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The Musical Times

Sophisticated musicologists, as well as world-weary music students, can easily lose sight of the obvious but basic fact that the more elaborate music notation becomes, the fewer people will be able to adequately perform the composition, or to precisely imagine the sound of the music from reading the score. Never can this have been truer than during the previous century, when a single year, 1970, could see the contrast between what looks like ultra-simple notation – Howard Skempton’s Waltz for piano – and something ultra-complex – Brian Ferneyhough’s Cassandra’s dream song for solo flute. And despite the claims, from those who value the inherent ambiguity of truly modernist art, that Skempton’s piece can actually appear more allusive, more enigmatic than Ferneyhough’s, Waltz undoubtedly remains easier to play and to hear from the page than Cassandra’s dream song.

A pair of two-disc sets recently issued by Métier/Divine Art Records presents Pace’s readings of all the piano works by Ferneyhough and Sam Hayden. The albums also include extensive notes (to which the composers have contributed) that offer invaluable insights into how what is performed can usefully be heard. Pace’s understanding of performance as an art in itself is rooted in deep experience of and admiration for the classics of a repertory that evolved historically as the instrument itself evolved, and whatever the complexities of the philosophical, political or music-theoretical hinterlands that Ferneyhough and Hayden bring to their thinking as they confront blank manuscript paper, neither of them has sought to permanently transform the instrument itself, along experimental post-Cageian lines. This music is therefore not just complex in its own terms, but has complex relationships with the techniques and traditions it might be thought to interrogate and to transform. In other words, it has remarkable depth, and in Hayden’s case at least there is an explicit commitment to problematising rather than simply rejecting the very concept of ‘background’.

The Schenkerian analyst believes that when Beethoven composed the first movement of his third symphony, he would have instinctively kept the overall controlling process inherent in the fundamental Ursatz (as Schenker came to define it in the 1920s) in mind. For Beethoven, to compose was to compose tonally, and to compose tonally was to commit to ways of thinking that Schenkerians have come to conceive of in terms of intersecting structural levels (foreground, middleground, background) that keep a classical balance between diversification and unification. In a detailed, sketch-based analysis of a post-tonal work (especially when informed by discussions between composer and analyst, as with Richard Toop’s study of Ferneyhough’s Lemma-Icon-Epigram¹), a comparable relation between source material and compositional surface may seem to be implied by the analytical narrative. Yet the harmony between surface and source detectable in Beethoven is replaced in Ferneyhough by something altogether more confrontational.

To regard the abstract materials determining pitch and other parameters in Ferneyhough as subject to progressive transformations that preserve an essential identity throughout risks traducing the composer’s avant-garde, radical intent, which is to generate something that violently resists conformity to a commitment to discipline and order as paramount. While Beethoven aimed to sustain a trajectory that coheres by ensuring that however disruptive in the short term an event might be, disruption does not overwhelm or even dominate the discourse, Ferneyhough prioritises the distinctiveness of each event in turn, accumulating an intricate network of ‘moments’ whose succession is freed from any sense of being ineluctably chained together. Even though these segments must always appear in the same order when the work is performed, the listener may never come to regard any single event as implied by or pre dictive of what comes before and after. A feeling of things balancing out at the level of event succession – shorter or longer, softer or louder, higher or lower – will reinforce the obvious point that literal, exact repetition of any active compositional feature is not to be expected, and relationships between traditional compositional genres – from sonata to opera – and those to which Ferneyhough’s works appear to allude will themselves be ambiguous and/or ironic.

In 1978 Ferneyhough began an article on Finnissy’s piano music with the then-reasonable observation that music for solo piano was only ‘a small part’ of his output.² That was true for Ferneyhough himself at that date, and the contrast between his relatively infrequent resort to solo piano since and Finnissy’s cornucopia of compositions for the instrument is just one of the obvious differences between the two. With Ferneyhough, you get the feeling that there is something exceptional about any writing for a single performer, with shunning the collective, interactive drama that most of his compositions revel in: and this makes it all the more appropriate that his use of solo piano music in a theatrical setting for the centrepiece of his one and only opera, Shadowtime, first performed complete in 2004, should require the (single) pianist to act two parts simultaneously – speaking as well as playing.

