the second half) is a sustained tutti (bars 107–124), the culmination of several smaller tutti ‘interventions’:50 the form moves from layering to embedding (block-like patterns).51 After the central tutti the work progressively — ‘spirally’ — refers back to earlier textures, concluding with a short coda for flute, viola and percussion. The spiral image also lies behind the pattern of interventions,

Figure 8.4:  Two-bar gestures, wind and brass, Carceri d’Invenzione I, bar 9ff.

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Figure 8.4:  (Continuted)

Figure 8.4:  (Continuted)

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which grow progressively further apart, referred to as ‘foreign inserts/“intermedii”,’52 foreshadowing in miniature form the Intermedio (alla ciaccona) that acts as a ‘foreign insert’ — a violin solo — in an otherwise flute-dominated Carceri cycle. The impact of gesture is palpable from the outset. Those delineated early in the work undergo a process of de- and re-constitution but remain clearly related to the ‘parent’ gestures. The spiral image is chosen because the winding circle becomes gradually more distant from the point of origin, and yet each circling is also a return, an apt metaphor for Ferneyhough’s concept of gesture. Both time and space are implicated in the image as periodic return and distance from the point of origin, respectively. The beginning of Carceri I is highly gestural and, despite Ferneyhough’s assertion that ‘there is absolutely no illustrative intent in my composition’ it is difficult not to ‘see’ Piranesi’s images in the extreme piccolo, trombone and piano registers (implied, at least, if not technically the furthest limits possible) and the cavernous space in between.53 Since he holds that the presence of the gesture must survive its initial appearance, however, its ramifications for the ensuing texture are clearly perceptible: the wind and brass material that enters in bar 9 exactly fills the space between and represents the first of many kinds of repetition explored in the triptych.54 A two-bar fanfare-like gesture is repeated, its second bar progressively more distorted each time. The entry of the strings (bar 19) definitively establishes the different texture-types obtaining in each instrumental group: these are quite audible and distinguishable in the score. Table 8.3:  Carceri d’Invenzione I, instrumental groups.55

In contrast with the durational expansion and contraction of the interventions, the progress of the string quartet after its first entry in bar 19 is straightforwardly linear and erosive, each subsequent entry shorter, and the ensemble progressively tapered to a solo. The quartet also participates in the tutti interventions, some of which begin to intervene on the linear force established (Table 8.4). As the piece progresses, the groups are scrambled (see for example pages 15 and 16) or absent altogether as the piano solo ‘finds’ the elusive middle registral range, expressed in Lemma-like gestures (page 25). Ferneyhough refers to the groupings as ‘wiped over (in the Baconian sense) in the middle [of the work]’,56 a reference to the painter’s smearing over of his figures’ features with a hand, a brush, or even a sock. Significantly, though, Francis Bacon’s wiped-over figures still resemble their subject, the distortion notwithstanding (as mentioned in Chapter 3). So it is with Ferneyhough’s figures, because progressively, 239

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Table 8.4:  Carceri d’Invenzione I, string quartet entries.

throughout the so-called central tutti and especially afterwards, the subgroups revisit the texture-types they established early on. The activity of the string quartet from bar 125 neatly illustrates this, racing as it does through earlier textures (including glissandi, gettato and harmonics), the ‘turnover’ from type to type now much faster than before. Regardless of the extent of distortion, the gestural relationship to the first string entries is clear. In the coda (bar 148ff.), the flute and viola conspicuously occupy the register first articulated by the wind and brass at bar 9, in complete contrast to the piccolo and trombone explosion at the start. Other instruments that progressively ‘drop out’ of the coda are all in their lowest range: the small-scale dip in overall register traced in Carceri I intersects with the perspectival line of registral descent traversing the entire cycle, and is paralleled in each panel of the triptych. The guiding formal principle of Carceri II is repetition, articulated on a number of different levels, some obvious, others less so. Much as in the solo repertoire for the instrument, the flautist in particular is forced to ‘psychologize’ his/her relationship to the notation, owing to the periodic reappearance of bars that are literal rhythmic repeats of earlier units, bars that contain similar gestural shapes and texture-types already encountered, and others that combine part-repeats with new material. The ‘repeats’ often occur at some temporal distance in the piece, testing the performer’s capacity to recall correspondences in the longer term. In addition, the frequent use of ‘irrational’ metres in place of ‘normal’ values upon the repeat of a module forces the soloist once again into situations of limitation and energy transfer: how to bring under control the thing that looks the same but is situated in a different [proportional] context, and its corollary, the thing that looks different but is basically the same? Each reappearance of the soloist’s material is also contextualized differently in the ensemble. A few examples will suffice: a full scheme of repetitions and alterations bar-by-bar is reproduced by Pätzold, transcribed from a large plan in Ferneyhough’s sketches for the work.57 Bar 11 reprises bar 1; bar 14, 2; bar 23, 3; bar 32, 4; bar 37, 5; bar 40, 6 and bar 44, 7 (and so on). Even this cursory survey of the first repetitions encountered is instructive, since Ferneyhough alters the metre each time, forcing the performer to confront a reconfiguration of similar material within a different time-frame. Ferneyhough works with a 48-bar cycle that is re-permutated a number of times, with some ‘edits’ and a tempo change in each case. Repetition operates at numerous levels of the structure: at the highest level, the 48-bar cycle; smaller rhythmic cycles, each lasting a number of bars, and which progressively overlap;58 bar-to-bar ‘modules’ (solo flute), 240

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representing a lower level of repetition; finally, gestural repetition within the bar in the ensemble — see bars 186–191 for example — as though constricting the soloist still further (analogous, arguably, to the role of the tape material in Mnemosyne). The form of Carceri II combines elements of both passacaglia and chaconne, taking as its basis certain repeating units based on variations of identical rhythms, alongside extensive short melodic variation patterns. Ferneyhough uses a number of procedures to re-read material and generate repetition, including parody (here defined as taking whole bars, reordering them and inserting new material between them, as well as applying bar-length distortion techniques), variation (re-reading ‘old’ bars with new transformational rules) and permutation (reordering groups of materials). In the sketches he further provides for the insertion of newer versions of modules into cuts made in an original continuum, taking care (characteristically) to ‘“camouflage” the montage-boundaries.’59 Carceri II follows Intermedio alla ciaccona in a complete performance of the cycle, the similarities in approach (the chaconne elements) further evidence of Ferneyhough’s efforts to carry across and elaborate on stylistic premises over the boundaries between successive pieces. In addition to the repetitive/variation structure, the flute is further limited in terms of the registral span made available to it at any point: this first increases (bars 1–48), then progressively decreases (bars 55–81), enclosing the instrument within only a minor third (bars 77, 79, 81) before registers are systematically ‘rebuilt’ (bars 82–112) and reduced yet again to the end of the piece (recalling the treatment of the piano in Carceri I). The end of the piece again invokes the spirit of Carceri I’s opening passage in the registral contrast between the bass clarinet and the strings in harmonics, the flute completing a drawn-out descent that covers much of the space in between. The end also recalls its equivalent in Carceri I, the flute finally occupying a low register, partnered with the viola and percussion (including three triangle lines derived from the same basic rhythm). Both pieces’ conclusions foreshadow that in Carceri III, in which the background pulse cycles take over the texture and reveal themselves; in Carceri II the horns enter for the last time at bar 226, articulating two overlapping metric patterns as the rest of the ensemble (excluding the soloist and the double bass) falls silent. Carceri III also ends with the flute in an emblematically low register: for the final few bars, it exchanges the flute in C for the alto instrument, in preparation for the final descent of Mnemosyne, whose beginning overlaps with the conclusion of Carceri III in a complete performance of the cycle.60

Figure 8.5:  Carceri d’Invenzione II, registral distribution, flute solo, (bars 1–74).

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Figure 8.6:  Carceri d’Invenzione II, limited registral range, flute solo, bars 186–189.

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The prominence accorded the solo flute does not denote a traditional ‘concerto’, with the exception of highly gesturally differentiated material articulated in all possible flute registers at ‘quasi una cadenza’ (bars 129–185); instead, the composer suggests that the soloist forms a ‘group of one’, equivalent in standing to other sub-groups within the overall ensemble, groups again defined as in Carceri I according to colour and texture-types — ‘physiognomically’ — and their associated strategies of variation and development.61 Returning again to the example from bars 186–192 illustrates the functioning of the different groups as contrasting texture layers (solo flute, winds, horns, strings). The strings are introduced to the piece in stages, building to a full ‘variations’ texture downwards from solo violins (see pages 11–14 for the ‘variations’), after which they disappear before being filtered in once again, this time from the lowest upwards. The extent of the detail in Ferneyhough’s planning of this texture group is revealed in the sketches: as in the Third String Quartet, he itemizes texture-types (there are 12 here), which are then applied according to a complex pre-composed pattern. The strings’ progressive re-proposal of earlier textures is audible, and follows principles established in Carceri I: only occasionally does a string instrument break away from the mass to complement the flute (as violin 1 does in bars 140–156, articulating small grace note flurries separated by rests, each flurry beginning on a pitch shared with the flute). After this point, other instruments readily combine with the flute in a ‘rhetorical flow’ of small chamber formations.62 Earlier in the piece, Ferneyhough conceives of the role of the winds as akin to the Messenger in ancient Greek drama, ‘reporting’ gestures and textures between the solo and tutti strings in passages for the full ensemble, as in the passage from bar 72, in which the wind ‘echo’ flute texture-types (tremolo glissando for example), before the strings begin to adopt them, albeit at an interval.63 Like Carceri II, the third panel in the triptych begins with a solo, this time for B H clarinet. Again, the instruments enter in staggered fashion: to the solo (chord AS1) is added the bass clarinet (bar 18, chord AS2), followed by a second clarinet (bar 31, chord S3) whose task is to mediate between them. Piccolos join the texture at bar 34 (chord AS3) and other wind instruments follow at intervals, each based on pitch material from the eight fundamental chords. These generate not only the pitch material but also metrical patterns and points of entry for each new instrument. For example, the intervals that comprise the chord AS1 in the solo clarinet, read from the bottom, yield the sequence 3–3–5–5–6–3–7, which governs the piece’s first seven bar-lengths. In addition to determining instrumental entries, the sequences yielded by the chords dictate the length (in bars) of impulse cycles upon which the percussion lines are built. Ferneyhough refers to this as a complex ‘color and talea system.’64 In the composer’s sketch materials, the cycles — of which there are six in total in the course of the piece, but never more than three overlapping at one time, hence the ‘triple irregular metronome’ referred to earlier — comprise chains of regular impulses in each bar, most of which are ‘deleted’ or filtered out in the piece itself, which explains why there are so few percussion impulses at the beginning. The form of the work is summarized in Table 8.5. As cycles 4–6 are introduced, a greater number of impulses ‘survive’ erasure and reveal themselves. To these impulses specific rhythmic micro-formulae attach, accounting for the 243

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Table 8.5:  Carceri d’Invenzione III, form.

progressively greater density of the percussion lines. Compounding this effect, the later impulse cycles are considerably longer than the first three, and the degree of overlap is significantly greater. The function of the brass allies them from the outset to the percussion. Cycle 1 is characterized by single impulses (tenor drum) interrupting the clarinet solo at intervals, at which point the tempo changes. A brass chord is ‘triggered’ by each impulse, each time at a different dynamic level. Pulse cycle 2 is differentiated from the first, with which it overlaps, by means of a bass drum roll of different length upon each appearance. The roll is partnered by fluttertonguing in the brass, and again, a tempo change. Pulse cycle 3, unlike the other two ‘triggers’, is given by pitched drums so that the impulse itself may contain several pitches and eventually trigger multiple ‘events’ on account of its own internal differentiation into micro-pulses.65 If initially the role of the percussion is to ‘trigger’ brass chords and new tempi, these ‘ticking structures’ soon have wider-ranging effects, determining changes of texture in the wind and brass.66 From the very beginning of the first pulse cycle, announced by an sfz chord, one note ‘lingers’ in a single brass instrument for a proportion of the beats remaining until the next impulse, as though indicating that the isolated trigger ‘points’ will become more substantial in their own right. The explicit ‘ticking structures’ grow from the occasional sustained note to longerpitched structures in the first part, which continues into the second part, usually overlapping in registers and timbres resulting in dense chordal textures. Ferneyhough conceives of these as chorales (evoking the memory of Prometheus, which also explored antiphony with a wind/ brass ensemble, and which likewise draws on chorale textures whose chordal richness contrasts with the frenzied, layered activity elsewhere in the piece).67 According to the composer, one percussion/trigger cycle is based on an additive procedure, (adding incrementally to a base tempo of E=52), another is formed by subtracting from the same base tempo, and a third consists of ‘geometric’ relationships).68 This is the only clue Ferneyhough gives as to his procedures in Carceri III, and what he describes seems reasonably 244

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straightforward in principle. However, the cycles predicated on additive and subtractive procedure do not, in fact, use E=52 as a consistent base tempo. Three of the recurring tempi first established towards the very beginning of the movement, which are related to one another geometrically, can each act as bases for additive and subtractive schemes.69 For example, E=80, 82 and 84 add two incrementally to a base of E=78 (and E=75, 72, 69, 66, 63 and 60 subtract in threes from the same base E=78). Likewise E=67 and 69 add two to a base of E=65, and E=62, 59 and 56 subtract from it in threes. E=50 and 48 subtract in twos from the base E=52. The geometric series dominates the very opening of the work, the tempi given in the following order: E=52, 65, 52, 78, 52, 41.6, 52 where E=52 acts as a reference tempo.70 An additive process predominates between bars 93 and 122, during which blocks of interventional E=80 tutti triggered by two percussion, each allied with one antiphonal ‘half ’ of the ensemble, recall the tutti interventions in Carceri I. These E=80 interventions begin with significant rhythmic unison between the ‘triggered’ wind and brass instruments, giving an impression of bold, albeit controlled, force. Progressively, however, their internal stability is compromised (see the wind textures in bar 106 and 115) as the distance between interventions increases, until a final deployment of all three percussion layers culminates in a frenzied final tutti (bars 120–121). The increasing number of impulses and sub-impulses in the percussion cycles as the piece continues leads to ever greater trigger activity, turning the ensemble into a hub of soloists — recalling the initial solos — as more resources become necessary to respond to multiplying trigger activations (see for example the clarinet solo, bar 137).71 This becomes explicit from bar 123 onwards, which is characterized by a macro-texture of ‘monumental’ vertical blocks (see bars 125–130, 141–142) and hocket-like passages:72 antiphony on both the large-scale and the local level.73 The greater the number of triggering impulses in the percussion and brass, the more rationalized the organization of the resulting texture-types becomes. Their behaviours mimic in miniature form the larger-scale additive operations found elsewhere (as at bar 65: 3, 4, 5, then 6 impulses, and so on). These local within-the-bar proportional devices represent one of several levels on which Ferneyhough instigates a ‘perceptibly different rapidity’ in Carceri III.74 The next level involves the use of irrational metres to effect bar-to-bar proportional change (which the composer does not consider to be tempo changes).75 A third, higher level is articulated by the tempo changes — on the basis of the trigger cycles — described above, and a fourth by entire sections of the piece which fall under the particular rule of one or other type of tempo change process (additive, subtractive or geometrical). For the performers of Carceri III, the problem of negotiating different ‘time-frames’ in Carceri II is compounded. In the flute piece, Ferneyhough instructs that the bar-by-bar metrical shifts between rational and irrational values must be interpreted as exactly as possible, whereas overall tempi are to an extent flexible in their interrelationships; in Carceri III both the metre changes and tempo interrelationships must be observed precisely, even though increments of two and three in the arithmetic processes are surely virtually impossible to render accurately.76 By the conclusion of Carceri III, the impulses are so numerous as to overcome or negate their trigger function. The possibility of entering a ‘grey zone’ looms, since the ensemble 245

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risks becoming too differentiated to render an appreciable aural effect: so the pitched instruments recede into silence, and the percussion impulse patterns are divested of their original triggering purpose. In the end they are simply presences, their notated appearance identical with the underlying impulse matrices found in Ferneyhough’s sketches. Etudes transcendantales Given its seemingly obvious connection with two illustrious precedents — Pierrot lunaire and Le marteau sans maître — it is surprising to discover that the original scoring of the Etudes transcendantales did not include the flute.77 Boulez’s work already contemplates, references and negates aspects of the structure of Pierrot, so that Ferneyhough’s song cycle becomes, in one sense, a reflection-upon-a-reflection.78 Subtitled Intermedio II, it would have formed a flute-less symmetrical complement to Intermedio alla ciaccona (Intermedio I). Ferneyhough went so far as to declare that ‘[he] didn’t want to concentrate on the flute’ again, that he was ‘tired of the Pierrot lunaire ensemble sound, with the clarinet, the rather white sound; and I was interested in having something which for my style seemed alien: a hardedged, metallic quality.’79 After planning for nine songs, and having determined an instrumental distribution and some basic strategies, he nevertheless reintroduced the flute (and, for the first time in the cycle, the alto flute), to the extent of composing a song for voice and flute alone, immediately invoking a direct parallel with both Schoenberg and Boulez.80 The Etudes thus bring together numerous ‘histories’: as a mise-en-âbime of the Carceri cycle, it draws on the same eight chords deployed in the other constituents; it creates a triptych with Schoenberg and Boulez; and the title invokes Liszt’s eponymous piano pieces, (although there is no suggestion that this indicates anything more than a passing reference to the technical challenges of Liszt’s works), an enhancement of Ferneyhough’s rather mundane working title: Nine Studies.81 Ferneyhough explains that ‘the title may be understood, in part, as a play on the generic title of the Ernst Meister texts set: Etüden; at the same time it implies an approach to the vocal medium which is both technically virtuosic and an attempt to look at the relationship voice/instrument in a fashion advancing beyond some of the more traditional assumptions associated with verbally-related music.’82 Ferneyhough characterizes Meister as ‘one of these reductive lyricist poets who wrote pithy metaphysical poems of a few lines in length but with very vivid imagery.’83 The works selected ‘concern themselves with [a] particular circle of themes — of death, the resonance potential of stones: precious, gravestones, natural stones in the landscape, and so on, and their cultural significance.’84 Unable to find enough poems by Meister on these images to support the projected length of the cycle, Ferneyhough approached contemporary poet Alrun Moll to supply newly composed texts (around 20), which together with the Meister group were treated as a total reservoire from which the composer selected a number for use that tessellated best with his musical formal and expressive objectives.85 Following on from his unconventional — often phonetically rendered — treatment of texts in works of the previous decade, he subjects the poetic material 246

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to processes that parallel those in the music itself: consider the interlocking of two texts in Song 8, which ‘are radically broken up like the shuffling of a pack of playing cards.’86 This is both reflected in the musical structure of the song (the two instruments being treated like two separate ‘texts’ — with different metrical patterns — constantly reconfiguring the relationship between each other, each vying for prominence) and in later parts of the cycle, such as towards the conclusion of Carceri III, in which the rapid intercutting of different texture-types, articulated in two antiphonal ensembles, creates ‘hoquetus’-type textures leading to ‘pulverized single sound-splatters.’87 The partnership between the voice and the claves in Song 9 perhaps evokes the ‘resonance potential of stones’ investigated in the poems, despite the text itself being subverted in this case. Ferneyhough’s treatment of the voice in turn reinforces the reference to Schoenberg, since the latter’s writing for the voice in Pierrot lunaire departed from the traditional.88 With the Sprechstimme technique, Schoenberg found a means of differentiating the voice from the instrumental material in performance and while embedding it within the work’s intricate contrapuntal structure, treating it as though it were an instrument first, rather than ‘painting’ the text by emphasizing the difference between the voice and instrumental parts. For example ‘Nacht’, number 8, constructs a particularly dense contrapuntal and imitative web, but the strict adherence of the voice part to the imitative texture on the page is contrasted with the imprecision of Sprechstimme technique in performance. Ferneyhough draws on the consequences of this, citing his own ‘double approach to text interpretation — the reflection of text-structure in the overall formal layout of a song while delaying the actual insertion of its substance into the text until the moment of most obvious resistance.’89 Further correspondences affect Ferneyhough’s formal approach: Boulez’s Marteau comprises nine songs, divided unevenly into three sections; Schoenberg’s 21 songs are similarly divided into three groups, but this time evenly (3x7). Ferneyhough acknowledges them both, effectively, by composing nine songs divided into three even groups as shown in Table 8.6. Finally, as previously mentioned, the cycle crystallizes aspects of the Carceri cycle in miniature. Just as Mnemosyne ‘remembers’ the Carceri as a whole, so Song 9 ‘remembers’ Table 8.6:  Etudes transcendantales, form.

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the Etudes, summarizing each song in a final coda-quodlibet (described below). The first song, written before the Etudes as a set had been planned, upholds the ‘automatic’ material principle. As such, it mimics the role of Superscriptio and employs similar techniques to generate material. The 36-bar structure derives from the opening twelve-metre pattern: Toop explains that ‘once the bar lengths have been decided, the process of deriving the rhythmic structure (a process which is one of the most involved — or at least labour intensive — in the whole of Ferneyhough’s work) consists of […] five stages.’90 Toop’s reproduction of these stages, reconstructed from Ferneyhough’s sketches, provides an insight into the precompositional planning and the ‘automatic’, leaving no significant structural decisions to be made in situ, as it were. Nevertheless, all-pervasive ‘automatic’ processes do not indicate a lack of concern for physiognomically expressive features or lines of force; they are no less perceptible here than in Superscriptio, the abstraction purposely deployed in the service of expression, rather than in spite of it. Despite his intended spectrum from ‘automatic’ to ‘informal’, Ferneyhough found [t]hat there was enough leeway in each of the pieces to be much more flexible than I had originally supposed might be possible. […] I had got a different concept of balance of information between movement and movement, and cycle and cycle [of three songs], but also that the actual techniques available were so much more multifarious than I had originally conceived, that there was so much more freedom available to me, and it didn’t seem necessary to be quite that didactic.91 Toop draws attention to ‘an exquisite technical touch’ in the first song: at one stage, Ferneyhough applies a filter to erase certain groups of pulses from the oboe part (this is highly typical, a means of giving a set of generated impulses a ‘profile’).92 ‘Up to now,’ Toop suggests, ‘the modifications [enacted on the oboe part] were more or less statistical in character: their function was to create a certain ebb and flow, not to impose broad formal tendencies.’93 At the beginning of the piece, the oboe part is far more complex and populated with detail than the vocal line, composed separately. The latter, if anything, seems to offer a kind of symmetry in relation to the extremely broken atomization of the vocal line and text in the final song of the cycle. The oboe part becomes progressively less dense, leaving little to choose between the two contributors by the end of the song. Toop observes that in order that ‘the oboe part [become] ever more fragmentary […] Ferneyhough deploys two interlocking number series.’94 The first (the cycle 6, 2, 7, 3, 8) determines which impulses will be erased (tied together) and the second determines the ‘gaps’ between eliminated groups of notes. This series is ‘almost simplistically directional’ (20, 19, 18, 17, 16 and so on).95 After the midpoint of the song, Ferneyhough flips the roles of the two series, so that the directional series now specifies the number of impulses to be erased (tied together). Furthermore, he retrogrades both series in the second half of the work. This apparently abstract decision involving the two number series and their exchange nevertheless effects what Ferneyhough has elsewhere called a ‘sudden omnidirectional 248

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“dematerialization”. At such moments it is the line of force itself which, like a wave, assumes momentary physical shape as a spectral foreground projected on to the cloud of energized particles.’96 If at the beginning of the work, the gaps between erasures are lengthiest, their incidence is rarer, becoming greater towards bar 18 (the midpoint). Once the series are exchanged, however, the gaps become much smaller (8, 3, 7, 2, 6) and the number of erased impulses significantly greater (3, 4, 5 → 17) resulting in the increasingly lengthy sustained notes in the oboe part as the song progresses. This processual neatness accounts for what is nonetheless experienced as a progressive de-densification of the oboe part from the beginning to the end. Something similar obtains in Song 4 (despite its originally intended ‘informality’ of process). The four opening flute gestures are clearly related. Certain features are obvious: the first is evenly subdivided into four groups of three (there are 11 pitches, so the final impulse is a rest), and the dynamic ‘envelope’ can be expressed as a smooth ‘curve’. The gesture is entirely ascending and legato, and is intervallically symmetrical about the midpoint resulting with the interval pattern ST, m3, T, M3, ST, ST, M3, T, m3, ST. The second has a similar profile, although it very slightly destabilizes the solidity of the first, one note being detached, staccato and outside the dynamic ‘curve’, marked marc. in p. The 11-note flourish remains completely ascending and, apart from the first detached pitch, legato. It is still internally regular, although the tuplet is now 13:10, incorporating two rests, not one. The first entry of the soprano coincides with the first note. Again, the gesture is intervallically symmetrical (T, T, ST, m3, T, T, m3, ST, T, T). The third gesture marks more significant changes. It includes descending intervals for the first time, and is unevenly divided, using nested tuplets. Nevertheless it is legato and restores the dynamic profile of the very first gesture. It remains intervallically symmetrical, although the direction of the intervals is no longer uniform (ST↑, m3↑, T↓, M3↑, ST↓, ST↑, M3↑, T↑, m3↓, ST↓). The fourth gesture follows very quickly and carries the greatest degree of distortion: several impulses have been erased, compromising the symmetry, legato and dynamic profile. The micro-detail of each gesture has been calculated, but the overall formal effect is to produce a sense of linear force. Each gesture draws on a transformation of chord S2 (Figure 8.7).97 The beginning of Song 4 bears out Redgate’s assessment of Ferneyhough’s more ‘traditional’, but also more direct gestural style after 1980. The form of the song is built on what were three 11/8 bars, the last of these having been modified to 10/8 (bars 1, 13 and 26). In each case the flute is prominent, and returns to a re-reading of the gestural profile of the opening bar. In bars 1 and 13, the voice is also built on the Carceri chords. Again, Ferneyhough establishes ‘rules’: from partway through bar 13 onwards, descending gestures are staccato and ascending ones legato. Similar dynamic envelopes attach to the gestures in bar 13 as in bar 1. The movement’s final bar is a flute cadenza that counterbalances the soprano solos of bars 4–6 and 17–20. The many tuplets containing 11 impulses in this bar recall the 11-note gestures of the opening, and similar tuplets in bar 13. Redgate also notes the single dynamic profile (basically fff → ffff), which surely acknowledges the smaller-scale versions in bar 1. In order to interrupt the virtuosity of the final solo, 249

Figure 8.7:  Etudes transcendantales, Song 4 opening gestures.

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Ferneyhough includes pauses on held notes, implicitly referring back to the techniques in Song 1. Elsewhere, the flute takes on an accompanying role, containing trills, tremolos, microtones and glissandi. For example, the flute accompanies between bars 7 and 12, but then the roles are exchanged such that the flute leads at bar 13, when the trills and glissandi are transferred to the accompanying voice. Just as the Carceri cycle accumulates resonances between pieces, so too do the Etudes. Redgate and Toop both describe the extent of these interrelationships, particularly strong between songs 1, 2 and 3 (despite Ferneyhough not having composed the nine in order).98 Similarly, Songs 4 and 5 share material, the final flute solo of the former taking its pitches from the voice part of song 5.99 Song 5 is one of the most intriguing because it also establishes links with another work composed at roughly the same time, Adagissimo. (The tempo indication for Song 5 is ‘Adagissimo’.) In common with the texture of the string work, in which the lower two voices’ material is expressed in longer note values, hinting at isorhythmic technique, Song 5 is a kind of distorted prolational canon, having certain characteristics of an isorhythmic motet, observed in the relationship between the voice part and the other lines in particular. The first bar in the voice falls under a 7:5 tuplet and every note is dotted, whereas all other voices (besides harpsichord) ‘divide a regular four against five among themselves.’100

Figure 8.8:  Etudes transcendantales, impulse cycles underlying opening to Song 5.101

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According to the composer, the [o]nly word-painting encountered resides in the image of bee captured immobile in amber, this being reflected in the vocal part by the consistent isolation of single syllables between variable length rests. At the very end of the movement this tendency is taken even further in that the phonetic contour of the poem is subdivided still further, so that the frequent ‘n’ sounds of ‘Insekteinschluss’ are allotted separate impulses, like distant echoes.102 In its capacity for representing the bee’s immobility, and its consistently dense and varied texture throughout (consider the array of ‘texture-types’ including glissandi, trills and harmonics), the piece’s ‘overall effect is of a slow moving continuum of intricate beauty’,103 prefiguring the ‘slow moving continuum’ of Mnemosyne (it is perhaps significant that the instrumentation for the piece exchanges the flute for alto flute, oboe for cor anglais and the harpsichord is exclusively in its lower register, mimicking the trajectory of the Carceri cycle overall as it progresses towards the bass flute piece). The various oblique ‘presences’ of Monteverdi throughout the cycle are as significant, in their own way, as those of Schoenberg: almost every song, to a greater or lesser degree, can be related to Monteverdi’s preoccupations (or, more generally, to those particular to his era) and the advent of the Seconda Prattica, a revolution in text setting and harmonic practice. Ferneyhough acknowledges the importance of Monteverdi to his own thinking on a number of occasions, and this has continued to such an extent that the argument and many structural features of the opera Shadowtime clearly draw on the Cremonese composer’s legacy. In some instances, Ferneyhough’s Etudes emulate Monteverdian techniques; in others, Ferneyhough defines his own music ‘negatively’ in relation to Monteverdi’s, not least when he claims to avoid what he calls ‘madrigalisms’ in text-setting. This is somewhat ironic, given that much of Monteverdi’s most adventurous work is found in his madrigals, but as the quotation above on Song 5 and the ‘bee in amber’ suggests, Ferneyhough avers that his music refrains from explicit mimetic relationships between musical figurations and words, such as characterize the early madrigal in particular.104 The Etudes explore different manifestations of the music-text relationship, the two pursuing completely independent processual paths at times, seemingly affecting each other very little when measured according to ‘traditional’ notions of text-setting: Song 1 is characterized by the composer as a ‘mis-relationship’ between voice and instrument, because the two remain characteristically contrasted throughout and offer different directional tendencies (as mentioned previously).105 Of Song 6, Ferneyhough says that The music has total autonomy after the moment at which the mere material distribution of the text has been taken account of in the musical form. Of course it was necessary to integrate that which was on the paper, in terms of quantity of syllables, length of lines, structure of verse, and so on, into my concept for a musical structure. These things had 252

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to be inseparably united. Having arrived at that point, I wrote the vocal part according to the exigencies of the musical (!) structure — the type of density, the type of relationship between vocal gesture and instrumental gesture, the degree of automatism or informality of the two levels, and so on. Afterwards, going back to the text and actually inserting it into the already formed vocal line was something I found very exciting, because the exigencies of the situation sometimes brought me up against quite serious problems which forced me to come to very radical solutions.106 Whereas Song 2 contains so-called ‘recitative’ and ‘commentary’ passages,107 Song 6 takes the form of a ‘post-Monteverdi recitative’,108 drawing on the longest text in the cycle. Its nine sections, each with its own tempo marking, hint at the importance of this song in relation to the cycle overall, which comprises nine songs: ‘the cycle orbits, in many respects, around Song 6 the most overtly rhetorically appellative of all.’109 Song 6 represents the furthest point of one text-‘setting’ trajectory pursued by the composer insofar as it is the ‘most informed by received notions of vocal expression in the cycle’;110 it complements Song 9, which denotes the extreme of a contrasting trajectory whereby the vocal treatment becomes progressively less traditional, the soprano first articulating the consonants, then the vowels of the text before reciting (speaking) it over the concluding instrumental material and the coda-quodlibet, itself in nine sections (hence forming the complement to song 6 and the overall structure of the cycle). Here, Ferneyhough seeks to emulate Monteverdi’s Sonata Sopra Sancta Maria, whose repeated cantus firmus gradually fragments into individual syllables broken by rests as the instrumental ensemble remains florid around it.111 This is already hinted at in Ferneyhough’s description of Song 7, in which ‘the voice functions like a cantus firmus which has to carry the main thrust of the formal divisions as well as keeping in check the more diversely anarchic impulses of the piccolo, oboe and harpsichord.’112 A further Monteverdi ‘reference’ obtains in Song 8, the last of the cycle to have been composed, which intercuts two texts, resulting in musical textures A and B, the former a ‘febrile, harshly illuminated sort of enhanced speech’ and the latter ‘an almost completely static, pianissimo pulsation, frequently practically inaudible under the brusque interruptions of the harpsichord.’113 The phrase ‘enhanced speech’ invokes Monteverdi’s musical innovation: The novelty of Monteverdi’s text-setting techniques emerges when we consider the aspect of language regarded by the composer as that which music should imitate: oratione, a term referring to spoken texts. Intended in such a literal way (from orare, meaning to recite a ritual, to plead, to pray, to speak), oratione indicates the peculiar literary status of an operatic libretto, a status that it shares with a spoken play.114 In Song 8, Ferneyhough creates a basic rhythmic and metrical sequence, which is then cut up into nine units and re-ordered twice: once for soprano, and once for harpsichord (with different 253

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orders for each, so that they become, in effect, completely self-contained processual layers). The trace of this abstract process remains in the moments of metrical de-synchronization evident from the score. Describing his initial treatment of the text in Song 9 as ‘pared down to the hectic enunciation of the consonantal material’,115 Ferneyhough’s counterpoint of plosive consonants and dry claves impulses itself effects a sense of compression, whilst the vocalize on the vowels that follows seems to ‘dilate’ the material (the contrast between the two processes is audible): the held pitches and legato phrasing in the flute, oboe and ’cello lines from midway through bar 49, contrast with the short repetitive patterns and highly differentiated ‘busy’ textures — including tremolos, staccatos, trills and glissandi — accompanying the consonants and claves earlier on. Monteverdi’s Sonata begins with an extended instrumental introduction, to the extent that the listener might legitimately confuse it with a canzona until the moment when the voice finally enters. Song 9 also begins with a reasonably lengthy ‘introduction’, itself hinting at a typically instrumental form: a Ligetian pitch-canon announced with a high unison F#.116 Throughout Song 9, the instruments continue to assert their prominence and maintain the formal ambiguity, striving at times to subvert the voice’s presence altogether (recalling the final song of the Marteau, perhaps), and alternately pursuing passages alla cadenza (marked in the score). Despite the ‘weight’ of Song 9 relative to the cycle, and its intransigent beginning, it does include a rather humorously entitled series of tutti, first ‘reasonable’, then ‘unreasonable’, and finally ‘maniacal’ (bars 42–48; 59–62 and 73–76 respectively), based on the increasingly complex rhythmic layering.117 Ironically, it is these passages, rather than specifically vocal constructions, that ‘word-paint’, the soubriquets seemingly entirely appropriate to the material so designated. In the 1970s, these might have appeared directly in the score (some of the directions to the performer in Time and Motion Study II come close), but here they remain in the ‘background’, perhaps to be inferred by performers and taken tongue-in-cheek. Likewise the ’cello gesture at bar 67: ‘hold main note enough to establish its pitch then slide evenly over remainder of value’,118 referring to the short descending glissandi marked ‘subito cantando’ — an unmistakeable reference, however brief, to Schoenberg’s Sprechstimme. The first segment of the coda-quodlibet is a final, miniature tutti. The following eight sections, separated by increasingly lengthy pauses, ‘remember’ the songs in inverse order (with Song 8 remembered first, and Song 1 last), and in a ‘negative’ of their original instrumentation (so that those instruments that were silent in the Song proper are included in its recollection, and vice versa: thus bar 83, is scored for piccolo, oboe and ’cello, mirroring the inverse of Song 8, a duet for harpsichord and voice). If this skewed reference to serial technique seems typical of the composer, the incrementally increasing pauses themselves recall the conclusion of Berg’s Chamber Concerto. Surprising as this reference may seem in the context of Ferneyhough’s published output, the early sketches and juvenilia bear witness to a more than passing interest in the third member of the Second Viennese School’s ‘trinity’.119 254

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The Solos: Superscriptio, Intermedio alla ciaccona, Mnemosyne Superscriptio is one of the first works to announce the above-mentioned change in Ferneyhough’s compositional approach at the onset of the 1980s. Its gesturality — the physicality of its impact — is the more remarkable for its being ‘highly automatized’ from the compositional standpoint,120 every last interval, duration, rest, register, metre, tuplet and dynamic attributable to extensive and meticulous pre-compositional planning, as Cordula Pätzold has shown. In both sound and notation it is quite unlike any of Ferneyhough’s previous works for the flute family, calling upon no extended techniques; but it is no less demanding, requiring of the performer energy, breath-control and virtuosity in equal measure. As previously mentioned, Superscriptio was written before the Carceri cycle had been conceived as such (which explains why it is the only piece not to use the eight-chord reservoire, though not why it is still included in the cycle as the ‘odd one out’). Nevertheless, it heralds its major concern: the exploration of borders, and limits — of instruments, performers and material density. The piccolo’s highest possible pitch is heard no fewer than four times within the first 17 bars, initiating the long, gradually descending trajectory to the bass flute in Mnemosyne, the latter at one stage provisionally titled Subscriptio.121 The piece comprises five sections, shown in Table 8.7. ‘Automatic’ though it might be, it contains in nuce the strategies and implications relevant to all that follows, including those towards the ‘informal’ end of the compositional spectrum. Whilst the tempo remains constant, frequent irrational metres create shifts in the density of material per bar, a feature of numerous pieces in the cycle and raised to a formal principle in Carceri III. Registral position of the pitches is critical throughout Superscriptio. In the first 20 bars, the material is confined within a major tenth; in the second section, Ferneyhough institutes a system of fixed registers resulting in a complex interrelationship of five pitch plateaux by the piece’s final section. In Carceri II, register is also systematically established, broken down and rebuilt, and in both Carceri I and II, material is confined within particular interval ‘bands’ at particular junctures, recalling the beginning of Superscriptio. The latter’s construction of a harmonic spectrum prefigures that in the eight-track tape for Mnemosyne, the grace-note figures weaving around fixed registers in Superscriptio redolent of the role of the solo bass flute in relation to the tape later on. Gesturality and ‘lines of force’ are in evidence immediately: the directional flourishes with which Superscriptio begins the cycle pre-empt those in the solo flute (Etudes, Song 4), the wind/brass from bar 9 in Carceri I or those that breakthrough the texture in the first section of Intermedio, with increasing regularity. Finally, the 19 bars of secondary material in section 2 are separated from one another into smaller units of up to two bars’ duration, acting as interventions relative to the primary material. The ‘intervention’ of contrasting material upon primary forces is typical of Ferneyhough’s formal strategy in the cycle’s larger pieces, notably Carceri I and III. There are undoubtedly more germinal ideas contained in Superscriptio, but those suggested here make sufficient case for its formal integration into the cycle, despite the lack of the fundamental chordal material 255

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Table 8.7:  Superscriptio, sectionalization of form. Section (Bar numbers)

Summary of material

1–59 One key principle: interval row (primary material)

Primary material, iterations of tone row in original and inverse forms, mostly in upper register. Further bar-divisions according to numerical system, occasional change in direction of gestural material, either ascending (at the start), descending or, latterly, both.

60–118 Two key principles: primary material and secondary ‘registral/ harmonic spectrum’ material

Primary material (derived from section 1, observing similar profile) for 40 bars; 19 bars of secondary material interspersed, comprising rapid repetitive gestures underpinned by consistent dynamic ‘envelope’. Secondary material (two interlocked series, modified) articulates fixed registral space or ‘harmonic spectrum’, first constructing, then ‘destructing’ it.122 Compare bar 60 (‘construction’) with 105 or 108 (‘destruction’). NB. Sections 1 and 2 are the same overall length. Metres for this section are derived from the first section.

119–137 Three tier process

19 bars in length, derived from the 19 bars of secondary material in section two. The material is punctuated by frequent rests and registrally disparate, owing to the combination of three interlocked series in three layers, high, medium and low. The dynamics change with virtually every note, accentuating the pointillist texture. The rhythms and entry points are governed by numerical patterns derived from section two, and recall the kinds of patterns used in the Etudes, Song 1, to determine density of material and delay between moments of activity.

138–198 Four types of material

The primary and secondary material types from section 2 reappear. In addition, Ferneyhough introduces microtones for the first time (derived from re-reading the original row) and notes of longer duration than previously (e.g. bars 182–185).

199–217 Five registral levels

19 bars once again. Grace-note materials interspersed amongst main material disposed across five fixed registral spans. Each registral cartouche contains a version of the row and its microtonal associate. Grace-notes are registrally ‘free’.123

just mentioned. The final section requires an approach to dynamic control as measured as section 3 is volatile: from ppp poss. to ffff poss., it propels the cycle forward. Carceri I commences attacca, following the high c at the top of the piccolo’s range. It is indeed a pity that no commercial recording of the complete cycle is currently available, since the ‘border’ effect that Ferneyhough seeks here and elsewhere in the cycle is particularly intensified in these moments of passage from one movement to the next (in this case, Superscriptio as ‘launchpad’ to the rest of the cycle and, mirror-fashion, the overlapping of the conclusion of Carceri III with the opening held pitch of Mnemosyne) and can only really be apprehended in the context of a complete performance. 256

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The principle of negative mirror imaging, observed above in the coda-quodlibet to the Etudes transcendantales, also characterizes the relationship between Mnemosyne and Intermedio alla ciaccona. Both arise from the same basic materials (pitch, rhythmic and metrical), yet possess totally different characters, rather like the two movements of the contemporaneous Third String Quartet.124 The metrical scheme for the bass flute piece is reversed in Intermedio, with some tranches missing in the latter (which also contains no irrational metres).125 The basic rhythmic scheme for the one is similarly reversed in the other. Compare, for example, bars 85–86 in Intermedio with bars 66–67 in Mnemosyne (Figure 8.9). In Intermedio, the tempo range stipulated at the beginning remains in force throughout. Different degrees of density are created through progressively more intricate figuration and decoration of the basic harmonic progression. As indicated earlier, nested tuplets in up to four layers acquire an important role: the outermost tuplet in these cases is generally a bar-length subdivision, creating similar proportional adjustments to the irrational metres used in other Carceri pieces.126 The innermost tuplet is to be understood as a spontaneously added form of ornament that creates a torque in a figure’s profile (Figure 8.10). The chaconne form is appropriate because predicated on repetition, a constant feature of the Carceri cycle, however unusual in the more general context of Ferneyhough’s output. Carceri II comes closest to Intermedio as a formal model: both involve repetitions of small cells of material, the former more obviously, although the latter adheres more ‘classically’ to its nominated form. In Intermedio, the short, basic intervallic or harmonic pattern is established in the first four bars and then repeated numerous times, not always exactly; and typically enough, it becomes increasingly varied and distorted as the piece progresses. It comprises four intervals: the quartertone, semitone, threequartertone and a perfect fifth minus one quartertone, initially expressed as diad chords (Figure 8.11). In bar 5, it is expressed by adding an octave to each interval; there are further statements in bars 6–7, 8–9 and so on. It can also be expressed linearly, as in bars 17–19. Whereas the emphasis in Intermedio is on melodic invention, Mnemosyne reappraises the ‘multilayered interaction of diverse metrical and temporal patterns’ seen in Carceri III, the ‘metronome function’ applying to the background tape materials, which consistently emphasize the downbeat in every bar.127 The tape can be replaced in performance by eight bass flutes arranged in a semicircle around the soloist, but in either case the background chordal material begins when the flautist reaches the metrically precise materials (bar 1) after the senza misura opening. Each tempo change in Mnemosyne introduces another of the eight chords fundamental to the cycle in the tape.128 Such a literal approach to musical materials is rare in Ferneyhough, though the chords’ function within Mnemosyne go beyond that of a teleological ‘explication’ relative to the Carceri as a whole: their gradual accretion in the tape part progressively restricts the pitches available to the soloist. Regarding Mnemosyne’s place at the end of the cycle, Ferneyhough himself notes a wish to avoid a merely ‘tasteful’ ending, instead regarding the cycle’s finale as an 257

Figure 8.9a:  Intermedio alla ciaccona, bars 85–86.

