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The Musical Times

Readers familiar with the notion of ‘new complexity’ are likely to accept that its purest British manifestations stem from a clutch of composers born between the early 1940s and the late 1950s, with Ferneyhough (b.1943), Michael Finnissy (b.1946), James Dillon (b.1950) and Richard Barrett (b.1959) the best-known practitioners. Sub-categories of musical modernism have always been supremely porous, welcoming – temporarily or permanently – as many additional composers to the fold as individual listeners might care to propose. But I would expect a majority of listeners in 2021 to be content with placing Sam Hayden (b.1968) in the ‘complex’ category on grounds of intricacy of notation and intensity of expressive atmosphere. It is also the case that Hayden shares with all the other composers named above a willingness to write substantial works for the piano, spurred on, no doubt, by the knowledge that there are specialist performers like Ian Pace who are willing and able to learn and interpret that music.

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’.

That Sam Hayden is a quarter-century younger than Ferneyhough signals a considerable difference in formative environments with respect to avant-garde preoccupations in the 1980s as opposed to the 1960s. Among his close British contemporaries only Rebecca Saunders (b.1967) – long resident in Germany – might be thought at all comparable, even though the expressionistic starkness of her late-modernist ethos depends rather less on sheer notational or textural complexity. But in a generation where Julian Anderson (also b.1967) and Thomas Adès (b.1971) lead the field, and a range of other composers – among them Tansy Davies, Joe Cutler, Roxanna Panufnik, Kenneth Hesketh and Richard Causton – come to mind, a general inclination to marginalise avant-garde tendencies seems patent.

Since 2000, what remains of ‘complex’ initiatives acknowledges the contribution of  rapidly evolving electro-acoustic technologies in enhancing the capacity to highlight dramatic confrontations and interactions of ‘live’ and ‘electronic’, reflecting the kind of well-funded institutional underpinning of which, from Britain, Jonathan Harvey (one of Hayden’s teachers) was a leading beneficiary. The musical outcome, speaking very generally, was the embrace of varieties of pluralism that acknowledged the complementary extremes of avant-garde and neo-romantic. But Hayden seems increasingly resistant to such inherent heterodoxy, searching instead for a purer plane of post-expressionism, whose affinities come closer to the specific pitch and interval aspects of spectralism than the more abstract structural notions of pitches and intervals as classes in any and every register. As Hayden’s notes with these discs explain, his techniques now involve the use of IRCAM’s Open Music computer-assisted composition software to generate underlying duration structures and their rhythmical subdivisions, and pitch-field transformations between invented 12TET or 24TETscales and more overtone-based pitch structures.

With such a basis in predetermination, the individualised expressive charge of the discourse being conveyed to the listener allows for a consistently constructive quality quite different in spirit from that found in earlier, more sheerly brittle manifestations of avant-garde complexity.

Back in 1997 Ian Pace hazarded a basic com­parison between Ferneyhough and Finnissy: as young composers, both seemed to be consciously inhabiting ‘a post-Big Bang world’, which attempted ‘to form some shape out of the millions of particles which are flying around the air, the residue of the musical explosion that was brought about by Cage’. But whereas Ferneyhough ‘assembles units of debris to form some sort of entity, Finnissy presents the debris en masse, then like a sculptor creates areas of coherence within the whole phenomenon’ (‘The piano music’, p.50). Finnissy himself has vividly described the effect of other media – notably film – on his earlier work, and such experiences have clearly fuelled his use of ‘alien’ material, especially exact or adapted but still recognisable quotations of musics from outside the modernist vocabulary – material that is bound to seem strange when treated as part of the debris that survives to float around in modern musical space.

In such a disintegrated technical environment it seems right for Hayden to question the late-modernist implication that ‘dramatic confrontations’, and a whole range of disruptive strategies, are preferable to a more austere, less oppositional avant-garde aesthetic that seeks to maintain an unstable flow to a degree that is almost classical in its unoppressive insistence. For Hayden, ‘less confrontation, more contemplation’ might be a suitable mantra, but if this is expected to promote an academical blandness of musical tone the music itself could hardly be more different. Having worked at various times with both Finnissy and Ferneyhough as well as Harvey and Louis Andriessen, Hayden seemed to acquire an early expertise in avoiding anxieties of influence, and his individual creative instinct has led him, in Becomings, the most recent and most ambitious composition on these discs, to explore in depth the most challenging of all modernist concepts – the dialogue – differences from the compositional starting point revealed in the earliest pieces recorded here.

