A guide to Brian Ferneyhough's music | Music | The Guardian

11/2/15, 23:55

A guide to Brian Ferneyhough's music

His compositions are the ultimate in complexity. So how to approach the works of this
philosophically demanding musician?
Tom Service
Monday 10 September 2012 16.47 BST

Here's a question. What is complexity in music? Is there any music more complex than, say,
the six-part Ricercar
, with its six independent but symbiotically related strata of ever-changing musical
information, from Bach's Musical Offering? Has anyone in the 20th or 21st century come close
to demanding as much from his or her listeners and performers than JS Bach did in that piece,
or any of his innumerable fugues? Or what about Beethoven's late quartets
? Aren't they the acme of musical complexity, in the sense of a rich stream of musical meanings
and unpredictabilities, for the players just as much as the audience? Or is the bar set still higher
by Schoenberg's First Chamber Symphony
, that jam-packed single movement that compresses pretty well the entire classical and
romantic tradition of forms, structures and expressivity into 20 minutes? Or what about the
compressed atonality of Webern's early works
, or the quasi-neural network of multiple musical connections of his later music
? The impossible canons of Conlon Nancarrow
, taking his player pianos to other dimensions in the Mexican desert? Or the vertiginous sound
and fury of the postwar avant-garde composers Ligeti, Stockhausen, Boulez, Xenakis ?
The reason I ask is 69-year-old Coventry-born composer Brian Ferneyhough. His works, it is
often said, are the ne plus ultra of musical complexity, in the sense of notational overload,
performing difficulty and even philosophical questioning. He is even, supposedly, one of the
godfathers of "New Complexity", although he rejects the term (just like his fellow so-called
complexists, James Dillon and Michael Finnissy). Here's a good example of what I'm on about,
including, thanks to flammesombres's YouTube channel, a score of Ferneyhough's piano piece
Lemma-Icon-Epigram
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as well as its sounds. (And this is one of Ferneyhough's "simpler" scores, by the way.) The
comments below include some pretty polarised opinions on this piece, falling into a typical
new-music polemic, of "It sounds like a monkey throwing itself on the keyboard" versus "If
you don't get this, you're a philistine". If you're new to this music, though, you may need some
help in decoding the score. So let's have a wee think about how you might approach the very
first bar.
Firstly, the pianist has to play a group of 11 hemi-demi-semiquavers in the time of seven in the
basic tempo of quaver = around 50, followed by a single hemi-demi-semiquaver rest and then a
semiquaver rest. That volley of notes is followed by a group of 11 hemi-demis in the time of
eight, enclosing a triplet and dotted notes; then comes a group where you need to count 10
hemi-demis in your head in the time of eight, but you also have to subdivide them into one
group of five against four in your new virtual tempo, and then six against four, before a final
hemi-demi rest in that overall scheme of 10 against eight. Got that? And that's just the rhythm.
There's then, of course, the small matter of the notes you have to play in this rhythm, the
dynamics, and the huge variety of expressive markings and pedal indications. And that's just
to be able to get close to playing the first five seconds of this 14-minute piece. It is, well, pretty
complex!
So what does this kind of notational complexity mean? What does it produce in performance,
and what does it sound like? Virtually every single bar of Ferneyhough's music poses these
questions (his mature music, at least he grew up playing in brass bands in the Midlands, but
left what he saw as the UK's musical provincialism for the more experimental climes of Europe
and the US, where he now lives and teaches). It's in performance that the open-ended and
endlessly fascinating answers are disclosed: philosophical solutions that pile musical riddle on
to musical riddle to push at the existential limits of what a musical work might be.
Ferneyhough holds no compositorial guillotine of musical perfection over the heads of his
performers. Asking any of the musicians who regularly commission and play his pieces the
Arditti Quartet
, say, or pianist Nicolas Hodges
, or violinist Mieko Kanno, or cellist Neil Hyde to perform them perfectly, according to the
precise letter, dot, and micro-indication of his scores, is not Ferneyhough's abiding aim. You
see, the desire to put all that information on the page is really the start of a dialogue, with the
possibilities of what the performer is going to do with the piece and with what the listeners will
hear. 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.
The point is, if Ferneyhough wanted his scores (and check out the orchestral works, such as La
Terre Est un Homme
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or Transit
if you really want your head to spin) to be a sort of straitjacket for the performer, to determine
precisely what they should be doing at every micro-second of the piece, he would have become
an electronic or electro-acoustic composer. In that case, a single recording could and would
represent the definitive realisation of each of his pieces. In fact, as hundreds of composers
have discovered in the past, the more information you give for your performers to interpret,
the more open-ended rather than fixed the work becomes, as every expressive mark becomes
something that's played and interpreted differently by each different performer.
Reading this on mobile? Click here to listen