Figure 8.9b:  Mnemosyne, bars (65 and) 66–67 as ‘negative mirror’.

Figure 8.10b:  Intermedio, nested tuplets, bar 93.

Figure 8.10a:  Intermedio, nested tuplets, bar 71.

Figure 8.11:  Intermedio, bars 1–11, chaconne pattern.

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Table 8.8: Mnemosyne, section-by-section introduction of Carceri chords, and equivalent (mirrored) sections in Intermedio.

‘amplification, a densification of the techniques that until that point [have] been treated in [it].’129 The densification of processes and materials as the Carceri nears completion brings the preoccupation with musical style full circle, and consolidates Ferneyhough’s involvement with image in the works of the 1980s, as opposed to the abstract ideas the previous decade:130 A […] vital strand of thought highlighted by my concern for Piranesi’s achievement was the question of style. Just as the life-and-death cycle of specific materials as exemplified in any given work depends on the former’s relative diachronic integrity, so the extension of these principles to the dimensions of an entire cycle of works offers the opportunity of still vaster perspectives, more profound interactions. I have always experienced great difficulties in keeping works entirely separate; continuity of style takes this fact into account and amplifies it to a more general principle of potential linguistic definition. Precisely the contrasts and developmental elaborations distinguishing earlier and later versions of many of Piranesi’s Carceri imbue his second thoughts with more intense semantic ‘perspective’.131

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Notes   1 The flute concerto is designated Carceri d’Invenzione IIa. Carceri II exists in three versions: a (227 bars), b (180 bars) and c (180 bars). Only the concerto (a) is a part of the cycle. Carceri d’Invenzione IIb is a flute solo using the same material as the solo in the concerto. Carceri d’Invenzione IIc is a version for solo flute and pre-recorded tape.   2 According to the composer, the cycle should either be played as a whole, or individual pieces separately. He regards the performance of sub-cycles (for example Carceri d’Invenzione I–III as a kind of triptych without the other four works) as inadvisable, explaining that ‘I don’t like this; they shouldn’t be played as a sort of mini-symphony, one after the other; the pieces are too close in some ways: there are too many inter-references, in spite of their different instrumental colorings, to enable this to be a successful artistic solution.’ (Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 291).   3 The ambiguity of the translation of the title is intended and appeals to Ferneyhough precisely on that account. As discussed in Chapter 3, there is a level on which his performer experiences ‘real’ constraint (limitations of technique or instrument), but a fantastical aspect to his music whereby he imagines a ‘shadow piece’ to extend beyond the double bar, just as he supposes Piranesi’s lines to continue in the imagination, beyond the edge of the page.   4 Ferneyhough, unpublished sketchbooks, Carceri d’Invenzione cycle, Paul Sacher Stiftung, Basel c. 1980–1986. The sketches for the cycle are found, in part, in sketchbooks, representing a consolidated body of work in themselves. It is unusual to find Ferneyhough’s sketch materials in sketchbooks as such, since they are usually a collection of rather haphazardly gathered on single leafs of paper, envelopes, hotel notepaper, concert programmes and meeting agendas. Presumably the scale of the undertaking in this case necessitated a more ordered approach, particularly because so many of the works share material, not least the fundamental chords, their transformations and filter operations.   5 Ferneyhough, unpublished sketchbooks, Carceri d’Invenzione cycle.   6 Tommaso Campanella, The City of the Sun: A Poetical Dialogue between a Grandmaster of the Knights Hospitallers and a Genoese Sea-Captain, his guest (University of Adelaide, 2012), http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/c/campanella/tommaso/c18c/ (accessed December 27, 2012).   7 This reproduction of Ferneyhough’s diagram is taken from Cordula Pätzold, “Carceri d’Invenzione von Brian Ferneyhough: Kompositionstechnische und höranalytische Aspekte” (PhD thesis, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität zu Freiburg i. Br., 2002), 167. The documentation can be obtained online, http://www.freidok.uni-freiburg.de/volltexte/583/ (accessed September 20, 2012).   8 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 291.   9 Ibid.   10 Ibid.   11 Ibid., 243, 277.   12 See Chapter 3 in this book for a discussion of Ferneyhough’s concept of ‘energy transfer’.   13 To a less obvious extent, Intermedio alla ciaccona is also inherently repetitive, as its title implies.

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  14 The Icon section of his Lemma-Icon-Epigram, finished in the year that the Carceri were begun, similarly re-presents a select group of chords from different ‘vantage points’.   15 Roger Redgate, “Brian Ferneyhough’s ‘Etudes transcendantales’,” Contemporary Music Review 20/1 (2001): 81.   16 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 133.   17 Added to this, the performer is further ‘imprisoned’ by the increasingly constricting pre-recorded tape materials and the presence of a click-track. This aspect of Mnemosyne is discussed in Chapter 3 (which deals with the solo works) because of its undoubted relevance to Ferneyhough’s approach to composition for solo monophonic instruments, and specifically the flute. The detail in that chapter provides some context for further discussion of the work in this chapter.   18 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 47.   19 Ibid., 292. ‘The doctrine that beauty is unity in diversity originated with the eighteenthcentury thinker Francis Hutcheson, who said, “The figures which excite in us the ideas of beauty seem to be those in where there is uniformity amidst variety….The variety increases the beauty in equal uniformity….The greater uniformity increases the beauty amidst equal variety”.’ Hutcheson, quoted in Paul Thagard, Coherence in Thought and Motion (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000), 199. Ellipses and emphasis in original.   20 Ferneyhough, unpublished sketchbooks, Carceri d’Invenzione cycle. The extremes of ‘automatic’ and ‘informal’ composition envisaged for the Etudes are discussed in detail in Richard Toop, “Brian Ferneyhough’s Etudes Transcendantales: A Composer’s Diary (Part 1),” EONTA Arts Quarterly, 1/1 (1991): 55–89.   21 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 133.   22 See Ferneyhough, “Form-Figure-Style: An Intermediate Assessment,” Collected Writings, 21–28 and “Il tempo della Figura,” Collected Writings, 33–41.   23 Ferneyhough, unpublished sketchbooks, Carceri d’Invenzione cycle.   24 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 68, 248.   25 This is also addressed as appropriate to other works, in Chapter 3 on the solo works, and briefly in Chapter 11 on Ferneyhough’s aesthetics, such is the importance of his focus on gestural musical discourse from 1980 onwards.   26 Carceri I, Intermedio and Carceri II (the latter in the solo part).   27 Redgate, “Brian Ferneyhough’s ‘Etudes transcendantales’,” 79.   28 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 213.   29 Ibid., 295.   30 See Denys Bouliane and Anne LeBaron, “Darmstadt 1980,” Perspectives of New Music, 19, 1/2 (Autumn, 1980 – Summer, 1981): 420–441.   31 This is referred to as Neue Romantik in Ferneyhough’s Collected Writings, although it is unclear whether the use of the term denotes the same group of composers more typically referred to as the Neue Einfachheit or represents an editorial decision. See Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 21.   32 The composers’ yearning for an idealized past is well represented in their writings of the time, as well as some of their approaches to musical material. The bibliography in Nicolas Darbon, Wolfgang Rihm et la Nouvelle Simplicité: La Capture des Forces I (Notre-Dame de Bliquetuit: 264

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Millénaire III, 2007) provides a list of publications to which the various composers allied to New Simplicity contributed. Composers included Hans-Jürgen von Böse, Hans-Christian von Dadelsen, Detlev Müller-Siemens, Wolfgang von Schweinitz and Manfred Trojahn amongst others.   33 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 23.   34 According to Ferneyhough, ‘the essence of the matter would seem to be this: that the musical sign or sign-constellation be, to a significant degree, transparent to emotive intentionality.’ (Ibid., Ferneyhough’s emphasis).   35 Ibid., 25.   36 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 384.   37 The dissertation is valuable as a resource, regardless of whether the reader reads fluently in German. Pätzold provides translations for all Ferneyhough quotations in English and represents in diagrammatic form all structural information relating to the works as are found in the sketches, with the exception of the complete notes on Etudes transcendantales: here, she selects Song 9 to use as an exemplar.   38 Toop, “Brian Ferneyhough’s Etudes transcendantales,” 59.   39 Culminating in Mnemosyne, the main subject of his essay “The Tactility of Time,” Collected Writings, 42–50.   40 Ibid., 300.   41 Ferneyhough, Carceri d’Invenzione III (London: Peters Edition No. 7293), 5.   42 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 300.   43 Ibid., 44–45.   44 Ibid., 300. Ferneyhough’s treatment of the two horns is, in one sense highly complex and yet in another rather straightforward (at least insofar as the process has an audible result, explained in what follows). The two horns play regular metronomic pulses in an overlapping pattern: horn 1 has the same pattern in bars 77–78 and 79–80; horn 2 has the same pattern in bars 78–79 and 80–81, and so on. From bar 49 the overall tempo of the piece is E=62. In bar 77 the metre is 4/10, a quintuplet metre (so that the basic pulse is 77.5mm relative to the ‘straight’ quaver pulse E=62). Horn 1 subdivides the four quaver pulses into seven, resulting in a faster pulse of 135.625mm. This pulse is carried over to bar 78, indicated by a notational symbol similar to that used to denote metric modulation, but here it indicates that the ‘metronome’ pulse established in bar 77 remains the same in bar 78, despite the basic pulse in 77 (a quintuplet metre) changing to a ‘straight’ quaver (i.e. with a denominator of 8) in bar 78. (This notation of rhythmic equivalences is used extensively in ‘Sandpiper’ from Elliott Carter’s A Mirror on Which to Dwell (1975), where a single pulse is played throughout but notated in different guises as the ensemble’s tempo passes through a number of metric modulations.) While horn 1 has a quaver pulse from 77–78, horn 2 articulates a dotted semiquaver ‘metronome’ at bar 78. Across bars 81–82, horn 1 is subject to quintuplet subdivision, resulting in a ‘metronome’ of 96.875mm. At this point Ferneyhough has made an error either of notation or of calculation under the first quintuplet, which contains seven semiquavers where there should be five. Nevertheless, the principle that the pulse or ‘metronome’ carries over the bar (as at 77–78) is upheld and once again signalled by the notation in brackets above the horn 1 part. In bars 82–83, 265

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horn 2 has a ‘straight’ semiquaver pulse (124mm), since the metre denominator for both bars is 8. In bars 80 and 84, the horns play the same rhythms as one another, suggesting that one ‘metronome’ is temporarily suspended. These pulses are audibly regular, set against the fluctuations of the remainder of the ensemble. The horns return at bar 112, possibly using the same principle as previously; but if so, at least one new layer of process has been added, obscuring the (relative) simplicity of the metronomic function. Horn 2 enters two bars ahead of horn 1, although their rhythmic profiles are similar, suggesting that each is a ‘reading’ of the same rhythmic loop, but horn 1 is at a delay (therefore overlapping with horn 2 once more): horn 2, for example, ‘reads’ the loop using several triplet subdivisions. In bar 112, horn 2 is subject to a 7:4 tuplet bar-length subdivision; in bar 114, horn 1 enters, and the metre for the bar is 7/24. In bar 113, the metre is 7/20; at bar 115, horn 1 is subject to a 7:5 subdivision, suggestive of a relationship between bar-length subdivisions and metre at a delay of two bars. Repeated pitches acquire significance here, and are consolidated when the horns enter at bar 186 (rapid repeated pitches are prominent from bar 188–191, redolent of a similar texture in Superscriptio, and though unusual in Ferneyhough’s music, they resonate with the use of repetition both in Carceri II and in the cycle as a whole). It is possible that the single horn from bar 152 (part of a reduced ‘chamber group’) is a collapsed version of the two ‘metronomes’, although this is difficult to ascertain, and the sketches do not reveal the technical details. The horns’ final appearance at bar 226–227 (the last two bars of the piece) features further rapid repetitions, and the tuplets ascribed to each overlap in a kind of stretto, until they become synchronized in the final three quavers (each quaver subdivided into five demisemiquavers). It is impossible to know whether the metronomic function of the horns is really only applicable between bars 75 and 92, but the audible ‘ticking’ almost certainly gives rise to Ferneyhough’s characterization of the ‘triple metronome’ in Carceri III as a ‘ticking’ structure, discussed below. I am extremely grateful to John Hails for working out the horn processes here and for alerting me to the similarity with Carter’s notation and procedure in A Mirror on Which to Dwell.   45 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 299.   46 Ibid., 47, 300.   47 Ferneyhough, unpublished sketchbooks, Carceri d’Invenzione cycle. The capitals are Ferneyhough’s.   48 The microtonal versions of the chords use the same intervallic structure as the main chords, but count quartersteps for semitonal steps in the equivalent ‘parent’ chords.   49 In the sketches, Ferneyhough writes the following: ‘Pitch structure of “Carceri I” derives from a series of symmetrical and asymmetrical chords. These structures, transposed onto various steps, are unordered horizontally. Ordering is defined by reference to “sch” (= the row of “Moses and Aron”). The form is taken as a fixed row in its own right, which may be treated in all the usual ways (transposed, inverted, retrograded). Transposition of a chord may be “filtered” in this way through the same Sch-form, or, alternatively, the same unchanging chord transposition may be filtered through various Sch-forms.’ See Ferneyhough, unpublished sketchbooks, Carceri d’Invenzione I.   50 Very roughly it is meant to be placed near the Golden Section-point, which seems to be a formal ‘turning point’ for the work. 266

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  51 Ferneyhough, unpublished sketchbooks, Carceri d’Invenzione cycle. Note the similarity of the terms ‘layering’ and ‘embedding’ to the concepts central to Terrain: ‘strata’ and ‘faults’, indicating Ferneyhough’s preference for associating aspects of musical structure with geological metaphors.   52 Ferneyhough, unpublished sketchbooks, Carceri d’Invenzione cycle.   53 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 291.   54 Ibid., 287.   55 Ferneyhough, unpublished sketch materials, Carceri d’Invenzione cycle.   56 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 251.   57 Pätzold, “Carceri d’Invenzione von Brian Ferneyhough,” 243–247 and 261–323.   58 Again, Pätzold gives a comprehensive list in Ibid. 233–243.   59 Ferneyhough, unpublished sketchbooks, Carceri d’Invenzione. See also Pätzold, “Carceri d’Invenzione von Brian Ferneyhough,” 243–245.   60 The bass flute begins four bars before the end of Carceri III (bar 161).   61 Ferneyhough, unpublished sketchbooks, Carceri d’Invenzione III, 1984.   62 Ferneyhough, unpublished sketch materials, Carceri d’Invenzione II.   63 Ibid.   64 Ferneyhough, unpublished sketchbooks, Carceri d’Invenzione III, c. 1984–1986.   65 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 300.   66 Ferneyhough, unpublished sketchbooks, Carceri d’Invenzione III, c. 1984–1986. Later in the piece, the ticking structure is most readily audible after bar 123, where triggers in the percussion initiate fragmentary block-bursts in small sub-groups of instruments.   67 Ibid. Ferneyhough refers to the brass ‘chorales’ in Carceri III in the sketches for the work. See passages of held notes (relatively speaking) in the brass towards the beginning of the second part, from bar 101ff.   68 Ibid., 299. He refers to cycles 1–3 (cycles 4–6 are in any case derived from these and continue the same procedures).   69 Although the geometric relationships are readily identifiable because Ferneyhough indicates the metric modulations in the score, the additive and subtractive processes are more difficult to work out. Pätzold acknowledges the difficulty of identifying which cycle is based on which procedure (see Pätzold, “Carceri d’Invenzione von Brian Ferneyhough,” 360–361) and has written an article devoted to tempo and rhythmic organization in Carceri III, which explains certain aspects of the composer’s approach in greater detail than is found in the thesis. See Pätzold, “Aspects of Temporal Organization in Brian Ferneyhough’s Carceri d’Invenzione III,” Search: Journal for New Music and Culture 8 (2011), http://www. searchnewmusic.org/paetzold.pdf (accessed July 8, 2012). I am particularly indebted to John Hails for allowing me to distil findings contained in an unpublished Masters essay on the subject of tempo-metre relationships in Carceri III (University of Huddersfield, 2001), particularly his deciphering of the three base tempi in the arithmetic relationships reported here.   70 The ratio relationships are 52:65 (4:5); 52:78 (2:3); 52:41.6 (5:4). Other less frequently occurring ‘geometric’ tempi include E=47.3 (52:47.3 = 11:10); E=45.5 (52:45.5 = 8:7) and 77.5 (77.5:51 = 3:2, both found towards the end of the work). 267

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  71 Ferneyhough compares the flute as ‘group of one’ in Carceri II to the prevailing sense that each and every performer in Carceri III is a soloist. (Ferneyhough, unpublished sketchbooks, Carceri d’Invenzione III). The comments are made on what appears to be a programme note, which however states that the work is some 20 minutes long, suggesting that this note was made either before the piece was started, or when it was only just begun (as is Ferneyhough’s habit, to help rationalize his thoughts on a piece); in the event, the piece is about half that length. The reference to the ‘group of one’ in Carceri II recalls Boulez’s treatment of the orchestra in Rituel, in which the oboe similarly constitutes a ‘group of one’, other groups comprising like instruments in groups of two, three four and so on.   72 Compare percussion 2 with the horns and trombones, bar 140; percussion 2 and 3 (bar 142) and the ‘hocket’ in percussion and lower brass bar 116ff., for example.   73 Ferneyhough, unpublished sketchbooks, Carceri d’Invenzione III.   74 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 278.   75 Ibid., 299.   76 See the prefatory remarks and performance notes in both scores. These are Ferneyhough, Carceri d’Invenzione II (London: Peters Edition No. 7292, 1985) and Carceri d’Invenzione III (London: Peters Edition No. 7293, 1993).   77 Ferneyhough, unpublished sketch materials, Etudes transcendantales, previously entitled “Transcendental Studies,” Paul Sacher Stiftung, Basel, May 1982. The original intended instrumentation was for oboe, ’cello, harpsichord and voice.   78 In a comment quoted in Chapter 3, Ferneyhough suggests that a piece radiates out beyond its double bar, becoming a ‘shadow piece’. The Etudes transcendantales become (in this sense) a ‘shadow piece’ in relation to these exemplars (see Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 267).   79 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 294.   80 Pierrot Lunaire ‘Der kranke Mond’ (song 7) is for voice and flute alone, as is movement 3, ‘L’artisanat furieux’ from Boulez’s Le Marteau sans maître. Ferneyhough suggests that ‘the harpsichord was not forseen right from the outset […] the harpsichord arrived last of all [in the addition of instruments to the ensemble].’ This is not entirely accurate, given that the flute was added later to an ensemble already including the harpsichord. See Jane Chapman, “An interview with Brian Ferneyhough: thoughts on the harpsichord in ‘Etudes transcendantales’,” Contemporary Music Review 20/1 (2001): 101.   81 Ferneyhough, unpublished sketch materials, Etudes transcendantales, 1982. The Etudes came together as a larger project — the cycle — only gradually. To begin with the first song was a standalone composition for oboe and soprano that was considered a ‘study’. In the sense that the title has been elevated from ‘Studies’ to ‘Transcendental Studies’, the title trajectory also follows Liszt’s precedent — his works were first called 12 Studies and then became the Etudes transcendantales when he increased the level of technical difficulty and degree of interrelationship between them.   82 Toop, “Brian Ferneyhough’s Etudes Transcendantales,” 55.   83 Ibid.   84 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 297.   85 Ibid. 268

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  86 Ibid.   87 Ferneyhough, unpublished sketchbooks, Carceri d’Invenzione III.   88 Ferneyhough’s Fourth String Quartet, written a few years after the Etudes, again explicitly revisits Schoenberg’s innovations with regards to the relationship between text and music, once again taking a specific work — Schoenberg’s Second String Quartet — as its model.   89 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 363.   90 Toop, “Brian Ferneyhough’s Etudes Transcendantales,” 63.   91 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 295.   92 Toop, “Brian Ferneyhough’s Etudes Transcendantales,” 65.   93 Ibid.   94 Ibid.   95 Ibid.   96 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 35.   97 Ferneyhough, unpublished sketch materials, Etudes transcendantales Song 4, June 12, 1984.   98 Toop has deduced from the sketches and the composer himself that the order of composition was 1, 2, 6, 3, 7, 5, 4, 9, 8 (see Toop, “Brian Ferneyhough’s Etudes Transcendantales,” 57). Redgate discusses structural interrelationships between songs 1–3, song 3 having been in part derived from the structure of song 2, itself in part a re-reading of the opening of song 1. See Redgate, “Brian Ferneyhough’s Etudes transcendantales,” 90.   99 Ferneyhough, unpublished sketch materials, Etudes transcendantales, 1984. 100 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 363. See Ferneyhough’s illustration of the different levels of impulses set against each other (proportionally) in the fifth song, Collected Writings, 364. Here the two levels of pulse cycle are redolent of the two horns in Carceri II. In Song 5 the pulse patterns ‘trigger’ gestural activity in the ensemble like a miniature version of the processes obtaining in Carceri III (again, this is clear from Ferneyhough’s diagram). 101 Diagram taken from Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 364. 102 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 363. 103 Redgate, “Brian Ferneyhough’s Etudes transcendantales,” 95. 104 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 295. Later Monteverdian madrigals focused on drama and ‘[t]he singers’ use, for example, of pure voice as empty, non-verbal sounding music [which] enables them to shift the audience’s perspective toward the narrative power of music per se.’ This seems particularly apt in Ferneyhough’s case, given his career-long interest in what might likewise be referred to as the ‘narrative power of music per se’, as exemplified in the Fourth Quartet. See Mauro P. Calcagno, From Madrigal to Opera: Monteverdi’s Staging of the Self (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2012), 6–7. 105 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 363. 106 Ibid., 297. 107 For full analysis see Toop, “Brian Ferneyhough’s Etudes Transcendantales.” 108 Redgate, “Brian Ferneyhough’s Etudes transcendantales,” 96. 109 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 364. 110 Redgate, “Brian Ferneyhough’s Etudes transcendantales,” 96. 111 Of the Sonata Sopra Sancta Maria Ferneyhough has observed the ‘dilations and compressions of phrasing […] where the utterly basic nature of the vocal invocations is most subtly 269

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varied and placed against a mass of metric and textural invention.’ (Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 338). He also mentions the Sonata Sopra Sancta Maria in the unpublished sketches in relation to song 9 specifically. 112 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 362–363. 113 Ibid., 366. 114 Mauro Calcagno, “‘Imitar col canto chi parla’: Monteverdi and the creation of a language for musical theater,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 55 (2002): 385. 115 Ibid., 367. 116 György Ligeti begins several pieces and movements of significant scores (particularly those of the 1960s) with a unison between several voices, which gradually unfolds chromatically in the manner of an early Renaissance mensuration canon. First observed in the Kyrie of the Requiem, the technique occurs more conspicuously in Lontano, Lux Aeterna and the second movement of the Second String Quartet (to give just a few examples). By contrast, it is highly atypical of Ferneyhough’s output, especially as an opening gesture. 117 These designations are found in the sketches. Ferneyhough, unpublished sketch materials, Etudes transcendantales, c. 1984–1985. 118 Ferneyhough, Etudes transcendantales (London: Peters Edition, No. 7310, 1987), 59. 119 The reference to Berg’s Lyric Suite in the section of the String Trio bearing the indication ‘largo desolato’ has already been touched upon in context; here, however, the reference is heard directly in the music itself. 120 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 134. 121 Toop, “Brian Ferneyhough’s Etudes Transcendantales,” 59. 122 Richard Toop, “‘Superscriptio’ pour flûte piccolo solo,” Entretemps 3 (1987): 100. 123 Ferneyhough’s sketches are very detailed in relation to this piece. Both Richard Toop and Cordula Pätzold have reproduced and analyzed considerable portions of Ferneyhough’s notes on the work, enabling a reconstruction of the work from first principles. 124 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 489. Some sketches for a string quartet are found in the bundle of papers relating to Mnemosyne at the Paul Sacher Stiftung, Basel. 125 A diagrammatic representation of this metrical scheme is found in Pätzold, “Carceri d’Invenzione von Brian Ferneyhough,” 381–383. 126 These perhaps have the greatest effect in Carceri III, in which they represent local-level prolational changes within a prevailing tempo, themselves proportionally interrelated, as described earlier. 127 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 137. 128 Ferneyhough, unpublished sketch materials, Mnemosyne, Paul Sacher Stiftung, Basel, c. 1985–1986. 129 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 300–1 (emphasis Ferneyhough’s). 130 Toop compares the starting point of La terre est un homme (Matta’s painting) with the abstract ideas (such as the Music of the Spheres) that characterize the inspiration for the works of the 1970s. See Toop, “Brian Ferneyhough,” A Biocritical Sourcebook, 140. 131 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 132–133.

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Chapter 9 Shadowtime

The Renaissance explores the universe; the Baroque explores libraries.1

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hadowtime is Ferneyhough’s only opera, but except in the first of its seven scenes it does not present dramatic action in a typical way. It charts the death of the German Jewish essayist Walter Benjamin at the Spanish border on September 26, 1940, after border officials denied him safe passage into Spain, whence he would have travelled on to Lisbon, and finally America. For Benjamin, return to France would have meant near-certain deportation to the concentration camps, which he forestalled by committing suicide. The action at the Spanish border, culminating in the moment of Benjamin’s death, comprises only one of several narrative strands of the opera’s first scene. The remainder of the work follows his ‘shadow’s’ journey to the underworld, although Benjamin himself only appears in one other scene (the fifth). Ferneyhough explores allegorical representation throughout: the figure who makes the most appearances in Shadowtime (often represented by the chorus) is the ‘Angel of History’, proposed by Benjamin in his Theses on the Philosophy of History, and based on a print by Paul Klee, Angelus Novus, which captivated Benjamin, who owned it for a number of years.2 Benjamin’s importance for Ferneyhough was established as early as Lemma-Icon-Epigram and Kurze Schatten II. Many of the composer’s own aesthetic ideas owe something to Benjaminian concepts, somewhat ironically, given that the latter seems to have been largely uninterested in music.3 The resonances of Benjamin’s ideas within Ferneyhough’s output are further explored in Chapter 11 of this book; but it is in Shadowtime that the composer’s fascination with the philosopher finds its fullest expression. Indeed, the extent to which it will be necessary in what follows to engage with Benjamin’s ideas in order to appreciate Ferneyhough’s approach (and that of his librettist, Charles Bernstein) confirms that, of all philosophers, it is Benjamin to whom Ferneyhough is most consistently drawn across his career.4 Ferneyhough’s characterization of Shadowtime as a ‘thought opera’ or ‘opera of ideas’ reflects his interest in Benjamin’s assertion that ‘it is characteristic of philosophical writing that it must continually confront the question of representation.’5 Although there are many philosophical implications arising from Benjamin’s argument (too many to be considered here in appropriate detail), the key issue relates to a tension between allegorical and symbolic forms of representation. Benjamin’s rejected Habilitationschrift, later published as Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels [The Origins of German Tragic Drama] sought out obscure seventeenth-century German mourning plays, likening their fallen heroes, typically

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noble characters who suffer some form of humiliating fall from grace, to the protagonists of Classical drama, whose heroic endurance in the face of tragedy and suffering elevate them to the status of Gods, into a realm of mythical timelessness ‘displacing the anguish of life with images of stabilized harmony and eternal perfection.’6 The Trauerspiel genre, by contrast, focused on historical life, affirming that in addition to the events that precipitate historical progress, there are failures in history too, ‘sorrowful, or unachieved states’ embodied by the fallen heroes, discontinuous moments which, existing outside the historical ‘grand narrative’, undermine and ultimately rip through its perceived continuity.7 For Benjamin, the allegory is a critique of the Romantic symbol, itself related to the Classical symbol: [The symbol] is idealizing because it ignores history, claiming the absolute eternal value of nature, which supplies symbolism with its idea of unchanging, organic forms. Nature has been presented in ideal, not real, terms; indeed it has been turned into an abstract, but authoritative entity. Symbolism, because it implies unification, bringing things together, idealizes, and constructs a perfect transcendent world: these are ideas associated with Coleridge and Yeats. In this Romantic context, even suffering can be seen as redemptive. Romanticism celebrates nature, and symbolism, which draws on elements of nature, evokes timeless, beautiful, eternal truths.8 Whereas the Romantics viewed the ruin as a symbol of artistic creation and a fragment pointing to an ideal totality and eternity, Benjamin argues that ‘allegories are, in the realm of thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of things.’9 Ruins indicate the predisposition of the thing to decay: the fall of the hero in tragic drama, the predisposition of human life to death; above all, the transience of human history. Allegory therefore begins from death: the ruin is its afterlife. According to Benjamin: Whereas in the symbol destruction is idealized and the transfigured face of nature is fleetingly revealed in the light of redemption, in allegory the observer is confronted with the facies hippocratica [death’s head] of history as a petrified primordial landscape. Everything about history that from the very beginning has been untimely, sorrowful, unsuccessful, is expressed in a face — or rather in a death’s head.10 The incompleteness of the fragment in the Romantic work is essential insofar as there obtains in it the symbol’s false promise of transcendence, ‘its resolution in the Absolute’,11 whereas for Benjamin, the allegorical work is doomed to incompleteness, ‘to necessary irresolution, “to pile up fragments ceaselessly, without any strict idea of a goal”.’12 Benjamin identified writers of mourning plays ‘piling up fragments’ and transferred the technique to Tragic Drama, which amasses some 600 quotations and interlaces them in his argument. The reader must read ‘between the lines’, understanding that in allegory, meaning is other than what is contained in the text itself.13 Such is the experience of Benjamin’s ‘Angel of History’ in the latter’s ‘Ninth Thesis on the Philosophy of History’, in which history itself 274

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becomes the ‘text’ as the angel, possessed of a way of seeing through the narrative or ‘chain of events’ that we perceive, ‘sees one catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage, and hurls it in front of his feet.’14 Benjamin proposed that ‘it was the Baroque Trauerspiel that presaged modernity by exposing the chasm separating human life from a transcendent ideal’,15 despite the fact that ‘to impute an allegorical motive to contemporary art is to venture into proscribed territory, for allegory has been condemned for nearly two centuries as aesthetic aberration, the antithesis of art.’16 Allegory, unlike the Romantic symbol, which is predicated on completeness-in-itself, is conceived as that which opens artworks and texts to meanings not immanent to the work itself, its relationship to the ‘real world’, as it were. Ferneyhough grasps this implicitly: To compose an opera or incidental music, as I just did for the first and probably the last time, you have a certain responsibility, not to become more accessible — that’s not what I mean — but to make music more receptive to implications not intrinsic to music itself […] in the sense that they embody or reflect life.17 From his study of Baudelaire and his incomplete Arcades project, Benjamin understood that the images of modern life become inseparable from the commercial forces that drive commodity culture. His most famous essay, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility’, identifies the destruction of the ‘aura’ that surrounds unique artworks once they become reproducible for a mass market. However, far from considering this as being to art’s detriment, Benjamin recognizes that ‘sense perception changes along with humanity’s entire mode of existence.’18 Photography, for example, includes technique as part of its art, the photographic negative enabling multiple ‘originals’ to be produced.19 Reproduction (re-production) admits new forms of originality, new forms of aura, and becomes part of the work itself. Translation is a case in point for Benjamin: translation-byrote cannot capture the poetic element of a text; thus translation involves the re-production of meaning, and hence a peculiar form of originality in its own right.20 Ferneyhough also cites the importance of reproduction: ‘Wiedergabe. I think it’s very important to separate the two parts of this word, Wieder-Gabe [re-production]. […] To produce means both to create and to put on stage. In a sense, meaning, which I define as the revitalizing exegesis of things from the past, must be freshly staged. That’s what a piece of music is truly capable of achieving.’21 Benjamin’s concept of translation resonates with his understanding of allegory, since both necessitate the reading of what is not, literally, inscribed in the text. According to Craig Owens, ‘allegory becomes the model of all commentary, all critique, insofar as these are involved in rewriting a primary text in terms of its figural meaning […] the allegorist does not invent images but confiscates them. He lays claim to the culturally significant, poses as its interpreter.’22 The ‘pile-up’ of fragments in allegory leads Owens to argue that the ‘paradigm for the allegorical work is thus the palimpsest’;23 and elsewhere, that ‘in allegory, 275

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the image is a hieroglyph; an allegory is a rebus — writing composed of concrete images.’24 Ferneyhough ‘translates’ both the rebus and the palimpsest into musical forms in the opera (in Scene V, discussed below), and the constant evocation of images in the libretto speak to Ferneyhough’s and Bernstein’s fascination with the relationship between text, the visual, and Benjamin’s particular ways of seeing. At times it is impossible to hear or decipher textual content in Shadowtime, but this should not be mistaken for an unfortunate obscuration of the libretto by the music, a fault of text setting (besides which, the indecipherability of the text is hardly alien to the operatic genre). Ferneyhough and Bernstein both consider that the semantic qualities of words obtain beyond their intelligibility (in both senses) to a listener. Even where Ferneyhough layers Bernstein’s texts on top of each other (as in Amphibolies I–III, Scene III) and disrupts their poetic form, their semantic content acts as another layer in the overall sound, Ferneyhough’s music already being understood as multi-layered.25 Reading the libretto and hearing the music with all this in mind illuminates what the composer and librettist mean by ‘thought opera’: throughout, references to history, time, transience, language, aura, translation and reproduction form a constellation of ideas, from discussions about them in the libretto to musical interpretations in forms, gestures and recourse to the allegorical. Allegorical representation, and its relationship to historical time, is the principal ‘idea’ on which Shadowtime draws. Ferneyhough cites musical precedents as well, including Emilio de’ Cavalieri’s Rappresentazione di Anima e di Corpo (1600), in which the principal characters are abstract concepts or allegorical figures, such as ‘Vice’ or ‘Virtue’ (a recurring feature of early opera and oratorio).26 The history of opera, as such, is of little interest to him, except for its earliest exemplars. These latter — opera and oratorio, since there was little to distinguish them originally — arose in the same context (that is, the Medici court at Florence at the turn of the seventeenth-century), and by invoking opera’s genesis rather than its subsequent history, Ferneyhough speculates not on what opera is or is not, but on what might have been. Thus, to call Shadowtime an opera is valid only up to a point: it aligns itself neither with so-called anti-opera or anti-anti-opera, but has been called ‘ante-opera.’27 The tragic hero of Monteverdi’s Orfeo (1607) is particularly relevant: Orfeo descends into the underworld to attempt to retrieve his lost love Eurydice, persuading the ferryman Caronte to take him across the River Styx to Hades, where he negotiates Eurydice’s return (ultimately unsuccessfully: his error is to turn and look at her before they have left Hades, against Pluto’s instructions). Shadowtime envisages Benjamin’s descent into Hades after his own fateful experience at Portbou, and his subsequent interrogations by a succession of mostly historical figures, a border guard (surely Ferneyhough’s Caronte) and another guardian of the gates of Hell, the multi-headed Cerberus, discussed below. Where Monteverdi’s choir is treated in the manner of a Greek chorus, commenting on the action, Ferneyhough’s comments, in allegorical terms, on the nature of history and time. A ‘thought opera’ implies such an abstraction of ideas that it is arguably Monteverdi’s ‘model’ that allows Ferneyhough to ground the abstraction in a workable dramatic context. 276

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There are seven scenes, the opera being structured, in the broadest sense, according to prime numbers. All except Scenes I and V may be performed as freestanding concert pieces (echoing, albeit on a smaller scale, Stockhausen’s modular approach to scenes from Licht, and Ferneyhough’s own work-cycles, the Carceri d’Invenzione and the Time and Motion Studies). Scene 1:  New Angels/Transient Failures (Prologue) Scene 2:  Les Froissements des Ailes de Gabriel (First Barrier), guitar ‘concerto’ Scene 3:  The Doctrine of Similarity (13 Canons) Scene 4:  Opus Contra Naturam (Descent of Benjamin into the Underworld) Scene 5:  Pools of Darkness (11 Interrogations) Scene 6: Seven Tableaux Vivants Representing the Angel of History as Melancholia (Second Barrier) Scene 7:  Stelae for Failed Time (Solo for Melancholia as the Angel of History) Although the first scene is to an extent biographical, detailing Ferneyhough and Bernstein’s reconstruction of the final night of Benjamin’s life, the ‘sort of diaspora, an expansion of [Benjamin’s] mode of thought in different directions’ begins almost immediately as several layers overlap, each representing a different type of time.28 In the title New Angels/Transient Failures (Prologue) the opera’s other main protagonist, referred to above, is introduced: Benjamin’s Angel[s] of History, personified throughout by the chorus.29 There are four layers to this scene: ‘War Time’ at the Spanish border; a flashback to Benjamin’s earlier years with his wife Dora; children’s nursery rhymes, intended to honour Benjamin’s son Stefan; and a triple lecture entitled ‘Redemptive Time’. Only the dialogue in the ‘War Time’ layer directly relates the final encounter with an innkeeper/border authority upon Benjamin’s arrival at the Spanish frontier with his friend Henny Gurland. The innkeeper insistently repeats ‘Frau Gurland, Herr Benjamin’ between every phrase of her officious speech, delivering the news that the travellers’ transit visas are not valid;30 when Benjamin sings, his material (on the subject of time running out) is delivered in mostly staccato pulses often separated by rests, mimicking the ticking of a clock, the falling grains of sand in an hourglass timer, and Benjamin’s own heartbeat, which was habitually weak, at times irregular.31 Layers complement each other: the children’s rhyme in the chorus (from bar 255) consolidates the heartbeat figure immediately prior to the doctor’s explicit instruction that Benjamin must rest owing to his heart problem (and Gurland’s description of his efforts to walk in the Pyrenees). The counterpoint to this material is a conversation between the young Benjamin and his wife Dora whose subject is emotion and eros (accounting for this layer’s more lyrical sound), a dialogue — a love duet — perhaps implicitly recalling Poppea and Nero in Monteverdi’s L’Incoronazione di Poppea). Here it functions ironically, although differently from the love duet between Amanda and Amando in Ligeti’s Le Grand Macabre (the latter case better described as a parody). Full of hope for the future, Ferneyhough’s duet takes on an air of 277

Figure 9.1a:  Shadowtime, Scene I, bars 185–189, representation of the heartbeat in Benjamin’s vocal material.

Figure 9.1b:  Shadowtime, Scene I, bars 256–258. Choir, ‘heartbeat’ motif immediately prior to entry of the doctor (speaking role).

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Figure 9.1c:  The doctor speaks, with an ensemble in the background, implying the flutterings of the weak heart, Scene I, bars 262–266.

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tragedy when played out alongside the failure of time represented by Benjamin’s frustrations the night before his death. Formally, the first scene is divided into many short sections, each of which is generally contrasted with its neighbours in terms of instrumentation, density and rhythmic liveliness. Ferneyhough introduces the different sound-worlds of the subsequent scenes: the intimate, restricted resonance of the guitar (prefacing Scene II), and the children’s rhymes prefigure the slapstick and childlike humour of the Seven Tableaux (Scene VI). Following the operatic convention that the overture is written last of all, Ferneyhough summarizes the main musical ideas and prepares the listener for what is to come. However, another convention relating to the overture, that it contains no action, is turned on its head: though a prologue, Scene I is the only scene to contain ‘conventional’ dramatic action; it is Scene II that has none. The composer’s concern with musical time, itself a reflection of Benjamin’s own discourse on the subject, is manifest to greatest effect in the Scene I. As Benjamin laments that ‘the future seems certain to go on without us’ (bar 278ff.), the texture suddenly slows and thins, comprising attenuated sustained chords that are the more arresting for the vivacious rhyme that precedes it: ‘you’ll still fall down whoever you are’ (bars 283–286). The passage recalls the slowing down of the music in the moments before Lulu’s death-cry in Berg’s opera.32 Scene I evinces many examples of descending (sometimes microtonal) chromatic scales in both the instrumental and vocal lines, a recurrent feature of the opera as a whole. The material in the clarinet and saxophone (bars 125–127), and the inversion in violin I (bar 126), is indicative. Figure 9.2 is taken from Benjamin’s vocal material during his conversation — another layer — with Gershom Scholem and Hölderlin. The rhetorical figure katabasis, rendered musically as a slow chromatic descent, traditionally symbolized grief and death. Apart from this specific Baroque musical convention, the term also denotes a journey to the underworld (the descent into Hades). Katabasis is also Ferneyhough’s title for the central section of Opus Contra Naturam, Scene IV, when it might be inferred that Benjamin begins his own descent, although this is not represented dramatically. A third meaning of the word is relevant here, which indicates travel from the interior of a country to the coast: as Gurland recounts, Benjamin had laboured over the Pyrenees to Portbou, on the Spanish coast. Ferneyhough refers to Scene I as ‘effort music’ (Figure 9.3), suggesting that [Shadowtime] is based on the paradigm of ascent and descent, that is, on a covert pyramidal shape. Its first half grows increasingly difficult to perceive, increasingly problematical and static, increasingly abstract and impersonal. The piano piece takes us up to the very pinnacle. When we walk down the other side everything becomes more readily accessible. I didn’t simply want to set a dramatic plot consistently to music in one way or another, but to make the listener truly part of the wearisome ascent and descent of the mountaintop. He palpably experiences Benjamin walking over the mountain, over the Pyrenees to Spain.33 The Pyrenean trek is implicitly evoked again in the Amphibolies (Scene III: The Doctrine of Similarity). Like so many words or aphorisms in the libretto, ‘amphiboly/amphibole’ has 281

Figure 9.2:  Shadowtime, Scene I, conclusion (‘Triple Lecture’), bars 347–356. Benjamin (middle stave) descending chromatic figures.