Shadowtime deals obliquely with the tragic wartime death of the German-Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin. The scene entitled ‘Opus contra naturam’ can be performed outside its operatic context, but the score dubs it ‘a shadow play for speaking pianist’ and it remains the acme of Ferneyhough at his most febrile, a wild ride to the abyss that encapsulates Benjamin’s fate in failing to escape to safety in 1940. The Charles Bernstein text which the pianist declaims while playing is not printed with the Métier discs, and Pace’s recording of the original version, in which the short third section’s text is not included – added to the difficulty in hearing what is being said in the earlier sections – reinforces the air of desperation that this unsparing representation of the philosopher’s futile struggle to survive conveys. There is a very different balance on NMC’s compete recording of Shadowtime, taken from the BBC’s live transmission of the work’s single London performance at ENO in July 2005 (NMC D12₃, 2006). Here Nicholas Hodges projects the text much more forcefully, as you would expect when the opera is staged in a large theatre: by contrast, Hodges’s later studio recording, included in his two-disc Ferneyhough set from Neos issued in 2015, goes much further in the direction of a more downbeat detachment.

Opus contra naturam hinges on the sense that the narrator-pianist (Liberace-like, according to Ferneyhough) is not Benjamin, and the opera overall seems to invite the conclusion that Benjamin’s ideas and writings are what survive and what matter, even as his terminal suffering is starkly contemplated and anatomised. This conclusion can be seen as Ferneyhough’s version of alienated, doomed modernist creativity, striving to be acknowledged and valued against overwhelming odds, and there is a strong feeling of desperate affirmation at the end of Shadowtime’s final choral scene, ‘Stelae for failed time (Solo for Melancholia as the Angel of History)’, especially as recorded by the BBC Singers on another Métier disc (MSV 2501, 2007), where the required electronic background (including the composer’s own speaking voice) is barely perceptible.

Nevertheless, as an anti-heroic narrative with heroic overtones, Shadowtime sits well with the prevailing spirit of Ferneyhough’s music from its earliest post-Webernian forays in the 1960s, and the short ‘Invention’ (1965) which launches Pace’s Métier album seems to share something of Heinz Holliger’s uneasy response to Boulezian glitter and Darmstadt-like earnestness, even though it was written well before Ferneyhough settled in Germany. Nevertheless, from as early as the fractured syntax and textures of the Epigrams, first played by John McCabe at an SPNM concert in 1967, it seems increasingly clear that Ferneyhough would not be satisfied with the mainstream view of post-tonal expressionism that appealed to serial composers keen to write music that the broadcasting and concert-giving establishment might be willing to perform. He appears to have shared the optimism of the youthful avant-garde that something more radical and challenging than Dallapiccola, Karl Amadeus Hartmann, Elisabeth Lutyens or Alexander Goehr could win acceptance – prominence, even – in the post-Schoenbergian, post-Stravinskian world of the 1970s.

After a year of study in Amsterdam (1968–69), Basel and Freiburg were destined to be the bases for Ferneyhough to sculpt his own response to the charismatic challenges of the leading avant-gardists in the decade after Le marteau and Gruppen. The Epigrams, Sonata for Two Pianos (for which Pace is joined by Ben Smith) and the Three pieces for piano from the mid-1960s may be preliminary to the ensemble and vocal works on which he built his reputation after 196₇, but they have abundant depth and gravitas, a poise and sense of purpose, within which the exceptional ebullience and ferocity of his fully mature works were already simmering. Ferneyhough’s own note on the Three pieces finds an ‘overall tendency’ to ‘a sense of increasing entropy countered, in part, by the evolution of the nervous, evasive flickerings characterising the first movement into more consistently stable (and thus recognizable) textures’, as ‘a form in which disbalance, frustration and unpredictability are the norm’ and which leads to ‘a sort of “negative resolution” […] in the third movement’, where ‘all types of activity, whatever their putative origin, are held forcibly isolated from one another almost as if they belong in distinct, mutually incomprehensible universes of discourse’.

Talk of forcible isolation suggests that even in his student years Ferneyhough was well aware of what truly avant-garde composition required. But Pace’s own comment about a style of writing in the second piece that ‘gradually gives way to an evocative late expressionist idiom (with a particular fixation on repeated pitches and chords), which dominates the third piece’ is a useful corrective. The mid-to-late 1960s was one of the richest times in British modernist composition, with a particularly potent expressionist charge found in Maxwell Davies’s Revelation and fall and St Thomas wake, and the explosive originality of Michael Finnissy’s Songs 5–9, of which Pace has said elsewhere that ‘a more electrifying entry into the arena of piano literature could hardly be imagined’. Ferneyhough’s Three pieces might not present such formidable challenges to the per former, but their skilful management of the textural dramas in which varying degrees of stability are both challenged and quizzically reinforced lays firm foundations for his magnum opus of these years, the Sonatas for string quartet (196₇). This is a virtuosic magnification of Webernian expres sionistic miniaturism onto a scale able to absorb what now seems like an infusion of Italianate warmth – perhaps in consequence of Ferneyhough’s awareness of Nono, Maderna and Donatoni – to counter the neo-Webernian febrility.

