Brian Ferneyhough

Brian John Peter Ferneyhough ( /ˈfɜrnihoʊ/, born 16 January 1943) is an English composer. His music is characterized by the extensive use of complex rhythmic tuplet notation. He has written for many different formations from solo, to chamber works, to orchestral pieces, to opera.

Life

Ferneyhough was born in Coventry and received formal musical training at the Birmingham School of Music and the Royal Academy of Music from 1966–67. His teachers there included Lennox Berkeley, a respected teacher though a conservative figure who preferred the works of French impressionism to the internationalist avant garde. Ferneyhough was awarded the Mendelssohn Scholarship in 1968 and moved to mainland Europe to study with Ton de Leeuw in Amsterdam, and later with Klaus Huber in Basel. Between 1973 and 1986 he taught composition at the Hochschule für Musik Freiburg, Germany.

His profile rose in the middle of the 1970s, as the Royan Festival of 1974 saw the premiere of Cassandra's Dream Song, the first of several pieces for solo flute, as well as Missa Brevis, written for 12 singers. In 1975, performances of his work for large ensemble Transit and Time and Motion Study III were given; the former piece being awarded a Koussevitzky prize, the latter performed at the prestigious Donaueschingen festival. In many of these events he was twinned with fellow British composer, Michael Finnissy, whom he became friends with during his student days. In 1984 he was given the title Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

Between 1987 and 1999 he was Professor of Music at the University of California at San Diego. As of 1999, he is William H. Bonsall Professor in Music at Stanford University. For the 2007–08 academic year, he was appointed Visiting Professor at the Harvard University Department of Music. Between 1978 and 1994 Ferneyhough was a composition lecturer at the Darmstädter Ferienkurse and, since 1990, has directed an annual mastercourse at the Fondation Royaumont in France.

In 2007, Ferneyhough received the Ernst von Siemens Music Prize for lifetime achievement, which includes a 200,000 Euro cash award. In 2009 he was appointed foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Music.

Works

Ferneyhough's initial forays into composition were met with little sympathy in England. His submission of Coloratura to the Society for the Promotion of New Music (SPNM) in 1966 was returned, with a suggestion that the oboe part should be scored for clarinet. However, whilst Ferneyhough did find it hard, one source of support came from Hans Swarsenski who saw the same thing happen to Cornelius Cardew; Cardew enjoyed a prestigious continental reputation, but a poor one in his homeland. Swarsenski said of Ferneyhough: 'I've taken on an English composer who is I think is enormously talented. If this doesn't work, this is the last time'. Ferneyhough continued to struggle, but the aforementioned Royan festival marked a breakthrough for Ferneyhough's career.

From here, Ferneyhough became closely associated with the so-called New Complexity school of composition (indeed, he is often referred to as the "Father of New Complexity"), characterized by its extension of the modernist tendency towards formalization (particularly as in integral serialism)^{[citation needed]}. Ferneyhough's actual compositional approach, however, rejects serialism and other "generative" methods of composing; he prefers instead to use systems only to create material and formal constraints, while their realisation appears to be more spontaneous. A recurring feature of his works is the use of rhythmic tuplet notation, and layered polyrhythms.^{[citation needed]} Unlike many more formally-inclined composers, Ferneyhough often speaks of his music as being about creating energy and excitement rather than embodying an abstract schema.^{[citation needed]} His pieces rarely use 12-note rows, but do include microtones and frequent use of glissando.^{[citation needed]}

His scores make huge technical demands on performers; sometimes, as in the case of Unity Capsule for solo flute, creating parts that are so detailed they are likely impossible to realize completely.^{[citation needed]} The compositions have, however, attracted a number of advocates, among them the Arditti Quartet, ELISION Ensemble, the members of the Nieuw Ensemble, Ensemble Contrechamps, Ensemble Exposé, Armand Angster, James Avery, Massimiliano Damerini, Arne DeForce, Friedrich Gauwerky, Nicolas Hodges, Mark Knoop, Geoffrey Morris, Ian Pace, Carl Rosman, Harry Spaarnay, and EXAUDI Vocal Ensemble.