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Figure 9.3:  Shadowtime, Ferneyhough’s sketch diagram for overall form. (Note the reference to ‘effort music’.)34

multiple meanings, already suggested by the Greek root amphibolos, meaning ‘ambiguous’. Ferneyhough deliberately accentuates the ambiguity by using the plural ‘Amphibolies’, so that his preferred spelling of the singular is unclear. An amphiboly is something that can be read two ways on account of its grammatical structure, as in the phrase ‘high school drop outs cut in half ’;35 as amphibole the term refers to mineral rock composition. The first poem — structured according to prime numbers — includes several words that suggest terrain and walking: paths, briar, shadows, thickest (thickets); the phrase ‘pricks are points on a map’ hints at pricks of the briar. The second and third verses follow suit: thump, mire, sticks, clover, tire, fallow and so on. Bernstein creates symmetry in his text: Amphibolies II ‘is a word-for-word mirror inversion’ of the first, and Amphibolies III reverses Amphibolies I line by line.36 Ferneyhough reproduces the symmetry in musical-formal terms. Amphibolies II is instrumental only, whereas the outer panels stay true to Bernstein’s form, setting the texts as mirrors of each other. In Amphibolies I, Ferneyhough creates metrical symmetry. The 32-bar piece is symmetrical about bars 16–17 and each set of 16 bars is itself internally symmetrical about the midpoint. In a number of bars, symmetry obtains on the local level in regular, repetitive tuplets within the bar unit (see bar 1, percussion), a technique already explored in Scene I. The Amphibolies account for only three of the thirteen ‘canons’ in the Doctrine of Similarity. The latter refers to Benjamin’s short essay ‘The Doctrine of the Similar’ (1933), one of two short essays to discuss mimesis in detail.37 Benjamin suggests that ‘nature produces similarities; one need only think of mimicry’, but that man’s capacity for producing similarities is greater.38 This accounts for the early mimetic behaviours of humankind, which exhibited a ‘powerful compulsion to become similar and behave mimetically.’39 This similarity is called ‘nonsensuous’ and refers to an original perception of magical similarity between man and the cosmos. According to Benjamin, ‘if, in the dawn of humanity, [humans’] reading from stars, entrails and coincidences represented reading per se […] then one might well assume that the mimetic faculty, which was earlier the basis for clairvoyance, quite gradually found 283

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its way into language and writing in the course of a development over thousands of years.’40 Now, he suggests We no longer possess in our perception what once made it possible to speak of a similarity which might exist between a constellation of stars and a human being. Nonetheless, we too possess a canon on the basis of which we can bring towards clarification the obscurity attached to a concept of non-sensuous similarity. And that canon is language.41 For Benjamin, mimesis is not the imitation of nature but a human faculty, the product of historical development (an illustration of Benjamin’s understanding, noted earlier, that sense perception changes along with humanity’s entire mode of existence). ‘Non-sensuous similarity’ now resides in language: Benjamin identifies the onomatopoeic element of sounding language as the trace of the sensuous, originary similarity between nature and the human being. For Bernstein’s part, texts become an exploration of sound similarities (a technique that he calls ‘homophonic sound translation’).42 Two lines from the Amphibolies, each the first of their respective verses, demonstrate onomatopoeic similarity, concentrating on the vowel sounds: Walk Slowly Fault no lease The poem Dew and Die is a concrete/sound poem, both a structural and homophonic translation of Ernst Jandl’s der und die.43 In the latter, ‘he’ and ‘she’ (masculine and feminine articles in German, normally attached to nouns) represent ‘a lovers’ rendezvous, reduced to its most basic elements of coming together in a non-specified setting.’44 Bernstein’s title is a play on multiple similarities: du und sie, ‘do and die’, ‘you and I’, ‘Jew and die’. Ferneyhough sets the text in two choirs, interrupting each other in hocket-like bursts, emphasizing sound similarities (see for example bar 5 ‘eye’ (Choir 1), ‘die’ (Choir 2)). Procedures that reference the Benjaminian leitmotifs of repetition, transformation and reproduction, occur in other songs, including ‘Dust to Dusk’ and its later variant, ‘Dusts to Dusks’. In the first, Ferneyhough divides his material into two-bar variational segments, usually composed of a bar of polyphonic activity followed by a rest bar, the percussion material seemingly filtered re-readings of the first bar patterns. Bernstein’s two poems are subtly different, yet Ferneyhough elects to set the first twice: instead, the second musical setting subtly recasts the first. In ‘Dusts to Dusks’, in which two clarinets and high voices are added to the ensemble, Ferneyhough breaks up the first bar percussion material of ‘Dust to Dusk’, placing one ‘sub-figure’ in each new bar. Percussion material that was stated in the first bar of ‘Dust to Dusk’ is therefore redistributed across four bars in the second piece, and this technique is visited on each bar of ‘Dust to Dusk’ material. As a consequence, ‘Dusts to Dusks’ is a longer piece than its antecedent. Whereas the percussion and voices’ activity is synchronized in the first piece, they (and the clarinets) become decoupled in the second, 284

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to the extent that ‘Dusts to Dusks’ is highly sectionalized, sometimes for unaccompanied voices, sometimes for instruments only, and at other times for the full complement. The term ‘canon’ has musical resonances stretching back hundreds of years, but it would be a mistake to assume that it refers exclusively to the musical process in the context of The Doctrine of Similarity (in fact only a few pieces seem obviously to employ it, including ‘Sometimes’). Ferneyhough hints at this, but obfuscates as much as he reveals: A ‘canon’ […] can be taken in a great many ways. You can start all the canonic voices simultaneously and have them stop at different times. But you can also set up twisted mirror symmetries […] All imaginable practices can be subsumed under the term. When I use the word ‘canon’ I certainly do not mean only the canonic forms you find in musical textbooks. My concern is the before and after, which are very close together in time and thus interact. Another composer would probably call it something different.45 Apart from Benjamin’s description of language as a canon, the term ‘canon’ also refers to the ‘grand narrative’ of musical history, something that Ferneyhough addresses in the survey of historical forms that constitutes Scene V, Pools of Darkness. The term also denotes ‘non-fugal’ canon,46 the rubrics typical of medieval and Renaissance compositions, which instructed performers to read notation in a particular way, thereby modifying the sounding result. In an oblique fashion, Ferneyhough applies the principles of ‘non-fugal’ canon in ‘Motetus Absconditus’, a parody of a medieval motet, which takes as its model an anonymous threevoice English tenor motet from the Montpellier Codex (late thirteenth-century). The motet tenor statement is 16 bars long; Ferneyhough states and transforms it twice in his 32-bar piece, first ‘reading’ it in the percussion part, and secondly, in the piano part, the lower two lines based on the equivalent lines in the motet model, although Ferneyhough transposes the lower up a semitone per bar and the middle voice down a semitone per bar.47 Parody technique in medieval repertory refers to a specific case of musical borrowing. Borrowing was typical of the entire medieval and Renaissance periods insofar as new compositions (when not built on existing plainchant material) were based on a borrowed tenor from an existing polyphonic piece. Parody refers to the borrowing of more than one voice from a pre-existing polyphonic piece. In addition to the use of the tenor, the motet’s highest voice is represented in Ferneyhough’s soprano. The ‘non-fugal’ canon arguably obtains in the piano: although Ferneyhough notates the piano part in full, his stepwise transposition of the model suggests the presence of an unwritten canon or rule governing his treatment of material, not very different from the widespread filter and sieve procedures deployed across his oeuvre. ‘Schein’, the tenth canon, takes its name from a notoriously difficult-to-translate concept of particular importance to Benjamin.48 Bernstein creates multiple overlappings between sound and sense similarities (Schein/shine/time/rime/mine/crime and space/lace): There’s no crime like the shine in the space between 285

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shine and shame. No shine like the mine between meaning and history. No space like the rime between shine and face. No rime like the lace between time and memory. Embedded within the poem is a reference to Benjamin’s interest in the ‘spaces’ between different words, which are never empty, but accommodate the overlapping mentioned above. Apart from the sound rhyme between ‘Schein’ and ‘shine’, one meaning (amongst others) of the word ‘Schein’ is ‘sham’, perhaps implied in Bernstein’s use of ‘shame’ in the poem. ‘Schein’ and ‘sham’ are different words in different languages, yet according to Benjamin’s theory of similarities, since they both point to a shared meaning, they are nonsensuously similar.49 They intermingle despite their differences, in the space between them. Ferneyhough’s initiation of prolational canon at the beginning of ‘Schein’ and at several other junctures in the movement might be interpreted in light of this ‘overlapping’ (fundamental to canonic technique of course), exploring the space ‘between’ three independent voices insofar as each points to a shared pitch content, but articulates it differently in terms of rhythm. Sometimes Ferneyhough varies a basic statement found in one voice in the other two (as in bar 4). The work also uses truncated repetition, emulating assonance in the text (see soprano 1, bars 7–8: ‘no shine the mine’), and is built from stepwise figures (including some more inverted katabasis as in soprano 3, bars 8–10). Throughout, the microtonal saturation of restricted pitch-space, as between the FJ and AJ in soprano 1, bar 1 effects the ‘shine in the space between shine and shame’, whilst the more registrally expansive gestures seem to reflect ‘the mine between meaning and history’ (bars 7–10), in which context ‘mine’ infers an explosive device that creates a chasm, or a large mine/labyrinthine structure. Implicit in Bernstein’s text (and his reading of Benjamin) is an acknowledgement that the distance between ‘shine and shame’ is small whilst that between meaning and history is greater (despite constructions, such as that of Modernism, that represent them as mutually dependent). Bernstein’s text recalls Benjamin’s interest in the meaningfulness of seemingly small and inconsequential events (as manifest in his Trauerspiel study) rather than the major events that contribute to the construction of Historical narrative. Scene IV, Opus Contra Naturam, like the Etudes transcendantales in the Carceri cycle, occupies an important central position. Ferneyhough had also used the piano before in a vocal work as a purveyor of drama, notably at the beginning of On Stellar Magnitudes. Robin Freeman characterizes the introductory piano material in that piece in the following terms: ‘(oh madrigalism of madrigalisms albeit ‘Song without Words’) a field of stars.’50 Besides the alchemical inferences of the title Opus Contra Naturam,51 the piece is subtitled ‘a shadow play for speaking pianist’. Ferneyhough’s own text for the first section invokes Plato’s Allegory of the Cave in which prisoners cannot see real objects, but only the shadows they make on the cave wall. A film — another parallel with Lulu — including footage of Las Vegas and fin-de-siècle Berlin cabaret, is projected silently whilst the pianist ‘begins to talk to the piano, 286

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bored out of his mind, the ordering superego confronts the lewd and rebellious unconscious lurking in the piano.’52 The work is a triptych, its outer panels accompanied by distorted plainchant quotations. The central, most substantial panel, Katabasis, draws on fragments of Romantic pianistic material, itself a ‘shadowplay’ projecting Romantic simulacra for the listener. Frequent tempo changes nuance this material, which contains many functional triads that cannot be heard in context (again: a shadowplay). The work introduces a note (or many notes) of dark humour, which characterizes the opera’s remaining scenes. The pianist, a Liberace-like club musician atop a Las Vegas hell-portal, provides a sharp contrast to the Angels of the previous scene; nevertheless, the third panel reproduces the piano part of Amphibolies III exactly, with added interventions of contrasted material. The first half of the opera is bathed in light. References to light abound in the libretto, as in phrases such as ‘the trees are shot with light’, and other components of The Doctrine of Similarity including ‘Even Fire is Light’ and ‘Schein’. Following Benjamin’s descent, however, darkness prevails, both in Pools of Darkness (Scene V) and Seven Tableaux Vivants Representing the Angel of History as Melancholia (Scene VI). In Act I of Wozzeck — a work much admired by Benjamin — Berg surveys historical forms. In another reference to the Viennese composer, Scene V of Shadowtime subjects Benjamin’s avatar to eleven interrogations by historical figures (Oedipus and the Sphinx?), each interrogation drawing on a past musical form (and some on allegorical forms important to Benjamin himself). Some are reasonably self-explanatory, as in the first interrogation, in which prolational canon begins in the voices at bar 9, or the second, an isorhythmic motet in which the periods in the wind and brass are clearly discernible. Others, such as Joan of Arc’s ‘Palimpsestic Chorale’ are more complex or subverted, the ‘evidence’ of palimpsestic technique left in traces such as the added metres in each bar suggesting the compaction of several ‘texts’ into one: Ferneyhough acknowledges the use of ‘a “metal compactor” version of some [Christopher] Tye material in the instrumental parts.’53 In the third part of Scene V, ‘Kerberos’, the multi-headed Kerberos that guards the gates of hell — the heads being those of the incongruously homonymic Karl, Harpo and Groucho Marx — interrogates Benjamin’s avatar. Ferneyhough designates the ‘form’ in this case as ‘Hoquetus-Melodrama’, a curious mixture of a very old technique (hocket as in bars 90 and 94) and gestures typical of Schoenberg’s expressionistic style. The piece is in part an homage to Schoenberg’s Sprechgesang technique, which is implicit in the performance of prevalent glissandi in Benjamin’s vocal material. According to Ferneyhough, Sprechgesang ‘expounds the purlieus of the instruments’ gestural universe’,54 which in effect describes his own piece: the rhythmicization of the voices (as in Karl Marx’s first question, ‘is it possible to forget without remembering that one has forgotten?’) cuts against typical speech patterns, Ferneyhough lengthening syllables unexpectedly, and punctuating with rests. This ‘linguistically charged gestural world of the singer’ affects the melodramatic, mannered glissandi in the strings, Benjamin’s answers, and later, the array of texture-types in all instruments.55 Scene VI is characterized by slapstick humour reinforced by hocketing. The libretto includes elements of farce (‘[t]he bear sees the canteloup only at the filling station’; or 287

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‘Madame Moiselle and Mister Moiselle went for a walk with their gazelle’: see bars 105–107 and 152–157). Nevertheless, the scene is entitled Seven Tableaux Vivants Representing the Angel of History as Melancholia, invoking the figure in Albrecht Dürer’s 1514 engraving Melencolia, which depicts a dejected angel. Melancholy in the Benjaminian context does not equate, as it has historically, to illness or depression that can be treated or overcome, but to a relationship to the world, a mood that seeks meaning in the obsolete, the ruins of an age. Benjamin’s Angel of History is itself already melancholic in this sense (‘the angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed’), but its melancholy is further reinforced by the association with Dürer’s image as allegory in Scene VI.56 Like the Angel of History, Dürer’s angel ‘piles up wreckage’ at its feet: scattered around the angel’s feet are disused ‘instruments of scientific enquiry.’57 In Benjamin’s view, Dürer’s engraving anticipates the Baroque transition from the mystical or cosmic to the historical, insofar as the disused scientific instruments are ‘objects for contemplation. They are stripped of practical utility and become allegories of melancholy so that they have to be encoded now and read.’58 Musical elements of humour, in the form of clichés removed from their original contexts into the opera, represent ‘wreckage’ of previous eras, and are therefore melancholic, in Benjamin’s sense of the term. Examples include an apparently ethereal arrival on a tonal chord (bar 195) ‘spelt’ in microtones, and a descending brass riff ‘straight out of a lowbrow comedy soundtrack’ in the final tableau (bars 198–201), incidentally an ironic take on the recurring katabasis figure heard throughout Shadowtime.59 The riff is heard within the context of an increasingly chaotic yet playful ‘piling up’ of fragments in the concluding section of the scene (after the speaker falls silent), recalling the fragmented form of Scene II. Their respective positions in the context of the seven scene opera, as well as their allegorical summoning of two different representations of Benjamin’s ‘Angel of History’ cast scenes II and VI in a symmetrical relationship. The angel in Scene II — Les Froissements des Ailes de Gabriel — is the angel of the Annunciation, the subject of a discussion between Scholem and Benjamin at the conclusion of Scene I (Benjamin laments the promise of a Messiah who does not come, the truth that all art senses but cannot name).60 The angel is not represented by a singer in Scene II, but by a guitar soloist in a quasi-concerto, ‘quasi’ because the solo is rarely prominent amongst the ensemble: when the guitar is a strident presence, it is only briefly so, because the piece comprises over 100 tiny fragments of material, the instrumentation and distinctive texture-types changing with each new fragment.61 Furthermore, a second guitar in the ensemble is tuned a quartertone lower than the solo instrument, and often engages it in duet-dialogues or reinforces its figurations. Ferneyhough’s treatment of the ‘concerto’ form, in his ‘quasi opera’ renders both Scene II (and Shadowtime as a whole) simulacra, in keeping with Benjamin’s theories of reproducibility. Ferneyhough dovetails the final bars of Scene I and the beginning of Scene II, as he does the correspondingly placed movements of the Carceri cycle (Superscriptio and Carceri d’Invenzione I). The gesture is the first hint that the angel invoked in Scene II ‘perform[s] a sort of allegorical “extinction of time” analogous to the “deafness to time” sometimes attributed to angels (who are alleged to act within time but oblivious to it).’62 The allegory of the beating 288

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wings in the relationship between the guitars is unmissable, as the angel presents a riddle to the listener, the fragments hurtling by too fast to be properly registered as objects in a discourse and thus assimilated into ‘human’ time. Benjamin’s preferred form of expression was the aphorism, and Ferneyhough interprets this in musical form: just as the aphorism compacts meaning into a pithy linguistic ‘space’, so do each of Ferneyhough’s fragments, with no obvious correlation between one and the next. Occasionally, figures do seem designed to evoke a sense of progression (the rising gestures in the solo guitar, sometime corroborated by the ensemble guitar, between fragments 6 and 13), but if the listener is briefly preoccupied with this, the suddenness of some of the new fragments is all the more marked: fragment 35 is dark, the instruments deliberately in their lowest ranges, and 36 texturally sparse, with only one instrument of each ‘family’ (wind, brass, plucked/struck and bowed) in evidence. Fragment 37, at ffff, and broadly an instrument-complement of 36, creates an unexpected ‘presence’, following two quiet, reduced-texture and low-register fragments. Small touches, like the fact that the guitar solo at 38 is also ffff, yet cannot hope to be as loud as the same indication provokes at 37, exploit the subtleties made possible by the choice of solo instrument in this setting. It is useful to think of the piece as a meditation on other works: fragments 62 and 63 draw the listener into the intimate world of Ferneyhough’s Kurze Schatten II (this is the centrepiece of the work, given the total number of fragments is 124), whereas other fragments harness the Varèse-like timbre of Octandre and Ferneyhough’s own Terrain (both of whose instrumentation is present here, with the exceptions of bassoon and double bass, substituted by contrabass clarinet and ’cello, respectively). These simulacra of Ferneyhough’s own works, as well as acknowledged influences (Terrain is, in a sense, already a simulacrum in relation to Octandre) suggest that in Shadowtime Ferneyhough engages in autobiographical ‘re-production’, especially in light of his reflections quoted at length at the conclusion of Chapter 1. As a recent interview with Thomas Meyer makes clear, he is re-presenting himself as a musician, and it is argued elsewhere that the opera marks the beginning of the latest compositional and aesthetic period of Ferneyhough’s output.63 Ferneyhough has often remarked on his own interest in ‘boundary states’,64 and the fragment form is no different: in earlier works, the bar line functions as a boundary, leading Ferneyhough to pay particular attention to events that occur within the bar unit, and to attach significance to material that spills over the boundary. In Les Froissements he initiates a series of recent works in which the material particular to each fragment is treated in similar fashion: instrumental lines cannot always be contained between the double bar-lines framing each fragment, and typically this results in notes tied over, and often in parts other than the guitar(s).65 However, towards the end of the piece, ambiguity enters by way of guitar gestures that clearly occupy space in two fragments (see fragments 87–88, 94–95, 105–6 and 123–4). Other instruments’ propensities towards a similar extension beyond their ‘frames’ builds as the piece nears its conclusion in a kind of fragment stretto (see for example horn, fragments 116–117; trumpet 119–120; contrabass clarinet 103–104). The often extreme contrast between neighbouring fragments in the concerto is somewhat less marked in a related work for two guitars tuned a quartertone apart, No Time (at all) (2004). Its title hints again 289

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at the allegory of the angel’s extinction of time, albeit that this is a freestanding work not included in the opera itself (and thus yet another simulacrum, especially considering that Les Froissements itself can be performed as a freestanding ‘concerto’). In effect, the work is part of the opera, since it shares in its allegorical aesthetic (rather as Carceri IIb is part of the Carceri cycle, as a re-presentation of material from Carceri IIa). No Time (at all) is predominantly composed of the two guitars’ material from the concerto, but reordered. The positioning of the fragments relative to one another in No Time makes greater sense than in Les Froissements, insofar as more fragments of similar ‘type’ (for example the ascending directional gestures in the first movement) are grouped together in the duet. Ferneyhough has clearly attempted to create an arch form across all movements, and thus some more obvious degree of continuity, fragment-to-fragment, relative to the concerto (the central glissando-dominated movement contains the most ‘new’ material in No Time). The second and fourth movements are the same as one another and take their material from the unaccompanied guitar duet fragments in the concerto. However, in the fourth movement, the differently tuned guitars exchange parts (relative to the second movement), so that the sound of the ‘same’ is in fact rather different (a re-presentation, or Ferneyhough’s take on Benjaminian ‘translation’). The first and fifth movements prioritize ascending and descending gestures, respectively. In Les Froissements, the gestures and texture-types grouped together in No Time are scattered throughout the piece, maximizing contrast wherever possible. The procedure (or this reading of it, which assumes that No Time represents an earlier or even original state of the guitars’ material relative to Les Froissements) recalls Ferneyhough’s treatment of other works in his past, including the Sonatas for String Quartet, Bone Alphabet and the second movement in the Fourth String Quartet, in which an original formal continuity is compromised by the cutting up and rearranging of the resultant fragments. Once again it is tempting to speculate that in Les Froissements, Ferneyhough re-presents techniques used earlier in his career in a kind of compositional autobiography. Although fragments that are similar to one another (in terms of shared texture-types, for example) are littered throughout Les Froissements, they are often distant from one another in time, so that hearing a similar shape later in the piece causes a memory to ‘flash up’ in the instant, before it is gone as the material moves on.66 In drawing them next to one another and having their directionality map onto the formal ‘arc’ idea, Ferneyhough carries across the paradigm of ascent and descent elaborated over a much-extended time-span in the opera. The final scene, for 12 voices and computer-generated sound, is described as an epilogue, ‘an elegiac solo by the Angel of History (imagined as the angel in Dürer’s Melencolia)’:67 the solo is Ferneyhough’s own sampled voice reciting text in a language of his own invention, which is most prominent at the very end, the ultimate ‘nonsensuous similarity’, or the ruin of history. The text is a translation of Bernstein’s five nursery rhymes from Scene I. The five Stelae for Failed Time are each 30 bars long, each a variation of the metrical scheme of the first (which is symmetrical). They are, however, characteristically rather different, following a trajectory away from pitched vocal sounds towards breathy vocal articulations that recall parts of Time and Motion Study III. The presence of electronic sounds gives an impression of enclosure in 290

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an echo chamber and, consequently, the solo nature of each voice becomes all-important: individual lines come to prominence and recede again into the enveloping texture. At the end of the first stela, textural contrast between unpitched sounds and ‘conventional’ singing, the latter phrases generally ending in long notes, ensures that the last two bars (‘backwards in time’) feel very slow in comparison to preceding material. This principle transfers into the second section, in which Ferneyhough introduces long glissandi and staggered-entry sustained notes (‘whispers’, bars 15–19). Single interventional bars in unison rhythm ensure that in the intervening passages the quaver and crotchet (the latter rarely seen in Ferneyhough’s output) bring time to a standstill: it tends ‘towards experiential congealment or selfcommemoration.’68 Instead of creating durational tension in the fourth stela, the composer consolidates microtonal ‘chromaticism’, saturating the piece with tightly constructed ‘knots’ for each singer. Initially, the three singers in each voice-type are folded over one another in terms of range, but space opens up as the piece progresses, the voices decouple and time seems to speed up as grace-notes take over the texture and transform into brief, percussive unisons. The final section is a brief ‘pile-up’ of fragments that runs counter to the prevailing tendency towards unpitched vocal sounds at its conclusion, reverting to fortissimo sung tones, some accented and detached, others a lyrical legato. Perhaps this is the effect Ferneyhough refers to in a characteristically elliptical prefatory note: ‘[t]ime, in musical terms, is most fully, successfully and subversively itself when it ruptures the unspoken compact of solidarity with musical materials in order to offer itself up as a sudden presence of “ironic energy”.’69 The concluding choral phrase ‘now time is stone’ can be read in various ways, invoking Benjamin’s concept of Jetztzeit [now time], discussed in Chapter 11 on aesthetics.70 Dürer’s Melencolia figure sits near a stone that Benjamin considers in Tragic Drama, noting that There is one symbol that seems to have been passed over in the rediscovery of the older symbols of melancholy embodied in this engraving […] This is the stone […] It may be that all that is to be seen in the emblem of the stone are the most obvious features of the cold, dry earth. But it is quite conceivable…[and] by no means improbable, that in this inert mass there is a reference to the genuinely theological conception of the melancholic, which is to be found in one of the seven deadly sins. This is acedia, dullness of the heart, or sloth.71 Ironically, Benjamin’s association with flânerie, his lack of defined occupation — he has been variously called an essayist, philosopher and so on — has resulted in the inference that he himself ‘suffered’ from acedia. Françoise Meltzer suggests provocatively that ‘what emerges from the language of [Hannah] Arendt and Adorno is that Benjamin’s project was as much nonwork and nonutilitarian as was his life.’72 However, Meltzer also notes Benjamin’s own acknowledged debt to Baudelaire and Proust for example, is motivated not only by the fact that they were both famous dandies but also by Baudelaire’s overwhelming sense of ennui (or spleen) and descriptions of its debilitating effects, and Proust’s outright withdrawal 291

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into a hermetic immobilization with a concomitant scrutiny of memory as a means, not so much of recapturing, but of expressing what is lost.73 Meltzer remarks that both Arendt and Adorno seem shocked by Benjamin’s posthumous prominence.74 The despair and failure that Benjamin experienced at the Spanish border and throughout his life (witness his failure to gain his Habilitation, and with it a tenured university position) invites speculation as to the ambivalence at the end of Ferneyhough’s opera: is Benjamin’s suicide the endpoint of his acedia, or the consequence of failed time? The Stelae — gravestones, ‘five dense, violent, self-contained pillars’—for ‘failed time’ are Benjamin’s own, but the term also suggests the demarcation of boundaries, as Ferneyhough’s prefatory note points out.75 The opera concludes where it began, in effect: at a border, for the end of history.

Notes   1 Walter Benjamin quoted in Rolf J. Goebel, A Companion to the Works of Walter Benjamin (New York: Camden House, 2009), 58.   2 Benjamin procured the Klee print and it hung for some time in Gershom Scholem’s Munich apartment. The latter composed a poem to it, to which Benjamin often referred. See Walter Benjamin, The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, 1910–1940, ed. Gershom Scholem and Theodor Adorno, trans. Manfred R. Jacobson and Evelyn M. Jacobson (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1994), 184. The Angel(s) are not ‘characters’, but are often represented abstractly. They are referred to in the title of the prologue/Scene I; Scene II is an allegory for the Archangel Gabriel; in Scenes III, VI and VII, the chorus stands for the Angel of History.   3 The correspondence between Benjamin and Adorno reveals that although the latter discussed his writings, Benjamin did not generally respond with appreciable enthusiasm. Only in the case of Alban Berg’s untimely death did he acknowledge to Adorno that ‘I felt for you yesterday on learning of the death of Alban Berg. You know that whenever we talked about music, a field otherwise fairly remote from my own, it was really only when his work was under discussion that we reached the same level of intensity as we usually do in our discussion of other subjects.’ (Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, The Complete Correspondence: 1928–1940, ed. Henri Lonitz, trans. Nicholas Walker (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 119.)   4 In addition to its association with Ferneyhough’s opera, Bernstein’s libretto is published separately, also under the title Shadowtime. See Bernstein, Shadowtime (Los Angeles, CA: Green Integer, 2005).   5 The phrase ‘thought opera’ is found in Ferneyhough, “Synopsis,” Shadowtime, NMC D123, 2006, compact disc. The quotation on representation is from Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: Verso, 2003), 27. Ferneyhough’s opera is not the only one to draw on Benjamin’s ideas. For example, the libretto of Nono’s Promoteo (1981/1985) contains some of Benjamin’s writing and, like Shadowtime, may be 292

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characterized as an ‘opera of ideas’ to the extent that it does not present a plot or narrative of the myth of Prometheus. Its librettist Massimo Cacciari draws on a wide corpus of texts and fragments, not all of which Nono sets to music. In some cases the text is not to be read, but is to be heard through the musical formulations (Nono’s subtitle for the work is ‘Tragedia dell’ascolto’ [Tragedy of hearing/listening]). Undoubtedly influenced by Nono’s Promoteo, Helmut Lachenmann’s ‘opera’ Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern [The Little Match Girl, 1990–1997] also subverts operatic conventions, taking as its main source Hans Christian Andersen’s eponymous tale. Lachenmann’s work does not identify characters, only voice types (sopranos, a speaker, and a chorus). Lachenmann also uses a range of texts by Leonardo da Vinci and the founder of the German left-wing militant group Rote Armee Fraktion, Gudrun Ensslin (among others), resulting in another ‘opera of ideas’. These texts are interlaced with elements of narrative and various historical and musical references. The work is subtitled “Musik mit Bildern” [Music with Images], subverting declamatory vocal style and drama. John Warnaby suggests that the work should provoke an ‘existential experience’ in its audience, placing the audience in such a position as to empathize with the suffering of the match girl (in an interesting parallel with Ferneyhough’s assertion that his own listener palpably experiences Benjamin’s efforts to climb up a mountain to the Spanish border, discussed later in this chapter). See John Warnaby, “Lachenmann’s ‘Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern’,” Tempo, New Series 201 (July 1997): 37. See also Arnold Whittall, “Lachenmann: Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern by Staatsoper Stuttgart; Luther Zagrosek; Helmut Lachenmann (Review),” Tempo New Series 222 (October 2002): 35–36. Lutz Koepnick, “Allegory and Power: Walter Benjamin and the Politics of Representation,” Soundings 79, 1/2 (Spring/Summer 1996): 68. Jeremy Tambling, Allegory (Oxford: Routledge, 2010), 117. Ibid., 116. Benjamin, German Tragic Drama, trans. Osborne, 178. Benjamin quoted in Tambling, Allegory, 116. Beatrice Hanssen and Andrew Benjamin, eds., Walter Benjamin and Romanticism, (London: Continuum, 2002), 108. Walter Benjamin quoted in Hanssen and Benjamin, eds., Walter Benjamin and Romanticism, 108. Benjamin envisaged for his Tragic Drama the ideal of a book ‘that would eliminate all commentary and consist in nothing but quotations: “Method of this project: literary montage. I have nothing to say. I have only to show”.’ Françoise Meltzer, “Acedia and Melancholia”, in Walter Benjamin and the Demands of History, ed. Michael P. Steinberg (New York, NJ: Cornell University Press, 1996), 162. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zorn (London: Pimlico, 1999), 249. Rita Copeland and Peter T. Struck, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Allegory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 10. Craig Owens, Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power and Culture (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1992), 52. Meyer, “Ein Gespräch mit Brian Ferneyhough,” 57. 293

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18 John Lechte, Fifty Key Contemporary Thinkers: From Structuralism to Postmodernity (London: Routledge, 1994), 204. 19 Ibid. 20 Benjamin writes that ‘[t]ranslation is so far removed from being the sterile equation of two dead languages that of all literary forms it is the one charged with the special mission of watching over the maturing process of the original language and the birth pangs of its own.’ In the same essay, he adds that ‘[a] real translation is transparent; it does not cover the original, does not block its light, but allows the pure language, as though reinforced by its own medium, to shine upon the original all the more fully.’ Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” in Illuminations, trans. Zorn, 74 and 79. 21 Meyer, “Ein Gespräch mit Brian Ferneyhough,” 58. Ferneyhough’s choice of the word Wiedergabe here is, in itself, a demonstration of the issues inherent in translation that Benjamin identifies. Whilst one translation of the word Wiedergabe is ‘reproduction’ (as well as ‘account’ and ‘report’), the sense that Ferneyhough intends to convey — to re-stage or re-show — is better captured in the German word Wiederaufführen, which can also mean ‘re-run’ or ‘re-enact [a historical event]’. In suggesting that meaning must be freshly staged, Ferneyhough casts his entire opera as a re-production of Benjaminian thought, contributing to his explanation of the work as a ‘thought opera’ or ‘opera of ideas’. My thanks to Martin Iddon for pointing out the nuances in the German and suggesting the term Wiederaufführen in this context. 22 Owens, Beyond Recognition, 54. 23 Ibid. Owens also discusses Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, ‘itself a graphic document inscribed on the surface of the Great Salt Lake. […] [t]he Jetty is not a discrete work, but one link in a chain of signifiers which summon and refer to each other in a dizzying spiral. For where else does the Jetty exist except in the film which Smithson made, the narrative he published, the photographs which accompany that narrative, and the various maps, diagrams, drawings, etc., he made about it? Unintelligible at close range, the spiral form of the Jetty is completely intuitable only from a distance, and that distance is most often achieved by imposing a text between viewer and work’ (47). Smithson’s Earthworks are important images underlying the ideas in Ferneyhough’s Terrain (1992). 24 Ibid., 57. Another of Ferneyhough’s works heavily involved with Benjaminian thought is Lemma-Icon-Epigram, the score prefaced with Baudelaire’s remark, ‘tout est hieroglyphique’. 25 Bernstein refers to Benjamin’s fragments ‘not as discontinuous, but as overlays, pleats, folds: a chordal poetics in which synchronic notes meld into diachronic tones.’ This is found in the Arcades Project as well as Benjamin’s early essays, and he adds, when asked if Ferneyhough’s layering of his own texts surprised him, that ‘I was not disappointed. For one thing, and I find this one of the most remarkable aspects of the vocal setting in Shadowtime, Brian has sometimes overlaid the text: different parts of the libretto are sung simultaneously. So the verbal matter becomes part of the acoustic layering of the sound composition. Eventually, if you know the words, it might be possible to hear the distinct verbal strands, but in composite one hears not the singular threads but their composite: so here is an example of what I mentioned before, a “chordal poetics”.’ See Charles Bernstein, “Charles Bernstein, Interview,”

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with Eric Denut, The Argotist Online, http://www.argotistonline.co.uk/Bernstein%20 interview.htm (accessed January 21, 2013). Fabrice Fitch, Liner Notes, Shadowtime, 7–8. Ibid, 8. Meyer, “Ein Gespräch mit Brian Ferneyhough,” 57–58. The use of the term ‘prologue’ likely reflects the opera’s association on the level of form with early operas and oratorios. The innkeeper alternates the phrases ‘Frau Gurland, Herr Benjamin’ and ‘Herr Benjamin, Frau Gurland’. See bars 161ff (Walter Benjamin). The Innkeeper also mimics a ticking clock from bar 219 onwards, and especially from bar 234. See Ferneyhough, Shadowtime (London: Peters Edition No. 7732, 2004). Berg’s work is referenced elsewhere in Shadowtime, too. Knowing that Benjamin was partial to Berg’s music adds an extra dimension to Ferneyhough’s implicit references. Ferneyhough’s ‘composer’s note’ prefatory to the score of Opus Contra Naturam (Scene IV) indicates that a silent film projection accompanies the pianist’s performance, redolent of the silent film at the midpoint (the equivalent formal juncture to Opus Contra Naturam in Shadowtime) in Lulu. Meyer, “Ein Gespräch mit Brian Ferneyhough,” 60. Ferneyhough, Programme Notes, “Diagramme de Shadowtime,” Shadowtime: Brian Ferneyhough, Charles Bernstein, Festival D’Automne à Paris, Théâtre Nanterre-Amandiers October 26 and 27, 2004, 5. Marjorie Perloff, Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 91. See discussion, Perloff, Unoriginal Genius, 93. The other is “On the Mimetic Faculty,” in Benjamin, Selected Writings, Vol 2, Part 2, ed. Michael W. Jennings et. al., (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 720–722. Ibid., 720. Ibid. Walter Benjamin, “Doctrine of the Similar (1933),” trans. Knut Tarnowski, New German Critique 17, Special Walter Benjamin Issue (Spring 1979): 68. Ibid., 66–67. One implication of Ferneyhough and Bernstein’s reference to ‘Thirteen Canons’ becomes clearer in this context. Perloff, Unoriginal Genius, 92. Ibid., 94. Ibid., 95. Meyer, “Ein Gespräch mit Brian Ferneyhough,” 56. Virginia Newes, ‘Mensural Virtuosity in Non-Fugal Canons’, in Canons and Canonic Technique, 14th–16th Centuries: Theory, Practice, and Reception History, ed. Katelijne Schiltz and Bonnie J. Blackburn (Leuven: Peeters, 2007), 19–46. Motetus absconditus is discussed in more detail in F. Fitch, “Prima Prattica”. Schein is a particularly difficult German word to translate into English, and has posed problems for English-language scholarship in philosophy in studies of Hegel, Kant, Nietzsche and others.

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Often translated as ‘semblance’, it is a key concept in Benjamin’s writing, to which he dedicated an essay fragment ‘On Semblance’ (1919–1920). The word means, variously, appearance as in simulacrum or facsimile, but also shining, or showing forth, ‘the truth behind the beautiful appearance. “Everything beautiful in art can be ascribed to the realm of beautiful semblance [Schein]”.’ (Benjamin cited in Perloff, Unoriginal Genius, 95). Benjamin plays on the term’s implications, and Bernstein takes this further, drawing on assonance in English as well as the ambiguity of Schein in the German: ‘There’s no crime like the/shine in the space between/shine and shame/No shine like mine between meaning and history.’ (Perloff, 95). According to Benjamin, ‘if words meaning the same thing in different languages are arranged about that signified at their centre, we have to inquire how they all — while often possessing not the slightest similarity to one another — are similar to the signified at their center.’ Benjamin, Selected Writings, Vol. 2, Part 2, trans. Michael W. Jennings, 696. Freeman, “Retuning the Skies,” 35. In Renaissance alchemy, the term suggests transformation or transmutation of an object ‘against nature’. Alchemy changed natural substances such as quicksilver or antimony into fantasies, recognizing the fantasy aspect of all natural substances. See Arleen B. Dallery et al., eds. Crises in Continental Philosophy (New York: SUNY Press, 1990), 179. Meyer, “Ein Gespräch mit Brian Ferneyhough,” 58. Lois Fitch and John Hails, “Failed Time, Successful Time, Shadowtime: An Interview with Brian Ferneyhough,” Contemporary Music: Theoretical and Philosophical Perspectives, ed. Max Paddison and Irène Deliège (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 325. Meyer, “Ein Gespräch mit Brian Ferneyhough,” 55. Ibid. Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Zorn, 249. Charles Bernstein, Liner Notes, “Synopsis,” Shadowtime, 15. Goebel, A Companion, 58. Fabrice Fitch, Liner Notes, Shadowtime, 10. Benjamin sings ‘I am the prosecutor who will put divinity on trial for breach of contract for God promised a Messiah but no Messiah comes’, to which Scholem replies ‘Comes to whom? Who can say how the Messiah’s presence emanates of How it is hidden?’ Benjamin continues ‘I speak of the Messiah whom the poet senses without naming, the painter feels without seeing, the composer hears without noting, the philosopher supposes without knowing.’ (See bars 327–338, Scene I.) From a stylistic standpoint, Les Froissements is perhaps the most far-reaching of the opera’s modular components, being the first instance of the fragment-form that underlies the most extended and substantial works in the years following Shadowtime’s completion. Richard Toop, Liner Notes, “Concerto, que me veux-tu?” Brian Ferneyhough: Terrain et al., Elision Ensemble, Kairos 0013072KAI, 2010, CD,13. See Meyer, “Ein Gespräch mit Brian Ferneyhough” (2007) drawn on earlier this chapter and in previous chapters of this book. Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 77. Recent fragment works include Finis Terrae, Plötzlichkeit and others discussed in Chapters 5 and 10 of this book. 296

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66 Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Illuminations, trans. Zorn, 247. This momentary conscious recognition of similarity also recalls Benjamin’s essay ‘Doctrine of the Similar’, in which he writes that ‘The perception of similarity is in every case bound to a flashing up. It flits past, can possibly be won again, but cannot really be held fast as can other perceptions. It offers itself to the eye as fleetingly and transitorily as a constellation of stars. The perception of similarities thus seems to be bound to a moment in time.’ Benjamin, “Doctrine of the Similar,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings Vol. 2, Part 2: 695–696. 67 Bernstein, Liner Notes, Shadowtime, 16. 68 Ferneyhough, Stelae for Failed Time, http://www.editionpeters.com/resources/0001/stock/ pdf/stelae_for_failed_time.pdf (accessed January 2, 2013). 69 Ibid. 70 Another symmetry can be identified here between the closing ‘now time’ in Scene VII and the opening scene in the opera, in which the four time layers purporting to represent Benjamin at the border, Benjamin’s early married life, his son’s youth, and Benjamin’s philosophical life (in the ‘Triple Lecture’) unfold in an eternal present — ‘now time’ — Benjamin’s rejection of empty and homogenous or repetitive historical time. 71 Walter Benjamin, Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne, 154–155. 72 Françoise Meltzer, Hot Property: The Stakes and Claims of Literary Originality (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 137. 73 Ibid., 135. 74 Ibid., 137. 75 Ferneyhough, Stelae for Failed Time, http://www.editionpeters.com/resources/0001/stock/ pdf/stelae_for_failed_time.pdf (accessed January 2, 2013).