Ferneyhough has said as much himself in the trademark poetical convolutions of his prose.
"What can a specific notation, under favourable conditions, hope to achieve? Perhaps simply
this: a dialogue with the composition of which it is a token such that realm of non-equivalence
separating the two (where, perhaps, the 'work' might be said to be ultimately located?) be
sounded out, articulating the inchoate, outlining the way from the conceptual to the
experiential and back." I like that, because what Ferneyhough's really saying is that the "work"
is not to be found only on the printed page (his "non-equivalence" phrase), but somewhere
between and beyond the sum of the score's indications and the sum of all of the possible
performances that may result from it as well as being a record of Ferneyhough's own
gigantically complex compositional processes.
OK now bear with this, because these general points will give you a framework at least to
begin to understand the rest of Ferneyhough's music, and have something to say about the
whole culture of classical music, too. What happens, then, when you hear a piece of
Ferneyhough's, in the process of communication from performer to audience? While it's true
to say that Ferneyhough does not expect perfection on the part of his performers, he does
expect them to try to get there, and part of the thrill of what you hear in any performance of
Ferneyhough's music is an experiential extreme of the world's most virtuosic musicians
pushing themselves to the boundaries of what they can do and sometimes beyond. (At least
one of Ferneyhough's pieces, Time and Motion Study II
for solo cello and electronics, makes expressive play with that idea, virtually strapping the
cellist into a sort of musical electric chair in which one of the strictures that binds the musician
to the attempt to realise the work is the labyrinthine density of the notation, sometimes
written on five staves instead of the single stave that a cellist usually needs.) There is no
chance not even if you're Pierre Boulez or Oliver Knussen of notating down what you hear
when you hear a Ferneyhough piece. And similarly, there's no chance that the mind-bending
rhythmic density of that first bar of Lemma-Icon-Epigram is heard as it is written. Here's what I
mean: the effect of that first bar, without the score, is of a coruscating burst of piano sound
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that propels the start of the musical labyrinth of the piece; it isn't of 10 hemi-demis in the time
of eight, or whatever else the score says. So what's the point of all that "complexity"?
If you talk to the players who most often play Ferneyhough, they all say that his notation has
to be the way it is to achieve the results he wants in performance, even if there's a vanishingly
tiny possibility of all that information being communicated to the listener. What we're getting
as listeners is a trace of the score the performer is playing from, which is in turn only a trace of
the musical work that Ferneyhough has imagined. And yet, because of the ferocity of
concentration on the part of the musician, and because of the range and imagination of what
you hear, what you actually get when you hear a performance of his music is something
definitive, direct and undeniable a sheer thrill of musical extremity.
If you heard the BBC Symphony Orchestra's revelatory performance of La Terre Est un Homme
last February at the Barbican in London, you can't have escaped the elemental power of this
music, one of the most significant achievements in late 20th-century orchestral writing, yet
hardly known until that concert. (And it must be issued on CD soon, if there's a record
company reading this!)
All of that is a sort of gigantic upbeat to your own exploration of Ferneyhough's music. Get
stuck into his works for solo instruments or chamber ensemble. There's also an unclassifiable
music-theatre piece on Walter Benjamin called Shadowtime
; there are those gigantically ambitious orchestral pieces, including the most recent,
Pltzlichkeit
; and there are some brilliant large ensemble pieces that grab you by the scruff of the neck and
don't let go. Try the Carceri d'Invenzione pieces
, or one of my favourites, Terrain
, a kind of uber-violin concerto. Oh, and Ferneyhough has also written one of the most
important canons of string quartets in the entire literature
, six of them so far.
One last thing: just what is it that Ferneyhough's music has to tell us about the entire literature
of western classical music? Well: that it's all essentially unknowable it is as difficult to answer
the question of what Beethoven's Fifth Symphony really is as what Lemma-Icon-Epigram
might be, if you think about it for a second and essentially experiential, revealed in all of its
elusive but definitive power through the evanescent illumination of performance. In that
fundamental sense, Ferneyhough's music is no more and no less complex than any other
classical music. Got there. I've only scratched the surface of Ferneyhough's work here, of
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course: the rest is up to you!

Five key links

Terrain

String Quartet No 5
Carceri d'Invenzione III

Lemma-Icon-Epigram

Bone Alphabet in performance

and Ferneyhough teaching the piece
Next week: Jonathan Harvey
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