Recently, he has started writing works which allude to past composers; his Dum transisset are based on Elizabethan composer Christopher Tye's works for viol.^{[citation needed]} In addition, the fourth string quartet references Schönberg.^{[citation needed]} One of his latest works, an opera, Shadowtime, with a libretto by Charles Bernstein, and based on the life of the German philosopher Walter Benjamin, was premiered in Munich on 25 May 2004, and recorded in 2005 for CD release in 2006. As is usual for Ferneyhough's works, the opera received mixed reviews. In addition, the production was picketed by a group called Militant Esthetix over the treatment of and association with Walter Benjamin, amongst other things.

Ferneyhough uses the software packages OpenMusic, PatchWork (PW) and the PatchWork successor PWGL.

Selected works

Some works at Sound and Music include score samples

• Carceri d'Invenzione I for fl,ob,2cl,bn, hn,tpt,trb,euphonium, 1perc, pf, 2vn,va,vc,db [1121, 1111.2111] (1982) (analysis, score sample)
  (inspired by the "Carceri d'Invenzione by Giambattista Piranesi).
• Kurze Schatten II for solo guitar (1989) (essay, analysis, analysis, score sample)
• Bone Alphabet for solo percussion (1991) (score sample)
• Allgebrah for oboe and 9 solo strings (1996) (score sample)
• Incipits for solo viola, obbligato percussion and six instruments (1996)
• Unsichtbare Farben for violin (1999) (score sample)
• The Doctrine of Similarity for Chorus (SATB), 3 Clarinets, Violin, Piano and Percussion (2000) (score sample)
• Etudes Transcendantales (1985)
• Shadowtime (1999–2004), premiered at the Munich Biennale
• 5th String Quartet (2006)
• Plötzlichkeit for large orchestra (2006)
• Chronos-Aion for large ensemble (2007–8)
• Dum transisset I–IV for string quartet (2007)
• Exordium for string quartet (2008)
• Renvoi/Shards for quarter-tone guitar and vibraphone (2008)

Reception

Ferneyhough has been called "the most controversial composer of his generation". "In the same year [1974], the performance of several of his works at the Royan Festival established Ferneyhough as one of the most brilliant and controversial figures of a new generation of composers". "Brian Femeyhough may well be one of the most important composers to emerge from the latter half of this century. Simultaneously famous and infamous, he is a controversial figure of world renown, bent on making the most out of music."

Positive/Neutral

the superbly accomplished duettists Bruno Canino and Antonio Ballista rendered a service by opening their Wigmore Hall recital last night with Brian Ferneyhough’s Sonata for Two Pianos, first heard in 1967.

Ferneyhough combined an excellent ear for instrumental timbre with a keen structural sense. Extremes of dynamics, register and density characterize his textures, which are sustained by the constant transformation and elaboration of diverse rhythmic and harmonic cells, the expansion and contraction of which always holds the attention.

These harmonic and rhythmic elements appear singly but later interlock, are superimposed, and are finally broken up in a coda where the textural and structural density is gradually relaxed. And as the razor-edge precision of this performance made clear, Ferneyhough’s Sonata also succeeds as sheer sound, and releases considerable dramatic force through its exciting accumulations of energy, registral contrast and rhythmic complexity.

Few musical experiences can rival the first acquaintance with a major item of new music, especially when it is by a composer more often spoken about than performed. Such is Brian Ferneyhough, who last night conducted the London Sinfonietta in the premiere here of his Transit, an extended piece for vocal sextet and orchestra. … Transit is no less elaborate in texture and intellectual conception than earlier works by Ferneyhough known to me: its modus operandi is metaphysical (he is a disciple of Klaus Huber) yet dramatic and sonorous, too. The rich contrapuntal invention is clarified by shapely decorative melodic line, and the transition from two sorts of music, by mutual interference, to a third sort of sensuously as well as dialectically communicated. Concentration at either level is rewarded.

Funerailles had a way of convincing listeners that all these divergencies travel in a common direction, that they meet at key junctures and acknowledge a commonality. Mr. Ferneyhough's notation is maddeningly precise for musicians trying to coordinate its oppositions, but he does manage to reconcile the aimless with the carefully aimed and to do so with convincing irony.