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Chapter 10 Works for Orchestra and Large Ensemble

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erneyhough’s works for orchestra and large ensemble are not often heard — ClausSteffen Mahnkopf remarked in 2008 that La terre est un homme is ‘largely forgotten’ — and apart from the early recording of Transit with the London Sinfonietta for Decca,1 very few commercially recorded performances of the works discussed in this chapter have been released.2 The earliest among this group of pieces (Firecycle Beta and Epicycle) were written with no promise of performance, and it has been suggested that their scale and ambition, as well as the large-scale treatment of metaphysical subject matter, owe something to Ferneyhough’s studies with mentor Klaus Huber.3 For reasons including, no doubt, the nature of commissions received during his career, the first group of large ensemble pieces, which also includes Transit and, on the periphery, La terre est un homme, has been complemented only recently by the addition of Plötzlichkeit [Suddenness] for large orchestra, Chronos-Aion, and Finis Terrae (both for large ensemble). These works comprise many tiny sections, typical of Ferneyhough’s latest approach to form. Completed in 2006, Plötzlichkeit marks a resumption of the composer’s engagement with orchestral music after more than 25 years. Orchestral Colour Given such a long hiatus it is perhaps surprising that so many aspirations and concerns of the most recent output echo those formulated in the drafting and composition of the earlier works. Foremost amongst these is Ferneyhough’s attention to orchestral colour, identifying smaller subgroups within the totality of the ensemble on the basis of similar tone qualities or articulational possibilities, leading to the creation of several colour ‘superinstruments’ that are at once timbrally integral but structurally discrete.4 Ferneyhough’s large-scale works are conceived as ‘chamber music writ large’ — this is no less true of Plötzlichkeit than of the earlier group,5 to be discussed below — and it is the treatment of colour that permits him to [o]bviate the abstract nature of […] hierarchical ordering [of the different instrumental sections of the orchestra] by recourse to a concept which was suggested to me by the study of early works of the Second Viennese School (Passacaglia, Webern; Pelleas, Schoenberg; Altenberg Lieder, Berg) — among all the conventions of instrumental usage […] one or two passages — usually built on the basis of canonic or close-imitative sequence-work — struck me forcibly by the careful employment of closed colour groupings in the

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accompanying materials, something which radically altered in some manner the status of the material offered. This insight suggested to me the idea of relating each player to an intimate group of similar timbre to his own instrument.6 As a piece progresses, these groupings can expand to adopt ‘foreign’ materials, or ‘infect’ other groups: the piano in La terre is cited as an example of an instrument that begins with a distinctive allegiance to the double bass, before merging with other keyboard instruments (shared instrument ‘type’), then pitched percussion (shared ‘attack’) and finally with several other groups including strings (shared process).7 As a consequence it is possible to hear a piece in layers, rather than becoming overwhelmed by the totality; the layering of the discourse is crucial to the performer too, so that s/he acquires a sense of personal contribution, notwithstanding the mass of forces.8 According to the composer: There have been well-meaning performances of [La terre], particularly with less-adept orchestras, where the conductor has attempted to conjure up some monolithic, overall sound, to make the work somehow more than the sum of its parts. What happens on such occasions is that the individual life-processes are blotted out and degraded to the status of undifferentiated particles in some mistaken statistical process. The best performances have always been those paying undivided attention to the coherence of linear energy flow and transparency sufficient to permit the individuality of the layers to assert themselves.9 Ferneyhough refers to his calculated use of quadruple woodwind and brass to enrich these ‘superinstruments’ in La terre;10 he requires that the singers in Transit play small percussion instruments (as in Time and Motion Study III and the Etudes transcendantales); and his addition of soprano trombones and the cimbasso in Plötzlichkeit vividly extends the range of the brass family, deliberately enhancing the colours and textures available, offering multiple possible relationships with other ‘foreign’ instruments and groups (a necessary condition of the frequent fragment turnover, which entails a rapid rate of change of instrumentation). Form Ferneyhough emphasizes the presence of ‘dissenting’ elements in relation to all large-scale works, regardless of period.11 Formal ‘dissent’ can be considered a re-contextualization of what is conceived as ‘interference form’ in solo works. Examples include abrupt but holistic entities (occupying the whole ensemble) such as interventions, inserts and ‘anti-material’ (as in La terre, Transit and Carceri I);12 La terre itself is, he suggests, several compositions coexisting simultaneously;13 he describes Firecycle Beta, the only completed (central) panel of a projected triptych that was to have included Alpha and Gamma, as a ‘torso’, ‘the only meaningful way of confronting the infinite’,14 another kind of fragment in effect, albeit a massive one;15 Epicycle, like Firecycle (which is written for two orchestras), deploys two 302

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equally weighted antiphonal groups that interfere with and erode each other throughout, leading the composer to refer to it as a ‘collapsed string quartet’ in which sections normally heard consecutively are ‘somehow heard at the same time.’16 The composer acknowledges the utopian formal vision — the ‘hermetic aesthetic, according to which each individual work came to be based exclusively on its own unique internal organizational principles’ — of his earliest works such as Firecycle, predicated on the Heraclitean concept of cyclical consumption and reconstitution of the earth by fire.17 Consequently, in Firecycle and Epicycle dissenting elements are ultimately subsumed to a larger-scale self-consistency or ‘atmospheric envelope’: [The works contain] large and small scale repetition patterns on the rhythmic, sometimes on the pitch level whereby new layers are added over such repetitions, frequently slowed down so as to function more as referential grids than recognizable concrete figurations. They thus act very much as an atmospheric envelope or life-support system within which other events can live and breathe. I was definitely concerned with researching the implications of the simple fact that, if you change the speed of an object, it becomes very often a completely different form of life indeed […] imbued with all sorts of unpredictably quirky qualities.18 Despite the external stimuli (visual images) that gave rise to Transit and La terre, Ferneyhough maintains that a ‘multiplicity of “lifeforms” should coexist within each work [but] can only be adequately expressed in a texture of such a radical degree of unity as that imposed by the language which I employ. If so, the inside of the work is truly a reflection of the work/world axis.’19 The most recent works approach the question of form somewhat differently, rejecting both the hermetic aesthetic and the principle of a radically unified texture. Ferneyhough still believes a work must possess an interior life and be self-reflective, but indicates his current thinking when discussing Shadowtime, remarking that ‘over the last twenty-five years I’ve tended to open up to other kinds of music, perhaps thanks to my extensive teaching activities. Even so I never used anything corresponding to particular works or composers — until my opera. When you take on a work of that scale you have to relax your principles whether you want to or not.’20 It is reasonable to infer that the experience described has left its mark in the latest works. Although the very obvious (however brief) references to jazz or slapstick in Shadowtime contribute specifically to the drama or narrative in that work (such as they are: both terms must be used with qualification in the case of Ferneyhough’s opera) and are not emulated as such in the subsequent orchestral pieces, the latter nevertheless contain fleeting references, such as the post-Romantic sonorities exemplified in the orchestration of Plötzlichkeit. This is carried through to tiny details such as the rapid triplet followed by the held chord in the brass (bars 7–8), which, rather like the extended tonality at the basis of the Sixth Quartet, captures in an idiomatic gesture an impression of tonal reminiscence (albeit slightly, microtonally deformed). This way of working with material redefines the 303

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world/work relationship anew. The latest works consolidate Ferneyhough’s interest in the palpability of time, compressing the substantial expressive resources of the large ensemble into tiny aphoristic frames; but there is another dimension to this experience that helps to explain the recalibration of the world/work relationship. Ferneyhough admits to being fascinated by the historicity of the compositional act as it relates to individual pieces, down to the nervous energies required to complete them to a tight schedule: ‘to finish Plötzlichkeit I had to work twelve hours a day, seven days a week, and I developed such a working routine that I couldn’t do anything else.’21 Even though there are a number of works in the past — such as the Third Quartet — that were barely completed in time for their first performances,22 it is only since Shadowtime that Ferneyhough has raised this urgency to a formal principle, making no concessions to unity. He works from fragment to fragment in a much more responsive fashion than ever before, treating each as a little whole. In essence, the ‘dissent’ that has always been a cornerstone of formal articulation in the large-scale works has become the prevalent structuring device. Despite the complex conceptual-philosophical nuances of the term Suddenness (discussed below), it encodes an irony relating to the composer’s ‘everyday world’, the practicalities of ‘the time of composing.’ In Transit, three levels of text represent ‘a trilogy of modes of perceiving and ordering the world around us;’23 in the later works, Ferneyhough permits his world to order his work. Epicycle (1967–1968) and Firecycle Beta (1969–1971) Both these early works are based on an epicyclic principle, Firecycle abandoning the ‘deliberately abstract and colourless string texture’ of the earlier work in favour of using orchestral colours as part of its formal structure.24 An epicycle is a geometrical model used by the ancient astronomer Ptolemy to explain planetary motion about what was then supposed to be a central, stationary Earth. Planets, the sun, moon and stars were held to orbit the Earth in small regular circular motions (epicycles), the centre of which plotted the circumference of a larger circular path (the ‘deferent’).25 In Epicycle, the concept is both an allegory for the ‘self-renewing power of the work’s constituent elements’ (alluding to the  ‘organic communality of all existent things’) and a model for the musical form.26 The preface to the score suggests that ‘one might perhaps regard the large circle as representing the overall form of the work, with each of the subsidiary circles standing both for a particular sub-set of the original materials and that point in the overall spiral process to which the progressively more complex re-reading of past events has brought us.’27 These ‘re-readings’ are audible, as are their progressive distortions: the opening sustained harmonic texture returns periodically, for example, sometimes embellished with glissandi and inflectional microtones; other textures and gestures are similarly recurrent (sustained trills, rapid col legno battuto quintuplets). According to epicyclic theory, ‘because one half of an epicycle runs counter to the general motion of the deferent

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path, the combined motion will sometimes appear to slow down or even reverse direction (retrograde)’28: Ferneyhough renders this phenomenon by inserting a single page of senza misura material (consisting of held tones, and including numerous inflectional microtones) towards the conclusion, which seems to slow the music down. A long pause either side, and the quick pace established immediately afterwards (at ‘vivo’, rehearsal number 24), accentuates the effect. Furthermore, the same passage acts as a point of textural retrograde: the subsequent pizzicato and tremolo, followed by glissandi and lastly six distinct textural layers (of three instruments each) represents a reading, in reverse, of the texture-types leading into the senza misura section.29 The ‘epicyclic’ element in Firecycle is manifest according to the recurrence of ceremonial or ritual segments employed not for their potential ‘tone-painting’ connotations but because they each designate (in the composer’s estimation) particular ‘classes of procedure.’30 In effect, Firecycle is a double piano concerto, although one in which the pianos are less soloistic in the conventional sense than emblems of the antiphonal concept. The form is outlined below, a table characterizing each component.31 Since Firecycle Beta was intended to be flanked by Alpha and Gamma, the former the shortest of the three, and the latter the most substantial, Ferneyhough had devised an overall tripartite form: ‘Fanfare-Alleluia-Amen’ (Alpha-Beta-Gamma respectively). Although in the event, Beta is considerably longer than was initially intended — almost as long as the three parts’ intended combined duration — it remains dominated by ‘Alleluia’ material, approaching what Ferneyhough calls the ‘string carpet’ textures heard at the beginning of La terre est un homme, referring to the total saturation of a delimited registral ‘space’ with polyphonic Table 10.1:  Firecycle Beta, form.32

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string material.33 The amputated outer limbs also project their phantom presence in the instrumentation: the absence of wind and brass in Beta can be ascribed to their intended domination in Alpha, in which the presence of strings was to be restricted to the double bass. Gamma was to unite the total forces used so far, and Ferneyhough’s early plans suggest that he conceived the brief Alpha ‘like, say, an astronomical object seen from a great distance’ and Beta as the ‘human perspective’. Gamma ‘would have approached the object so closely [that the observer would] find himself actually moving inside its “molecular structure”.’34 In common with other works of this period, Firecycle includes indeterminate notation in many sections, such as the appropriately titled Sequence (assuming that the ‘class of procedure’ indicates a sequence of self-contained materials separated by pauses ad libitum at the conductors’ discretion). ‘Alleluia IVb’ and the ‘Amen’ both include cells to be repeated numerous times, in an order determined (in the case of the former) by performers and up to five conductors (one principal conductor, one for each orchestra, and two performers taking on a conducting role as necessary to co-ordinate groups). The influence of Stockhausen’s Gruppen for three antiphonal orchestras, which emphasizes orchestral colour in the concept of ‘groups’, is palpable throughout the work. Ferneyhough contrasts quasi-pointillistic local textures (such as the violas, Soli molto secco) with the ‘mass effect’ of the strings notably when multiple glissandi appear. Each section of Firecycle Beta uses its own group of instruments selected from the total available reservoire (a feature shared with Plötzlichkeit, Chronos-Aion and Finis Terrae). Ferneyhough conceptualizes horizontal and vertical compartmentalization in the piece: the instrumentation and naming of sections according to their inherent procedures represents the horizontal dimension, and the vertical refers to harmonic ‘classes’ and the antiphonal exchanges between the two orchestras.35 The Processional offers examples of both approaches. As its name implies, it articulates a ‘procession’ of materials in the form of variations, like an increasingly dense refrain in the orchestras (accompanied by the build-up of iterative percussion patterns). An amplified chamber group including both pianos begins simultaneously with several soloists — including two string trios — echoing piano gestures such as a single, insistent repetitive pitch, but gradually tapering down to the pianos alone by the conclusion. Instrumental colours are readily articulated and contrasted with ostinati in lower strings. To contrast with this ‘horizontal’ variations process, Ferneyhough differentiates bands of instruments harmonically, conceiving the material modally: in the ostinato instruments (orchestra I) he uses inflected microtones, (or eighth-tones); in the glissando and harmonic textures, a quartertone system (24-tone); by definition the keyboard material is chromatic, the pianos and organ joined by the electric guitar. Towards the end of the Processional, scordatura is applied to the lower strings in Orchestra II, creating still further microtonal layerings. The different modes — drawn upon throughout the piece — act as ‘closed colour groupings’ (a principle revisited in Plötzlichkeit, in which horn and trumpet material is in written sixth-tones, the wind and trombones in quartertones, and the strings are generally chromatic). The repetitive fragments in the Processional become separated by lengthy pauses, some of which are ‘coloured’ by sounds ‘leaking’ into them. Ferneyhough has returned to this technique again and again, notably in the Second Quartet (in which it becomes a 306

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fundamental formal principle) and later, in a different manner that nevertheless recalls the early deployment of the idea in Firecycle, in Plötzlichkeit, Chronos-Aion and Finis Terrae. Ferneyhough himself places Firecycle at the conclusion of his first compositional period, even though the next two works to be completed — Sieben Sterne and Cassandra’s Dream Song, both heralding a new concentration on solo works and the notation/realization problematic — had been started before its completion.36 The subsequent pieces for large forces can be considered as part of a second period, with La terre est un homme situated on the cusp of a third. Transit (1974) and La terre est un homme (1976–1979) Aspects of Transit recall Firecycle Beta and Epicycle, particularly its sectional structure, the invocation of Heraclitus’ vision of the cyclical consumption and regeneration of the world by fire (in ‘Voices III’) and Ferneyhough’s continued interest in the flawed Ptolemaic cosmology. The latter is represented in Transit by the explicit structural parallels between the ensemble — both the material and layout — and an anonymous pastiche engraving from the late nineteenth-century depicting a Renaissance magus breaking through the dome of sky and stars covering the earth to discover the heavenly spheres that lie beyond.37 The instruments belong to five ‘circles’, defined as follows: Circle I ‘the earth’: six solo voices, woodwind Circle II ‘the stars’: keyboards, plucked instruments (harp, guitar, cymbalom), trumpets and pitched percussion excluding timpani. Chamber ensemble: ‘Punktuelle Klänge’ [specific sounds]. Circle III ‘the darkness’: strings Circle IV ‘the transitional force’: timpani. Circle V ‘the spheres’/the illumination: horns, trombones, tubas.38 The piece follows the progressive transition from the ‘earth’ to the ‘spheres’, opening out from the six solo voices; consequently, the heavy brass do not enter until relatively late on and the strings, representing the black circle between earth and the divine — the limitation of human knowledge — cast a dark, lower-register presence even as they become progressively fragmented and ultimately effaced, to make way for the brass ‘illumination’.39 At ‘Transitio I’, clear colour groups or bands are discerned (wind, voices, trumpets, other brass, piano and strings respectively). The physical arrangement of the ensemble and the gradual introduction of musical components as described is an allegory for the engraving. In this sense, Transit might be thought of as a kind of rappresentatione, a dramatic working out of the potential of the source-image. The importance of allegory suggests that Transit is a significant precursor to Shadowtime, notwithstanding the time elapsed between them: as noted in the previous chapter, after the first scene, the opera contains neither characters nor plot, but instead 307

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pursues allegorical expression as a result of its subject Walter Benjamin’s involvement with theories of allegory. Furthermore, it has also been observed that the form of Shadowtime revisits aspects of the earliest exemplars of opera and oratorio, which were contemporaneous with sacra rappresentatione. In some respects, Transit may also be interpreted as a cycle of works. For all that it is predicated on the notion of transition of material from one state to the next, employing cyclic or looping rhythmic and textural patterns throughout, the work’s sectionalization, which includes three miniature ‘concertos’ for wind instruments, ventures further than the section-by-section form of Firecycle. In the latter, the sectional titles indicated ‘classes of procedure’ and, whilst that is also true in Transit (the Verses, for example, are all ‘concertos’, pitting soloist against a chamber ensemble), the sections aspire to a certain autonomy, or at the very least, interrelationships between like sections stand out as formal subsets with their own intrinsic ‘rules of play’ (a kind of miniature prototype of the larger-scale undertaking represented by the three Carceri chamber orchestra works that themselves form a ‘subset’ within the whole). The implications of Transit for Ferneyhough’s subsequent oeuvre are therefore not inconsiderable. An early sketch shows that Ferneyhough envisaged a structure comprising tuttis and solos (voices) in alternation, the tuttis becoming progressively longer, the solos shorter. This plan was ultimately refined by the addition of verses in place of some tuttis; a projected ‘Verse IV’ with a complex internal sub-structure was to have intervened between the ‘Intonatio I–III’ and the ‘Transitio’, but was abandoned. Five small, reduced texture segments roughly recapitulating the order of the instruments’ appearance in the piece were to be titled after Paracelsus’ five entia or modes of being (‘ens astrale’, ‘ens veneni’, ‘ens naturale’, ‘ens spirituale’, and ‘ens dei’).40 A certain symmetry may be observed in the relationship between ‘Vocal Model I’/ timpani and the final ‘Transitio’ insofar as both include unmeasured material, leaving some decisions to the performer, as well as fully prescribed ‘variation’ material. The six timpani represent the latter at the beginning of the work, whilst the vocal model comprises repeating

Figure 10.1:  Transit, formal model.

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rhythmic loops; at the end, Ferneyhough creates freer ‘inserts’ within an otherwise layered, process-driven orchestral texture (for example, the strings at ‘Transitio I.i’). The inserts recall a similar principle in ‘Tutti II’ (also called ‘Model II’ in the sketches), suggesting that the work’s midpoint participates in the formal symmetry: Model I

→

Tutti II/Model II

→

Intonatio/Transitio

A second ‘subset’ refers to the sections that set text.41 The choice and placements of text marks another ‘transition’ that takes place across the work: 42

Figure 10.2

A third formal subset comprises three ‘concertos’ for solo wind instruments: Verse I (Bass flute) → Verse II (Clarinet in Bb/Eb) → Verse III (Oboe/Oboe d’amore) All three Verses share the same tripartite form, and include various unmeasured segments — ‘open’ or repeating cycles (such as at B in the clarinet, ‘Verse II’) — and limited, or ‘finite’ cycles, as exemplified by the bar subdivisions in the celesta and percussion 2, ‘Verse II’.43 Here, Ferneyhough draws on a proportional series that is used repeatedly throughout the piece: 2, 4, 5, 9, 2, 1, 4, 5, 4 and its inverse 10, 8, 7, 3, 10, 11, 8, 7, 8 (where all corresponding values add up to 12). The same row is used to generate bar-lengths in the timpani at the beginning of the work, first in ordinary order, then the inverse; finally the two are intercut. The tuplet subdivisions in Verse II, celesta and percussion 2, are obtained by reading from a ‘matrix’ made from various iterations of the row (Figure 10.3). For example, the percussion 2 tuplets (3:2 and then 7:8) begin from the 2 in the top left-hand corner of the ‘matrix’, following a diagonal path (2–7–4–3–2–3–4–8–2–2). The celesta tuplet values begin from the 4, at the beginning of the third row of the matrix, and follow the dotted diagonal (4–8–4–11–2–11–5–7–2–4).

Figure 10.3:  Derivation of bar subdivisions in celesta and percussion 2, Verse II, Transit.

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Ferneyhough ‘sets’ phonetically transcribed texts in the Voices sections, ensuring their indecipherability. The texts are not intended to be represented in the musical language that Ferneyhough employs. Rather, their effect on the musical material is structural insofar as they generate it (the composer having ‘distilled from them informational quanta’, prefiguring his later relationship to text in works such as the Fourth String Quartet and, ultimately, Shadowtime).44 Some numerical information is derived from the syllables in the text from Hermes Trismegistus, for example, but even where Ferneyhough has used the abstract numbers he generates from texts, they are often untraceable in the work. The sketch materials for Transit are incomplete, and only partial remnants of procedures are preserved, which may or may not have ultimately been deployed in the work itself. Evidence from the sketches suggests that numerical schemes are generally treated using several procedures (overlappings, reverse readings and so on) to produce still more number series: the original textual involvement is therefore far removed from the musical results. The following example is indicative of the procedures used to generate material in Transit: it seems to provide a pitch reservoire for the work, although the procedures used to extract pitch material from the reservoire itself are unclear. In 1610, Galileo sent an anagrammatic message to his mentor, Johannes Kepler, ‘SMAISMRMILMEPOETALEUMIBUNENUGTTAUIRAS’ which Kepler managed to unscramble incorrectly, inferring that Galileo had sent him a message about the moons of Mars, whereas in fact the message is ‘decoded’ as follows: ‘Altissimum Planetam Tergeminum Observavi’ [I have observed that the most distant of planets has a triple form], referring to the rings of Saturn.45 The anagram itself, the fact that astronomers routinely encoded their findings to protect their discoveries, and the tale of Kepler’s error all doubtless appealed to Ferneyhough’s sense of procedure and its transferability to the musical medium, his own obfuscatory tendencies (‘I’d never have made it big as a bookkeeper’), and his fascination with the naivety and flaws in cosmological theories of the Renaissance and Baroque.46 He assigns each letter a pitch, noting that certain pitches will be repeated a number of times, thus yielding a proportional series that could be applied to any number of musical parameters.47 Treating texts in this way seemingly allows Ferneyhough to obviate the text-music ‘problem’, since the structural properties of the former are already integral to the music, rendering the text  semantically neutral and amenable to the same kinds of parametric manipulation enacted on specifically musical material. Yet the semantic reach of the texts is arguably less easily dispensed with than this suggests.48 Unobscured text features in the ‘Transitio’, despite the voices belonging to circle I, the Earth and representing the anthropocentric world-view throughout. (Placing the voices at the centre of the work resembles the Ptolemean vision of the

Figure 10.4:  Transit, pitch reservoire derived from Galileo’s anagrammatic message to Kepler.

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Earth at the centre of the universe, the basis for Ferneyhough’s Epicycle). James Erber observes that at the moment of illumination and revelation, the bass entry in the ‘Intonatio’ approaches the drama of a declamatory operatic solo.49 Erber argues that the claves accompanying the baritone solo at the very end of the work (played, as in so many of Ferneyhough’s pieces with voice, by the singer) complete the largest formal cycle of all, returning in a ‘perfect circle’ — appropriately, whilst intoning the word ‘eternity’ — to the percussion and voice with which the work began.50 Like Transit, La terre est un homme is conceived in response to an image, taking its title from a surrealist painting by Roberto Matta (La tierra es un hombre [The Earth is a Man], 1942). Although not monumental in terms of length, La terre employs a vast orchestra, including 40 string parts (a reference, perhaps, to Ferneyhough’s interest in Thomas Tallis (specifically the 40-part Spem in Alium). The work lays bare the consequences of Ferneyhough’s view that ‘no matter how far one penetrates into detail at a given reading, the density of information remains relatively constant until the smallest compositionally meaningful unit of articulation has been attained.’51 What is remarkable, in view of what Ferneyhough defines as the ‘smallest compositionally meaningful unit’ (some examples below hint at the sheer microscopic complexity involved), is that tiny details — like grains of sand — are as aurally meaningful as the brilliance of the larger, energetic musical argument. According to the composer, I had a very impressive dream some time before first seeing [the Matta], and somehow a very similar set of images was presented; the connection between the two experiences was strangely close. I dreamt of a strange and alien planet, traversed by a pitilessly hot sun. It was basically a desert landscape. The remarkable thing was, I seemed to be seeing every single grain of sand separately, not only in its spatial dimensions but also — somehow — sensed its individual weight. All was in slow, ineluctable motion. Between sharply contoured rocks scuttled tiny, scorpion-like creatures. One sensed the extreme complexity but inevitability of this strange combination of leaden, slowly-moving sand and sudden flashes of intensely colored movement.52 Ferneyhough’s title signifies more than the relationship to the painting: he reflects that [t]he world is a man both in the sense of ultimately being reduced to the dimensions of the perceptual capacities of the individual (it is as big as he is) and as organic entity: it is necessary to see to order its elements in a meaningful manner since we, too, are part of the same living fabric. On the other hand, man is a world. He is both sufficient unto himself and able creatively to muster the imaginative energies to point beyond himself.53 During the course of the piece there are numerous ‘interventions’ although they are not ‘mobile’ inserts, as in Transit, but short, block-like formal jolts ‘heroic in their intention, but also destructive. Each can stand for itself alone — a “world” indeed.’54 They deliberately assume the ‘proportions and aesthetic mantle of the compressed free-atonal years of the 311

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early part of the century’,55 prefiguring the abbreviated fragments comprising Plötzlichkeit. The interventions are labelled in the score (for example the bar before letter M). The hermetic aesthetic and utopian vision typical of the earliest works — exemplified in the image of the self-renewing cycle of fire — is abandoned in favour of an aesthetic that acknowledges the world-relationship of the artwork, explicitly courted in the association with an exterior image in both La terre and Transit. The latter’s circular form retains aspects of the earliest formal strategies; La terre represents a new departure, focused on dualities, embarking on an investigation of the relationship between the structurally determined and the intuitive  — ‘order and unorder’ — in musical form and expression, one of the composer’s main preoccupations of the following decade.56 The work is in three parts (the second and third beginning at letters L and Z respectively). A basic premise is the accretion of simultaneous variation phases whose overlapping generates an increasingly complex ‘superpolyphony’ in which instrumental groups, pursuing particular rhythmic, articulational and pitch patterns, act as ‘überparameters’. Instrumental layering (principally wind and strings) is clearly distinguishable to begin with but less so in the middle of the piece (around page 24 of the score), before moving apart again into highly colouristic groups for the final part.57 At times, Ferneyhough engineers a ‘transcendent luminosity’ (in emulation of the effect of the trumpets in the final sections of Transit) that subsumes any and all parameters in an eruption of loud, declamatory sound (as at letter Bb).58 Elsewhere, on a page with only a few scribbled notes, most of which have nothing to do with either Transit or La terre, he writes simply ‘the trumpet shall sound’. Whilst there is no direct evidence that his aspiration to ‘transcendent luminosity’ in La terre (or indeed Transit) is intended either to evoke the aria of that name from the third and final part of Handel’s Messiah or a specific kind of musical ‘topic’, namely trumpet-like fanfare gestures, it is tempting to speculate that this is the kind of effect towards which the cumulative patterns strive in the work’s final stages. The phrase also hints at a similar concern with final ‘illumination’ in La terre as was more explicit in Transit, given the clear inferences of the pastiche engraving. In the earliest plans for La terre, Ferneyhough includes 12 vocalists: although this scoring did not come to fruition, it inevitably encourages further reflection on parallels that ‘might have been’ with Transit; it is similarly interesting to note that Plötzlichkeit, Ferneyhough’s only composition for extended symphony orchestra since La terre, does contain voices. The first 22 bars of La terre are a paradigm of the piece as a whole. From the outset, the wind material is filtered in such a way that it becomes increasingly overlaid with ‘secondary variational patterns.’59 Compare the opening held notes decorated with occasional ornamental flurries  — Ferneyhough refers to these as ‘punctuating figurational “pillars”’ — with letter D, where earlier isolated gestures (such as the rapidly repeated tone) are reinterpreted in tiny microtonal variations of a single iterated pitch (as for example, in flute II in the bar before B).60 The opening string material is also filtered, but whereas the wind processes encrust each other like glosses on an ancient text, the gradual deployment of

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unobtrusive unison figures in a few strings (for example violin 20 and violas 6 and 7 at letter B) acts as a grid by which the individuality of 40 highly differentiated string parts is progressively filtered out, leading to a massive unisono rhythm at bar 22. Ferneyhough reports having set out to ‘“thematise” my own inner struggle between order and intuition in a clearer way than usual.’61 This, essentially, generates the form of the entire work. His pre-compositional material consists in part of an ordered reservoire of rhythmic figures: for the winds, elements are selected in the process of composition according to the demands of the context (the ‘intuitive’); the strings by contrast begin from a permutation of reservoire figures, treated as a ‘given’, and the application of filters is controlled by a rational, pre-determined process (the ‘ordered’). The initial contrast is complemented in the final part by the juxtaposition of ‘essays’ and ‘projections’, the former goal-directed, processual, intuitively ordered, the latter static, redolent of the ‘punctuational pillars’ in the early wind material, though much more substantial. Initially applied horizontal, or layered, processes become verticalized ‘instants’, although according to the composer, the montage of processual fragments fails because there is ‘no necessary law of interaction growing from inside to outside.’62 Nevertheless, in Plötzlichkeit, itself a montage of fragments, what was earlier deemed a ‘failure’ of form is embraced as its foremost principle; in other words, there is no law of interaction growing from inside to outside the work, as will be seen presently. The projections in La terre are, in effect, exploded texture-types already deployed throughout the work.63 Table 10.2:  La terre est un homme, Part III, Essays and Projections. Bar/Letter

Description

Bb (11 after Z)

Projection I (Duration 5 bars)

Ee

Projection II (Duration 5 bars)

Gg

Essay I (Duration 1 bar)

Hh + 1

Projection III (Duration 5 bars)

Jj

Essay II (Duration 2 bars) Main lines and grace notes.

Kk

Projection IV (Duration 5 bars) Keyboards and brass. Keyboards rapid filter figurations around brass main notes.

Mm

Projection V very ‘black’64 (Duration 3 bars)

Oo

Essay III (Duration 3 bars) Rhetorical interjections in one colour and mixed colour groups

Qq

Essay IV (Duration unclear) Many solo lines, high degree of contrast.

Rr

Projection VI (Duration unclear) Built up of superimposed layers

Ss

Essay V (Duration 4 bars)

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The essays and projections are inserted into a complex phase-structure operating on several levels simultaneously, comprising ‘microphases’, ‘macrophases’ and ‘superphases’.65 This follows a growing tendency towards such overlapping, noted above. Groups of instruments articulate chains of variations (as in the four-bar phases of the brass at the start), causing parts I and II to overlap considerably, as Mahnkopf observes, selecting the double bass variations (letters F–L), the piano (F–N) and flute group (H–M) as examples.66 Part II initiates the ‘verticalization’ of forces that reaches its apogee in Part III, introducing seven ‘interventions’, the seventh a ‘simulacrum in miniature’ of the previous six instrumental combinations in a similar vein to the projections, themselves simulacra of previously heard texture-types.67 The increasing presence in the second half of the work of dissenting elements is enhanced by the introduction of ‘antimaterial’ that prefigures a similar principle in the Second Quartet: a shapeless ‘non’ material (such as harmonically vague glissandi and marcato diads) enters gradually in the basses and ’cellos just prior to letter W.68 According to Ferneyhough, like ‘certain monsters of science fiction [antimaterial] can take on any desired shape, thus becoming increasingly subversive.’69 Notwithstanding the range of disruptive elements, the form of La terre remains concerned with overarching unity — a conjunctio oppositorum between the fully rationalized and the intuitive — which contains and ultimately integrates the subversive interventions at the very end of the work, marking the biggest conceptual difference with Plötzlichkeit.70 In Part III, the first projection is monolithic and disruptive: either side of it is a sparse texture and there is some distance before the next insert (Essay I). Progressively, the projections and essays become adjacent. The final inserts (whether essays or projections) overlap with one another and are typically distinguished by their tempi (one set for non-intervention material in part III and one for inserts, as in Table 10.3). All Essays are marked =56 except for the last (in keeping with the idea of integration), which begins =72, the highest ‘normal’ tempo to feature in the rest of the work. This integration is a further, subtle acknowledgement of Ferneyhough’s earlier alchemicaltheoretical interests. It suggests that the work represents a final large-scale engagement with them (although they are revisited, through the ‘filter’ of Benjamin and his mentor Gershom Scholem, in Shadowtime): La terre represents the end of a period, but also a beginning, the Table 10.3:  La terre est un homme, relative and interventional tempi.

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1980s marking a decisive shift away from certain formal and notational preoccupations of the previous decade. Ferneyhough remarks that the trajectory in Time and Motion Study II moves towards chaos, but is reversed in La terre, ‘the first half of an orphic journey.’71 Another immediate parallel within the same period calls to mind not the work’s epic or philosophical ambitions but its impact in performance, which it shares with Time and Motion Study II and Unity Capsule, all three works taking the principle of ‘too-muchness’ to the furthest point possible. Indeed, both La Terre and Unity Capsule have quite independently been likened to fifteen-minute explosions, all the more remarkable given their location at opposite extremes of available instrumental forces (solo monophonic instrument vs. large orchestra).72 Plötzlichkeit, Chronos-Aion, Finis Terrae Each of these recent scores is avowedly concerned with time and its perception, which in some way determines the formal principle of fragmentation in each case. The presentation of material in tiny sections that pass by too quickly for the listener to contextualize them relative to what s/he has already heard, or to predict what might yet come, is a deliberate strategy, the composer aiming to focus attention on the suddenness [Plötzlichkeit] of the moment rather than facilitate its symbolic interpretation. The concept of ‘suddenness’ is observed by the German theorist Karl Heinz Bohrer in his critique of the moment in Romantic and Modern literature, Suddenness: on the Moment of Aesthetic Appearance.73 According to Bohrer, the phenomenon emerges in the work of certain early nineteenthcentury writers, including Kleist and Schlegel. It is closely related to the experience of disruption associated with the ‘moment’ [Augenblick — literally, the ‘blink of an eye’], the ‘key to modernity:’74 ‘Bohrer cites Hugo von Hofmannsthal as one of the first to describe a new kind of epiphanic moment, one that “cannot be interpreted ‘symbolically’, does not point beyond itself [but rather] […] problematizes every sort of presumed continuity”.’75 In A Sketch of the Past Virginia Woolf relates the following experience: As a child, then, my days, just as they do now, contained a large proportion of this cotton wool, this non-being. Week after week passed at St. Ives and nothing made any dint upon me. Then, for no reason that I know about, there was a sudden violent shock; something happened so violently that I have remembered it all my life. I will give a few instances. The first: I was fighting with Thoby on the lawn. We were pommelling each other with our fists. Just as I raised my fist to hit him, I felt: why hurt another person? I dropped my hand instantly, and stood there, and let him beat me.76 The lack of warning of the sudden shock is fundamental to Bohrer’s insights. The sudden moment in the artwork disrupts the continuity of time, stands outside it and can only be apprehended in ‘aesthetic time’, as it were. Significantly for Ferneyhough, Bohrer also discusses Walter Benjamin, and it seems likely that Ferneyhough arrived at the concept of 315

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suddenness via his engagement with Benjamin’s own understanding of discontinuous history: ‘the past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again.’77 Because the suddenness is ‘without duration’ yet seizes its subject violently, the ‘moment of being’ is bigger than the flash in which it appears.78 Benjamin suggests that ‘knowledge comes only in lightning flashes’ but it cannot possibly be cognitively processed ‘in time’: the analogy with Ferneyhough’s formal intentions in respect of Plötzlichkeit and Chronos-Aion (as well as scene two of Shadowtime) is clear.79 Plötzlichkeit comprises 111 aphoristic fragments, ‘based on a predefined book of rhythms, harmonic progressions and instrumental combinations’ including a 20-layer rhythmic structure based on prolational patterns.80 Despite cycling through the basic processes three times — ‘a subliminal continuity’ — the work was composed in a non-linear manner,81 in order to uphold the ‘denial of time’ that represents its core premise.82 Tempo changes with nearly every fragment, as does instrumental timbre and the density of material. The concept of gradual transformation in time is abandoned, and the immediacy — the suddenness — of the change from one fragment to the next becomes paramount. Therefore it is advisable to attend to the ‘borders’, to listen for change rather than try to forge meaningful long-range connections.83 There are three types of ‘border state’: a complete silence before the next fragment, no pause (successive fragments abut each other with no break), and a ‘coloured silence’ in which one or more instruments hold a pitch or pitches, usually at a low dynamic, across an indicated caesura between fragments, recalling a strategy in the Second String Quartet, in which Ferneyhough gradually ‘colours’ silences, drawing on a concept not dissimilar to the ‘anti-material’ of La terre, employing glissandi, for example, and other sounds that lack definite harmonic identity.84 In the quartet, the coloured silences acquire a subversive function; in Plötzlichkeit, they are allied to similarly subversive elements and initially expressed as harmonics, trills, and so on. They contribute to what might be called a fragment macro-rhythm within the piece: concentrated in the middle, they contrast with the series of directly abutting fragments at the beginning and end, so that the piece seems to slow down towards the middle: ‘the question then is how do [the fragments] affect each other, perhaps over an interval of silence.’85 The ‘coloured’ attenuation between them increases their momentaneousness in one sense, and in another ensures that no fragment acts like a Webernian miniature, complete in itself: these quietly ‘subversive’ lingerings even hint at being ‘moments’ — in the sense understood by Bohrer and Benjamin — themselves. After all, they are, in one sense ‘timeless’, since they literally have no fixed duration in the score. The smallest seeming insignificance — ignored by a historical narrative that privileges major events — can have profound consequences.86 Early in the piece, the trio of female voices — themselves effecting a sudden appearance given that they are seated unobtrusively amongst the orchestra — employs figures that clearly spread across two immediately juxtaposed fragments (as for example, fragments 5–6). Shortly afterwards, the voices hold the first ‘coloured silence’ that bridges two neighbouring moments (12–13). As the piece progresses, spillage between and across multiple fragments becomes more common. Gestures with a clear 316

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shape (which might be expected to be contained by what Ferneyhough calls the ‘sausageslicer’ technique that predetermines fragment length) cut across a boundary (for example bassoon I, fragments 101–102; trumpets, 109–110), suggesting their own ‘moment’ status independent of the formal ‘slices’.87 The instruments are deployed and grouped according to pre-compositional plans that pay specific attention to the colour combinations in each fragment. The opening descending glissando gesture on soprano trombones, passed to the trombones, announces the importance of the instruments and virtually every subsequent appearance contributes glissando figures that dominate the texture. Texture plays a vital role in the articulation of fragments, and whilst the soprano trombone gesture is so consistent to that particular instrument alone, other recurring textures are heard in different instrumental combinations: tuplet ostinati feature throughout, sometimes in fragments just long enough that the ear adjusts to their regularity before experiencing the jarring suddenness of their interruption. Lest the ear also adjust to the rate of fragment turnover, thus negating the effect of suddenness (a possibility mitigated, however, by the processes described above), Ferneyhough inserts three longer, self-consistent tranches of colour material for subgroups comprising brass, strings and wind respectively.88 The principle of ‘interventions’ in previous works is effectively turned inside out, since here the inserts are the only non-disruptive, non-abbreviated elements in the piece, yet are nevertheless contextually distorting, given the ‘consistent inconsistency’ that characterizes the norm.89 Composed alongside Plötzlichkeit but premiered later, in 2008 (there were in effect two first performances, the first partial, and the second complete in October of that year),90 Chronos-Aion shares certain formal aspects with the large orchestral work, such as the use of ‘coloured’ and complete silences between certain fragments. The work marks another stage in Ferneyhough’s long-established fascination with the tactility of time, which relates it conceptually to Mnemosyne, the final part of the Carceri d’Invenzione. What was described in that piece as its ‘cathedral-under-the-sea type of sound […] in which everything is moving in slow motion’ can be compared with the ending of Chronos-Aion from fragment  98  onwards.91 This ending also effects ‘slow motion’ relative to previous fragments. Tempi become incrementally slower and the material — for the main part tiny isolated flickers — further attenuated and sparse. Ferneyhough suggests that as the piece progresses, the form ‘gradually begins to reveal an underlying deceleration.’92 He remarks of Mnemosyne that ‘I thought the bass flute very apposite to express this particular quality’,93 so it is perhaps no surprise to find the bass flute, and a general reduction to a lower octave level at the conclusion of Chronos-Aion.94 A ‘concerto for ensemble’, Chronos-Aion is written for players often momentarily deployed in small chamber groups or more rarely as soloists, although because some wind players alternate between different register instruments (for example piccolo, flute, alto flute, bass flute), and the range of percussion is sizeable, the piece’s colour-spectrum is richer still than the 17-strong ensemble suggests. The two types of time denoted in the title — Chronos, the pre-Socratic personification of time, and Aion, a Hellenistic deity referring to the unbounded orb that encircles the 317