Both … still time … and Piano moves (for amplified piano) date from 1990, and come across as exercises in the drawing of radically different conclusions from the same basic source. In simple terms, … still time … begins with three jagged assertions (marked ffff ) of an archetypal post-tonal trichord, spaced as C, E♭, C♯, A, B♭, G: F, G♭, A♭. Piano moves begins (over a low, indeterminate cluster) with a brashly minimalist toccata à la moto perpetuo whose initial pitches – D, E, C♯– also express. … still time … then builds to a state of maximal contrast between ferociously expressionist counterpoint culminating in brutal ffffff clusters and a pppppp ending with more silences than sounds that spreads its final – A, B♭, C – over many octaves. Piano moves also ends with empty space between very low and very high, but in this case the music has moved from fizzing velocity to frozen fixity, ending with clangourous five-note chords in each hand that share the generative D and E, and take their remaining pitches from a mode – B, C, C♯, D, E, F, F♯, G – that (when shown in pitch-class form) treats D/E as an axis of symmetry.

Hayden was writing this just a year after the founding of the British group Piano Circus to perform Steve Reich’s Six pianos, and at a time when the Factory label CD of Steve Martland’s Babi Yar for orchestra and Drill for two pianos was invigorating a contemporary British scene with a rough edge quite different from anything by Birtwistle or Ferneyhough. At 22 in 1990, Hayden clearly had the measure of minimalist and experimentalist propensities to kick over the aesthetic traces, but on the evidence of this pair of pieces, the dance-y exuberance and euphoria of Reich and his followers were there to be resisted. Repetitions aplenty are confined to small, even single elements, and placed in spaced-out environments, with plenty of time for resonance or simply silence.

The ‘keep ’em guessing’ quality of both pieces – ‘will this chord, or type of sound, ever change, and does it need to?’– challenges the listener to wait until a judgement about the whole can be arrived at, and after 30 years … still time … and Piano moves retain a freshness that holds you in thrall, thanks in large part to Pace’s vividly characterised playing and a recorded ambience capturing every twanging resonance of Pianomoves’ bell-like sonorities. But in the last of these earlier compositions – Fragment (after losses) from 2003, with minor revisions in 2019 (Losses referring to an orchestral piece, Sunk losses, from 2002) – any brashly minimalist tendencies have fallen away. The initial gesture, in which a symmetrical [0156] tetrachord is literally repeated as it moves from the left hand to the right, indicates the presence of invariance as a generative compositional principle, but the listener is likely to be more immediately aware of shapes in which the contrast between sustained sonorities and fleeting, ornamental features is used to animate a discourse which ends with gentle reminders of [0156]’s separate elements. The possibility that echoes (but not alienating quotations!) of the 19th-century virtuoso style can also be heard behind the hyper-expressionist turbulence that fuels the music’s main climaxes is all the more effective here for its relative explicitness, and these echoes reappear as a crucial feature on the much larger scale of Becomings, which occupied Hayden between 2016 and 2018.

As processes, both convergence and divergence might be designated aspects of musical ‘becoming’, and a full compositional demonstration of the dialogue between ‘becoming’ and ‘being’ would seem to call for some incontrovertible evidence of an advance beyond the norm, if not a resolution of an unstable process into a stable completion. The textural tangles that dominate the seven movements of Becomings play imaginatively with such notions. As Hayden explains, ‘the title deliberately refers to the philosophical sense of “becoming” dating back to Heraclitus’ and the ‘idea of a world in constant change’. This association of radical musical thought with Greek philosophy can be found in other writers on musical modernism, for example Michael Cherlin, who in 2000 wrote of Schoenberg brings unresolved opposition or conflict to the forefront of the musical language’. Similarly, Hayden writes of Becomings as one of a series of compositions that ‘oscillates constantly between dense, energetic, hyper-virtuosic gestural materials and moments of relative clarity, but never settling one way or the other, in a tension that is never really resolved’. He has used very similar phrases in describing Transience, his 30-minute work for string quartet, completed in 2014, which can be heard on NMC D247 (2019).