Carceri d'Invenzione III (Prison of Invention III)—in which a red-hot clarinet solo sparks a whirlwind of fire that burns itself out to leave ashes of alto flute and percussion—is Mr. Ferneyhough's closest approach to the sound world of his compatriot Harrison Birtwistle: it is imposing and gradual, though figured with furious activity typical of its composer. … And La Chute d'Icare (The Fall of Icarus) is a gem. Listen to the star bursts of tuned percussion and string glissandos around the romping soloist at the start, or to the way the energy of the cadenza breaks out from the solo instrument in a spurt of piccolo. This is a rare noise these days: the exhilaration of discovery.

Two short Ferneyhough pieces were on the program, and neither was a problem for the uninitiated listener. One, Coloratura, for oboe and piano, was almost exactly what you would expect: florid writing for the oboe given an exciting performance. The other work, Mnemosyne for solo bass flute and additional bass flutes prerecorded on tape, was more interesting. It got deep into the lush, velvety sonorities of an extraordinary instrument we almost never hear. It moved slowly but was full of interesting texture and sound.

A day submerged in Ferneyhough's music leaves one's ears quite reborn. The Diotima Quartet took the lunchtime stage for the compact, brief Second String Quartet and the compact but extended set of Sonatas for String Quartet. Supple and spirited, these tightly controlled but loving performances teased out the translucent beauty of these works. First performed in 1967, the Sonatas transformed Ferneyhough's reputation, and the Diotimas made it easy to hear why. The painstakingly prepared main concert heard the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Martyn Brabbins in Ferneyhough's two orchestral scores to date: Plotzlichkeit, from 2006, and La Terre Est un Homme. … Sandwiched between them were the third Carceri d'Invenzione, a Pandora's box of delights for chamber ensemble, and the Missa Brevis performed by the BBC Singers, led by James Morgan. Plotzlichkeit['s] … exploration of recherche textures and flashed colour spectrums is both beautiful and thrilling. La Terre, monumental in its intensity and magnificent in its sheer chutzpah, projects a seething macrocosm of souls struggling against the odds to grace mere survival with meaning. With the BBCSO at their committed, inspirational best, Ferneyhough's violent cry against the void has been answered at last.

It was the moment we had been waiting for. Brian Ferneyhough's La terre est un homme, his succès de scandale of the 1970s, had not been performed for 30 years.… Legends had grown up around it—how musicians at the premiere had defaced their scores, how the second performance under Claudio Abbado was a mess. La terre est un homme had come to define who Ferneyhough was: the last Modernist, an unreconstructed devotee of density and complexity. And yet here was the BBCSO under Martyn Brabbins making perfect sense of it. Worse sins have been committed in the name of Modernism than this cauldron of quasi-choate shudders and shimmers, welling up with untamed energy as if from the very centre of the earth. Was it right that a 90-piece orchestra should devote five days of rehearsal to just 50 minutes of music? If the purpose of subsidy is to finance art that is not commercially viable, the answer must be "yes". The value of this Ferneyhough focus was to show not just that his music has become easier to play, but that it embodies more tradition, fluency and beauty than inherited opinion suggests.

Massive tidal waves of pent-up energy have to be controlled—or perhaps surfed, for there is an exhilaration in confronting these awesome sonic structures. There’s an aesthetic pleasure to be had too, not in terms of agreeable sonorities—though Ferneyhough’s music is richly and subtly textured—but in the complexity and originality of its soundworld. It frequently aspires, moreover, to the transcendental, even in a work such as Carceri d’Invenzione III, which pits itself against the prison walls of Piranesi’s famous etchings, seeking always to stretch the limits of the imagination. Ferneyhough also stretches the limitations of his performers, nowhere more so than in Plötzlichkeit, receiving its UK premiere. Consisting of over 100 small cells, with nothing in the way of systematic patterning or development to aid the ear, the latter score achieves the sudden inspiration of its title by constantly generating new, unpredictable material.