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universe — are discussed in Gilles Deleuze’s The Logic of Sense (1969), a reading of various modes of thought from Stoic philosophy, the writings of Plato and Parmenides to Lewis Carroll, and psycholanalysis.95 Aion ‘is the present […] which is subdivided ad infinitum into something that has just happened and something that is going to happen, always flying in both directions at once.’96 Aion is an empty present, an eternity that Ferneyhough refers to as ‘flowing time’.97 Chronos, by contrast, is cyclical time: ‘only Chronos is filled up with states of affairs and the movements of the objects that it measures.’98 Ferneyhough describes Chronos as ‘material-bound time (the temporality of the concrete figure, of abrupt changes of texture, perspective and directionality).’99 Whereas Chronos is counted, rationalized and measured, Aion is tactile, sensuous time. Ferneyhough draws primarily on Henri Bergson’s philosophy of time, as detailed in Duration and Simultaneity (1922) and discussed in another of Deleuze’s texts, Bergsonism (1966), in which he differentiates between time counted as a sequence (past-present-future) and time as duration. The former is understood by a reflective consciousness that uses ‘tools’ of language, logic and so on to rationalize and order experience, lining up events as though they were objects in space.100 In other words, time collapses into space, in which objects are simultaneous. Duration can only be approached through ‘inner states’,101 the kind of immediate experience of the senses, before cognitive reflection processes can begin. Experience here is qualitative and ‘radically independent of space.’102 This means, in effect, that inner states are ‘confused multiplicities’ that ‘overflow into one another, interpenetrate, even as they succeed each other.’103 As previously noted, Ferneyhough has repeatedly rejected representation as a form of musical expression (‘there is absolutely no illustrative intent in my composition’),104 although there are examples of works, and Ferneyhough’s descriptions of them, discussed in previous chapters, which manifest ‘illustrative intent’ nonetheless. Chronos-Aion flirts with the representation of the two types of time, especially near the beginning of the work, when the listener begins to draw a distinction between an apparently faster, highly figured material and a ‘frozen’ sustained texture, inferring that the former is Chronos and the latter Aion. The first few fragments are purposely disconnected, arguably more highly texturally contrasted than neighbouring fragments in Plötzlichkeit, but the seventh, the slowest tempo so far, containing only a few long-held tones, announces Aion, compounded by string harmonics. The eighth, however, is full of ‘counted’ elements. The regular tuplet ostinati that also feature in Plötzlichkeit play a significant role in this piece: the winds, piano and strings invoke Chronos unambiguously (as in the simple additive process in the strings, from one ‘voice’ to five, revisited elsewhere as at fragments 12, 23, 61, 72, 79 and 84). However, fragments eight, nine and ten exemplify Bergson’s vision of a ‘confused multiplicity’, signalling that different temporal states are not only set out successively but on different levels that suggest foreground and background layers which equally solicit the listener’s attention. Qualitatively perceived states can overlap, rather than being organized into a distinct succession as concepts:105 it is therefore also possible to read and hear the three cited fragments as Aion, because they flow into each other. The incrementally ‘stretched’ bassoon line reinforces this impression in particular: it is ‘counted’, and yet the glissando counteracts harmonic precision 318

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and slides over the fragment border (as do the piccolo trumpet and oboe materials). In his programme note for the work, Ferneyhough also draws on Marcel Duchamp’s concept of inframince, which seeks to explain the tiniest differences, almost imperceptible, between two things.106 This, he suggests, was in his mind as he conceived the ‘abrupt non-sequiturs typical of Chronos-Aion’s language.’107 Comparison of the winds in fragments eight and nine (the latter subject to a metric modulation in relation to the previous), particularly of the similarities between their rhythmic cells, offers one possible example of Ferneyhough’s musical appropriation of the concept. Over the course of the work the effectiveness of the contrast between the two types of time is less a question of determining which fragments can be ascribed to Chronos and which to Aion, more a matter of hearing and feeling the piece on multiple levels simultaneously. Consequently, whilst the ear can be drawn to the precariousness of isolated or soloistic foreground figures (as from fragments 80–90) and thus to Chronos, these figures occur against a timeless backdrop of ethereal ‘slow motion’ or Aion, in which, as Bergson has it ‘[our self] abstains from establishing a separation between the present state and anterior states.’108 Perhaps one of the most acute contrasts is found at fragment 56, the exact midpoint of the piece (in terms of its 112 sections). The wind, brass and strings present sustained material in durational values of a length rarely encountered in a Ferneyhough score, whilst the percussion, harp and piano are subject to additive rhythmic cell processes, each iteration dependent on the previous for its contextual meaning. For several sections thereafter, the piano dominates the texture, the other instruments echoing or ornamenting its figurations (as, for example, fragment 59 in which a lower string ‘buzz’ comments on the equally low pianistic register). A rare piano solo at section 60 is complemented and completed by a fully orchestrated fragment 61, in which all other instruments complete an upward flourish that amplifies and colours the conclusion of the piano solo. The ambiguity of these fragments results in a ‘bifurcation of temporal perspective’:109 what is surface detail and what indistinct background fluctuation?110 What is heard as ornament (supplementary to counted time) as opposed to figure-object? Throughout the piece, fragments that include multiple texture-types sound less rationalized than those dominated by regular ostinato patterns and consistent articulation. Fragment 62 indicates further layering at work: compare the unadorned chromatic harp pitches with the remaining instruments, each of which articulates small gestures around the E, the bassoon and strings in quartertones and brass with inflectional microtones. Instrumental colour layers are distinguished according to harmonic system, as in Plötzlichkeit. Examples presented here represent only a small proportion of possible observations. The level of detail contained in each fragment is disproportionate to its overall length. Numerous fragments contain, in miniature, processes seen elsewhere in Ferneyhough’s oeuvre on a larger scale (prolational canon techniques, or impulse filtering to shape a linear force, as in the percussion at 107). The website of the Münchener Biennale characterizes Aion as a ‘lifetime: full, remembered, hoped for.’111 This, coupled with the ever-greater extent to which the urgencies of the compositional act impinge on his formal approach, suggests that Chronos-Aion and other recent fragment pieces can be taken to some degree 319

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as ‘autobiographical’, reflecting on techniques acquired over 50 years of writing and thinking about music. In this sense these works — including the creative use of brass at the opening of Plötzlichkeit, summoning Ferneyhough’s youth spent playing in Coventry’s brass bands — form a complement to earlier ‘composer’s diaries’ such as Unity Capsule.112 At the time of writing (late 2012), the most recently completed large-scale work is Finis Terrae for six voices and ensemble. Formally, it too comprises numerous small sections of varied lengths, in common with many works composed since Shadowtime; but thematically it returns to the scale of some of Ferneyhough’s compositions from the 1970s, once again considering a ‘world’ (the title means ‘the end of the earth’ or ‘land’s end’). Each miniature section is marked by a change of ensemble configuration, adding or subtracting one or more instruments to those sounding, but the tininess of many sections ensures that to the ear, these reconfigurations are barely graspable in real time. For example, bar 100 is a tiny fragment (1/8), entailing a change of timbre relative to the bars before and immediately after it, by the addition of the piano to the strings wind and brass already present at bar 99. The piano supplies only two very brief impulses in bar 100, and reappears two fragments (in this case, two bars) later, the xylophone and marimba added to the texture in the interval (bar 101). The meaning of the title is ambiguous to the extent that both an apocalyptic and a more literal reading may be inferred, the composer ‘consider[ing] the ravaged, rent and often grotesque moraine landscapes parsed by the vast forces typical of epochal glaciation.’113 Ferneyhough’s programme note conjures an image of ugly landscapes, bare but for the moraines, such as might be imagined to exist at the furthest reaches of civilization. Less obviously than either Plötzlichkeit or Chronos-Aion, Finis Terrae also deals with time, particularly the difference between human time and geological time: humans are new to the landscape in comparison with the landmarks left over from glacial movement. Ferneyhough plays on the idea of human minds and human knowledge attempting to rationalize such monumental physical changes to the earth, suggesting that ‘we sense ourselves abandoned to a series of frozen catastrophic abruptions on an ill-lit terrain without obvious recourse to comforting fictions of organic perspective: we are strangers on earth.’114 As well as reflecting on humans’ limited time on earth (a theme of Benjamin’s in the Theses on the Philosophy of History that also surfaces in Shadowtime), Ferneyhough probes the social implications: the singers represent the remainder of humanity ‘harried by […] depredations and compressed into a claustrophically narrow space only within which is a reductive form of survival possible.’115 The singers are seated at the front in a semicircle, framed on all sides by instrumentalists, their material not always audible above the ensemble, reinforcing this impression of claustrophobia. The first vocal material in the piece (bar 14ff.) unfolds within a limited registral range, the sopranos relatively low and the basses high in their respective ranges, all other voices locked in between. An online resource from the contemporary specialists Exaudi, whose members were singers at the première and subsequent performances of the work, notes that its subject is appropriate for today’s earth, irretrievably damaged by man-made climate change;116 the irony that humans, so cowed in Ferneyhough’s vision of the fight for survival, are the agents of their own demise, and despite 320

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the awesome presence of geological features contrive nonetheless to defeat them, is not lost on the composer. The text is of Ferneyhough’s own assemblage, derived from websites that discuss features of moraines in scientific terms. It  has no inherent poetic meaning, but serves to reinforce the small voice of humanity, and to cast an ironic light on the efforts of the voices to forge an identity: there are passages of unison singing and speaking, although there are others too fragmented to represent a society amongst the singers. The physical placement of the singers in performance (enclosed within the ensemble) recalls that in Plötzlichkeit, the role of the voice ever less operatic and declamatory in Ferneyhough’s work since Shadowtime or even On Stellar Magnitudes. In common with his other very recent large-ensemble works, Ferneyhough introduces pauses between tiny sections over which material is often sustained, creating an overall form out of panels defined by intensive instrumental (and vocal) gestural activity and linked together by still, rich chords. The latter are once again literally ‘timeless’ (not measured in every case) as well as figuratively so, suggesting the timelessness of eternity implied in the giant geophysical features of a moraine landscape. As observed throughout this study, Ferneyhough’s music has always had a close relationship to image. In recent works, and particularly Finis Terrae, the various ‘panels’ involve only small groups of the performers at any one time, lending a visual topology to the performance itself. Seeing a concert as much as hearing it helps the listener appraise Ferneyhough’s formal approach; the last time in his output that the mise-en-scène possessed as much significance — discounting the opera — was arguably in the 1970s, with works such as Time and Motion Study II.117 Despite obvious differences, the  striking similarity between the ensembles of Transit and Finis Terrae (extending as far as the number of voices and their semi-circular placement) invites comparison and speculation as to Ferneyhough’s wider philosophy of writing for large ensemble. It is tempting to extrapolate from the section-pause-section structure an image of moraines (accumulated glacial debris, as the opening text informs us). A ‘panel’ might comprise several tiny sections between which there is some form of consistency, so that a larger-scale sectionalization becomes perceptible, an accumulation of musical ‘debris’ (such as the strings’ repeated glissando arcs) and other gestures. A good example of such a recognizable panel is at bar 112ff. Here, the piano takes a prominent role until bar 122, around which several instruments sound repeated high pitches, recalling those in Liber Scintillarum. The repeated pitches are highly atypical of Ferneyhough’s music, indicating the extent to which the latest formal approach has brought stylistic changes to the fore: Ferneyhough’s working relationship with material has changed, the tiny sections precipitating an enhanced responsivity to context  — essentially, a freer approach — than extensive parametric pre-planning might once have permitted. He treats each little section as a new experience — not to the exclusion of any forms of consistency, since these are generally subsurface, allowing textural and gestural variety and contrast to reign at the surface — as though daring himself to explore the ‘debris’ of his own accumulated style, finding new fascinations therein (recall Benjamin’s obsession with the disregarded tatters of the flea market). Towards the end of the piece (bar 188ff.) he transforms the principle of ‘coloured’ pauses, so that the voices (speaking, not singing) and 321

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percussion continue to articulate material across crevices between instrumental texture bursts. Apart from negotiating the regular tempo changes, many of which are proportionally related throughout, the stop-start character of the ensemble is made more challenging by the irregular metres used (for example 4/9 or 1/20). Such metrical contrasts also occur in Plötzlichkeit, and it is in details such as these that real changes in Ferneyhough’s approach become apparent. It is easy to look at the score of La terre est un homme and be daunted by its ‘blackness’ and the sheer scale of the physical object: the intense writing for 40 strings has an instant effect upon the eye, making a performer (and conductor) immediately aware of the surplus of notational information which must be processed in both rehearsal and performance. Recent works including Plötzlichkeit and Finis Terrae perhaps misleadingly give an immediate impression of being less black, and therefore less obviously demanding, and not only because they are computer-produced scores rather than copied in Ferneyhough’s characteristic copper-plate hand (as had been typical until the mid-1990s). As with the change observed around 1980, it is the location of complexity that has shifted in Ferneyhough’s music: in La terre and Transit, the metres bar-for-bar tend to proceed along relatively stable lines (3/8, 4/8 and so on), which is not the case in Plötzlichkeit or Finis Terrae. Furthermore, the rate of tempo changes in the latest works is unprecendented: in La terre and earlier pieces, these occur with only moderate frequency compared with the composer’s recent practice. Ferneyhough’s orchestral and large-ensemble works have always been associated with a view of the world, their respective philosophies effectively reversing the progress outwards towards the spheres, from man — the human perspective — in Transit. He begins by looking beyond the earth to the mythical, cyclical and mystical (Firecycle, Epicycle and Transit) before observing that ‘the world is a man’ in La terre, and finally becomes concerned with the experience of lived time and eternity (Chronos-Aion, Plötzlichkeit) and the end of the earth in Finis Terrae. Considering the total contrast between the texts of Heraclitus (on fire and renewal) that underlie the earliest works and the purposely non-poetic text describing bleak moraine landscapes formed by glacial ice in the latest, one could be forgiven for detecting a progressive erosion of the optimism and idealism of youth; but Ferneyhough’s most recent music, challenging its listener to revel in the moment (a surprising conclusion!), does not bear this out. Notes    1 Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf, “Brian Ferneyhough: ‘La terre est un homme’,” in MusikKonzepte 140: Brian Ferneyhough, ed. Ulrich Tadday (Munich: edition text + kritik, 2008): 51. In fact, La terre est un homme was performed recently as part of a BBC ‘Total Immersion’ event dedicated to Ferneyhough’s music at the Barbican, London, Saturday February 26, 2011.    2 See Transit, London Sinfonietta dir. Elgar Howarth, Decca HEAD 18, 1978. See also Donaueschinger Musiktage 2008, Neos NEOS10944, 2010, CD, which includes a recording of Chronos-Aion, Ensemble Modern directed by Franck Ollu.    3 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 210–11. 322

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   4 Ferneyhough, unpublished sketch materials, La terre est un homme, Paul Sacher Stiftung, Basel, 1976–1979.    5 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 310.    6 Ferneyhough, unpublished sketch materials, La terre est un homme. Emphasis Ferneyhough’s.    7 Ibid.    8 Ibid.    9 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 327.   10 Ibid.   11 Ferneyhough, unpublished sketch materials, La terre est un homme.   12 Ibid. See also Denys Bouliane and Anne LeBaron, “Darmstadt 1980,” 425.   13 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 310.   14 Ibid., 211.   15 Ferneyhough recalls that ‘[although by the end of 1971] my technique was more or less fully formed, I still remember that period with warmth for the supportive attitude of Huber towards my projects. I was composing Firecycle Beta — work with no hope of performance at that time — and the lengthy period of continuity thus afforded enabled me to bring that massive fragment to an end only shortly after my official studies had been concluded.’ Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 236.   16 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 312. Interestingly, he returns to this idea of layering variations that would normally follow one another consecutively on top of each other in his recent Fifth String Quartet.   17 Ibid., 88.   18 Ibid., 307–308.   19 Ferneyhough, unpublished materials, including letters, working notes and essays/ presentation drafts on La terre est un homme, Paul Sacher Stiftung, Basel, undated (but likely contemporaneous with the composition of the piece). There are two pages of type-written materials on the piece, which could be a draft presentation, lengthy programme notes intended to help the composer formulate his ideas or part of a letter, but if the latter, there is no addressee, nor signature, suggesting that the cover page and final page(s) are missing.   20 Meyer, “Ein Gespräch mit Brian Ferneyhough,” 56.   21 Ibid., 62–3.   22 See recollection by Irvine Arditti, in Paul Archbold et al., “Performing Complexity,” 59.   23 Brian Ferneyhough, unpublished draft Programme Notes, Transit, Paul Sacher Stiftung, Basel, 1978.   24 Ferneyhough, unpublished draft title page, Firecycle Beta, Paul Sacher Stiftung, c. 1971.   25 See “Ptolemaic System,” in Encyclopedia Britannica Online, http://www.britannica.com/ EBchecked/topic/482079/Ptolemaic-system#ref756604 (accessed September 18, 2012).   26 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 88.   27 Brian Ferneyhough, Epicycle (1968), http://www.editionpeters.com/resources/0001/stock/ pdf/epicycle.pdf (accessed December 29, 2012). Ferneyhough’s description of the form of the work reinforces the point made earlier regarding large-scale formal unity, which subsumes ‘dissenting’ materials within it. 323

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  28 “Ptolemaic System,” Encyclopedia Britannica Online (website as above).   29 Brian Ferneyhough, Epicycle (London: Peters Edition No. 7119, 1985). See pages 46–50 (6 layers); pages 50–55 (glissandi and pizzicato); pages 53–56 (pizzicato).   30 Ferneyhough, unpublished sketch materials, Firecycle Beta, Paul Sacher Stiftung, Basel, c. 1968.   31 Ibid.   32 NB. ‘Alleluia I’ would have been in Firecycle Alpha.   33 Ferneyhough, unpublished sketch materials, La terre est un homme.   34 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 314.   35 Ferneyhough, unpublished sketch materials, Firecycle Beta.   36 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 313.   37 The image appeared, unattributed, in Camille Flammarion’s L’atmosphère: météorologie populaire (Paris: Hachette, 1888), 163. The engraving is reproduced in the published score of Transit.   38 Ferneyhough, unpublished sketch materials, Transit, Paul Sacher Stiftung, c. 1972–1975.   39 See Brian Ferneyhough, Transit (London: Peters Edition No. 7219, 1977), pages 32ff., strings.   40 Ferneyhough, unpublished sketch materials, Transit.   41 According to Ferneyhough, the text for Voices III comprises fragments of Heraclitus’ sayings. He notes the importance of this figure for numerous works in his earliest years, and the central principles he represents (the cyclical renewal of the earth by fire). Here, he suggests that ‘[Heraclitus] work stands for that “Weltanschauung” in which philosophy and the investigation of the physical universe (as well as the gods holding it in motion) were not yet seen as distinct disciplines.’ Unpublished sketch materials, Programme Note, Transit, Paul Sacher Stiftung, 1978. Other works that invoke Heraclitean principles include Prometheus, Firecycle Beta (detailed above) and a deleted work for piano, Metamorphoses on the Origins of Fire (undated, but likely early–mid 1960s). The Pre-Socratic philosophers are very important to Ferneyhough’s early period of composition (both published and unpublished).   42 See Brian Ferneyhough, “Transit (1972–5),” http://www.editionpeters.com/resources/0001/ stock/pdf/transit.pdf (accessed September 19, 2012).   43 Each verse comprises section A (x1), section B (x2) and section C (x3). In each case, A subdivides into 5 small parts.   44 Ferneyhough, unpublished sketch materials, Programme Note, Transit, Paul Sacher Stiftung, 1978.   45 Ellis D. Miner, Randii R. Wesse, and Jeffrey N. Cuzzi, Planetary Ring Systems (Springer: Praxis, 2007), 1. Kepler’s solution was ‘Salve umbistineum geminatum Martia proles’ [Hail, twin companionship, children of Mars] (See Miner et. al, Planetary Ring Systems, 19).   46 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 333.   47 It is worth noting that Ferneyhough is sometimes mistaken in his calculations, as he is in the sketches for this work, incorrectly counting the number of letter recurrences in Galileo’s anagram. In such cases, rather than correct his error Ferneyhough often retains the ‘flawed’ calculations and the resulting material they generate. 324

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  48 Ferneyhough’s creative use of his ‘mistakes’ exemplifies his interest in how material is mobilized in his composition rather than valued in quantitative terms alone. It does, however, leave interesting questions for the interpreter, who might reasonably ascribe significance to the composer’s sourcing of musical ‘data’ from written text (in this case), suggesting that the ‘hidden’ text is a cipher captured in the music. If the raw ‘data’ is unimportant, only its deployment in the work, why derive parametric quanta from Galileo’s text in the first place? It is tempting to read Ferneyhough’s incorporation of ‘flaws’ in his calculations as an allegory for the flaws in the very theories to which the figures invoked here put their names. Such an interpretation suggests that far from eliminating the semantic relationship between text and music, Ferneyhough exploits an aspect of it. In a lecture at Darmstadt (“Sprache und Musik,” 1957), Karlheinz Stockhausen suggested that Luigi Nono had turned the sounds of speech into noises in Il Canto Sospeso and therefore concealed the text in a dense musical form, rendering them hardly comprehensible. The ‘noises’ included phonetic and vowel permutations, leading Stockhausen to question whether the texts, so rich in meaning, should have been used in the first place. Nono refuted Stockhausen’s claims, arguing that the letters’ legacy was the expressive content of his composition. See Karlheinz Stockhausen, “Music and Speech,” Die Reihe 6, trans. Ruth Koenig (Pennsylvania: Theodore Presser, 1964). See also Luigi Nono, Texte, Studien zu seiner Musik, ed. Jürg Stenzl (Zürich: Atlantis, 1975).   49 James Erber, “Transit: Carrefour culturel,” Contrechamps 8 (February 1988): 82.   50 Ibid., 83.   51 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 7.   52 Ibid., 327.   53 Ferneyhough, unpublished sketch materials, La terre est un homme, Paul Sacher Stiftung, c. 1976–1979. This quotation is taken from the same source — ambiguous as to what it is, whether a letter, programme note, or part of a presentation — as given in note 19, above.   54 Ibid.   55 Ibid.   56 Ibid.   57 Brian Ferneyhough, La terre est un homme (London: Peters Edition, No. 7225, 1980). This edition of the score is used throughout this discussion and all page numbers refer to this edition only.   58 Ferneyhough, unpublished sketch materials, La terre est un homme.   59 Ibid.   60 Ibid.   61 Ibid. This quotation is taken from the same source cited in note 19.   62 Ferneyhough, unpublished sketch materials, La terre est un homme.   63 Ibid.   64 Ibid.   65 See Mahnkopf, “Brian Ferneyhough: ‘La terre est un homme’,” 58.   66 Ibid., 56.   67 Ferneyhough, unpublished sketch materials, La terre est un homme.   68 Ibid. 325

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  69 Ibid.   70 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 267.   71 Ibid., 213.   72 On Unity Capsule, see Artaud, Pierre-Yves. “Unity Capsule, une explosion de quinze minutes,” Entretemps 3 (February, 1987): 107–114; and on La Terre, see Neil Fisher, “Ferneyhough at the Barbican” (review of the BBC Ferneyhough Total Immersion Festival), The Times, February 28, 2011, excerpts accessed at http://www.editionpeters.com/modernnewsdetails. php?articleID=IN00564 (accessed January 18, 2013).   73 Karl Heinz Bohrer, Suddenness: On the Moment of Aesthetic Experience (New York, NJ: Columbia University Press, 1994).   74 Bohrer, cited in Nicholas Rennie, Speculating on the Moment: the Poetics of Time and Recurrence in Goethe, Leopardi and Nietzsche (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2005), 116.   75 Ibid.   76 Virginia Woolf, “A Sketch of the Past,” in Broadview Anthology of British Literature, The concise edition, volume B., ed. Joseph Black et al. (Broadview Press, 2007), 1214.   77 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zorn (London: Pimlico, 1999), 247.   78 Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being (Random House, 2002).   79 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 456. The original, Das Passagen Werk, was edited by Rolf Tiedemann (Suhrkamp Verlag, 1982).   80 Meyer, “Ein Gespräch mit Brian Ferneyhough,” 51.   81 Ibid.   82 Brian Ferneyhough, “Plötzlichkeit,” trans. Lydia Jeschke, Donaueschinger Musiktage (2006): 37.   83 The principle recalls that espoused in the music of John Cage and in particular, the Music of Changes.   84 This term is Ferneyhough’s, used to describe the infiltration of sounds into bars of silence in the Second String Quartet. He also refers to it in a discussion of Michael Finnissy’s Song 9. (See Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 124, 185.) Its use seems appropriate here.   85 Meyer, “Ein Gespräch mit Brian Ferneyhough,” 52.   86 See Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Illuminations (London: Pimlico, 1999), 245–255.   87 Paul Archbold et al., “Performing Complexity,” 13.   88 The latter includes some percussion, piano and voice.   89 Ferneyhough, “Plötzlichkeit,” trans. Jeschke, 37.   90 The first performance was given by the work’s commissioners, the Ensemble Modern/ Franck Ollu at the Munich Biennale, April 25, 2008. The second performance, also the first complete performance, was given by the same ensemble and conductor, October 18, 2008 at the Donaueschinger Musiktage.   91 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 301.   92 Ferneyhough, “Chronos-Aion: Concerto for Ensemble (2008),” http://www.fbbva.es/TLFU/ dat/cd_content_donaueschinger_vol3_ing.pdf (accessed October 10, 2012).   93 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 301. 326

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  94 This is the only appearance of the bass flute in the work.   95 A Roman mosaic dating from the third century BC depicts Aion and Gaia, the circular orb around Aion symbolic of infinite time. See http://faculty.sgc.edu/rkelley/titans_and_ olympians.htm (accessed January 3, 2013).   96 Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester (London: Continuum, 2004), 74.   97 Ferneyhough, “Chronos-Aion: Concerto for Ensemble (2008)”.   98 Deleuze, Logic of Sense, 75.   99 Ferneyhough, “Chronos-Aion: Concerto for Ensemble (2008)”. 100 Suzanne Guerlac, Thinking in Time: An Introduction to Henri Bergson (New York, NJ: Cornell University Press, 2006), 62. 101 Ibid. 102 Ibid., 63. 103 Ibid., 65. 104 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 291. 105 Guerlac, Thinking in Time, 66. 106 This phenomenon is also known as simultaneous delay. See Ferneyhough, “Chronos-Aion: Concerto for Ensemble (2008)”. 107 Ibid. 108 Bergson, quoted in Guerlac, Thinking in Time, 65. 109 Ferneyhough, “Chronos-Aion: Concerto for Ensemble (2008)”. 110 Ibid. 111 See “Biennale Plus (2008),” http://www.muenchener-biennale.de/standard/en/archive/2008/ biennale-plus/ (accessed September 30, 2012). 112 Ferneyhough titles his essay on the flute piece “Unity Capsule: An Instant Diary,” (see Collected Writings, 98–106). Also, he remarks in the notes for the piano solo Opus Contra Naturam (from Shadowtime) that the work reflects a diary of the compositional act over many months (see Ferneyhough, “Composer’s Note,” Shadowtime, London: Peters Edition No. 7606, 2000). 113 Ferneyhough, “Programme Note,” Finis Terrae (2012). Given in French at the première on Monday, November 12, 2012, Opéra National de Paris Bastille/Amphithéâtre. A translation can be found on the website of Exaudi, the performers (along with Ensemble Musikfabrik) at the première. See “Ferneyhough’s Finis Terrae,” http://exaudi2012.wordpress.com/2012/ 12/08/ferneyhoughs-finis-terrae/ (accessed January 3, 2013). 114 Ibid. 115 Ibid. 116 Ibid. 117 Ensemble Linea’s performance of Chronos-Aion from the Zurich Tonhalle, November 11, 2011 is available to view online, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qVplHKrzFwY (accessed January 3, 2013).

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Chapter 11 Aesthetics

A

s the Introduction to this book indicates, what might be called the aesthetic purview of Ferneyhough’s works is often intricately bound up with the techniques and musical objectives of the works themselves, making it all but impossible to draw a line between the two. Consequently, some of what will be discussed in this chapter will re-present or elaborate on earlier parts of the book, but in a context that appraises Ferneyhough’s aesthetic preoccupations, as far as possible, on their own terms. After initially drawing together the composer’s defining aesthetic concerns as they have manifested themselves to date, key concepts will be addressed in turn, offering further perspectives on the oeuvre to complement those addressed previously. In an interview conducted in 1990, Ferneyhough reflects that ‘for me, a piece of music tends to grow like a coral reef, accumulating or sedimenting the remains of many small animalculae.’1 The image applies equally well to the aesthetic speculations that amass throughout his career, the composer drawing on a diverse range of extra-musical perspectives as well as sustained discourses ranging from investigations into the palpability of time to Walter Benjamin’s theory of reproduction. Ferneyhough’s development of, and return to, certain key concepts throughout his career amounts to a consistently developed aesthetic vision. Throughout this book, shifts have been noted in Ferneyhough’s musical style. One in particular coincides with the composition of Shadowtime, during and after which the presentation of his notation and key aspects of his musical language such as form and rhythm undergo significant change (leading to the fragment-form of the most recent ensemble works, which often includes extended regular ostinatos to create a distinctive texture-type, for example). Broadly, parallel shifts can be identified in his aesthetic preoccupations: his latest compositions seek to ‘embody or reflect life’:2 like the opera, Finis Terrae is concerned with the human condition, placing the six singers — an allegory for the last vestiges of humankind — at the centre of a bleak landscape. Timelessness is confronted by the end of time. Earlier works including Epicycle, Transit and Lemma-Icon-Epigram ‘represent[ed] cognitive disciplines that somehow lend powers of speech to the world-view of earlier generations.’3 Difference is enshrined in Ferneyhough’s technical approach: Transit, which includes six voices whose text is, by processual means, a generator of parametric material and obscured for the main part by phonetic setting, amasses ‘concepts and superpose[s] them like so many slides, making it possible to find overlapping co-ordinates. [Ferneyhough tried] to build up a certain intelligible correspondence to these thought patterns in the music.’4 Finis Terrae, which also includes six voices, sets as mundane a text as possible but obscures

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the voices by having the ensemble overpower them on sufficient occasions as to place the singers in an analogous position to the diminished humanity they represent, engulfed within a larger, ultimately indestructible (musical) landscape. When Ferneyhough suggests that his music has become ‘more receptive to implications not intrinsic to music itself ’, he invokes this kind of aesthetic, imbricated with reality or what could be.5 Broadly speaking, although the locus of challenges faced by his performers has changed, the basic principles remain intact. Transit dates from a period in which Ferneyhough invested considerable effort into problematizing notation, requiring ‘mental polyphony’ of the performer; in Finis Terrae the psychological challenge to the singers arises from the necessity of learning the parts in the level of detail demanded by the score whilst knowing that in performance some of that detail will be lost. The fine line that Ferneyhough treads between pushing the performer to the limits of endurance and valuing this as a positive attribute in the production of the ‘work’ is probably the most fundamental aesthetic objective to obtain in his music. Before considering particular aesthetic issues in detail, it is worth establishing the parameters within which it is reasonable to consider Ferneyhough’s ‘aesthetics’ as an area of study in itself. There is a great difference between considering him a philosopher-composer and a philosopher and composer. The following observation on the relationship between music and language — one of the most significant and recurrent areas of enquiry informing his composition — is indicative of his approach to the musical work: I have sometimes spoken of music as being, if not a language, then amenable to being treated as if it were a language. This primarily operative assumption aids my stylistic evolution to the extent that it enables me to ignore wider philosophical concerns which, because articulating more abstract issues, are likely to stand in the way of concrete, context oriented enactments of meaning production.6 This insight is invaluable. Much as he may refer to his alchemical studies of the 1970s,7 and however obvious it might be that he has absorbed Benjamin’s ideas to a considerable degree, he places the utility of concepts for the concrete generation of musical ideas ahead of abstract philosophical principles, suggesting that his responses to texts and art forms are personal, appropriating as necessary ideas that enhance his notion of musical meaning: ‘what is musical meaning, if not the revelation of new perspectives according to constantly mutating sets of (musically immanent) rules of play?’8 He is aware that conceptual transferability from one form of discourse to another is often problematic, but avoids becoming locked into the extensive philosophical debates to have arisen on this point. If anything, he sees the relationships between language, painting, philosophy and music that his work variously investigates as another form of ‘energy transfer’. He argues that he is little ‘concerned with fabricating some consistent unification of intellectual origins. For me, music is nothing if not a kernel, a nucleus, around which cultural fragments capable of mutual relativization can gather, in order that a higher (although more heterogeneous) entity may be constructed.’9 332

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Mysticism and Alchemy Ferneyhough is by no means the first composer to draw on principles of mysticism and alchemy in his compositions. His attraction to Webern’s techniques, his interest in late Renaissance and early Baroque composers and culture, and the resonances with Stockhausen’s music at various junctures in his career, all suggest that he has also absorbed something of their respective interests in mysticism. In support of the notion of ‘energy transfer’ (the fundamental principle of alchemy), he observes that: I tend to adopt a more ‘catastrophic’ approach to learning, which involves the violent confrontation or superimposition of modes of discourse which, prima vista, might seem incompatible or even actively antagonistic to one another. Very often these partial confrontations point to unexpected areas of correspondence, to new momentary integrations of startling intensity.10 It is no exaggeration to claim that much of Ferneyhough’s later aesthetic identity emerges from his early studies in alchemy and mysticism: the links with Benjamin, for example (‘momentary integrations of startling intensity’), are unmistakable. Whilst no devotee of the belief systems themselves — the composer characterizes himself as a ‘mystique sceptique’ [skeptic mystic] — he is principally attracted to these ideas on account of their pertinence and conducibility to music-immanent innovations.11 In a number of cases discussed in previous chapters, particular sources have a direct impact on musical form, including Transit, Sieben Sterne and Lemma-Icon-Epigram. The alchemical tenet by which opposites are joined together in a consubstantial unity (the conjunctio oppositorum) is represented by the alternation of voice and instrumental verses in Transit and the juxtaposition of word and image in the emblem, exemplified in Lemma-Icon-Epigram.12 The number of occasions on which Ferneyhough draws on an image of the world is remarkable (Piranesi, Matta, Brueghel, Flammarion, Dürer) and this, allied with his predilection for proportional systems and the concept of fashioning order from chaos, suggests the extent to which he is in sympathy — surprisingly, perhaps, for someone often portrayed as an arch-Modernist — with Renaissance thinking.13 One of Ferneyhough’s fundamental premises concerns the necessary imposition of a forcible order on a ‘mass of initially unformed or unarticulated emotional, creative volition, the drive which leads on to create anything at all.’14 Various musical processes — often numerically generated, according to proportional relationships — give shape to this elemental matter: Ferneyhough in this sense corresponds to a compositional type, that of the Demiurgic figure or ‘world creator’ (in the manner of, say, Stockhausen) described in Plato’s Timaeus, who creates a world order out of chaos. Plato’s dialogue remained popular throughout the Renaissance when alchemical speculations were at their high point. According to Ferneyhough: The sort of structural setup which interests me is the one in which the constellations of detail emerge from the monolithic mass or block of creative drive, not by multiplication 333

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but by division, by being channelled forcibly through the precompositional grid […] It’s the instant at which the impacting of our will to order and the instinct to impose the self over all forms of external ordering actually produces some sort of explosively volatile mixture.15 The analogy applies equally well to Ferneyhough’s performer.16 The composer implies this with a certain irony: the instruction to the ’cellist in Time and Motion Study II to approach the final section with ‘passionate dedication and self-transcendence’, touches on the mystical belief that insight into the unity (harmony) of different elements is itself a kind of transcendence, beyond earthly enlightenment.17 The very title of the flute solo Unity Capsule, along with Ferneyhough’s attempts to capture ‘the form, material and absolute articulative qualities specific to the flute’ in indivisible unity implies a similar allegorical intention on the composer’s part.18 The alchemical motto ‘solve et coagula’ [dissolve and coagulate/make solid/concentrate] provides a useful focus for Ferneyhough’s deconstructed parametric notation typical of the 1970s, in the interpretation of which the performer must first ‘dissolve’ the information in the score, their learned technique and even accepted instrumental norms, and put them back together anew. Only in this sense does Ferneyhough ever hint at the most famous alchemical endeavour, to turn base metals into gold: in the flute solos, as indicated in Chapter 3, the ‘true flute’ is revealed.19 Deleted or superseded works consolidate the composer’s interests of the time still further. Perspectivae (no date, intended instrumentation unknown) is a case in point: it is unclear from what little sketch materials are preserved whether this was a working title for a piece ultimately published under a different name, or an abandoned idea. A short text — perhaps a draft for part of a programme or prefatory note — draws once again on alchemical concepts, including the juxtaposition of opposites, suggesting that as in Transit, they were to impact on the projected form: ‘Perspectivae’ This piece may be understood as a cross between a ‘black scherzo’ and a fractured perpetuum mobile. Its initial conception dates from a visit to Berlin, where I chanced to come across a tract which, whilst purporting to didactically exhibit the basic methods of using perspective to represent basic geometrical forms (the cube, globe, dodecahedron etc.) in fact had obviously used this external form as the point of departure for a typical exuberant Renaissance fantasy in which the almost exotic and unpredictable figures were generated. It was this juxtaposition of the specifically learned with a spirit of playful enquiry which I found especially appealing and which, in distorted form I aimed at recreating in this composition.20 Ferneyhough’s long-term engagement with the Renaissance emblem emerges from his study of Renaissance ideas, and intersects with another major interest: the writings of Walter Benjamin. Though written alongside the early sketches for the Carceri cycle and 334

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employing the gestural language that defines works of the 1980s, Lemma-Icon-Epigram is an outgrowth of an idea begun in the mid-1970s (Emblemata) that Ferneyhough abandoned, and which reflects in its form the tripartite schema of Alciati’s emblem. He recalls that Over the years, the detritus of images and partial images associated with my alchemical and metaphysical studies, or Renaissance studies, began to accumulate around a core, and this core was […] the idea of Denkbilder: pictures to help you think, or ‘thinking pictures’ — it’s very ambiguous, of course.21 By his own account, the composer did not become aware of the extent to which Benjamin was ‘obsessed’ with the emblem until later, at which point Lemma took on a retroactive significance.22 Benjamin was fascinated by aphoristic expression and ‘scraps’ in general: he prized the ‘autobiography’ of discarded, valueless items at the flea-market, the Surrealist ‘attempt to capture the portrait of history in the most insignificant representations of reality’,23 and the riddles in Alciati’s emblem books. His insight into language was from the perspective of the translator, in which he observed a moment of ‘transference’ between languages,24 which both presumes (given the very possibility of translation) the existence of an unspoken ‘true language’,25 and by extension envisages a moment of modulation between language and other forms of expression such as the visual.26 His metaphysical speculations thus caused him ‘not to investigate the utilitarian or communicative functions of linguistic creations, but to understand them in their crystallized and thus ultimately fragmentary form as intentionless and noncommunicative utterances of a “world essence”.’27 Another aspect of Benjamin’s life seems significant here: his propensity to wander (flânerie), which his enforced departure from Germany casts in a bitterly ironic light, emphasizing the dis-location of his biography. For Ferneyhough, both the content and the context of Benjamin’s work takes on a significance whose effects are felt beyond the overtly ‘Benjaminian’ works such as Kurze Schatten II and Lemma. Reflecting on the final bars of his Fourth String Quartet, in which the singer has to employ many unspecified foreign accents to articulate different syllables in whichever language(s) she deduces them to represent, Ferneyhough suggests that ‘in a sense, that’s a symbol, an image of the entire work: that all forms of contemporary expression are, in some measure, expatriate.’28 Time as History and as Sensation The greatest distillation of the composer’s affinity with Benjaminian thought is of course the opera, Shadowtime. Its very title foregrounds Ferneyhough’s return to the image of the shadow, having explored a so-called ‘time-sun’ in both the Icon section of Lemma-Icon-Epigram and Kurze Schatten II. As indicated in Chapter 3 Ferneyhough conceives of ‘shadow pieces’ that only begin after the end of a piece proper (both something that the listener experiences 335

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when trying to make sense of what has been heard, and that the composer reckons with, knowing that alternative solutions could have been pursued in creating a work. The latter is never simply an object with finite borders to be filed away ‘complete’: it immediately generates new ideas).29 In this sense, Lemma is already a shadow piece in relation to the incomplete Emblemata. The opera envisages Benjamin’s shadow afterlife as an extension of these musical principles. In his Seventeenth Thesis on the Philosophy of History, Benjamin writes that ‘thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well. Where thinking suddenly stops in a configuration pregnant with tensions, it gives that configuration a shock, by which it crystallizes into a monad.’30 The form of Shadowtime becomes an allegory for Benjamin’s perspective on history. He contrasts two paradigms, suggesting that history viewed or constructed as a continuum of cause and effect from a retroactive standpoint ‘musters a mass of [additive] data to fill the homogenous, empty time’,31 but arguing further that ‘every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably.’32 Thus the present ‘is not a transition, but [...] time stands still and has come to a stop’:33 on several occasions, Benjamin refers to the blasting open of the historical continuum, a ‘Messianic cessation of happening’, the end of history.34 He cites the French revolutionaries as an example: The awareness that they are about to make the continuum of history explode is characteristic of the revolutionary classes at the moment of their action […] On the first evening of fighting it turned out that the clocks in towers were being fired on simultaneously and independently from several places in Paris.35 The revolutionaries fired ‘in order to stop the day.’36 Ferneyhough reflects this standstill in the fragmented form of Les Froissements des Ailes de Gabriel — ‘time filled by the presence of the now’ — and its distillation into a freestanding guitar duet No Time (At All).37 He also refers to the fourth scene (Opus Contra Naturam) as ‘the central slowdown, the frozen heart of the opera.’38 For Benjamin, ‘the relation of what-has-been to the now is dialectical: it is not progression, but image, suddenly emergent.’39 As Graham Lack observes, at various junctures in Shadowtime — the end of Scene I being one example (bar 287ff.) — ‘there might be a sudden simplification of the musical language, this rare moment in any Ferneyhough score resulting in a window opening and an immediate slowing down of subjective time. Our encounters with history are like the stuff of history itself, or an historical thesis at least, one in which the reader experiences a number of blinding insights.’40 Scene 5, Pools of Darkness, offers a double reading of encounters with history. Benjamin’s avatar meets historical figures who interrogate him whilst Ferneyhough surveys numerous historical musical forms, or rather processes (fugato, isorhythm) and techniques (passacaglia, chaconne), none of which has a direct bearing on the form of each ‘interrogation’ as such (in contradistinction to some of the scenes of Berg’s Wozzeck).41 336