As well as maintaining his pre-eminence as a performer in recent years, Ian Pace has entered the musicological lists with his extensive scholarly writings, among which his review article ‘Ferneyhough hero: scholarship as promotion’ is notable for delineating the difficulties critical commentators can have in distinguishing a living composer’s preferred self-image from something more objective and detached. With Ferneyhough anything amounting to a comprehensive introductory overview is an Everest for any writer to climb, and Pace pulls no punches in his critique of Lois Fitch’s 2013 monograph, partly on account of the way it privileges ‘meta-musical over sonically generated meaning’ (p.103). I share Pace’s resistance to ‘bargain basement hermeneutics’ (p.110 – citing an unpublished 2014 paper by Björn Heile), yet Fitch’s study is not completely devoid of close-reading sensitivity. For example, she says of the Sonatas for string quartet that Ferneyhough’s ‘stated ambivalence towards musical word-painting […] belies some richly expressive passages’ such as that marked ‘Notturnamente’, ‘a calm chordal passage’ leading ‘into the closing polyphonic material of the section in high register, marked Sereno e chiaro, the whole episode a transfigured night’. Ferneyhough may remain at some distance from the young Schoenberg’s late romanticism in Verklärte Nacht (1899), but the effectiveness of this and several other comparably tender and eloquent moments in Sonatas, highlighted by Fitch, does rather reinforce awareness of what has been kept subordinate in his music with the progression from a modernist to an avant-garde aesthetic after 1970.

It was not till 1981 that Ferneyhough returned to solo piano music, with the 14-minute Lemma-Icon-Epigram, by which time such uncompromising conceptions as the three Time and motion studies, Transit and La terre est un homme had been completed and performed. The kind of confrontational hermeticism that has persisted in works whose titles appear to tease per formers and listeners with arcane references to alchemy, astrology or Tudor church music carry a torch for unrepentant elitism that is anathema when cultural ideals of accessibility and inclusionism rule the roost. Yet, even if one regrets the absence of music marked ‘sereno e chiaro’ in these later scores, the enduring vitality and urgent communicative exuberance of such music prevent it from seeming arid or passé. The way both Lemma-Icon-Epigram and Opus contra naturam seize the kaleidoscope of traditional pianistic virtuosity and shake it so forcefully that it remains shaken and never settles into a newly configured stability still has the power to leave the listener both stunned and stimulated, at least when played with such needle-sharp articulation and maximal clarity of textural layers as on these Métier discs.

With the rapidly changing shapes of a volcanic lava flow, Lemma launches a sonic tirade which Icon seems to be trying to monumentalise, or force into a more stately measure, only for Epigram to exert a short sequence of dismissive feints in face of such sobriety. Ferneyhough’s own laconic note for the work, also printed with Pace’s slightly earlier NMC recording (NMC DO66), released back in 2001, relishes the ambiguities consequent to any brief attempt to define with absolute clarity the three terms in his title, and the strength of the music is its assertiveness – this is how it has to be, and once you’ve heard it, airy dismissal or cosy embrace seems equally absurd as considered responses. But you have to look elsewhere for a moderate mainstream. Pace’s Ferneyhough set ends with the two most recent solo piano pieces. Quirl (2011–13) responds to the image of ‘a coil, curl, or intricate entanglement, a series of writhing distorquements’, conceived as an ‘extended study in self-similar fractal rhythms’ and has moments of an almost Ligetian lightness of touch, in keeping with the relatively domestic, decorative quality of Ferneyhough’s second definition of ‘quirl’, ‘the act of abstractedly winding ringlets of hair around the forefinger’. Rhythmic buoyancy is paramount here, and although uninhibited playfulness is kept in check, the absence of post-Benjaminian melancholia is notable. Domesticity is even more frankly acknowledged in the brief El rey de Calabria (c.2019), inscribed ‘for Trifolio (1988– 2005)’, who, Pace tells us, was the Ferneyhough’s three-legged cat (presumably a successor to Lancelot, who appears in a photograph in Fitch’s book). Quite how this, and the music, connect to the title, and the striking image on the booklet cover of Reggio di Calabria’s monument to the war-goddess Athena and the Italian King Vittore Emanuele II, is not explained. Far from warlike, the mood is one of well-nigh romantic restraint, and alongside Pace’s observation of Schoenbergian qualities, the spirits of Scriabin and Szymanowski can also be sensed. As Ferneyhough approaches 80 in 2023, it is only appropriate for the lion to grow less abrasive, though there is nothing predictable about this gentle threnody as it moves circumspectly towards its understated ending.