Brian Ferneyhough’s complex String Quartet No 6 gave the listener far more to chew on. At the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival in November it seemed shorter, friendlier too. But you could still appreciate Ferneyhough’s game of plunging us into a dense jungle, then giving the vegetation more room to breathe. There’s unison playing at one point, and a cadenza from the first violinist, Irvine Arditti. Even with these simplifications our ears stayed under strain; worth it, though, for the composer’s magic sculpting of textures and gestures in a volatile world.

Negative/Neutral

Ferneyhough's obsession with "model"-making itself results, inevitably, in the erection of a surrogate-metaphysics, a substitute universe of the artist's own making, and reflecting primarily his own arbitrary flights of ego-whim. (Fanfare, Volume 3 (1980), Issues 4-6, p. 86)

Musicologist Peter Franklin commented of Ferneyhough in 1985: "whose works, and whose commentaries upon them, show every sign of synthesizing a final ne plus ultra of orthodox avant-garde conservatism"

The name of Brian Ferneyhough, who in the 1970s was England’s most prominent export to the heartland of modernist Europe and in the eighties consolidated a reputation as spiritual leader of the ’new complexity’, seems even today to be a byword for all that is best and worst about hard-line musical modernism. … Ferneyhough’s risks may have seemed too great at times, his compositional solutions failing to live up to his stimulating, endlessly questing diagnosis of the problems as a highly engaging public speaker, self-confident and articulate.

Brian Ferneyhough is one of the last of this school of people who go with simple arithmetic ideas rather than a musical score – we call them blackboard composers. Their forum is in the classroom, talking about the music.

His article, "Form, Figure, Style—an intermediate assessment," is as impenetrable as the title. What is an "intermediate assessment"? From Ferneyhough' s prose style it would appear to be jargon, wordiness, vague abstractions, and pretentious prose. Consider, for example, the following sentence, which seems like a mish-mash of structuralist theory: "One conceivable approach to a provisional resolution of the dilemma might be a renewed concentration on, and redefinition of, the term style itself: in particular, it seems vital to focus attention more intensively on the diachronic features of stylistic formation, since this alone promises a salutary counterbalance to views of style which concentrate on the simultaneity of diverse physiognomic features in some historically referential, but apparently extrahistorically utopian subjectivism."

Ferneyhough talked about the disruption of time and the structure of emblems as if they were as straightforward as, perhaps, the choice of form or the biographical impulse behind composition. He sounded either delusional or extremely pretentious, and indeed there were snickers in the audience. ... While his music could never be said to "sound nice", though, it arguably creates a space for rich reflection. … Ferneyhough's own Carceri d'Invenzione I was nearly incomprehensible to this listener. …

Brian Ferneyhough … His programme notes suggested that he might even have forgotten his mother tongue. "This multiplicity largely undermines the spirit of the original autonomous 'time slice' principle, leading to a sort of mirrored or negative hierarchy of material and form conveying a qualitative reformulation of the work's initial conceptual environment." Eh? … I came with open ears. I read and listened. I listened and read. Yet I came away from this performance defeated. Bafflement refused to give way to any enlightenment. I could make neither head nor tail of Ferneyhough's 20-minute work. I tried following the tiny fragments and their fleetingly intriguing textural journeys. At times the work seemed to be making sense as a mini-Mahlerian canvas full of intense collisions and sharp changes of tack. But it was all in vain. I was flummoxed in the face of what seemed like a starry sky of discombobulating chaos.

[...] Brian Ferneyhough's Time and Motion Study II, for example. Here the main purpose seems to be an exhaustive examination of how far the performer can be driven by noise and impossible scoring before he is broken down and destroyed. In this sense it is an ugly and de-humanising piece. It exemplifies the way in which the composer-musician relationship can be pushed, and the antithesis of the aspirations associated with contemporary improvised music; yet (to my anger) such pieces generally acquire more credibility as 'works of art'

Anybody who was unfortunate enough to have sat through Ferneyhough's disastrous 'opera' Shadowtime a few years ago may be relieved to hear that the composer has salvaged something from the wreckage. [...] Les Froissements d'Ailes de Gabriel, is taken from Shadowtime, it is one of the extended interludes [...] The piece is the least successful on the disc, but there is still plenty of interest here, particularly the timbres and instrumental effects. In general, though, it seems that the rambling incoherence and lack of structural focus that plagues Ferneyhough's opera is as evident in the excerpts as it is in the complete work.