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For Benjamin, as for Jean-François Lyotard, the Enlightenment theory of historical progress is a ‘grand narrative’ or rationale. Lyotard’s ‘little narratives’ of the postmodern consciousness recognize difference, and Benjamin pursues a similar principle to the furthest degree, delighting in the smallest, seemingly most insignificant things. Hannah Arendt recounts an occasion on which Benjamin excitedly showed his mentor Gershom Scholem (who features in Ferneyhough’s opera) ‘two grains of wheat in the Jewish section of the Musée Cluny “on which a kindred soul had inscribed the complete Shema Israel”.’42 His concept of aura is as pertinent to unique, invaluable works of art as to the discarded bric-à-brac of the flea-market: Benjamin found rich historical relevance in each. The same philosophy applies to the individual subject, whose everyday life is forgotten in the grand narrative of events. He quotes an unnamed contemporary biologist, noting that ‘[t]he paltry fifty millennia of homo sapiens constitute something like two seconds at the close of a twenty-four hour day. On this scale, the history of civilized mankind would fill one-fifth of the last second of the last hour.’43 Ferneyhough’s interest in Benjamin’s life — or rather the catastrophe it became — reflects his own differentiation between History as narrative and the subjective history or time of the individual. As is well known, a momentous event in Benjamin’s life — his suicide — was occasioned by what was, statistically speaking, a tiny chance of bad luck: had he chosen any other day on which to arrive at the Spanish border, his passage through Spain and on to North America would likely have been a formality.44 Benjamin’s endgame is reinforced in the eventual gridlock in Ferneyhough’s setting of ‘Cannot Cross’, the third movement of The Doctrine of Similarity. Bernstein’s poem already tends towards such gridlock, moving from three or four words per line to two: ‘Cannot cross/Cannot cross.’45 The text is distributed among many voices in abbreviated musical statements at the beginning of the work, so that successively, single voices contribute a phoneme to a complete word (Figure 11.1). As the piece continues, musical fragments become ever more terse and isolated between rests (as in bars 16–20 for example) as different lines of text begin to pile up on top of each other. The range of vocal techniques and colour also expands. By the end, what began as a linear enunciation of the text in the manner described above has become verticalized atrophied time (as in bar 33ff., given in Figure 11.2): the original continuity, or whole, is replaced by Ferneyhough’s insight into Benjamin’s subjective time, his Jetztzeit, or ‘here and now.’ In many respects, Benjamin’s whole philosophy of history is contained in the image of the Angel of History he appropriated from Klee’s Angelus Novus in the Ninth Thesis: the angel faces backwards, not forwards with an intent to overcome historical obstacles; he would like to stay still [‘No Time at All’], but the storm of progress forces him into the future; his perspective on the past sees catastrophe, where ours permits a false narrative continuity. Crucially, though, the angel’s wings are spread: he is unable to close them to counter the storm.47 The angel features in Ferneyhough’s opera no fewer than three times, and the guitar concerto is surely Ferneyhough’s own meditation on Benjamin’s Ninth Thesis. In  addition to the ironic invocation of the Angel Gabriel, who announces the 337

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Figure 11.1:  Shadowtime, Scene III, ‘Cannot Cross’, bars 1–3.46

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Figure 11.2:  Shadowtime, Scene III, ‘Cannot Cross’, conclusion, bars 33–35.

coming of the Messiah, he simultaneously conjures another angel: the trumpeting angel that heralds the end of time, as in Messiaen’s quartet. Both are present at once (enhanced by the fragment ‘now-time’ form of the second scene). According to Benjamin, the present ‘as a model of Messianic time, comprises the entire history of mankind in an enormous abridgement.’48 339

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The concept of time as sensation in the musical experience has been one of Ferneyhough’s central concerns for much of his career. The Benjaminian perspectives outlined above constitute its largest-scale and furthest developed aspect, but fundamentally the aspiration to render time as a concrete presence arises within a purely musical context, in common with many other composers, in the aftermath of total serialism. Before the opera, the most substantial body of work devoted to ‘a detailed examination of the multifaceted nature of time’ is the tripartite Time and Motion Study cycle.49 Time and Motion Study II explores the relationship between time and memory in a manner that prefigures the more explicitly Benjaminian perspectives of the opera.50 Whilst the live ’cello materials represent in their textural consistency — and sustained difficulty of performative demands — the goal-oriented industrial efficiency referred to in the piece’s title, the use of live transformation, which samples and distorts specific fragments, reintroducing them at several seconds’ delay, is analogous to memory retrieval. Ferneyhough understands this to be instantaneous and in the order of the psyche’s conscious or unconscious determination: thus memories are excised from the temporal continuum of their original happening, and called forth, interrupting linear time.51 In both Mnemosyne and the ’cello piece, the pre-recorded and the live transformation materials, respectively, fulfil this function, acting as ‘catastrophic time-line modifiers’,52 another manifestation of ‘interference form’ discussed in Chapter 3. The physicality of time pressing upon the ’cellist is shared with the audience in the ‘theatre’ of the performance, enhanced by the imposing presence of the electronic equipment. In Mnemosyne, the oppression is less overtly theatrical, in keeping with the stylistic turn of the early 1980s towards material-bound gestural expression: the composer seeks to ‘focus temporal awareness through the lens of material.’53 As the tape pitches increase, the pitches in the live solo become ever more restricted, effecting a large-scale formal cross-play in the work that invokes at least some aspects of Stockhausen’s Kreuzspiel. In the first section of the latter, initial registral extremes are gradually exchanged (Ferneyhough’s ‘transposes’ Stockhausen’s registral contrast onto that between tape and live flute) whilst the overall structure of the movement is determined by the parameter of duration. Both works share a concern with the moment-to-moment shaping of time, which is rendered sensible through long-range transformations in pitch materials, a strikingly simple idea. In Shadowtime, as noted in Chapter 9, Benjamin’s (irregular) heartbeat is represented in the vocal material, the Innkeeper’s refrain ‘Herr Benjamin, Frau Gurland’ and various instrumental lines (as from bar 261ff.). Although such representation may be called for by the operatic genre, the conventions of which are of course only barely observed in Scene I and thereafter hardly at all, Ferneyhough extrapolates from the experience and revisits such direct invocations of ‘human time’ or ‘somatic time’ in other recent works. The Sixth Quartet is the most obvious example, as a representative of all the works composed in fragments: Ferneyhough has progressively focused down his temporal perspectives from the grand ambition of Epicycle or Firecycle Beta, based on cyclical rhythmic structures emblematic of the Heraclitean cycle of the earth’s renewal by fire, to the time particular to small fragments, in which the gestures map closely onto the rhythms of the human body. The role of the 340

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second violin comes closest to maintaining a ‘heartbeat’ in the Sixth Quartet, against which the remainder of the ensemble material is experienced (as too fast, too slow, regular, irregular and so on). The tendency to map from this to human emotions and characteristics that range from calm to hysterical in the expressive directions given to the performers is perhaps telling, and contrasted with the deliberately extreme instructions of the 1970s, which evoke atypical human responses, including homicidal aggression (Time and Motion Study II). The Gesture and Figure: Implications of the Visual It is not only Ferneyhough’s music that explores image; his writings about his music also  reference images, exploring his concept of a ‘higher’, if heterogeneous, entity (mentioned above). Notwithstanding his often repeated claims that ‘there is absolutely no illustrative intent in [his] composition’, several examples have been given in previous chapters of particular images being called forth in the music.54 His categorical tone in denying this reflects his conviction that his compositions neither set ‘some extra-musical textual or conceptual construct’, nor offer a programme ‘according to which the piece’s form would be referentially defined.’55 Nevertheless, despite critical appraisals that draw attention to Ferneyhough’s fondness for abstraction (such as those noted in Chapter 2), his musical expression is often disarmingly romantic, not least on account of the associations it evokes. Be that as it may, Ferneyhough’s music draws on images (and permits them to arise) principally by engaging with the formal energies inherent in specific images, such as the confusing perspectival lines of Piranesi’s Carceri d’Invenzione. In La Chute d’Icare it is less the story of Icarus per se that interests Ferneyhough than Brueghel’s marginalization of the tiny figure’s predicament. The formal tensions obtaining in both cases become stimuli to musical invention. In his writings, Ferneyhough often expresses ideas in relation to visual images or experiences, finding metaphorical thinking of this order (given that he is dealing with aural art in the first instance) useful for articulating musical intentions. The images in question might be dreams, geological phenomena or artworks. It is surely not too great a stretch to suggest that his principal mode of reflection when conceptualizing in the context of interviews, for example, is in visual terms. This may be evidence of Ferneyhough’s multi-disciplinary ‘Renaissance thinking’ or of his self-confessed predilection for covering his tracks in matters of compositional detail (since it helps cloak the musical detail itself).56 It  is undeniable, however, that the imagery and concepts derived from his experience of the visual arts provide a rich additional layer to his creative approach and self-reflection. This is as true at the beginning of the creative process as at the end: the earliest sketches for pieces seem full of references to images, literary quotations, or even Ferneyhough’s own drawings. Only at a later stage do concrete musical workings overtake these spurs to thought. Then, as the composer reflects on the finished work in interview, the image is often foregrounded once more. Despite the obvious differences between the visual and aural, creative ‘transference’ 341

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between these two sense domains is fundamental to that pre-compositional process, but its legacy remains in the finished piece. According to the composer: The first sensation, the experience which begins to persuade me that I am actually going to write a piece, is very often a cross between a tactile, a visual and an aural one. That is, I tend to perceive a mass, almost a tangible or sculpted mass, in some sort of imagined space, which is made up of these various elements — it might be a certain mass of undifferentiated instrumental colours, it might be a certain register, it might be a certain kind of transformation from one type or state to another, in some way congealed into one momentary experience.57 Although the focus here is on the individual piece, the combination of the tactile, visual and aural underlies at least two major concepts that become prominent in Ferneyhough’s writings from the 1980s onwards (even if musically, they are in evidence earlier). These include ‘interference form’ (discussed in Chapter 3) and the gesture and its subcategory, the figure. Although gesture and figure have been considered to some degree in previous chapters (mainly Chapter 6), their non-musical context has been but little elaborated. Examples given in relation to the string quartets and the Carceri cycle take on extra meaning in light of the following discussion. It should not be lost sight of that at the same time that it establishes a polemic against Neue Einfachheit ideology, Ferneyhough’s concept of gesture is also a form of critique of serial parametric ideology: No longer does one attempt to create a gesture via the automatic coming together of abstract parametric units or quantities, nor does one try to build a gesture as an affective quality, and place these totalities against one another. One attempts to so construct gestures that the parametric qualities of which they are composed are released into the world of the music, as it were, into the future, the future potential of the music, at the moment in which the gesture presents itself.58 Ferneyhough’s term for the agency that extends the life or ‘autohistory’ of the gesture is the figure. It ensures the gesture’s integration into the musical discourse over the longer-term. The term ‘figure’, as Ferneyhough intends it, draws heavily on its meaning in Gilles Deleuze’s Francis Bacon: Logique de la sensation, a study of the painter in which Deleuze considers Bacon’s relationship to the figurative tradition.59 Ferneyhough read the text in 1981, the year of its publication, and the means by which Deleuze conceptualizes Bacon’s techniques offered a framework for articulating already latent musical strategies. Even in the works of the Carceri cycle, which are nominally a response to Piranesi’s eponymous etchings, Ferneyhough’s interest in Deleuze’s reading of Bacon plays a significant formative role in establishing the relationship between musical gesture and ‘figure’. However, as in all cases of extra-musical relevance, the concept’s primary utility is expressed in music-specific terms: 342

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A gesture whose component defining features — timbre, pitch contour, dynamic level etc. — display a tendency towards escaping from that specific context in order to become independently signifying radicals, free to recombine, to ‘solidify’ into further gestural forms may, for want of other nomenclature, be termed a figure. The deliberate enhancement of the separatist potential of specific parametric aspects of the figure produces a unit at one and the same time material presence, semantic sign and temporary focus of the lines of organizational force until the moment of their often violent release.60 As is evident from Ferneyhough’s explanations, the principal stylistic issue concerns the treatment of musical parameters, which he recognizes are qualitatively different from one another and experienced as such by the listener. Both Jonathan Harvey and Richard Toop identify the composer’s development of their ‘gestural, expressive independence’ as fundamental to his striking out beyond his serial heritage:61 Whereas early European serialism, as embodied in much of Stockhausen’s early work, allowed the various parameters to operate as independent, ‘statistical’ variables – as independent ‘monads,’ so to speak – in Ferneyhough’s mature work the parameters almost always act and interact as part of an organic unity, with a clear processual intent.62 Although Ferneyhough suggests that the term ‘figure’ has been chosen to describe this phenomenon only ‘for want of other nomenclature’ it is, nonetheless, a deliberate and meaningful choice. Deleuze’s study, which also draws on Bacon’s statements about his own work and that of others, makes much of the painter’s well-known obscuration of the figurative tradition. The figurative is considered the domain of conventional representation, whilst by contrast the figure [i]s not simply the isolated body, but also the deformed body that escapes from itself. What makes deformation a destiny is that the body has a necessary relationship with the natural structure: not only does the material structure curl around it, but the body must return to the material structure and dissipate into it.63 Bacon’s iconic screaming Popes embody these principles. His Study after Velázquez’s Portrait of (1953) positions the Pope within a constraining geometrical structure, and a textured background (a curtain?) at the same time, apparently impossibly, obscures the figure’s face and throne: the material structure both encloses the figure and the body indeed returns to it.64 Deleuze argues that ‘the scream, Bacon’s scream, is the operation through which the entire body escapes through the mouth.’65 The Figure at a Washbasin (1976) takes this still further, portraying ‘the Figure that wants to pass through a vanishing point in the contour in order to dissipate into the  material structure.’66 Ferneyhough’s rationale for his compositional procedures echoes Deleuze’s terms: 343

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It was thus the overall decontextualization of parametric structuring which led inevitably to the decay of compositional credibility, not any particular inadequacy inhering in the view of a sonic event as being a momentary fixing of a number of independently moving streams of information. On the contrary, the resultant ‘dematerialization’ of the event, its radiation into, and illumination of its defining context, is an essential prerequisite for the establishment of those taut chains of mutually embedded perspectives without which the event must needs remain largely incommunicado in respect of larger formal concerns. In this fashion, the event experiences a return to itself as affective substance at the very moment at which the illusion of a stable identity is processually transcended.67 The geometric ‘frame’ is a common feature of Bacon’s work, although it takes on different forms, and contributes to the bare, angular backgrounds that focus attention on the figure itself.68 Deleuze and Bacon propose various interpretations: it helps the viewer to see the figure better; it exerts a force upon the figure to counterbalance the figure’s own ‘escape from itself ’; and it isolates the figure, preventing its participation in any ‘narrative’ interpretation of the work.69 Put simply, Bacon enacts violence upon the figure, the trace of that violence is palpable in the paintings, but no story of violence is represented on the canvas. The Pope screams at nothing. Bacon is anxious to ‘bring the figurative thing up onto the nervous system more violently and more poignantly’ and to avoid painting ‘that tells you the story in a long diatribe through the brain.’70 The undermining of representation in figurative painting is key to Bacon’s style, as it is to Ferneyhough in the musical domain, the composer suggesting that ‘the main argument against most New Romantic phenomena is that the iconic representation theory (on whatever level) leaves the single gestural unit of significance on a rather isolated and formally ineffective island.’71 Bacon makes no claim to be the first artist to paint ‘sensation’, citing Rembrandt and Velázquez as particularly powerful precedents, but his figurative interpretation in a post-photographic era presents challenges that previous generations did not have to contend with, which he addresses with a degree of physicality — including throwing and flicking paint at the canvas — more typical of abstract expressionist painters. Although as a musician Ferneyhough does not enjoy the immediacy of relationship to his material that a painter does, tiny adjustments to processual materials made intuitively are nonetheless redolent of Bacon’s flair for enhancing the figure with an apparently spontaneous flick of paint. For Bacon, a whip of thick oil paint ‘manipulate[s] this paint further into — anyway, for me — a greater intensity.’72 Examples include the Portrait of George Dyer in a Mirror (1968) and the outer panels of the Triptych — May–June 1973. In Ferneyhough’s case, ‘figural enhancement’ may involve applying tuplets to the ends and beginnings of figures spontaneously, in order to speed them up or draw attention to them (as in Intermedio alla ciaccona), or some of the more extravagant glissandi in Exordium.73 It is by now clearly possible to draw parallels between Bacon/Deleuze’s ‘body’, ‘figure’ and material structure and Ferneyhough’s ‘gesture’, ‘figure’ and musical structure respectively. Furthermore, both consider their materials to be self-motivated. Deleuze argues that ‘the body is not simply waiting for something from the structure, it is waiting for something 344

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inside itself, it exerts an effort upon itself in order to become a figure. Now it is inside the body that something is happening; the body is the source of movement.’74 Ferneyhough concurs when he suggests that ‘a mode of composition which enhances the affective gesture with the energy to productively dissolve itself in a quasi-analytical fashion suggests itself since, by adopting such a standpoint, the gesture is brought to function in several ways simultaneously, thus throwing its shadow beyond the limits set by its physical borders.’75 The examples of figures in Ferneyhough’s music referred to earlier in this book, including the opening of Lemma-Icon-Epigram and Song 4 of the Etudes transcendantales as well as (on the larger scale) the beginning of Carceri I, acquire further significance in light of the Baconian-Deleuzian context described. Like Ferneyhough, Deleuze thrives on the possibilities of creative ‘transference’ between artistic domains, and makes an important point as relevant to the composer as to the painter whose deformation of representational conventions he appraises: ‘in art, and in painting as in music, it is not a matter of reproducing or inventing forms, but of capturing forces.’76 It is also imperative that the artwork render those forces perceptible as sensation: despite Ferneyhough’s undoubtedly formidable abstraction and the layers of complex sieves and filters through which material is forced and organized, something of the original composite tactile sensation that prompts him to compose in the first place obtains in the finished work. He argues that ‘the musical event is defined by its capacity to render visible the forces acting on it as well as the energies thereby set free.’77 This relates to the summoning of temporal sensation in the musical work: The more the internal integrity of the musical event suggests its autonomy, the less the capacity of the ‘time arrow’ to traverse it with impunity; it is bent by the contact. By the same token, however, the impact of the time vector ‘damages’ the event-object, thus forcing it to reveal its own generative history.78 His thoughts are analogous to Deleuze’s, the latter observing in relation to Bacon’s figures that ‘for a sensation to exist, a force must be exerted on a body, on a point of the wave.’79 Ferneyhough consolidates his concepts of figure and force in particular in his 1984 essay ‘Il Tempo Della Figura’, whose prefatory quotation is an excerpt of a lengthy poem by John Ashbery, which offers the same image of the wave.80 Bacon’s whips of paint are not the only traces of directional force left in his finished canvases. He adds arrows in some paintings, and more often rubs areas of a figure (with his hand, dust from his studio floor, or a cloth) to blur its features. Rather than rendering features less precise, the scrubbed ‘zones of indiscernibility’81 indicate what is figural in the image: ‘they are nonrepresentative, nonillustrative, nonnarrative. They are no longer either significant or signifiers: they are asignifying traits. They are traits of sensation.’82 It has been proposed that the zones d’indiscernabilité [zones of indiscernibility] identified by Deleuze in respect of Bacon’s paintings become zones d’injouabilité [zones of unplayability] in Ferneyhough’s works.83 According to Alain Beaulieu, these are localized, and never 345

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proliferate (as in Bacon’s paintings: the painter expresses distaste for ‘sloppy’ proliferation in abstract expressionism).84 Beaulieu draws on Pierre-Yves Artaud’s essay on Unity Capsule in which the flautist discusses the impossibility of performing a piece with 100 percent accuracy, given the demands of the notational detail.85 Artaud remarks on Ferneyhough’s propensity to effect temporal distortion in the rapid — too rapid — succession of musical events in a given time-frame.86 It is possible to extend analogies between Ferneyhough’s performer and Bacon’s figures still further, considering a work such as Time and Motion Study II in which the performer becomes, in a sense, a real-time ‘figure’, flirting with representation, but ultimately focused on conveying sensation. Significantly, both Unity Capsule and Time and Motion Study II predate the publication of Deleuze’s Logic of Sensation, and yet devices analogous to Bacon’s frames are present in the ’cello piece (the eight speakers, wires and other electronic equipment, processed material returning at a delay), the ‘deformation’ of the figure clear by the end, as the ’cellist slumps over his or her instrument, the presence of the text inviting a Deleuzian interpretation. The verbalization is akin to the Pope’s scream: ‘what fascinates Bacon is […] all the interior forces that climb through the flesh. To make the spasm visible. The entire body becomes plexus […] the entire body trying to escape, to flow out of itself […] the Figures themselves always present scrubbed zones and blurred ones which attest to this dissipation.’87 Language and Music Language plays a fundamental role in Ferneyhough’s expressive world on numerous levels, from his apparently riddle-like programme notes, interviews, wide-ranging and  avidly consumed reading materials, to his interrogation of possible structural and semantic relationships between language and music, either in compositions for voice(s) and instrument(s), or in music’s ‘speech-likeness’. His sketches are peppered with quotations and references to literature, as well as various statements and drafts of what later become essays or presentations. As much as he is compelled to compose music, he is driven to write. He writes poetry himself and resided for a sizeable proportion of his career in Germany, adopting it as a ‘thinking language’ on the evidence of various sketches for pieces in the 1970s and early ’80s. To begin with, around 1968 he ‘spent a significant period virtually speechless’ whilst he learned German.88 ‘In some ways’, he admits in a rare published reference to his childhood, it ‘mirrored my experiences, as a child, of having to carefully “translate” censored aspects of my inner world into the words of the people around me.’89 This has undoubtedly contributed to his idiosyncratic use of language, coupled with an instinct for self-protection cultivated at an early age, to judge from that last remark — again, covering his tracks — evident in the published writings and interviews. Language assumes the role, later, of a space in which the composer is able to articulate complex ideas meaningfully, but do so whilst retaining a distance from those who expect digestible explanations of his music. Richard Toop and James Boros are frank in their introduction to 346

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the Collected Writings: ‘the reader will doubtless be struck by the individuality of Ferneyhough’s English usage — potentially the despair of any house editor.’90 The complexity of Ferneyhough’s language is both deliberate and yet indicative of the way he thinks about music, and himself: a letter to Harry Halbreich, in which he recounts some motivations and workings in Time and Motion Study I, is expressed in the same language as a published essay on his own work.91 This is important, because while some have interpreted his manner of speaking about [his] music as being needlessly rhetorical and designed to obfuscate, his personal correspondence is often no less challengingly expressed.92 One particular case of interest is the category of programme notes, Ferneyhough’s approach to which exemplifies his more general aesthetic: The texts I sometimes offer (only when asked!) are certainly not intended as descriptions of my music in a direct sense: after all, there are a number of stages of the compositional process associated with verbal, conceptual activity, each of which is capable of making a specific contribution to the work’s unique ambience. This many-layered aspect of creativity should surely be emphasized, not eliminated. Also, a text can stand in all sorts of relationships to the work with which it is nominally associated, even to the extent, for instance, of collecting together aspects of the original ideational ‘background’ not expressed directly in the music itself — remainders if you like.93 He suggests, further, that programme notes possess an ‘exemplificatory’ function, which allows the resonance of the music to be projected into the linguistic dimension.94 In this sense the programme note is not prefatory to the work, to prepare the ground, but another example of a shadow, beginning where the work itself ends. His involvement with Emblema is recalled in this relationship between music and writing in which both explicate, in different terms, the work or ‘idea’; the concluding Epigram section of Lemma is, likewise, a kind of programme note in musical terms. A telling anecdote, which is surely exaggerated but nevertheless revealing, refers once again to his immersion in the German language, which for all sorts of reasons (bringing him closer to the Austro-Germanic tradition to which his music is in many ways indebted, as well as representing his first international recognition) marks a pivotal moment in his life. He recalls that The way I finally learned German was by reading masses of classical texts and making lengthy vocabulary lists […] so that I could read Goethe with reasonable facility almost before I could confidently order a cup of coffee in a café. This sense of culturally incongruous or inappropriate verbal comportment had remained actively with me ever since, to such an extent that extricating myself from the influence of vernaculars as such has never been as much of a problem as finding some modus vivendi with them.95 Some of this highly cultivated Germanic persona was undoubtedly distilled into Ferneyhough’s English as he moved to North America in 1987 to take up his post at 347

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San Diego. Finding himself in an ‘alien’ environment — the English language notwithstanding — he began to read American poetry (Eliot and Pound for example), which informed his own creative efforts in that medium. Describing his ‘physical and mental dislocation’ upon moving to the US, it is clear that language is a refuge, a forum for selfexploration and self-expression:96 ‘one writes what one would like to read, which incidentally involves the activation of a number of other aspects of the self.’97 To that extent, it parallels Ferneyhough’s attitude towards musical composition very closely: ‘I would say that one particular aspect of my work is that I construct myself through the work. I am what I am through having gone through the experience of writing the work.’98 As with visual images, his engagement with language, whether an abstract system of communication or particular examples of poetry, applies both to individual works and across multiple works as part of the development of a consistent personal style. Even by the mid-1980s he could refer to it as ‘one of my old interests […] to what extent it is possible to relate a musical language to, or locate a musical language in, a more general field of discourse that includes, or takes note of, or reflects upon, other forms of communicative discipline.’99 This is pertinent to works with or without an actual text included in performance. In Lemma, as discussed in Chapter 3, Ferneyhough explores the notion of musical exegesis, using the three perspectives on an image that constitute the Renaissance Emblem puzzle as his point of departure. He characterizes the emblem-form as ‘frozen rhetoric […] the idea of the piece was to bring the tripartite structure of the emblem into frenetic motion, to dissolve its conventionalized immediacy into a new species of communion between musical object  […] and chain of transformatory processes.’100 Lemma is among the first works (along with the Second String Quartet) to deploy explicitly the gestural-figural discourse that becomes the cornerstone of his style from 1980 onwards, and both concepts are bound up with extra-musical — linguistic — expression. Toop suggests that the gesture relates to a kind of Affektenlehre; in fact, the term ‘figure’ also resonates with musical-rhetorical figures of the Baroque era.101 The closest Ferneyhough comes to this is with the all-pervasive katabasis figure in Shadowtime. The gesture, like the emblem, is conceived as ‘frozen force’ or rhetoric, the figure its exegesis. Ferneyhough compares the ‘gestural vocable […] to the individual word, in that it may be usefully recognized in radically diverse contexts and manifested through a vast variety of individual nuance.’102 The gesture relies on communal understanding to be effective, and therefore on a kind of code comparable with Saussure’s grid of signifiers; the figure is poetic. It ‘liberate[s] that surplus of discursivity hitherto locked in the interstices of the sonic object.’103 Besides Shadowtime, Ferneyhough’s most significant interaction with ‘the minefield of music/language analogies’104 is arguably his Fourth String Quartet. It is a composition wholly ‘to do with language. To what extent music is 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 [to] structuralist discourse?’105 As discussed in Chapter 6 the quartet is a critique and analysis of, and response and homage to, Schoenberg’s iconic Second String Quartet. Ferneyhough addresses the relationship between music and language in a number of ways: 348

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he reflects on the ‘discursive logic’ of the quartet genre; the historical quartet form as a communal ‘objectively viable [form] of musical communication’;106 the poetic language of the text and its function in relation to the musical ‘discourse’; the very ‘nature of linear creation’;107 and the legitimacy or otherwise of Sprachähnlichkeit [speech-likeness] as a ‘gestural or rhetorical vehicle for organizing and assessing music.’108 Ferneyhough notes that Sprachähnlichkeit was a model of musical expression in the nineteenth and early twentieth-centuries,109 a relationship between music and language that Albrecht Wellmer describes as ‘absolutised in the Romantic topos of music as the language of emotions (or affects) which played a central part in the music-theoretical discussions from Rousseau to Wagner, particularly also in early German Romanticism.’110 It applied to music with or without a text because ‘through the long-standing connection between music and poetry in the development of tonal music, “the musical form was entirely enwoven with conceptual and emotional threads”.’111 The concept of speechor language-likeness is also significant in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory and his fragment essay on music and language. Music, Adorno argues, is like a language because it is purposive, but unlike language, it is nonconceptual: ‘the resemblance points to something essential [in music] but vague.’112 Music simultaneously reveals but conceals ‘what it has to say’, and therefore its similarity to language is at the same time its absolute difference from language.113 Ferneyhough is less interested in the philosophical context for Sprachähnlichkeit, and more concerned with how something of the text’s rhythm, structural principles and capacity for semantic expression might inhere in his own music. Ferneyhough himself argues that his quartet examines the phenomenon of Sprachähnlichkeit, but it is perhaps more productively considered with reference to Schoenberg’s concept of ‘musical prose’, insofar as, following Julie Brown, one may cast musical prose as allegory.114 Brown begins from the same premise as Ferneyhough: how to assess the relationship between Schoenberg’s music and the George poetry he sets.115 In her view, complexity arises because the poem ‘enjoys such broad mythological resonance itself ’, which is only compounded by its interaction with ‘equally, if not more, enigmatic music.’116 Musical textures can be read against ‘anything from a literal reading of the poem’s surface imagery to two or more mythical subtexts.’117 She proposes allegory as an appropriate interpretative mode in such cases of ambiguity, made even more so by Schoenberg’s imminent departure into atonal musical language. The poetry Ferneyhough uses does not manifest surface imagery, and neither is the atonality of his musical language a new departure in the sense unique to Schoenberg’s historical position in 1908. Nevertheless, Ferneyhough’s textures can be read against the semantic residues of Mac Low’s texts: this generates moments that ‘seem like “expressive” reflections of subjective text interpretation’, as in the setting of ‘paradiso’ in the final vocal solo in the fourth movement, which is heard three times (bar 80 and twice in bar 82), articulated differently in each case as though to maximize its expressive impact. Nonetheless, the composer suggests such moments are ‘in fact simple and systematic registration of what the poet is already offering [the composer].’118 Crucially, there are additional subtexts at work: here Ferneyhough engages with allegory, if not in terms of musical prose, then by means of the aphoristic, fragmented expression that is later so pervasive in Shadowtime. 349

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In light of Ferneyhough’s relationship to allegory in the opera, it is productive to consider the Fourth Quartet anew from this perspective. Brown cites the following definition of allegory: a work ‘in which the apparent meaning of the characters and events is used to symbolize a deeper moral or spiritual meaning.’119 According to Brown, Schoenberg drew on Wagner’s use of the term ‘musical prose’ in Oper und Drama (1851) ‘in connection with the new relationship [Wagner] envisages between verse and melody: a composer wanting to illuminate the true bond between speech and melody would dissolve not only the verse, but also his melody, into prose.’120 Ferneyhough seems to identify this very aspiration in Schoenberg’s quartet, remarking on ‘[the latter’s] versatility in taking such rigidly metric, rhyming verse as George and transforming it into textures of such flowingly sinuous unpredictability.’121 No such ‘sinuous unpredictability’ is available (or desirable) for Ferneyhough, who points to the processual nature of much recent music, arguing that ‘a chasm has opened up between musical and verbal pattern-making.’122 He chooses a text that is similarly generated processually, Jackson Mac Low’s Words nd Ends from Ez, to ‘guarantee the continual presence of a strong processual element’ in the two vocal movements.123 (The two non-vocal movements reinforce the processuality of the others by foregrounding musical gestures or ‘taxonomies of objects’ that engage the listener in a kind of ironic narrative or superficially linear argument.)124 While in Brown’s reading of Schoenberg’s first Georgelied ‘“surface” textual meaning is taken to obscure an allegorical meaning that is enacted by the music; in the process, music-technical processes — in particular, musical prose — are given metaphoric resonance’,125 in Ferneyhough’s case, expressive residues of the Mac Low text heard very clearly towards the end of the work conceal an allegorical meaning that is enacted in Ferneyhough’s music. The three staves of notation for the soprano lend her three ‘voices’, a musical allegory for the other voices ‘behind’ Mac Low’s work, including Ezra Pound and the texts he mobilizes and re-reads in the Pisan Cantos. Ferneyhough himself hints at an allegorical reading in a passing comment: his second movement re-reads Mac Low, who in turn re-reads Pound, who was imprisoned in an open-air cage after the Second World War in Italy, leading Ferneyhough to characterize the movement as ‘a triple constriction, if you like, since my quartet actually isolates specific sections of the text setting via indefinite duration pauses.’126 If Ferneyhough’s quartet fails to find its Einklang between text and music in structural terms (because the singer and quartet ‘go their separate ways’), it does find it on the level of allegory.127 In Shadowtime, Ferneyhough takes the principle examined at the conclusion of the Fourth Quartet — a chaos of syllables from numerous foreign languages — a step further, inventing his own universally foreign language. That it is his own voice (electronically manipulated and disembodied) that speaks the text draws together several important strands of his enduring fascination with language, including the ‘censored’ inner world of his childhood and Benjamin’s own predilection for the riddle. Across the span of his career, Ferneyhough’s interest in expression that strikes beyond conventional limits and cannot be easily apprehended is writ large in the demands made of the performer, but it is also a significant factor in the conceptual context of many works, whether or not they set text. 350

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Like Benjamin’s oracle — the Angelus Novus — that haunts his oeuvre and Shadowtime,128 oracular figures supply allegorical meaning in works such as Cassandra’s Dream Song, Time and Motion Study II [Artaud], Allgebrah [Wölfli], Etudes transcendantales [Pythia, Song 8], or the Fourth Quartet [Pound], introducing the moral or spiritual meaning of allegory.129 In most cases, the oracle-figure is imprisoned and/or insane, a victim of fate, the concept of imprisonment (as forces of limitation to be resisted) being another considerable facet of Ferneyhough’s creative thinking. The Cassandra myth is allegorically reflected in the difficulty of the music and Ferneyhough’s first experiment in psychologizing performer response to notation; Wölfli and Antonin Artaud were both institutionalized, and both pursued unique relationships to language (allegorically represented by the oboe, as paper trumpet, in Allgebrah, and the breakdown of the ’cellist in Time and Motion Study II respectively). Artaud’s ‘Theatre of Cruelty’ is cited by Ferneyhough on multiple occasions as invaluable to his creative vision. He explains that [Artaud’s] view of the communication impasse, ‘the absolute cruelty of thought thinking us’, has had some bearing upon my approach to the question of language and its powers on the one hand, the fundamental possibility of artistic interaction on the other. His view of the soul tortured on the rack by the twin forces of external reality and internal emotion seems central to any artistic activity at the present time.130 For Ferneyhough, Benjamin is, in death, the ultimate oracle: his own untimely detention and terrible fate was, according to Hannah Arendt, as good as prophesied in his childhood: His mother, like millions of other mothers in Germany, used to say ‘Mr Bungle sends his regards’ […] whenever one of the countless little catastrophes of childhood had taken place. And the child knew of course what this strange bungling was all about. The mother referred to the ‘little hunchback’, who caused the objects to play their mischevious little tricks upon children; it was he who tripped you up when you fell […] And after the child came the grown-up man who knew what the child was still ignorant of, namely, that it was not he who had provoked ‘the little one’ by looking at him […] but that the hunchback had looked at him and that bungling was a misfortune. For ‘anyone whom the little man looks at pays no attention; not to himself and not to the little man. In consternation he stands before a pile of debris’.131 The most important form of dialogue at the basis of all of Ferneyhough’s compositional experience is a particularly personal one: his understanding of the relationship between himself as composer and his material, and ultimately between himself and his works. Comments referred to earlier (for example when Ferneyhough differentiates between social implications of his material and ‘the composition itself ’ in Time and Motion Study III, discussed in Chapter 7) reveal the composer’s strong conviction regarding the existence of a 351

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work as an entity with its own internal laws and identity. In the critical reception of his work, this relationship is often overlooked in favour of that between performer and score, or between listener and performance. As a problematization of the performer-composerlistener triangle, this is a very different proposition from that of, say, Cage and the American Experimentalists, who probe the role of the listener and the interchangeability or collapsing of roles between the points in the triangle. Ferneyhough imagines ‘a work entering into conversation with the listener as if it were another aware subject.’132 Whilst the listener is often described as having the opportunity to enter into a work’s many layers and navigate at will, when the work itself is perceived as ‘another aware subject’, something in it inevitably escapes the listener: Ferneyhough’s comment implies that a work is capable of subjective experience. Ferneyhough follows Adorno when he argues that ‘we, as composers, do not only manipulate material; it signals to us — by means of the ordered freeing up and redisposing of figural energies — what it itself desires.’133 But whereas Adorno argues that the composer-subject struggles with, but ultimately dominates, the material, Ferneyhough credits the latter with a greater degree of self-direction. It is as though the work escapes the composer, just as it does the listener: When one composes, one is constantly in dialogue with one’s means and, in order to enter into fruitful concourse with them, there has to be some common denominator, on the basis of which the equality of conversation partners can be assured. There is little point in one of the involved parties — either the language, the expression, or the composing will or volition — predominating.134 There is, then, a point at which neither listener nor composer has any more access to the music than to any other living, conscious thing’s interior being.135 Just because a piece is made to be listened to, it does not follow that its innermost ‘self ’ should be perceptible to those exterior to it. It seems entirely possible that Ferneyhough would subscribe to such an extreme interpretation of Adorno’s thinking. Once asked whether he was proud of his works, he responded, ‘I would rather hope that my works were proud of me.’136 Notes    1 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 382.    2 Meyer, “Ein Gespräch mit Brian Ferneyhough,” 57.    3 Ibid.    4 Ibid.    5 Ibid.    6 Brian Ferneyhough, “Words and Music,” http://www.argotistonline.co.uk/Ferneyhough%20 essay.htm (accessed January 3, 2013). 352

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   7 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 264.    8 Ibid., 41.    9 Ibid., 87.   10 Ibid., 415.   11 This phrase was used by Ferneyhough in an interview in the French television magazine Télérama in 1989. The reference can be found in the Encyclopédie Larousse online, http:// www.larousse.fr/encyclopedie/musdico/Ferneyhough/167586 (accessed February 5, 2013). See also Courtot, Figures et dialogues, 188.   12 According to the composer, Transit is ‘probably’ the earliest published work ‘in which, right from the outset, [aesthetic/metaphorical] considerations come to the fore as the piece’s raison d’être.’ (Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 212).   13 Francis Courtot, Brian Ferneyhough: Figures et dialogues (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2009), 188.   14 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 228.   15 Ibid. Ferneyhough recalls that ‘I became vitally interested in the complex way in which music, as a social phenomenon, reflects and incorporates other spheres of discipline, mental model-building and so on. One has only to think of the elevated place of music in the world view of the Middle Ages, for instance, to appreciate the sort of thing I had in mind.’ (Ibid., 316).   16 This is touched on in Chapter 3 in relation to a sort of musical gnosis in Lemma-IconEpigram.   17 Ferneyhough, Time and Motion Study II (London: Peters Edition, No. 7223, 1978),16.   18 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 99.   19 Ferneyhough suggests that in Unity Capsule, ‘the flute reveals itself as what it uniquely is — its “essence”.’ (Ibid.)   20 Ferneyhough, unpublished sketch materials, Emblemata, Transit, Paul Sacher Stiftung, Basel, c. 1972–1975. There are no separately collated sketches for Perspectivae, and very little except a few text remarks contained in other piece’s sketch bundles. Ferneyhough also refers to other works, including Unity Capsule, as ‘black scherzos’, as indicated in Chapter 3.   21 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 264.   22 Ibid.   23 Hannah Arendt, “Introduction,” Illuminations, trans. Harry Zorn, 17.   24 Ibid. 20.   25 Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Zorn, 77.   26 The use of the term ‘modulation’ is Ferneyhough’s. He suggests that Benjamin’s ‘primary concern was always the moment of modulation between one manifestation of meaning and another.’ (Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 246).   27 Arendt, “Introduction,” Illuminations, trans. Zorn, 54.   28 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 157.   29 Ibid., 267.   30 Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Zorn, 254.   31 Ibid.   32 Ibid., 247.   33 Ibid., 254. 353

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  34 Ibid.   35 Ibid., 253.   36 Ibid. Benjamin quotes a rhyme attributed simply to ‘an eye-witness’.   37 Ibid., 252.   38 Ferneyhough, quoted in Programme Notes, Shadowtime, 9. Münchener Biennale, 2004: Internationales Festival für neues Musiktheater, Gartensaal im Prinzregententheater, May 25, 2004, 44.   39 Walter Benjamin, Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 462.   40 Graham Lack, “Ferneyhough’s ‘Shadowtime’ and other new operas at the Biennale, Munich: review,” Tempo New Series 58/230 (2004): 55.   41 For the most part, Ferneyhough’s borrowed ‘forms’ are perhaps more accurately described as procedures, and have their roots in early repertories up to and including the early Baroque (e.g. isorhythm, hocket, passacaglia, chorale), whereas Berg’s archetypes are typically drawn from the tonal canon from Bach onwards (e.g. Invention, sonata form, rondo) and his use of them tends to privilege their formal properties.   42 Arendt, “Introduction,” Illuminations, trans. Zorn, 17.   43 Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Zorn, 255.   44 Arendt, “Introduction,” Illuminations, trans. Zorn, 23.   45 Perloff, Unoriginal Genius, 94.   46 Cannot Cross is marked ‘largo desolato’, in yet another possible reference to Berg (part of Ferneyhough’s String Trio is also marked largo desolato, after Berg’s Lyric Suite).   47 Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Zorn, 249.   48 Ibid., 255.   49 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 107.   50 This underlines the central importance of these matters to Ferneyhough over some 30 years and more, given the continued emphasis on the perception of musical time in the latest orchestral and large ensemble pieces, Plötzlichkeit and Chronos-Aion.   51 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 114.   52 Ibid., 45.   53 Ibid.   54 See Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 88 and 291.   55 Ibid., 88.   56 Ibid., 259.   57 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 260.   58 Ibid., 285.   59 See Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel W. Smith (London: Continuum, 2003). Originally published as Francis Bacon: Logique de la sensation (Paris: Éditions de la Différence, 1981).   60 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 26.   61 Ibid., x.   62 Toop, “Prima le Parole,” 164.   63 Deleuze, Francis Bacon, trans. Smith, 18. 354

