I’ve been intrigued (some might say borderline obsessed) with Brian Ferneyhough’s music since 2010 when I first heard Mnemosyne for bass flute and tape in a class at Bowling Green State University. The highly complex web of activity, decoupled staff notation, the look of his scores and the endurance required to perform his music has fascinated and puzzled me for years. At first I wasn’t sure if I actually liked the music or if I was just obsessed with trying to decode and unravel it the way some people obsess over Sunday New York Times crossword puzzles. Eventually I realized that, ultimately, it’s the sound world, the music, that draws me into what Ferneyhough creates, but my left-brain personality couldn’t stop obsessing over trying to figure out how a performer approaches deconstructing a Ferneyhough piece. I decided to seek out Ferneyhough’s now out-of-print collected writings (Routledge [June 1, 1995]) and see if I could find any answers there. What I found was one of the most rewarding books I have ever read. Brian Ferneyhough’s essays, while difficult to digest, are informative, rich, engaging and thought-provoking. Additionally, they provide insights into his music which no one is able to provide as effectively as the composer himself. The collection is organized into one book divided into 4 sections - essays, analyses of Ferneyhough’s own music, analyses of other composers’ music and various interviews, with a forward to the book by Jonathan Harvey. Typically with these kind of collections I feel more inclined to jump around and read whatever catches my fancy, or what I’m particularly interested in. I think that freedom is kind the beauty of reading a collection of essays without a defined narrative. With Ferneyhough’s book I didn’t take that approach. Even though I had an affinity for Ferneyhough’s music when I picked up a copy of the book, I still found the theory, structure and philosophy behind the music to be so foreign that I honestly didn’t know where to start reading. So, I felt it was best to just start at the beginning and read to the end (what a novel idea, right?). In the end, I found this to an effective way to approach this book. By the end of the first couple of essays I felt I was already understanding Ferneyhough's philosophy of composition and music on a much deeper level. To be honest, though, I wasn’t sure how deep into that rabbit hole I wanted to go, but I couldn’t stop reading. Still, the organization of topics seems to provide the reader with an effective trajectory to approach Ferneyhough’s writing and analysis. In general, I found this entire book extraordinary and I could not put it down for days. When I first started reading it I was on a trip to a conference. I started reading it at 7:00 AM in an airport terminal. I stopped reading at 6:00 PM when my final flight landed later that day, and didn’t want to stop reading. Granted, I didn’t make it through very much of Ferneyhough’s dense prose in those 11 hours, because I found myself re-reading section over and over again to make sure that I was fully (or at least mostly) comprehending the point being made or the question being proposed. The first section of the book (Essays) was definitely my favorite section, and the one that contained topics I was most interested in - notation, teaching composition, intersection of technology and composition - and held answers to some of the more pressing questions I had about the music and the ideology behind it. If you are a person who is interested in (or even infuriated by) the dense scores and rhythmic language of Ferneyhough’s music, these articles would be a great place to start. Ferneyhough goes through some excerpts of his music and provides his reasoning and methodology behind how he creates his nested tuplets, why they exist in his music and the necessity of the sometimes overly complex - but not impossible - scores he creates. An example of one his scores is below. The excerpt is Terrain composed for violinist Irvine Arditti (and yes, the performer does play both of those staves simultaneously) One of the topics I found most provocative was the essay on teaching composition and the role of the teacher (Divining Rods and Lightning Conductors), probably because I am in the early stages of becoming an educator. Without getting into too much detail, Ferneyhough discusses how it is often believed that the job of a composition teacher is to dive into their students’ minds, find any talent and know-how buried inside and bring it to the surface (hence the divining rod metaphor) through rigorous practice of compositional exercises (composing with “good” counterpoint, voice leading, orchestration, etc.). Ferneyhough argues that it is not the job to impose on the student, but to engage with them through discourse and let the student find his or her own compositional voice, talent and know-how. They should act as their own divining rod. While this teaching philosophy is probably often agreed on in theory, I wonder how much it is actually practiced. There is much more to that essay than I’m expressing here, and I feel that it’s a must-read for anyone interested in teaching for any subject, not just composition teachers.
The articles analyzing his own music and other composers music (specifically Webern, Michael Finnissy and Carl Ruggles) are very interesting, but without some knowledge of the pieces discussed, that entire section of the book probably won’t be very fruitful. However, the last section of the book - Interviews - is incredibly insightful and was probably what I found the most enjoyable to read. I’ve spent more time than I’d like to admit over the last 3-4 years watching interviews with Brian Ferneyhough on YouTube, and I’ve always been mesmerized by the way he speaks about music and art in candid conversation. The interviews in the book are transcriptions, so they aren’t quite as candid a live unedited video interview, but they’re still very engaging and mostly easy to read compared to the essays. And I think they provide an insight into Brian Ferneyhough that is very humanizing. I think the difficulty of the music and the complex notation of Ferneyhough’s scores makes it easy for him to be written off, either as overly cerebral or, Harvey puts it in his foreword to the book, a “boogeyman” of new music. The interviews that close his collected writings do a lot to dispel that attitude, maybe not about Ferneyhough’s music, but about him as a person and an artist. With all of the great things I’ve mentioned about this book, it isn’t without its flaws. Ferneyhough’s style of writing could easily be compared to the density of his scores. There’s a vast amount of insight and knowledge to be taken away from each article, but the amount of reading and re-reading I had to do in order to fully absorb the points being raised is the main reason I only got through about 25% of the book after 12 solid hours of airport reading. The long run-on sentences, incredibly dense language and syntax is often more confusing than it is clarifying. The subject matter is already complicated enough, I don’t see the reason to complicate it further with overly dense language. The main reason I found this to be a glaring issue with the book is because in the interviews, Ferneyhough’s manner of speaking is significantly less complicated and in the video interviews I’ve watched his language and explanations are lucid and comprehensible, even for someone not associated with Ferneyhough’s music. My only other gripe with this book is the third section about other composers’ music. I like the idea of a composer analyzing the music of other prominent composers - past and present - but devoting only 30 pages of a 525 page book to this topic seems unnecessary, if not a little forced. Maybe these are the only substantial writings Ferneyhough had published at this time, or maybe they just the most extensive ones he had published. Perhaps these are the only writings he felt were necessary to include in the collection. Regardless, I think having such a small amount of writing on that topic throws off the balance of the overall subject matter, and I felt there should have either been more time devoted to section 3 (even if it meant devoting less to one of the other sections of the book) or it should not have been included at all. Overall, this is an incredible collection and provides the reader with lots of insight to a brilliant composer whose sound world and compositional process is often misunderstood. I would definitely recommend this book to anyone with even a passing interest in Ferneyhough or new complexity in general. I would recommend it even more to anyone harboring animosity toward Ferneyhough and/or his music. It just might change your mind about the man and his music.
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Reverberations is a catch-all page for everything that doesn't fit into a neat and tidy box of blog posts and interviews. Enjoy!
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