Bibliography

• Boros, James, and Richard Toop (eds.). The Collected Writings of Brian Ferneyhough. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1995. Review by Ian Pace
• Bortz, Graziela. Rhythm in the music of Brian Ferneyhough, Michael Finnissy, and Arthur Kampela : a guide for performers. Ph.D. Thesis, City University of New York, 2003.
• Duncan, Stuart. "Re-complexifying the Function(s) of Notation in the Music of Brian Ferneyhough and the “New Complexity”. Perspectives of New Music 48, no. 1 (Winter 2010): 136–72.
• Ferneyhough, Brian. Brian Ferneyhough by Brian Ferneyhough. Paris: L'Age d'homme OCLC 21274317 (French)
• Pace, Ian. [Review:] "Brian Femeyhough, Collected Writings, edited by James Boros and Richard Toop. Harwood Academic Publishers; Ferneyhough: String Quartet No. 4; Kurze Schatten II ; Trittico per G. S.; Terrain, Arditti String Quartet with Brenda Mitchell (sop); Magnus Andersson (gtr); Stefano Scodanibbi (db); Irvine Arditti (vln) with ASKO Ensemble c. Jonathan Nott. Disques Montaigne MO 7 82029. Ferneyhough: Prometheus; La Chute D'Icare; On Stellar Magnitudes; Superscriptio; Carceri d'Invezione III. Luisa Castellani (voice); Felix Renggli (fl); Ernesto Molinari (cl); Ensemble Contrechamps c. Giorgio Bernasconi, Zsolt Nagy, Emilio Pomarico. ACCORD 205772". Tempo new series, no. 203 (January 1998): 45–48, 50–52.
• Rosser, Peter. "Brian Ferneyhough and the 'Avant-Garde Experience': Benjaminian Tropes in Funérailles". Perspectives of New Music 48, no. 2 (Summer 2010):114–51.
• Schick, Steven. "Developing an Interpretive Context: Learning Brian Ferneyhough's Bone Alphabet" (Subscription Access). Perspectives of New Music 32, no. 1 (Winter, 1994): 132–53.
• Tadday, Ulrich (ed.). "Brian Ferneyhough". Munich: Edition Text+Kritik in Richard Boorberg Verlag, 2008. (German)
• Toop, Richard. "Brian Ferneyhough's Lemma-Icon-Epigram". Perspectives of New Music 28, no. 2 (Summer, 1990): 52–100.
• Toop, Richard. "'Prima le Parole…' (On the Sketches for Ferneyhough's Carceri d'invenzione I–III)". Perspectives of New Music 32, no. 1 (Winter, 1994): 154–75.
• Whittall, Arnold. "Connections and Constellations". The Musical Times 144, no. 1883 (Summer): 23–32.
• Williams, Alastair. "Adorno and the Semantics of Modernism". Perspectives of New Music 37, no. 2 (Summer 1999): 1–22.

External links

Biographical

• Info at Brian Ferneyhough's publisher, Edition Peters – includes biography, works and selected discography
• Info at Stanford University Department of Music
• Living Composers Project

Interviews

• Interview (SOSPESO)
• Open questions for Brian Ferneyhough (also applicable to other composers of our day) – turned into an interview, since Ferneyhough replied (Stanford IP address...)
• NewMusicBox cover: Brian Ferneyhough in conversation with Molly Sheridan, July 22, 2005 (video excerpts from NewMusicBox)
• An Interview with Brian Ferneyhough by Felipe Ribeiro, James Correa, Catarina Domenici (Search Journal for New Music and Culture; Summer 2009)

Articles

• The Experience of Complexity by Larson Powell (Search Journal for New Music and Culture; Summer 2010)

Films

• Electric Chair Music / Time & Motion Study II; (film by Colin Still, cello: Neil Heyde, electronics: Paul Archbold)

Other

• Brian Ferneyhough wins 2007 Siemens Prize for Music
• Excerpts from sound archives of Ferneyhough's works.
• (French) A biography of Brian Ferneyhough, from IRCAM's website.
• Brian Ferneyhough at the Open Directory Project