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  64 See Francis Bacon, Study After Velázquez’s Portrait of , Official Website of the Estate of Francis Bacon, http://www.francis-bacon.com/paintings/study-aftervelazquezs-portrait-of-pope-innocent-x-1953/?c=52-53 (accessed January 3, 2013).   65 Deleuze, Francis Bacon, trans. Smith, 16.   66 Ibid.,17.   67 Ibid., 26–27.   68 See for example Francis Bacon, Study for a Self-Portrait (1982), http://www.francis-bacon. com/paintings/study-for-self-portrait-1981/?c=80-84 (accessed January 3, 2013); Study of the Human Body after Muybridge (1988), http://www.francis-bacon.com/paintings/ study-from-the-human-body-after-muybridge-1988/?c=85-92 (accessed January 3, 2013); Triptych 1986–87, http://www.francis-bacon.com/paintings/triptych-1986-87/?c=85-92 (accessed January 3, 2013); Study for a Crouching Nude (1952), http://www.francis-bacon. com/paintings/study-for-a-crouching-nude-1952/?c=52-53 (accessed January 3, 2013).   69 Deleuze, Francis Bacon, trans. Smith, 16, 40 and David Sylvester, The Brutality of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon (London: Thames and Hudson, 1975), 22.   70 Sylvester, The Brutality of Fact, 12 and 18.   71 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 248.   72 Sylvester, The Brutality of Fact, 90.   73 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 36.   74 Deleuze, Francis Bacon, trans. Smith, 15.   75 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 27.   76 Deleuze, Francis Bacon, trans. Smith, 56.   77 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 132.   78 Ibid., 45.   79 Deleuze, Francis Bacon, trans. Smith, 56.   80 John Ashbery, “Self-portrait in a convex mirror,” Selected Poems (London: Paladin, 1987), 201.   81 Deleuze, Francis Bacon, trans. Smith, 130.   82 Ibid., 100.   83 Alain Beaulieu, “L’art figural de Françis Bacon et Brian Ferneyhough comme antidote aux pensées nihilists,” Canadian Aesthetics Journal/Revue Canadienne d’esthetique 9 (Spring 2004), http://www.uqtr.uquebec.ca/AE/Vol_9/nihil/beaul.htm (accessed August 1, 2012).   84 Sylvester, The Brutality of Fact, 94.   85 Pierre-Yves Artaud, “Unity Capsule, une explosion de quinze minutes,” Entretemps 3 (February, 1987): 109–111.   86 Ibid., 111–12.   87 Deleuze, “Author’s Preface to the English Edition,” Francis Bacon, trans. Smith, xi–xii.   88 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 464.   89 Ibid., 465.   90 Ibid., xiv.   91 Ferneyhough, “Letter to Harry [Halbreich?],” in unpublished sketch materials and correspondence, Paul Sacher Stiftung, Basel. Letter dated Berlin, March 3 and 14, 1977.   92 See for example Bouliane and LeBaron, “Darmstadt 1980,” 425. 355

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  93 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 244. Of the programme notes for the Second String Quartet, he remarks that the ‘text has been offered on several occasions as program note. That it seems to some willfully gnomic or oracular, to others verbose and diffuse, to yet others both of these at the same time is to be regretted, but scarcely altered’ (Ibid., 117).   94 Ibid., 245.   95 Ibid., 475.   96 Ibid., 464.   97 Ibid., 468.   98 Ibid., 250.   99 Ibid., 295. 100 Ibid., 246. 101 Ibid., 287. See also the discussion of Johannes Mattheson’s 1739 treatise Der vollkommene Capellmeister in Daniel Albright, Music Speaks: on the Language of Opera, Dance and Song (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2009), 6. 102 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 35. 103 Ibid., 36. Emphasis added. 104 Albrecht Wellmer, “On Music and Language,” Identity and Difference: Essays on Music, Language and Time, Collected Writings of the Orpheus Institute (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2004): 75. 105 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 153. 106 Ibid. 107 Ibid., 154. 108 Ibid., 153. Ferneyhough translates the term as ‘speech-resemblance’. 109 Ibid. 110 Wellmer, “On Music and Language,” 75. 111 Nietzsche cited in Wellmer, “On Music and Language,” 72. 112 Theodor Adorno, “Music and Language: A Fragment,” Quasi una fantasia: Essays on Modern Music, trans. Rodney Livingstone (London: Verso, 1992), 1. 113 Ibid. 114 Julie Brown, “Schoenberg’s Musical Prose as Allegory,” Music Analysis 14, 2/3 (July–October 1995): 161–191. 115 Brown discusses a selection of Schoenberg’s works that set George’s poetry, including Das Buch der hängenden Gärten and the first Georgelied. 116 Ibid., 166. 117 Ibid. 118 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 157. ‘Paradiso’ is first heard with each syllable sung on a different pitch, moving from non vibrato texture to vibrato rapido e intenso; in bar 82 it is firstly spoken (parlando), distorted, and secondly intoned on a single pitch marked sereno. 119 Brown, “Schoenberg’s Musical Prose,” 167. Brown gives the reference as ‘Collins English Dictionary’. 120 Ibid.,161. 121 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 339. Brown describes something very similar, noting the ‘deliberate strategy on Schoenberg’s part that the rigid precision of George’s rhythmic 356

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repetitions and the static symmetry of his verse construction do not immediately come into conflict with his new prose like musical procedures’ (Brown, 171). 122 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 338. 123 Ibid., 157. 124 Ibid., 156. 125 Brown, “Schoenberg’s Musical Prose,” 168. 126 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 157. As discussed in Chapter 6, the second movement of the Fourth Quartet comprises a number of sections separated by pauses, and within those short sections, every soprano impulse coincides with an impulse within the quartet ensemble. Ferneyhough suggests that the soprano is thus dependent on the quartet, but also in a position to re-propose those impulses that she articulates, rather as Mac Low depends on the Pound texts for his material but, by capitalizing particular letters, re-proposes words and ends of words from Pound’s Cantos. 127 Toop, “Brian Ferneyhough,” A Biocritical Sourcebook, 142. 128 See Walter Benjamin, “Letter to Gerhard Scholem (no.108),” The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin 1910–1940, ed. Theodor Adorno and Gershom Scholem, trans. Manfred R. Jacobson and Evelyn M. Jacobson (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1994), 195. Benjamin writes ‘The Angelus has been assigned the place above our sofa. Everyone was pleased with him. Just as before, he disdains to whisper suggestions — like the oracle.’ 129 Pound’s Cantos are based on Homer’s Odyssey: in assuming the guise of Homeric storyteller, Pound casts himself in the role of oracle. Pound takes as his point of departure for the Cantos not the original Greek Odyssey, but a Latin translation of it. He interprets this Latin using structural features (metre, for example) of an Old-English poem called The Seafarer, which he had himself translated into modern English some time earlier. The theme of this Anglo-Saxon poem is ‘a life shaped by fate.’ I thank John Hails, who originally observed the recurrence of oracular figures in Ferneyhough’s works, for discussing these ideas with me. 130 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 213. 131 Arendt, “Introduction,” Illuminations, trans. Zorn, 12. 132 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 41. 133 Ibid. 134 Ibid., 155. Describing the final days of the working process on the orchestral piece Plötzlichkeit, Ferneyhough observes that ‘It’s a terrific experience: you feel at one with the working process and sometimes don’t even know what the work is.’ (Meyer, “Ein Gespräch mit Brian Ferneyhough,” 63). 135 I am grateful to Fabrice Fitch for discussing this point with me. 136 See “More Open Questions for Brian Ferneyhough,” http://www.finaldestination.herobo. com/?media=Talk:Brian_Ferneyhough (accessed December 12, 2012).

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Photograph 1:  Brian Ferneyhough, c.1948.

Photograph 2:  Willenhall Church of England School play, c.1953. Ferneyhough is front row centre right.

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Photograph 3:  School photograph, c.1954.

Photograph 4:  Coventry Festival Band (led by John R. Major) processing through Coventry Precinct, c.1956–7. Ferneyhough (only partly visible behind Major’s left shoulder) plays the euphonium.

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Photograph 5:  Rehearsing at home prior to a performance of Handel’s Messiah, December 1963 (Coventry Evening Telegraph, reproduced by permission of Trinity Mirror plc).

Photograph 6:  With Franco Donatoni, Royan, c.1973.

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Photograph 7:  Conducting the London Sinfonietta and soloists in Transit, Royan, March 1975.

Photograph 8:  With Michael Finnissy, Royan, c.1975.

364

Illustrations

Photograph 9:  With Klaus Huber at an open-air concert, Rathausplatz, Freiburg, 1977.

365

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Photograph 10:  At home (with Lancelot), Palo Alto, California, c. 1998.

366

Bibliography

Books and Dissertations Adorno, Theodor W., Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Bertolt Brecht and Georg Lukacs. Aesthetics and Politics. London: Verso, 1980. Adorno, Theodor W. Aesthetic Theory, edited and translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor. London: Athlone, 1999. Essays on Music, selected, with introduction, commentary, and notes by Richard Leppert and new translations by Susan H. Gillespie. Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2002. Mahler: A Musical Physiognomy, translated by Edmund Jephcott. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Negative Dialectics, translated by E.B Ashton. New York: Seabury and London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973. Philosophy of Modern Music, translated by Anne G. Mitchell and Wesley V. Blomster. London: Sheed and Ward, 1973. Albright, Daniel. Music Speaks: On the Language of Opera, Dance and Song. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2009. Ammons, A.R. Expressions of Sea Level. Ohio: State University Press, 1963. Artaud, Antonin. Collected Works: Volume I, translated by Victor Corti. OneWorld Classics, 1999. Le Pèse-nerfs. Paris: Leibovitz, 1925. Artaud, Pierre-Yves, and Gérard Geay. Flûtes au present/Present Day Flutes, introduced by Olivier Messiaen. Bilingual edition. Paris: Éditions Jobert and Éditions Musicales TransatlantiquesParis, 1980. Auden, W.H. Collected Poems, edited by Edward Mendelson. New York, NJ: Vintage Books, 1991. Barton, Marianne, ed. British Music Yearbook 1984. London: Classical Music, 1983. Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations, edited with introduction by Hannah Arendt and translated by Harry Zorn. London: Pimlico, 1999. Selected Writings 1927–1930, volume 2, part 1, edited by Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland and Gary Smith, translated by Rodney Livingstone. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999. Selected Writings 1931–1934, volume 2, part 2, edited by Michael W. Jennings, Gary Smith and Howard Eiland, translated by Rodney Livingstone. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999.

Brian Ferneyhough

The Arcades Project, translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. The Origin of German Tragic Drama, translated by John Osborne. London: Verso, 2003. The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, 1910–1940, edited by Gershom Scholem and Theodor Adorno, translated by Manfred R. Jacobson and Evelyn M. Jacobson. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1994. Benjamin Walter and Theodor Adorno, The Complete Correspondence: 1928–1940, edited by Henri Lonitz, translated by Nicholas Walker. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. Berger, Karol and Anthony Newcomb, eds. Music and the Aesthetics of Modernity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005. Bergson, Henri. Duration and Simultaneity, edited with an introduction by Robin Durie. Supplementary appendices translated by Mark Lewis and Robin Durie. Manchester: Clinamen, 1999. Matter and Memory, translated by Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer. New York: Zone Books, 2002. Authorized translation made from the fifth revised edition of Matière et mémoire. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1908. Bernstein, Charles. Shadowtime. Copenhagen: Green Integer Books, 2005. Bohrer, Karl Heinz. Suddenness: On the Moment of Aesthetic Experience. New York, NJ: Columbia University Press, 1994. Bons, Joël, ed. Complexity in Music? An Inquiry of its Nature, Motivation and Performability. Amsterdam: Job, 1990. Bortz, Graziela. “Rhythm in the Music of Brian Ferneyhough, Michael Finnissy, and Arthur Kampela: A Guide for Performers.” DMA thesis, City University of New York, 2003. Brougham, Henrietta, Christopher Fox, and Ian Pace eds. Uncommon Ground: The Music of Michael Finnissy. Aldershot: Ashgate, 1997. Buck-Morss, Susan. The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989. Cahoone, Lawrence, ed. From Modernism to Postmodernism: An Anthology (expanded second edition). Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003. Calcagno, Mauro P. From Madrigal to Opera: Monteverdi’s Staging of the Self. Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2012. Collini, Stefan. Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Cooper, David, ed. A Companion to Aesthetics. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1992. ed. Aesthetics: The Classic Readings. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1997. Copeland, Rita and Peter T. Struck, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Allegory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Cott, Jonathan. Stockhausen: Conversations with the Composer. London: Picador/Pan Books, 1974. Courtot, Francis. Brian Ferneyhough: Figures et dialogues. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2009. Cross, Jonathan, Jonathan Harvey, Helmut Lachenmann, Albrecht Wellmer and Richard Klein. Identity and Difference: Essays on Music, Language and Time, edited by Peter Dejans. Collected Writings of the Orpheus Institute. Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2004. Dallery, Arleen B., Charles E. Scott, with P. Holley Roberts, eds. Crises in Continental Philosophy. New York, NJ: SUNY Press, 1990. 370

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Darbon, Nicolas. Brian Ferneyhough et la nouvelle complexité: La capture des forces II. Nantes: Éditions Millénaire, 2008. Wolfgang Rihm et la nouvelle simplicité: La capture des forces I. Nantes: Éditions Millénaire, 2008. Deleuze, Gilles. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, translated by Daniel W. Smith. London: Continuum, 2003. The Logic of Sense, translated by Mark Lester. London: Continuum, 2004. Dydo, Ulla E. ed., A Stein Reader. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1993. Gertrude Stein: The Language that Rises 1923–1934. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2003. Evans, R.J.W. Rudolf II and His World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. First published 1973. Feller, Ross A. “Multicursal Labyrinths in the work of Brian Ferneyhough.” DMA diss., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1994. Ferneyhough, Brian. Brian Ferneyhough: Collected Writings, edited by James Boros and Richard Toop. London: Routledge, 1998. First published by Harwood Academic Press: Amsterdam, 1995. Fitch, Lois. “Brian Ferneyhough: The Logic of the Figure.” PhD thesis, Durham University, 2005. Friese, Heidrun, ed. The Moment: Time and Rupture in Modern Thought. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2001. Goebel, Rolf J. A Companion to the Works of Walter Benjamin. New York, NJ: Camden House, 2009. Goehr, Lydia. The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works (revised edition). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Gratzer, Wolfgang, ed. Nähe und Distanz — Nachgedachte Musik der Gegenwart I. Hofheim: Wolke, 1996. Griffiths, Paul. Modern Music and After (third edition). New York, NJ: Oxford University Press, 2010. New Sounds, New Personalities: British Composers in the 1980s. London: Faber, 1985. Guerlac, Suzanne. Thinking in Time: An Introduction To Henri Bergson. New York, NJ: Cornell University Press, 2006. Hanssen, Beatrice, and Andrew Benjamin, eds. Walter Benjamin and Romanticism. London: Continuum, 2002. Hawkins, Roderick. “(Mis)understanding complexity from Transit to Toop: ‘New Complexity’ in the British Context.” PhD thesis, University of Leeds, 2010. Heile, Björn, ed. The Modernist Legacy: Essays on New Music. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008. Hewett, Ivan. Music: Healing the Rift. London: Continuum, 2003. Hoeckner, Berthold. Programming the Absolute; Nineteenth-Century German Music and the Hermeneutics of the Moment. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002. Jacobs, Arthur, ed. British Music Yearbook 1980. London: Adam & Charles Black, 1980. Lechte, John. Fifty Key Contemporary Thinkers: from Structuralism to Postmodernity. London: Routledge, 1994. Mahnkopf, Claus-Steffen, Frank Cox, and Wolfram Schurig, eds. Polyphony & Complexity: New Music and Aesthetics in the 21st Century, volume 1. Hofheim: Wolke, 2002. Kritik der neuen Musik. Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1998. 371

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Manning, John. The Emblem. London: Reaktion, 2002. Meltzer, Françoise. Hot Property: The Stakes and Claims of Literary Originality. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Miner, Ellis D., Randii R. Wesse, and Jeffrey N. Cuzzi. Planetary Ring Systems. Springer: Praxis, 2007. Nono, Luigi. Texte, Studien zu seiner Musik, edited by Jürg Stenzl. Zürich: Atlantis, 1975. Norton, Robert E. Secret Germany: Stefan George and his Circle. New York, NJ: Cornell University Press, 2002. O’Hagan, Peter, ed. Aspects of British Music in the 1990s. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003. Owens, Craig. Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power and Culture. Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1992. Pätzold, Cordula. “Carceri d’Invenzione von Brian Ferneyhough: Kompositionstechnische und höranalytische Aspekte.” PhD thesis, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität zu Freiburg i. Br., 2002. Perloff, Marjorie. Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2010. Rennie, Nicholas. Speculating on the Moment: the Poetics of Time and Recurrence in Goethe, Leopardi and Nietzsche. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2005. Riggins, Stephen Harold. The Pleasures of Time. Toronto: Insomniac, 2003. Ross, Alex. The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century. New York, NJ: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007. Shapiro, Gary. Robert Smithson and Art After Babel. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995. Shearman, John. Mannerism. Middlesex: Penguin, 1967. Sitsky, Larry, ed. Music of the Twentieth-century Avant-Garde: a Biocritical Sourcebook. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2002. Smithson, Robert. Robert Smithson: the Collected Writings, edited by Jack Flam. Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1996. The Writings of Robert Smithson, edited by Nancy Holt. New York, NJ: New York University Press, 1979. Steinitz, Richard. Gyorgy Ligeti: Music of the Imagination. London: Faber and Faber, 2003. Sylvester, David. The Brutality of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon (third edition). London: Thames and Hudson, 1987. Tambling, Jeremy. Allegory. Oxford: Routledge, 2010. Taruskin, Richard. Music in the Late Twentieth Century. Fifth volume of The Oxford History of Western Music. New York, NJ: Oxford University Press, 2010. Thagard, Paul. Coherence in Thought and Motion. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000. Weisser, Benedict. “Notational Practice in Contemporary Music: A Critique of Three Compositional Models (Luciano Berio, John Cage, and Brian Ferneyhough).” PhD thesis, City University of New York, 1998. Welchman, John C. Invisible Colours: A Visual History of Titles. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997.

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Whittall, Arnold. Exploring Twentieth-Century Music: Tradition and Innovation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Musical Composition in the Twentieth Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Serialism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Williams, Alastair. Constructing Musicology. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001. New Music and the Claims of Modernity. Aldershot: Ashgate, 1997. Woolf, Virginia. Moments of Being. Random House, 2002. Yourcenar, Marguerite. The Dark Brain of Piranesi and Other Essays, translated by Richard Howard. New York, NJ: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984.

Book Chapters Adorno, Theodor W. “Music and Language: a Fragment.” In Quasi una fantasia, Essays on Modern Music, translated by Rodney Livingstone, 1–8. London: Verso, 1998. Artaud, Antonin. “The Nerve Meter.” In Antonin Artaud: Selected Writings, edited by Susan Sontag, translated by Helen Weaver, 79–85. New York, NJ: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976. Bashford, Christina. “The String Quartet and Society.” In The Cambridge Companion to the String Quartet, edited by Robin Stowell, 3–18. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Butt, John. “Performance on Paper: Rewriting the Story of Notational Progress.” In Acting on the Past, Historical Performance Across the Disciplines, edited by Mark Franko and Annette Richards, 137–158. Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 2000. Falck, Robert and Martin Picker. “Contrafactum.” Grove Music Online. Accessed January 17, 2013. Oxford Music Online. Feller, Ross. “E-sketches: Brian Ferneyhough’s use of computer-assisted compositional tools.” In A Handbook to Twentieth-Century Musical Sketches, edited by Patricia Hall and Friedemann Sallis, 176–188. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Ferneyhough, Brian. “Présentation du Trio à cordes.” In Brian Ferneyhough — textes réunis par Peter Szendy, edited by Peter Szendy, 49–60. Paris: L’Harmattan/IRCAM, 1999. Ferneyhough, Brian. “La ‘musique informelle’ (à partir d’une lecture d’Adorno),” translated by Peter Szendy. In Brian Ferneyhough — textes réunis par Peter Szendy, edited by Peter Szendy, 109–117. Paris: L’Harmattan/IRCAM, 1999. Fitch, Lois and John Hails. “Failed Time, Successful Time, Shadowtime: An Interview with Brian Ferneyhough.” In Contemporary Music: Theoretical and Philosophical Perspectives, edited by Max Paddison and Irène Deliège, 319–330. Farnham: Ashgate, 2010. Fox, Christopher. “New Complexity.” Grove Music Online. Accessed January 5, 2013. Oxford Music Online. Goldet, Stéphane. “Brian Ferneyhough: Sonatas for String Quartet, Quatuor no. 2.” In Quatuors du 20ème siècle, 117–120. Paris: IRCAM and Arles: Actes Sud, 1989. Malt, Mikhaïl. “Brian Ferneyhough et l’aide informatique à l’écriture.” In Brian Ferneyhough — textes réunis par Peter Szendy, edited by Peter Szendy, 61–106. Paris: L’Harmattan/IRCAM, 1999.

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Meltzer, Françoise. “Acedia and Melancholia.” In Walter Benjamin and the Demands of History, edited by Michael P. Steinberg, 141–163. New York: Cornell University Press, 1996. Newes, Virginia. “Mensural Virtuosity in Non-Fugal Canons.” In Canons and Canonic Technique, 14th–16th Centuries: Theory, Practice, and Reception History, edited by Katelijne Schiltz and Bonnie J. Blackburn, 19–46. Leuven: Peeters, 2007. Nicolas, François. “Une écoute à l’oeuvre: d’un moment favori dans ‘La Chute d’Icare’.” In Brian Ferneyhough — textes réunis par Peter Szendy, edited by Peter Szendy, 27–46. Paris: L’Harmattan/IRCAM, 1999. Paddison, Max. “Postmodernism and the Survival of the Avant-Garde.” In Contemporary Music: Theoretical and Philosophical Perspectives, edited by Max Paddison and Irène Deliège, 205–228. Farnham: Ashgate, 2010. Texier, Marc. “Brian Ferneyhough: Le dernier des modernes.” In Brian Ferneyhough — textes réunis par Peter Szendy, edited by Peter Szendy, 9–26. Paris: L’Harmattan/IRCAM, 1999. Toop, Richard. “Against a Theory of (New) Complexity.” In Contemporary Music: Theoretical and Philosophical Perspectives, edited by Max Paddison and Irène Deliège, 89–97. Farnham: Ashgate, 2010. “Brian Ferneyhough.” In Music of the Twentieth-Century Avant-Garde: A Biocritical Sourcebook, edited by Larry Sitsky, 138–143. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2002. “I Open and Close?” In Contemporary Music: Theoretical and Philosophical Perspectives, edited by Max Paddison and Irène Deliège, 133–142. Farnham: Ashgate, 2010. Williams, Alastair. “Ageing of the New: The Museum of Musical Modernism.” In The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Music, edited by Nicholas Cook and Anthony Pople, 506–534. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Woolf, Virginia. “A Sketch of the Past.” In Broadview Anthology of British Literature (concise edition, volume B), edited by Joseph Black, 1211–1215. Broadview Press, 2007.

Editions Van Benthem, Jaap, ed. Johannes Ockeghem: Masses and Mass Sections I/1. Utrecht: KVNM, 1994. Weidner, Robert, ed. Christopher Tye: The Instrumental Music, Recent Researches in the Music of the Renaissance, Vol. III. Middleton, WI: A-R Editions, 1997.

Journal Articles Albèra, Philippe and Brian Ferneyhough. “Parcours de l’oeuvre.” Contrechamps 8 (February,  1988): 8–40. Albèra, Philippe. “Le pari de la complexité.” Ars Musica Magazine 90 (1990). Andersson, Magnus. “Considerations d’un interprète.” Contrechamps 8 (February, 1988): 128–138. Artaud, Antonin. “The body is the body,” translated by Roger McKeen. Semiotext(e) 2/3 (1977): 38–39. Artaud, Pierre-Yves. “Unity Capsule, une explosion de quinze minutes.” Entretemps 3 (February, 1987): 107–114. 374

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Barry, Malcolm. “1945 and after.” Music and Musicians (May, 1980): 59–61. “Transit.” Contact 20 (1979): 12–14. Beaulieu, Alain. “L’art figural de Françis Bacon et Brian Ferneyhough comme antidote aux pensées nihilistes.” Canadian Aesthetics Journal/Revue Canadienne d’esthetique 9 (Spring  2004). Accessed August 1, 2012. http://www.uqtr.uquebec.ca/AE/Vol_9/nihil/beaul.htm. Benjamin, Walter. “Doctrine of the Similar (1933),” translated by Knut Tarnowski. New German Critique 17. Special Walter Benjamin Issue (Spring 1979): 65–69. Boros, James. “Why Complexity? Part One (Guest Editor’s Introduction).” Perspectives of New Music, 31/1 (1993): 6–9. “Why Complexity? Part Two (Guest Editor’s Introduction).” Perspectives of New Music 32/1 (1994): 90–101. Bouliane, Denys and Anne LeBaron. “Darmstadt 1980.” Perspectives of New Music 19, 1/2 (Autumn, 1980–Summer, 1981): 420–441. Brown, Julie. “Schoenberg’s Musical Prose as Allegory.” Music Analysis 14, 2/3 (July–October  1995): 161–191. Cavalotti, Pietro. “Einige Bemerkungen über die Tonhöhenorganisation in Brian Ferneyhoughs Zyklus ‘Carceri d’Invenzione’.” Mitteilungen der Paul Sacher Stiftung 13 (Basel, 2000): 48–53. Chaigne, Jean-Pascal. “Une esquisse de Brian Ferneyhough.” Musicorum 2 (Tours, 2003): 133–152. Chapman, Jane. “An interview with Brian Ferneyhough: thoughts on the harpsichord in ‘Etudes transcendantales’.” Contemporary Music Review 20/1 (2001): 101–105. Clements, Andrew. “Brian Ferneyhough.” Music and Musicians (July, 1977): 40. Cook, Nicholas. “Between Process and Product: Music and/as Performance.” Music Theory Online 7/2 (April 2001). Accessed January 3, 2013. http://www.mtosmt.org/issues/mto.01.7.2/ mto.01.7.2.cook.html. Corner, Kevin. “Time and Motion Study I.” Contact 20 (1979): 11–12. Darbon, Nicolas. “Virtuosité et complexité: l’injouable selon Brian Ferneyhough.” Analyse musicale 52 (2005): 96–111. Driver, Paul. “Musica Nova 1979 Glasgow University.” Tempo New Series 131 (December, 1979): 15–18. Duncan, Stuart Paul. “Re-Complexifying the Function(s) of Notation in the Music of Brian Ferneyhough and the ‘New Complexity’.” Perspectives of New Music 48/1 (2010): 136–172. “To Infinity and Beyond: A Reflection on Notation, 1980s Darmstadt, and Interpretational Approaches to the Music of New Complexity.” Search: Journal for New Music and Culture 7 (2010). Accessed July 12, 2012. Erber, James. “Transit: Carrefour culturel.” Contrechamps 8 (February 1988): 79–85. Feller, Ross A. “Random Funnels in Brian Ferneyhough’s ‘Trittico per Gertrude Stein’.” Mitteilungen der Paul Sacher Stiftung 10 (Basel, 1997): 32–38. “Slippage and Strata in Brian Ferneyhough’s ‘Terrain’.” Ex tempore 9/2 (1999): 77–122. “Strategic Defamiliarization: the process of difficulty in Brian Ferneyhough’s music.” The open space magazine 2 (2000): 197–202. Ferneyhough, Brian. “Les Carceri d’Invenzione — dialectique de l’automatique et de l’informe.” Entretemps 3 (February 1987): 115–126. “Apropos Schnitzeljagd.” Programme of the Donaueschinger Musiktage (1977): 7–9. 375

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and Claudy Malherbe. “Dossier de Brian Ferneyhough: Time and Motion Study: étude de temps et de mouvement.” Cahier Musique 2 (1981): 13–29. “Konservativ — Stand des Materials — Manierist.” MusikTexte 36 (Cologne 1990): 68. “Was heisst und zu welchem Ende dient Komplexität?” MusikTexte 35 (Cologne, 1990): 38–40. “Pierrot lunaire pour les temps presents/d’après une conference et un texte de Brian Ferneyhough,” translated by Karim Haddad. Voix nouvelles (Royaumont, 1994): 4–5. “Theodor Adorno selon Brian Ferneyhough.” Voix nouvelles (Royaumont, 1995): 4–5. “Barbarians at the Gates.” KunstMusik 4 (2005): 26–34. “Plötzlichkeit,” translated by Lydia Jeschke. Donaueschinger Musiktage (2006): 37–39. “Frammenti diversi.” I Quaderni della Civica Scuola di Musica. Numero speziale dedicato a Brian Ferneyhough. (Milan, 1984): 112–123. Finnissy, Michael. “Biting the Hand that Feeds You.” Contemporary Music Review 21/1 (2002): 71–79. “Ferneyhough’s Sonatas.” Tempo CXXI (1977): 34–36. Fitch, Lois. “Brian Ferneyhoughs Ästhetik der ‘Figur’.” Musik-Konzepte 140: Brian Ferneyhough edition. (Munich: edition text + kritik, 2008): 19–31. Fox, Christopher. “British Music at Darmstadt 1982–92,” Tempo New Series 186 (1993): 21–25. “Darmstadt 1984.” Contact 29 (1985): 43–46. “Getting a Complex 1.” The Musical Times 135/1815 (May, 1994): 263–264. “Other Darmstadts: An Introduction.” Contemporary Music Review 26/1 (February 2007): 1–3. “Past imperative: the Oxford History of Western Music Volume 5: The Late Twentieth Century by Richard Taruskin.” The Musical Times 146/1893 (Winter 2005): 104–107. ‘Stockhausen’s Plus Minus, More or Less: Written in Sand.’ The Musical Times 141/1871 (Summer, 2000): 16–24. Freeman, Robin. “Retuning the Skies: Ferneyhough’s ‘On Stellar Magnitudes’.” Tempo New Series 191 (1994): 34–37. Gottwald, Clytus. “Brian F. ou la metaphysique du positivisme.” Contrechamps 8 (February  1988): 64–78. First published as “Brian F., oder Von der Metaphysik des Positivismus.” Melos 44 (1977): 299–308. Griffiths, Paul. “Entretien.” Contrechamps 8 (Paris, 1988): 163–174. “Music in London [New Music].” Musical Times 112/1607 (1977): 55–61. Haggh, Barbara. “Crispijne and Abertijne: Two Tenors at the Church of St. Niklaas, Brussels.” Music and Letters 76/3 (August, 1995): 325–344. Halbreich, Harry. “Review: New Sounds/New Personalities.” Tempo 158 (1986): 57–58. Harvey, Jonathan. “Brian Ferneyhough.” Musical Times 120 (1979): 723–728. Hayter, Graham. “Funérailles.” The Musical Times 125/1693 (March, 1984): 135. Heaton, Roger. “The Performer’s Point of View.” Contact 30 (Spring 1987): 30–33. Hübler, Klaus K. “Images de la pensée, en mouvement.” Contrechamps 8 (February 1988): 41–44. Iddon, Martin. “On the Entropy Circuit: Brian Ferneyhough’s ‘Time and Motion Study II’.” Contemporary Music Review 25, 1/2. (Routledge, 2006): 93–105.

376

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Keller, Christoph. “Die Ferneyhough-Familie: Zürich, Tage für neue Musik 1996.” Dissonanz. Neue Schweizerische Musikzeitung 51 (February 1997): 34–36. Keller, Kjell. “Impulse aus dem Orient auf Klaus Hubers musikalisches Schaffen.” Musik-Konzepte 137/138, Klaus Huber edition (Munich: edition text + kritik, 2007): 119–134. Kenyon, Nicholas. “London Sinfonietta: Transit.” Classical Music 26 (November, 1977): 16. Koepnick, Lutz. “Allegory and Power: Walter Benjamin and the Politics of Representation.” Soundings 79, 1/2 (Spring/Summer 1996): 59–78. Lack, Graham. “Ferneyhough’s “Shadowtime” and other new operas at the Biennale, Munich: review.” Tempo New Series 58/230 (2004): 51–55. Lesle, Lutz. “Die Wunde zeigen: der Englische Komponist Brian Ferneyhough im Gespräch mit Lutz Lesle.” Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 155 (1994): 40–43. Lippe, Klaus. “Notation und Aufführung bei Brian Ferneyhough.” Musik und Ästhetik 4 (1997): 93–97. “Pitch Systems’ im Vierten Streichquartett von Brian Ferneyhough.” Mitteilungen der Paul Sacher Stiftung 13 (Basel, 2000): 54–60. “Who’s to say, what’s to say: Anmerkungen zur Rezeption von Brian Ferneyhoughs Oper ‘Shadowtime’ (im Kontext der Kunsttheorie Niklas Luhmanns).” Musik und Ästhetik 10/37 (2006): 26–40. Lukas, Kathryn. “Cassandra’s Dream Song and Unity Capsule.” Contact 20 (1979): 9–11. Mack, Dieter. “Lettera di Dieter Mack.” I Quaderni della Civica Scuola di Musica. Brian Ferneyhough edition (Milan, 1984): 99–100. Malherbe, Claudy. “Dossier de Brian Ferneyhough: Time and Motion Study: étude de temps et de mouvement.” Cahier Musique 2 (1981): 15–20. Mahnkopf, Claus-Steffen. “Brian Ferneyhough: ‘La terre est un homme’.” Musik-Konzepte 140. Brian Ferneyhough edition (Munich: edition text + kritik, 2008): 51–69. “Ferneyhoughs Streichtrio.” Musik und Ästhetik 1/2 (1997): 93–104. “Ins Detail: zwei Dissertationen zu Brian Ferneyhough.” Musik und Ästhetik 11/42 (2007): 110–113. “Vers une musique figurelle?” translated by Carlo Russi. Contrechamps 8 (February 1988): 45–63. Marsh, Roger. “Heroic Motives: Roger Marsh Considers the Relation between Sign and Sound in ‘Complex’ Music.” The Musical Times 135/1812 (February 1994): 83–86. Martin, Frédérik. “Entretien avec Brian Ferneyhough.” Musica falsa 7 (1999): 10–11. Melchiorre, Alessandro. “Les labyrinthes de Ferneyhough: a propos du Deuxième Quatuor et de Lemma-Icon-Epigram.” Entretemps 3 (February 1987): 69–88. Partial republication in French of first publication: “I Labirinti di Ferneyhough: la forza e la forma, la figura e il gesto nell’opera del compositore Inglese.” I Quaderni della Civica Scuola di musica (Milan 1984): 4–41. Meyer, Thomas. “‘Wichtig ist, dass sich der Komponist selbst beim Komponieren unkomponiert’: ein Gespräch mit Brian Ferneyhough.” Musik und Ästhetik 11/42 (2007): 48–63. Mosch, Ulrich. “Musikalische Komplexität.” Darmstädter Beiträge zur Neuen Musik 20 (Mainz, 1994): 120–129. Nicolas, François. “L’éloge de la complexité.” Entretemps 3 (February 1987): 55–68.

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Oehlschlägel, Reinhard. “Brian Ferneyhoughs ‘Shadowtime’ bei der Münchener Biennale.” MusikTexte 102 (Cologne, 2004): 81–82. Pace, Ian. “Brian Ferneyhough: book review.” Tempo New Series 203 (1998): 45–52. “Frank Cox and Brian Ferneyhough.” Tempo New Series 194 (October, 1995): 37–38. Paddison, Max. “Der Komponist als Kritischer Theoretiker — Brian Ferneyhoughs Ästhetik nach Adorno.” Musik und Ästhetik 10 (1999): 95–100. Pätzold, Cordula. “Aspects of Temporal organization in Brian Ferneyhough’s ‘Carceri d’Invenzione III’.” Search: Journal for New Music and Culture 8 (2011). Accessed July 12, 2012. “‘… die meisterliche Entfaltung von Schichtenaufbau und Perspektive …’ Organisational Structures in Carceri d’Invenzione.” Musik-Konzepte 140. Brian Ferneyhough edition. (Munich: edition text + kritik, 2008): 70–88. Potter, Keith. “Brian Ferneyhough, Introduction.” Contact 20 (1979): 4–5. “New Music Diary.” Contact 16 (1977): 29–31. Powell, Larson. “The Experience of Complexity: The Critical Discussion Concerning Brian Ferneyhough.” Search: Journal for New Music and Culture 7 (2010). Accessed July 12, 2012.

Redgate, Christopher. “Re-inventing the Oboe.” Contemporary Music Review 26/2 (April, 2007): 179–188. Redgate, Roger. “Brian Ferneyhough’s ‘Etudes transcendantales’”. Contemporary Music Review 20/1 (2001): 79–100. “Ferneyhough as Teacher.” Contemporary Music Review 13/1 (1995): 19–21. Reininghaus, Frieder. “Elaborieter Komplexismus: Brian Ferneyhoughs ‘Shadowtime’.” MusikKonzepte 140. Brian Ferneyhough edition. (Munich: edition text + kritik, 2008): 89–103. Rosser, Peter. “Brian Ferneyhough and the ‘Avant-garde experience’: Benjaminian tropes in ‘Funérailles’.” Perspectives of New Music 48/2 (2010): 114–151. Rupprecht, Philip. “Something Slightly Indecent: British Composer, the European Avant-Garde and National Stereotypes in the 1950s.” The Musical Quarterly 91/3–4 (2008): 275–326. Schaaf, Elke. “Das Porträt Brian Ferneyhough.” Melos 40 (1973): 214–220. Schick, Steven. “A Percussionist’s Search for Models.” Contemporary Music Review 21/1 (2002): 5–12. “Developing an Interpretative Context: Learning Brian Ferneyhough’s Bone Alphabet.” Perspectives of New Music 32/1 (1994): 132–153. Schulz, Reinhard. “Kunst als Waffe gegen under Verschwinden: Brian Ferneyhough mit dem Ernst von Siemens Musikpreis ausgezeichnet.” Neue Musikzeitung 56/2 (2007). Accessed January 17, 2013. http://www.nmz.de/artikel/kunst-als-waffe-gegen-unser-verschwindenbrian-ferneyhough-mit-dem-ernst-von-siemens-musikpr. Simms, Bryan R. “‘My Dear Hagerl’: Self-Representation in Schoenberg’s String Quartet No. 2.” Nineteenth Century Music 26/3 (Spring 2003): 258–277. Smalley, Roger. “Some Aspects of the Changing Relationship between Composer and Performer in Contemporary Music.” Journal of the Royal Music Association 96 (1969/1970): 73–84. Stockhausen, Karlheinz. “Music and Speech.” Die Reihe 6, translated by Ruth Koenig. (London: Theodore Presser, 1964): 40–64. 378

Bibliography

Toop, Richard. “Brian Ferneyhough’s Etudes Transcendantales: A Composer’s Diary (Part 1).” EONTA Arts Quarterly 1/1 (1991): 55–89. “Brian Ferneyhough’s Lemma-Icon-Epigram.” Perspectives of New Music 28/2 (1990): 52–100. First published as “Lemme-Icône-Epigramme.” Contrechamps 8 (1988): 86–127. “Ferneyhough’s Dungeons of Invention.” The Musical Times 128/1737 (November 1987): 624–628. “Four Facets of the ‘The New Complexity’.” Contact 32 (1988): 4–50. “Mehr Überzeugung als Theorie.” Musiktexte 35 (Cologne, 1990): 6–12. “On Complexity”. Perspectives of New Music 31/1 (Winter 1993): 42–57. “On Superscriptio: An Interview with Brian Ferneyhough, and an Analysis.” Contemporary Music Review 13 (1995): 3–17. First published as “A propos de ‘Superscriptio’: entretien avec Brian Ferneyhough.” Entretemps 3 (1987): 89–94 and “‘Superscriptio’ pour flûte piccolo solo.” Entretemps 3 (1987): 95–106. “‘Prima le Parole…’ — on the sketches for Ferneyhough’s Carceri d’Invenzione I–III.” Perspectives of New Music 32/1 (1994): 154–175. Ulman, Eric. “Some Thoughts on the New Complexity.” Perspectives of New Music 32/1 (Winter, 1994): 202–206. Warnaby, John. “Lachenmann’s ‘Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern’.” Tempo, New Series 201 (July, 1997): 37–38. Waterman, Ellen. “Cassandra’s Dream Song: A Literary Feminist Perspective.” Perspectives of New Music 32/2 (Summer, 1994): 154–172. Whittall, Arnold. “Brian Ferneyhough: Shadowtime.” Tempo New Series 60/235 (2006): 35–36. “Complexity, Capitulationism and the Language of Criticism.” Contact 33 (1988): 20–23. “Holloway and Ferneyhough at 60: Connections and Constellations.” The Musical Times 144/1883 (Summer, 2003): 23–32. “Lachenmann: Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern by Staatsoper Stuttgart; Lothar Zagrosek; Helmut Lachenmann (Review).” Tempo New Series 222 (October 2002): 35–36. “[Review] New Sounds/New Personalities.” Music and Letters 67/4 (1986): 425–426. “Review of Shadowtime recording NMC D123.” Tempo New Series 238 (October, 2006): 35–6. Williams, Alastair. “Adorno and the Semantics of Modernism.” Perspectives of New Music 37/2 (2001): 29–50. “Swaying with Schumann: Subjectivity and Tradition in Wolfgang Rihm’s Fremde Szenen I–III and Related Scores.” Music and Letters 87/3 (2006): 379–397. Wright, David. “Ferneyhough at Fifty.” The Musical Times 134/1801 (March, 1993): 125–128. Zehentreiter, Ferdinand. “Jenseits des ‘Alterns der neuen Musik’: ausdrucks ästhetische Korrespondenzen zwischen Theodor W. Adorno, Claude Lévi-Strauss und Brian Ferneyhough.” Musik-Konzepte 140. Brian Ferneyhough edition. (Munich: edition text + kritik 2008): 4–18.