‘Gestural materials’, suggesting physical motion, actions – rather than ‘motifs’ or ‘musical ideas’ that imply something equivalent to verbal propositions – are present from the outset, where the initial flurry of pitches (to be played ‘sempre con energia’) can easily be broken down into small invariant subsets. Yet such intimations of thematic coherence are swept aside by the predominant assertiveness of the overall shape, whose energetic character is launched by a trill, an adumbration of volatility whose physicality Hayden discusses further: ‘essential to the conception of the piece is the absence of clear pre-existing musical objects (or “beings”) as such: only musical “becomings” where transformation itself is the very basis of the music’. Despite the possibility of abstracting multiple instances of the [016] pc set at the beginning, then, such ‘clear, pre-existing musical objects’ are not aurally as basic to the music in the way they can be in much high and late modernist post-tonal music, not least Schoenberg and Webern.

In Becomings ‘the sonic surfaces constantly ebb and flow, coalesce and decompose in a state of flux, existing on an unstable continuum between computer-generated synthetic scales and quasi-spectral harmonic fields.’ Yet Hayden then ups the ante by declaring that ‘my intention was to create a piece with the maximum surface diversity and proliferation of materials whilst maintaining an underlying formal coherence’. Is the point that ‘becoming’ can, after all, coexist with ‘being’? Is there a complementary relation between ‘sonic surfaces’ that ‘constantly ebb and flow’ and an ‘underlying formal coherence’, comparable perhaps to the relation between the work’s overall repertory of ‘hyper-virtuosic gestural materials’ and those ‘moments of relative clarity’ which occur at points where the turbulent flow is stilled? What is still a relatively early stage of exploration of Becomings as a whole suggests that such a moment happens for the first time at bar 9 of Movement 1, with a long pause on a very loud six-note chord, followed by a much softer echo at a slower tempo before the predominantly energetic gesturing resumes.

In his liner notes, Hayden’s overall narrative sustains a balance between dialectically opposed extremes while including suitable qualifications along the way, as when the ending of Movement 6 involves ‘a stark juxtaposition between rapid filigree textures and slowly evolving, widely-spaced chiming chords almost representing a clarification of previous materials’ (italics added). Then, the seventh and final movement ‘functions as a kind of coda where all the tendencies from the previous movements are hinted at’. So far so quasi-classical? ‘Yet there is always the sense of unfinished business’, of wholesale ‘clarification’ resisted rather than embraced, and in this way the essential paradox of the piece remains – ‘the music is in a continual state of “becoming”’ – and the conventional creative aspiration to some kind of ‘underlying formal coherence’ itself contributes to the paradoxical enterprise of bringing avant-garde ambitions alongside more mainstream expectations and possibilities.

Hayden’s overall characterisation of Becomings, especially when accounting for the addition of two further movements after the initial concept was complete, leaves no doubt that for him a dramatic unfolding was taking place in which ‘scales’, generated algorithmically, and ‘spectra’ (with fundamental notes) combine and interact to propel the discourse within the continuum. Such a dramatic quality is arguably most evident in Movement 4, where something akin to late romantic grandeur is glimpsed in Pace’s brilliantly persuasive shaping of segments involving trills and tremolandos in lines whose floridity often seems organised to shun traditionally cumulative phraseology, but can still project a sense of epic engagement with the history as well as the mechanisms of pianistic virtuosity.

Seven movements spanning three-quarters of an hour are naturally harder to ‘process’ than the not-quite-five-minutes of Fragment (after losses). Listeners who learn to detect sufficient divergence as well as essential convergence across such a vast continuum should have the best chance of a positive reaction to the work as a whole. But in avoiding the sheer violence that Ferneyhough allows into his highly concentrated pianistic dramas, or the intra-stylistic allusiveness central to many of Finnissy’s most encyclopedic multi-movement works, Hayden has foregone some of the proven avant-garde ways of ensuring a certain visceral accessibility of musical tone – that working with ‘debris’ to which Pace has referred. With its obsessive faithfulness to its own particular manners and mechanisms, Becomings seems impelled by a particular paradox, achieving a very intense kind of detachment, which it sustains throughout. The habitual critical question – ‘what can possibly come next, and on what scale?’ – seems more than usually crass when so much remains to be learned about what Becomings itself has to say. Fortunately, these remarkable discs make it possible for us to do just that.