Brian Ferneyhough

Introduction

Brian 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 anti-intellectualism 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, and however much he may admit to preserving a deliberate distance: ‘an artist can’t be all-too-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

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 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 [inter-parametric] 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 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

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.

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 self-consistent 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 (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

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

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 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).

13 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.

14 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.

15 Meyer, Ein Gespräch mit Brian Ferneyhough, 52.

16 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).

17 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.

18 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.

19 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.

20 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).

21 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.

22 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.

23 Meyer, Ein Gespräch mit Brian Ferneyhough, 53.

24 Ibid.

25 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 213.

26 Ibid., 291.

27 Ibid., 387.

28 Meyer, Ein Gespräch mit Brian Ferneyhough, 55.

29 For example, the Christopher Tye project, discussed in Chapter 5 on chamber music.

30 Meyer, Ein Gespräch mit Brian Ferneyhough, 51–52.

31 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.

32 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).

33 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.

34 See Harvey, Foreword, Collected Writings, ix.

35 Meyer, Ein Gespräch mit Brian Ferneyhough, 55.

36 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 205.

37 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.

38 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.

39 Meyer, Ein Gespräch mit Brian Ferneyhough, 55–56.

40 See Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 25 and 77.

41 Ferneyhough, unpublished sketch materials, La terre est un homme, Paul Sacher Stiftung, Basel, Switzerland, c. 1976–1979.

42 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 242.

43 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 3–4.

44 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).

45 Ibid., 7.

46 Ibid., 318.

47 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 211.

48 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.

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), 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 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; 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,