Liner Notes Albèra, Philippe. Liner Notes. Brian Ferneyhough. Ensemble Contrechamps, directed by Giorgio Bernasconi, Zsolt Nagy and Emilio Pomàrico. Accord 205772. 1996, compact disc. 379

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Barrett, Richard. Liner Notes. Brian Ferneyhough: Solo Works. Elision Ensemble. Etcetera KTC 1206. 1998, compact disc. Blaich, Torsten. Liner Notes, translated by Brainstorm Translations and Interpretation. In Nomine: The Witten In Nomine Broken Consort Book. Ensemble Recherche. Kairos 0012442KAI. 2004, compact disc. Ferneyhough, Brian. Liner Notes, Brian Ferneyhough, Ensemble SurPlus, Composers’ Art Label/ SWR cal-13013. 2002, compact disc. Ferneyhough, Brian and John Hails. Liner Notes. Brian Ferneyhough: Choral Music. BBC Singers, Lontano, conducted by Odaline de la Martinez. Métier msv28501. 2007, compact disc. Ferneyhough, Brian, Charles Bernstein and Fabrice Fitch. Liner Notes. Brian Ferneyhough: Shadowtime. Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart, Nieuw Ensemble, conducted by Jurjen Hempel. NMC D123. 2006, compact disc. Halbreich, Harry. Sleeve Notes. Brian Ferneyhough, Sonatas for String Quartet. Berne String Quartet. RCA Red Seal, RL25141. 1978, LP. Melchiorre, Alessandro. Liner Notes. Brian Ferneyhough: Chamber Music. Ensemble Recherche. Stradivarius STR 33694. 2005, compact disc. Pennese, Matteo. Liner Notes, translated by Nicholas Boini. Brian Ferneyhough: Funérailles. Ensemble Recherche, Arditti String Quartet. Stradivarius STR 33739. 2006, compact disc. Redgate, Roger. Liner Notes. Chamber Music by Brian Ferneyhough. Ensemble Exposé, conducted by Roger Redgate. Métier msv 28504. 2008, compact disc. Schick, Steven. Liner Notes. Drumming in the Dark. Nuema 450-100. 2000, compact disc. Texier, Marc. Liner Notes. Brian Ferneyhough 2. Arditti Quartet, Brenda Mitchell, Asko Ensemble, Magnus Andersson and Stefano Scodanibbio. Audivis Montaigne MO782029. 1996, compact disc. Toop, Richard. Liner Notes. Brian Ferneyhough: Terrain. Elision Ensemble. Kairos 0013072KAI. 2010, compact disc. Liner Notes. Brian Ferneyhough 2. Arditti Quartet, Brenda Mitchell, Asko Ensemble, Magnus Andersson and Stefano Scodanibbio. Audivis Montaigne MO782029. 1996, compact disc. Liner Notes. Brian Ferneyhough: Various Works. Nieuw Ensemble, Irvine Arditti, Brenda Mitchell. Etcetera KTC 1070. 1989, compact disc. Liner Notes. Brian Ferneyhough. Ensemble SurPlus. Composers’ Art Label/SWR cal-13013. 2002, compact disc.

Programme Notes Ferneyhough, Brian. Témoignage. Karlheinz Stockhausen. Festival Programme for Montag aus Licht and Stockhausen Chamber Music Cycle. Opera Comique/Thèâtre des Champs-Elysées, Paris, September–October, 1988. (Paris: Contrechamps/ Festival d’Automne à Paris/Fondation Louise Vuitton pour l’Opéra et la Musique, 1988): 18–19. Ferneyhough, Brian, with Philippe Albèra. Programme Notes. Shadowtime. Neue Vocalsolisten, Stuttgart, Nieuw Ensemble, conducted by Jurjen Hempel. Thèâtre Nanterre-Amandiers, Nanterre. October 26 and 27, 2004. 380

Bibliography

Online Resources Adolf Wölfli Foundation. “Adolf Wölfli (1864–1930).” Accessed September 30, 2012. http://www. adolfwoelfli.ch/index.php?c=e&level=17&sublevel=0. Archbold, Paul. “Performing Complexity,” a pedagogical resource tracing the Arditti Quartet’s preparations for the première of Brian Ferneyhough Sixth String Quartet. Accessed June 6, 2012. http://events.sas.ac.uk/uploads/media/Arditti_Ferneyhough_project_documentation.pdf. Bernstein, Charles. “Charles Bernstein, Interview,” with Eric Denut, The Argotist Online. Accessed January 21, 2013. http://www.argotistonline.co.uk/Bernstein%20interview.htm. Campanella, Tommaso. “The City of the Sun: A Poetical Dialogue between a Grandmaster of the Knights Hospitallers and a Genoese Sea-Captain, his guest.” (University of Adelaide, 2012). Accessed December 27, 2012. http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/c/campanella/tommaso/c18c/. Coventry City Council, “Broadgate.” Accessed January 12, 2013. http://www.coventry.gov.uk/ info/2000701/broadgate/1453/broadgate/5. Ensemble Linea. “Chronos-Aion.” YouTube video, 34:50. From the Zurich Tonhalle, November 11, 2011. Posted by Ensemble Linea, November 15, 2011. http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=qVplHKrzFwY. Estate of Francis Bacon. “Francis Bacon, Study After Velázquez’s Portrait of .” Accessed January 3, 2013. http://www.francis-bacon.com/paintings/study-after-velazquezsportrait-of-pope-innocent-x-1953/?c=52-53. “Study for a Crouching Nude (1952).” Accessed January 3, 2013. http://www.francis-bacon. com/paintings/study-for-a-crouching-nude-1952/?c=52-53. “Study for a Self-Portrait (1982).” Accessed January 3, 2013. http://www.francis-bacon. com/paintings/study-for-self-portrait-1981/?c=80-84. “Study of the Human Body after Muybridge (1988).” Accessed January 3, 2013. http://www. francis-bacon.com/paintings/study-from-the-human-body-after-muybridge-1988/?c=85-92. “Triptych 1986–87.” Accessed January 3, 2013. http://www.francis-bacon.com/paintings/ triptych-1986-87/?c=85-92. Exaudi 2012. “Ferneyhough’s Finis Terrae.” Accessed January 9, 2013. http://exaudi2012. wordpress.com/2012/12/08/ferneyhoughs-finis-terrae/. Ferneyhough, Brian. “Allgebrah (1996).” Accessed September 30, 2012. http://www.editionpeters. com/resources/0001/stock/pdf/allgebrah.pdf. “Chronos-Aion: Concerto for Ensemble (2008).” Accessed October 10, 2012. http://www. fbbva.es/TLFU/dat/cd_content_donaueschinger_vol3_ing.pdf. “Epicycle (1968).” Accessed December 29, 2012) http://www.editionpeters.com/ resources/0001/stock/pdf/epicycle.pdf. “Ferneyhough’s Finis Terrae.” Accessed January 3, 2013. http://exaudi2012.wordpress. com/2012/12/08/ferneyhoughs-finis-terrae/. “Incipits (1996).” Accessed September 30, 2012. http://www.editionpeters.com/ resources/0001/stock/pdf/incipits.pdf. “More Open Questions for Brian Ferneyhough (also applicable to other composers of our day.” Posted by Anonymous. May 31, 2011. Accessed December 12, 2012. http://www. finaldestination.herobo.com/?media=Talk:Brian_Ferneyhough. 381

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“Programme notes, ‘Dum Transisset’.” Accessed January 7, 2012. http://www.music21c. org/pdfs/Arditti-Quartet_program-notes.pdf. “Prometheus.” Accessed December 14, 2012. http://www.editionpeters.com/ resources/0001/stock/pdf/prometheus.pdf. “Stelae for Failed Time.” Accessed January 2, 2013. http://www.editionpeters.com/ resources/0001/stock/pdf/stelae_for_failed_time.pdf. “Transit (1972–5).” Accessed September 19, 2012. http://www.editionpeters.com/ resources/0001/stock/pdf/transit.pdf. “Words and Music.” In The Argotist Online. Accessed January 21, 2013. http://www. argotistonline.co.uk/Ferneyhough%20essay.htm. Fisher, Neil. “Brian Ferneyhough at the Barbican.” The Times, February 28, 2011. Accessed January 18, 2013. http://www.editionpeters.com/modernnewsdetails.php?articleID=IN00564. Fitch, Fabrice. “Ferneyhough, Brian.” Accessed October 14, 2012. http://www.editionpeters. com/modern.php?composer=FERNEYHOUGH&modern=1. Hamilton, Richard. “The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) 1915–1923, reconstruction by Richard Hamilton 1965–6.” Accessed January 3, 2013. http:// www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/duchamp-the-bride-stripped-bare-by-her-bachelors-eventhe-large-glass-t02011. Jaguar Land Rover Band. “About the Band.” Accessed January 12, 2013. http://www. jaguarlandroverband.com/About_Us.html. Militant Esthetix. “Defend Walter Benjamin Campaign.” Accessed November 12, 2012. http:// www.militantesthetix.co.uk/actions/antishaim/antishad.htm. Münchener Biennale. “Biennale Plus (2008).” Accessed September 30, 2012. http://www. muenchener-biennale.de/standard/en/archive/2008/biennale-plus/. Pettitt, Stephen. “Review of Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival.” The Times, November 26, 1985. Accessed October 10, 2012. LexisNexis Academic. “Ptolemaic System.” In Encyclopedia Britannica Online. Accessed September 18, 2012. http:// www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/482079/Ptolemaic-system#ref756604. Service, Tom. “A Guide to Brian Ferneyhough’s Music.” Guardian On Classical Blog, September 10, 2012. Accessed October 10, 2012. http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/tomserviceblog/2012/ sep/10/contemporary-music-guide-brian-ferneyhough. St. Mary’s Guildhall, Coventry. “St. Mary’s Guildhall, Coventry’s Best Kept Medieval Secret.” Accessed October 20, 2012. http://www.stmarysguildhall.co.uk/download/downloads/id/7/ visitor_leaflet.

Unpublished Papers Fitch, Fabrice. “Brian Ferneyhough and the Prima Prattica.” Unpublished paper read at Brian Ferneyhough: A Symposium, Institute of Music Research, University of London, Senate House, London, February 23, 2011. Hails, John. “A brief survey of temporal, metric, and rhythmic practices within Brian Ferneyhough’s Carceri d’Invenzione III.” MA essay, University of Huddersfield, 2001. 382

Discography

All-Ferneyhough Recordings Allgebrah, Lemma-Icon-Epigram, Coloratura, Incipits. Peter Veale (oboe), James Avery (piano), Ensemble SurPlus. Composers’ art label cal-13013. 2002, compact disc. Cassandra’s Dream Song, Unity Capsule. Pierre-Yves Artaud (flute). Stil 3108 S83. 1984, LP. Flurries, Trittico per G.S., Incipits, Coloratura, In nomine a 3, Allgebrah. Ensemble Exposé, conducted by Roger Redgate. Métier Sound and Vision, msv28504. 2008, compact disc. Four Miniatures, Cassandra’s Dream Song, Unity Capsule, Superscriptio, Carceri d’Invenzione IIb/c, Mnemosyne. Kolbeinn Bjarnason (flutes), Valgerdur Andrésdóttir (piano). Bridge 9120. 2002, compact disc. Funérailles I, Bone Alphabet, Unischtbare Farben, Funérailles II. Arditti String Quartet, Ensemble Recherche. Stradivarius STR 33739. 2006, compact disc. Incipits, String Trio, Streichtrio (1994), Flurries, In nomine a 3. Ensemble Recherche. Stradivarius STR33694. 2005, compact disc. Kurze Schatten II, Trittico per G.S., Terrain, Fourth String Quartet. Magnus Andersson (guitar), Stefano Scodanibbio (double bass), Irvine Arditti (violin), Brenda Mitchell (voice), Arditti String Quartet, Asko Ensemble conducted by Jonathan Nott. Montaigne Auvidis MO782029. 2003, compact disc. La Chute d’Icare, Superscriptio, Intermedio alla ciaccona, Etudes transcendantales, Mnemosyne. Arman Angster (clarinet), Harrie Starrevald (flutes), Irvine Arditti (violin), Brenda Mitchell (voice), Nieuw Ensemble conducted by Ed Spanjaard. Etcetera KTC1070. 1989, compact disc. Missa Brevis, The Doctrine of Similarity, Two Marian Motets, Stelae for Failed Time. BBC Singers, Lontano, conducted by Odaline de la Martinez. Métier Sound and Vision, msv28501. 2007, compact disc. Prometheus, La Chute d’Icare, On Stellar Magnitudes, Superscriptio, Carceri d’Invenzione III. Luisa Castellani (voice), Felix Renggli (piccolo), Ernesto Molinari (clarinet), Ensemble Contrechamps conducted by Giorgio Bernasconi, Zsolt Nagy and Emilio Pomàrico. Accord ACC205772. 1996, compact disc. Shadowtime. Nieuw Ensemble, Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart, Nicholas Hodges, Mats Scheidegger, Jurjen Hempel. NMC D123. 2006, compact disc. Shadowtime VI; Seven Tableaux Vivants Representing the Angel of History as Melancholia. musikFabrik, James Wood. Wergo WER 6854 2. 2010, compact disc. Sonatas for String Quartet, Adagissimo, Second String Quartet, Third String Quartet. Arditti String Quartet. Montaigne Auvidis MO789002. 1990, compact disc. Sonatas for String Quartet. Berne String Quartet. RCA Red Seal RL25141. 1978, LP.

Brian Ferneyhough

Terrain, no time (at all), La Chute d’Icare, Incipits, Les Froissements d’Ailes de Gabriel. Graeme Jennings (violin), Carl Rosman (clarinet), Geoffrey Morris, Ken Murray (guitars), Erkki Veltheim (viola), Elision Ensemble, conducted by Franck Ollu, Jean Deroyer. Kairos 0013072KAI. 2010, compact disc. Time and Motion Study I, Time and Motion Study II, Unity Capsule, Kurze Schatten II, Bone Alphabet. Elision Ensemble, Carl Rosman (bass clarinet), Freidrich Gauwerky (’cello), Paula Rae (flute), Geoffrey Morris (guitar), Vanessa Tomlinson (percussion). Etcetera KTC1206. 1998, compact disc. Time and Motion Study II. Werner Taube (’cello), Hans Peter Haller (electronic realisation). Musicaphon BM 30 SL1715. No release date available, LP. Transit. London Sinfonietta, conducted by Elgar Howarth. Headline HEAD 18. 1978, LP.

Single Works Adagissimo. Arditti String Quartet. Col legno 31896. 1996, four compact disc set (disc 3). Bone Alphabet. Steven Schick (percussion). Newport Classics NPD85566. 1994, compact disc. Bone Alphabet. Steven Schick (percussion). Col legno 31896. 1996, four compact disc set (disc 3). Bone Alphabet, Steven Schick (percussion). Neuma 450-100. 2000, compact disc. Carceri d’Invenzione IIb. Roberto Fabbriciani (flute). PILZ/ARTS 447167-2. 2005, compact disc. Cassandra’s Dream Song. Pierre-Yves Artaud (flute). Neuma 450-72. 1988, compact disc. Cassandra’s Dream Song. Pierre-Yves Artaud (flute). Col legno 31896. 1996, four compact disc set (disc 3). Cassandra’s Dream Song. Richard Craig (flute). AGP73. 2005, online resource. Accessed June 10, 2013. http://avantgardeproject.conus.info/mirror/agp73/index.htm Cassandra’s Dream Song. Carin Levine (flute). Musicaphon M55710. 1998, compact disc. Cassandra’s Dream Song. Mats Möller (flute). Sforzando Records. 2001, compact disc. Cassandra’s Dream Song. Emmanuel Pahud (flute). Musikszene Schweiz 6107. 1995, compact disc. Chronos-Aion. Ensemble Modern, conducted by Franck Ollu. Neos NEOS10944. 2010, compact disc. Funérailles, Version I and II. Ensemble InterContemporain, conducted by Pierre Boulez. Erato 4509-98496-2. 1995, five compact disc set (disc 5). Re-issue of Funérailles, Version I and II. Ensemble InterContemporain, conducted by Pierre Boulez. Erato STU 71556. 1985, LP. In nomine a 3. Ensemble Recherche. Kairos 0012442KAI. 2004, compact disc. Intermedio alla ciaccona. Irvine Arditti (violin). Montaigne Auvidis MO789003. 1995, compact disc. Lemma-Icon-Epigram. James Avery (piano). Perspectives of New Music PNM28. 1990, compact disc. Released with Perspectives of New Music 28/2 (Summer, 1990). Lemma-Icon-Epigram. Massimiliano Damerini (piano). Arts 47216-2. 1998, compact disc. Lemma-Icon-Epigram. Ian Pace (piano). NMC D066. 2001, compact disc. Lemma-Icon-Epigram. Shannon Wettstein (piano). Centaur Records CRC2601. 2002, compact disc. Mnemosyne. Kolbeinn Bjarnason (bass flute). P Millennio 006. 1995, compact disc. Mnemosyne. Roberto Fabbriciani (bass flute). Agorà AG113. 1997, compact disc. 386

Discography

Prometheus. Sonor Ensemble, conducted by Rand Steiger. Composers recording Inc CD652. 1994, compact disc. Second String Quartet. Arditti String Quartet. RCA Victor Red Seal RL 70883. 1982, LP. Sieben Sterne. Kevin Bowyer (organ). Nimbus NI5580/1. 1999, compact disc. Sonatas for String Quartet (excerpts). Berne String Quartet. Gaudeamus 69002. 1968, LP. String Quartet No. 5. The Arditti String Quartet. WittenerTage CD Dokumentation live/WDR 3. 2006, compact disc. Superscriptio. Roberto Fabbriciani (piccolo). Arts ARZ 47167. 1996, compact disc. Time and Motion Study I. Harry Sparnaay (bass clarinet). Attacca Babel 8945-1. 1989, compact disc. Time and Motion Study I. Tommie Lundberg (bass clarinet). Fylkingen FYCD1001. 1991, compact disc. Time and Motion Study III. Atelier Schola Cantorum, conducted by Clytus Gottwald. Cadenza CAD 800 895. 1993, compact disc. Re-issue of Wergo 60111. 1985, LP. Time and Motion Study III. Schola Cantorum, Stuttgart, conducted by Clytus Gottwald. Donaueschinger Musiktage 75 Jahre vol. 6. Col legno 31905. 1996, compact disc. Unity Capsule. Laura Chislett (flute). Vox Australis VAST007-2. 1992, compact disc. Unity Capsule. Richard Craig (flute). Métier Sound and Vision msv28517. 2011, compact disc.

DVDs “Brian Ferneyhough: Climbing a Mountain.” Sixth String Quartet in rehearsal and in performance. Arditti Quartet, Paul Archbold, directed by Colin Still. Optic Nerve. 2011, DVD. “Brian Ferneyhough: Time and Motion Study II. ‘Electric Chair Music.’ A documentary and performance.” Neil Heyde (’cello), Paul Archbold (electronic realization), directed by Colin Still. Optic Nerve. 2007, DVD. Shaffer, Peter. Amadeus. Directed by Milos Forman. Warner Home Video. 1997, DVD.

387

Index

A Adorno, Theodor W. 10, 156n., 220n., 231, 291–292, 349, 352 Alchemy 23, 82, 117, 127n., 227, 286, 296n., 314, 332–335 Alciato (detto Alciati), Andrea 82, 97n., 84, 335 Allegory 82, 204, 215, 225, 273–276, 286–288, 290, 292n., 304, 307, 308, 325n., 331, 334, 336, 349, 350–351 Ammons, A. R. 105, 107, 121, 124n., 127n. Arditti, Irvine 40–42, 51, 59n., 197n., 323n. Arditti String Quartet 4, 20, 40–42, 59n., 160, 188, 191, 195n. Arendt, Hannah 291–292, 337, 351 Arradon Ensemble 20 Artaud, Antonin 203, 205, 207, 351 Le Pèse-nerfs 203, 211, 217n. Theatre of Cruelty 55n., 93, 203, 211, 217, 351 Artaud, Pierre-Yves 58n., 346 Ashbery, John 23, 345 Auden, W. H.: Musée des Beaux Arts 112, 117 B Babbitt, Milton 34, 56n. Bach, Johann Sebastian 25n., 27n., 354n. Bacon, Francis 11, 13n., 88., 91, 239, 342, 344–346 Figure at a Washbasin 343 Portrait of George Dyer in a Mirror 344 Study After Velázquez’s Portrait of 343 Triptych May–June 1973 344 Barrett, Richard 31, 202–204

Baudelaire, Charles 275, 291, 294n. Beethoven, Ludwig van 19, 59n., 174, 176, 180, 183 Benjamin, Walter 3, 11, 24, 37, 82, 85, 87–89, 98n., 135, 143, 154n., 273–292, 293n.–297n., 308, 314–316, 320–321, 331–340, 350–351, 353n., 354n., 357n. Angel of History 273–275, 277, 287–288, 290, 292n., 337 Arcades Project 275, 294n. Jetztzeit 291, 337 Kurze Schatten I and II 85, 88 Reproduction 284, 276, 275, 331, 294n. Schein 285–287, 295n.–296n. The Doctrine of The Similar 283, 297n. Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels 273–274, 291 Berg, Alban: Altenberg Lieder 301 Chamber Concerto 254 Lulu 281, 286, 295n. Lyric Suite 184, 270n., 354n. Wozzeck 287, 336 Bergson, Henri: Duration and Simultaneity 318–319 Berkeley, Lennox 20, 27n. Bernstein, Charles 23, 273, 276–277, 283–286, 290, 292n., 294n., 296n., 337 Birmingham: Birmingham School of Music 19, 22, 197n. City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra 20 Bohrer, Karl Heinz Suddenness 315–316 Böse, Hans-Jürgen von 265n.

Brian Ferneyhough

Boulez, Pierre 33–34, 95n. Anthèmes 148 Le Marteau sans maître 246–247, 268n. Répons 148 Third Piano Sonata 23, 58n. Burroughs, William 203 Brueghel, Pieter (The Elder) Landscape with the Fall of Icarus 13n., 112, 117–118, 120, 333, 341 Britten, Benjamin 139 Byrd, William 139

Defensor 150 De Leeuw, Ton 21 Deleuze, Gilles: Bergsonism 318 Francis Bacon 11, 13n., 88, 342–346 The Logic of Sense 318 Dench, Chris 31 Dillon, James 31 Duchamp, Marcel 79 Inframince 319 The Large Glass 215, 220n. Dunstable, John 138, 146, 154n. Dürer, Albrecht 77, 333 Melencolia 288, 290–291

C Cacciari, Massimo 293 Cage, John 28n., 96n., 326n., 352 Campanella, Tommaso 225–227 Camus, Albert 77 Caput (plainsong) 79–81 Cardew, Cornelius 27n. Octet ’61 for Jasper Johns 39 Treatise 40 Carroll, Lewis 318 Carter, Elliott 147, 197n.–198n. A Mirror on Which to Dwell 265n.–266n. Cavalieri, Emilio de’: Rappresentazione di Anima e di Corpo 276 Coventry: Belgrade Theatre 19 Cathedral 17, 25n. Coventry School of Music Brass Band 18, 25n. Coventry School of Music Orchestra 19 Limbrick Wood Junior School 27n. Major, John “Jack” R. 17–18 Midland Youth Orchestra 19–20 St. Mary’s Guildhall 138 Willenhall 17 Woodlands School 17, 26n.

E Emblem 82, 84–85, 97n., 333–335, 347–348 Ensslin, Gudrun 293n. Exaudi 320 F Ferneyhough, Brian: Adagissimo 146, 159, 190, 251 Allgebrah 90, 103, 118–119, 127n., 351 Bagatelles (n.p.) 22 Bone Alphabet 38, 40, 53, 66, 90–93, 94n., 145, 290 Carceri d’Invenzione cycle 4–5, 7, 9, 13n., 32, 49, 61n., 65, 74, 82, 97n., 99n., 106, 112, 124n., 131, 149, 152, 156n., 167, 201, 225–270, 277, 286, 288, 308, 317, 334, 342 Carceri d’Invenzione I 225–226, 232–246, 302, 345 Carceri d’Invenzione IIa 32, 225, 227–228, 232–246 Carceri d’Invenzione IIb 31, 65, 94n., 225, 263n., 290 Carceri d’Invenzione IIc 225, 263n. Carceri d’Invenzione III 123n., 225, 227, 232–246

D Dadelsen, Hans-Christian von 265n. Darmstädter Ferienkurse 6, 14n., 24, 32–34, 135, 231, 325n. 392

Index

Cassandra’s Dream Song 20, 27n., 44, 65, 69, 70–71, 74, 77, 95n., 136, 204, 212, 307, 351 Chamber Set (n.p.) 132, 153n. Chronos-Aion 47, 77, 152, 301, 306–307, 315–322, 354n. Coloratura 20, 145 Divertimento (n.p.) 22 Dum transisset 51, 139–140, 143–144, 146, 159, 188 Emblemata (n.p.) 22, 82–83, 97n., 335–336 Epicycle 22, 27n., 121, 136, 153n., 201, 301–305, 307, 310, 322, 232n., 324n., 331, 340 Epigrams 69, 87 Etudes transcendantales 13n., 103, 107–108, 110, 125n., 153n., 155n., 180, 215, 225, 227–229, 230–232, 246, 257, 264n.–265n., 268n.–269n., 270n, 286, 302, 345, 351 Exordium 77, 146–147, 150, 152, 159, 184, 188, 344 Fanfare, Fantasy and Fugue (n.p.) 19 Fanfare for Klaus Huber 145 Finis Terrae 25n.–26n., 301, 306–307, 315–322, 331–332 Firecycle Alpha (n.p.) 324n., 302, 305–306 Firecycle Beta 21, 27n., 136, 148–149, 195n., 220n., 301–302, 304–307, 323n.–324n., 340 Firecycle Gamma (n.p.) 302, 305–306 First String Quartet (n.p.) 154n., 192–193 Flurries 103, 105, 121–123, 149–150 Four Miniatures 145 Fourth String Quartet 9, 79, 100n., 108–110, 125n.–126n., 159, 174–182, 186, 230, 269n., 290, 310, 335, 348, 350–351, 357n. Funérailles I & II 131–135, 137, 143, 149, 153n., 162, 196n., 218n. Incipits 66, 93n., 103, 120–122, 150 In nomine a 3 139–140

Intermedio alla ciaccona 7, 42, 81, 225, 228, 239, 241, 246, 255–262, 344 Kranichtänze II (n.p.) 23 Kurze Schatten II 67, 73, 78, 85–88, 91, 99n., 135, 184, 273, 289, 335 La Chute d’Icare 7, 49–50, 78, 103, 105, 107, 109, 111–119, 126n., 146, 155n., 341 La terre est un homme 7, 21, 32–33, 45, 47, 49, 127n., 146, 194n.–195n., 301–303, 305, 307–316, 322 Lemma-Icon-Epigram 31–32, 49, 66, 73, 78, 82–87, 93, 97n.–90n., 117, 127n., 135, 162, 167, 185, 205–206, 239, 273, 331, 333, 335–336, 345, 347–348 Les Froissements des Ailes de Gabriel 47, 87, 89, 277, 288–290, 296n. Liber Scintillarum 148–152, 321 Maisons noires (n.p.) 23 Metamorphoses on the Origins of Fire (n.p.) 22–23, 28n., 58n., 324n. Missa Brevis 21, 27n., 47, 81, 121, 131, 135–139, 148, 201 Mort Subite 145–146 Mnemosyne 49, 65, 7, 69, 73–74, 85, 89, 94n.–95n., 97n., 105, 180, 225, 228–229, 233, 241, 247, 252, 255–259, 262, 264n., 317, 340 No Time (At All) 289–290, 336 O Lux 139–142 On Stellar Magnitudes 7, 103, 107–111, 113–114 Opus Contra Naturam 51–52, 196n., 277, 281, 286–287, 295n., 327n., 336 Opus Null (n.p.) 21–22, 194n., 212 Overture Op. 1, No. 1 (n.p.) 22 Plötzlichkeit 17, 25n., 47, 67, 77, 140, 148, 301–304, 306–307, 311–322, 354n., 357n. Prometheus 20, 93n., 123, 148–150, 156n., 161, 244, 293, 324n. Renvoi/Shards 89, 99n. 393

Brian Ferneyhough

Second String Quartet 36, 42, 54, 57n., 94n., 124n., 147, 161–167, 169, 172–176, 180, 184, 188–189, 192, 195n., 230, 306, 314, 316, 326n., 348, 356n. Seven Tableaux Vivants Representing the Angel of History as Melancholia 277, 281, 287–288 Shadowtime 3, 7–11, 23–24, 25n., 47, 51, 87, 91, 99n., 108, 131, 135, 137, 139, 143, 154n., 183, 201, 209, 215, 225, 252, 273–297, 303–304, 307–308, 210, 314, 316, 320–321, 331, 335–336, 338–340, 348–351 Sieben Sterne 21, 27n., 45, 60n., 77–78, 84, 97n., 136, 307, 333 Sisyphus Redux 24n.–25n., 74–77 Six Pieces for Large Orchestra (n.p.) 19, 26n. Sonata for Two Pianos (n.p.) 22 Sonatas for String Quartet 8–9, 19, 27n., 87, 149, 159–163, 183, 185, 193, 194n., 290 Sonatina 19–20, 26n.–27n. Stelae for Failed Time 277, 290, 292 Streichtrio 160 String Quartet No. 5/Fifth String Quartet 147, 160, 186, 188–192, 194n., 323n. String Quartet No. 6/Sixth String Quartet 9, 40, 103, 126n., 146–147, 159–162, 179, 184–185, 188–192, 194n., 196n., 303, 340–341 String Set (n.p.) 82, 132, 135, 153n., 196n. String Trio 53–54, 79, 108, 119, 160, 183–187, 191, 270n. Suite for Three Trumpets (n.p.) 19 Superscriptio 4, 65, 82, 225–232, 248, 255–256, 266n., 288 Terrain 7, 18, 49, 78, 103–107, 114, 118–121, 124n.–125n., 127n., 267n., 289, 294n. The Doctrine of Similarity 137, 277, 281, 283, 285, 287, 337

Third String Quartet 6, 57n., 90, 156n., 162, 167–175, 177, 186, 190, 195n., 243, 257, 304 Three Little Pieces for Orchestra (n.p.) 23 Three Pieces Of William Byrd (n.p.) 139 Three Pieces for Piano 69 Time and Motion Study I 27n., 58n., 153n., 218n., 347, 201–209, 211, 217 Time and Motion Study II 6, 22, 32, 47, 49–50, 58n., 60n., 71, 91, 93, 124n., 201–205, 207–212, 215–217, 218n.–220n., 230–231, 254, 315, 321, 334, 340–341, 346, 351 Time and Motion Study III 21–22, 66, 103, 138, 201–204, 212–217, 221n., 290, 302, 351 Transit 7, 21, 44, 60n., 84, 136, 138, 183, 227, 301–304, 307–312, 321–322, 324n., 331–334, 353n. Trittico per G.S. 11, 67–69, 73, 77–79, 87, 95n. Two Marian Motets 131, 137–139, 148, 194n. Unity Capsule 6, 20, 27n., 44–49, 65–67, 71–73, 82, 89, 91, 93, 94n.–95n., 97n., 1–3, 136, 192, 207, 212, 228, 230, 315, 320, 334, 346 Unsichtbare Farben 51, 78–81, 95n.–96n. Variations for Chamber Orchestra (n.p.) 19 Variations for Wind Trio (n.p.) 19 Figure 5, 11, 13n., 88, 91, 111, 119, 126n., 173, 219n., 239, 257, 341–346, 348 Finnissy, Michael 14n., 31, 36, 326n. Finzi, Gerald 139 Flammarion, Camille 13n., 324n., 333 Fondation Royaumont 24, 108, 193n. G Gabrieli, Giovanni 8 Sonata Pian’ e Forte 161 Galileo 310, 324n.–325n. George, Stefan 98n., 349–350, 356n. 394

Index

J Jandl, Ernst: der und die 284 Joyce, James 43

Gesture 5, 7–8, 13n, 17, 38, 49, 71–73, 83–84, 88–91, 97n., 106–107, 114, 118–120, 133, 148, 152, 162–180, 190, 192, 203, 205, 207, 209–211, 219n., 230–232, 239, 243, 249, 253–254, 256, 270n., 276, 290, 303–304, 312, 316–317, 341–350 Gnosticism 84–85, 98n. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 186, 197n., 347 Goldsmiths College, University of London 24 Griséy, Gérard 231 Guattari, Félix 203

K Katabasis 52, 281, 286–288, 348 Kepler, Johannes 220n., 310, 324n. Klee, Paul: Angelus Novus 273, 292n., 337 Kleist, Heinrich von 315 L Lachenmann, Helmut 58n. Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern 293n. Les Consolations I 215 Language 25n., 78–79, 159, 174, 176, 203, 230, 253, 276, 284–285, 290, 318, 332, 335, 346–352 Lawes, William 132, 154n. Lévi-Strauss, Claude: Le cru et le cuit 215, 220n. Ligeti, György 254 Aventures/Nouvelles Aventures 215 Le Grand Macabre 277 Lontano 270n. Lux Aeterna 270n. Requiem 270n. Second String Quartet 270n. Liszt, Franz: Etudes transcendantales 132, 246, 268n. Funérailles 153n. Lloyd, Roger 19–20, 26n. London Sinfonietta 301 Lyotard, Jean-François 337

H Halbreich, Harry 21, 153n., 204, 218n., 347 Handel, George F.: Messiah 312 Harvard University 23 Harvey, Jonathan 3, 33, 55n., 140, 155n., 343 Heraclitus 149, 307, 322, 324n. Hindemith, Paul 22 Hochschule für Musik, Freiburg 23 Hölderlin, Friedrich 281 Holliger, Heinz 27n. Homer: Odyssey 357n. Huber, Klaus 11, 21, 23, 27n.–28n., 145, 301, 323n. Hutcheson, Francis 264n. I Ingenio 43–45 Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM) 53 Interference Form 66–79, 87–90, 104, 114, 127n., 302, 340, 342 Interruptive polyphony 67, 73–74, 127n., 180, 228 Ives, Charles: Second String Quartet 159, 179, 188

M Mac Low, Jackson 23, 179, 349, 357n. Words nd Ends from Ez 177, 350 Mallarmé, Stéphane 176 Marx, Groucho 287 Marx, Harpo 287 395

Brian Ferneyhough

P Paracelsus 308 PatchWork 53–54 Paul Sacher Stiftung, Basel 18, 22–23, 25n., 28n., 53, 139, 192, 232 Peters Edition 20, 26n.–27n., 47 Piranesi, Giovanni Battista: Carceri d’Invenzione 11, 13n., 65, 112, 225–227, 231–232, 239, 262, 263n., 333, 341–342 Plato 220n., 286, 318 Timaeus 333 Pound, Ezra 23, 177, 180, 348, 350–351, 357n. Ptolemy 304 Purcell, Henry 8, 154n., 160–161

Marx, Karl 287 Matta, Roberto 13n, 333 La tierra es un hombre 45, 270n., 311 Messiaen, Olivier 34, 339 Meister, Ernst 246 Miles, Maurice 20 Mitchell, Brenda 37, 58n. Moll, Alrun 246 Monteverdi, Claudio 8, 108, 125n., 252–254, 269n. L’Incoronazione di Poppea 277 L’Orfeo 276 Vespers, 1610 137 Montpellier Codex 285 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 19 Müller-Siemens, Detlev 265n. Münchener Biennale 319 Musikakademie, Basel 21 Mysticism 23, 28n., 84, 98n., 288, 322, 333–335

R Rembrandt 344 Rihm, Wolfgang 231 Royal Academy of Music, London 20, 149 Royal Conservatoire, The Hague 23 Royan Festival 21, 26n.

N Narcolepsy 20, 61n. New Complexity 3, 5, 8, 12n., 31–36, 42, 55n.–56n., 58n. Nietzsche, Friedrich 295n. Nono, Luigi: Fragmente-Stille, an Diotima 97n. Prometeo 292n.–293n., 325n. Notation 4–6, 9–11, 18, 21, 23, 28n., 31–54, 56n.–58n., 60n.–61., 65–79, 84, 91, 95n.–96n., 118, 120, 133, 136–138, 145–146, 154n., 156n., 161, 163, 193, 195n., 202, 204, 210–215, 227–228, 233, 240, 255, 265n.–266n., 285, 306–307, 314, 322, 331–334, 346, 351–351

S Saussure, Ferdinand de 348 Schick, Steven 38–42, 49, 66, 90–91, 94n. Schlegel, Friedrich 186, 197n., 315 Schoenberg, Arnold 8, 14n., 28n., 33–34, 79, 98n., 108, 125n., 160, 176, 179, 183, 233–236, 246, 252, 349 Moses und Aron 233 Pelleas und Melisande 301 Pierrot lunaire 107, 247 Second String Quartet 9, 110, 125n., 159, 174, 188, 196n., 269n., 348, 350 Sprechstimme/Sprechgesang 247, 254, 287 Schweinitz, Wolfgang von 265n. Scodanibbio, Stefano 95n. Shaffer, Peter 31 Scholem, Gershom 281, 288, 292n., 296n., 314, 337 Sibelius, Jean 19 Siemens, Ernst von 24

O Obrecht, Jacob 79 Ockeghem, Johannes 79, 96n.–97n. 396

Index

Smithson, Robert 120, 123n. Spiral Jetty 105, 294n. Spence, Basil 17 Sprachähnlichkeit 110, 180, 349 Stanford University 23–24 Stein, Gertrude 11, 67, 78–79, 96n., 177 Tender Buttons 176 Stockhausen, Karlheinz: Gesang der Jünglinge 215 Gruppen 306 Klavierstück XI 23 Kreuzspiel 340 Licht 277 Mantra 90–91, 169 Plus-Minus 39 Stimmung 215 Stravinsky, Igor 34 Rite of Spring 20 Three Pieces for String Quartet 188, 192 Swarenski, Hans 26n.–27n.

198n., 202, 207, 211, 216, 227, 233, 239–240, 245, 273–292, 297n., 304, 315–322, 331, 335–341, 345–346, 354n. Tippett, Sir Michael 146 Toop, Richard 3–5, 12n.–13n., 27n., 31–32, 82, 226, 232, 270n. Trojahn, Manfred 265n. Tudor, David 96n. Tye, Christopher 8, 51, 81, 131, 139–144, 155n., 287 U University of California at San Diego 23–24, 348 V Varèse, Edgard 8, 51, 81, 131, 139–144, 155n., 287 Octandre 18, 104, 107, 289 Velázquez, Diego Rodríguez de Silva y 343–344 Vinci, Leonardo da 293

T Tallis, Thomas 8, 154n. Lamentations 138 Spem in Alium 311 Taruskin, Richard 14n., 32, 36, 43–44, 57n. Taverner, John: Missa Gloria Tibi Trinitas 139 Texier, Marc 18–19, 25n. Texture-type 6, 67, 71, 78, 81, 90–91, 100n., 107, 119, 140, 146–147, 162–165, 167–169, 172, 177–178, 184, 190, 192, 195n., 232, 239–240, 243, 245, 247, 252, 287–290, 305, 313–314, 319, 331 Time 4, 13n., 39, 78, 83, 85–88, 98n., 105–107, 117, 125n., 137, 148, 152, 159–160, 173, 177, 184, 191–192,

W Wagner, Richard 17, 349–350 Opera and Drama 350 Webern, Anton 6, 8, 23, 26n., 28n., 33, 160–161, 316, 333 Passacaglia 301 Variations for Orchestra Op. 30 19 Werktreue 57n., 59n. Wölfli, Adolf 118, 351 Woolf, Virginia A Sketch of the Past 315 n.p. = not published

397

BRIAN FERNEYHOUGH Lois Fitch One of contemporary music’s most significant and controversial figures, Brian Ferneyhough’s complex and challenging music draws inspiration from painting, literature and philosophy, as well as music from the recent and distant past. His dense, multi-layered compositions intrigue musicians while pushing performer and instrument to the limits of their abilities. A wideranging survey of his life and work to date, Brian Ferneyhough examines the critical issues fundamental to understanding the composer as both musician and thinker. The book balances critical analysis of the music and close scrutiny of its aesthetic and philosophical contexts, making possible a more rounded view of the composer than has been available hitherto. Lois Fitch is Head of Undergraduate Programmes at Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester. A much-needed introduction to the work of one of Europe’s most important composers. Lois Fitch considers Ferneyhough’s work from multiple perspectives, including the study of scores and sketches and the composer’s writings. Whilst presenting invaluable biographical material, this book also offers a wealth of fascinating detail on a great number of Ferneyhough’s compositions, negotiating the notorious complexity of the scores and the extensiveness of his catalogue in a way that is sympathetic to the reader. Close attention is paid to Ferneyhough’s many aesthetic conjunctions with the realms of visual art, literature and philosophy, and the resulting discussions are always valuable and informative. Dr Edward Campbell, University of Aberdeen Lois Fitch’s book swoops exhilaratingly between microscopic detail and epiphanic generalization in the same kind of way that Ferneyhough’s music itself draws the listener into doing. It demonstrates convincingly what is special about this body of work and at the same time what can be familiar and situated in it, cutting through the tendency of much Ferneyhough criticism to ignore that the music is vital, expressive and (though never without qualification) even spontaneous. Those already familiar with it will surely find themselves being drawn back to listen again in the light of her research and insights; those new to it will I hope see the book as a helpful guide to its sometimes perplexing but always alluring landscapes. Richard Barrett, Composer Brian Ferneyhough is regarded internationally as one of the world’s most remarkable and influential composers. He has redefined the terms ‘performance’, ‘interpretation’ and ‘virtuosity’, and led to a new form of encounter with the art of musical composition. Lois Fitch shows extraordinary skill, scholarship and eloquence in explaining the exciting originality of Ferneyhough’s work. No collection of books on music will be adequate without this magnificent study. James Clarke, Composer

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