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Ferneyhough FocusTom Service previews an inventive |
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| After his training at the Royal Academy in the late sixties, his whole career has been formed by wider cultural horizons: he first moved to continental Europe, and since 1988, has been based in America, where he has held professorships at the University of California, San Diego, and now at Stanford. It’s a cosmopolitanism that defines his music as well. From the very beginning, he has resisted identifying with any compositional school, and instead has expressed his individuality in works of uncompromising intricacy and complexity. Ironically, it was the very strength of this anti-establishment thinking that led to Ferneyhough being christened, in the late 70s and early 80s, as the figurehead of a fresh compositional movement: ‘New Complexity’. It’s a label that does more damage than good in understanding his music: it may hint at the ecstatic notational abundance of his scores, like the second Time and Motion Study for solo cello and electronics, notated on anything up to five staves for the cello part, but it does not suggest the immediacy of the drama, the sheer physical thrill, that a performance of any of Ferneyhough’s works can create. These are vertiginous thrills, certainly, but they are relished by performers like the London Sinfonietta, the Arditti Quartet, and the other participants of Inventions, a day of concerts and workshops that juxtaposes music by Ferneyhough with works from a younger generation of British composers, and is hosted by the London Sinfonietta in collaboration with spnm at the South Bank Centre in London on Saturday 14th February. The Ardittis have been associated with Ferneyhough since the early eighties, and they play his Third Quartet, a piece of precipitous, unpredictable violence composed for them in 1987. James Dillon’s 'the soadie waste' is a new piano quintet, and the Quartet are joined in this visceral, dance-like single movement by pianist Noriko Kawai. Dillon is a composer whose music was once bracketed with Ferneyhough’s in its rhythmic intricacy and notational complexity, but the Arditti’s pairing of these two works reveals the differences between their musical approaches. Dillon’s piece, for all its volatility, is founded on a sense of the ensemble as a single unit, albeit one in which the quartet and the piano have complementary roles, but in Ferneyhough’s piece, the quartet dissolves into separate, competing parts, most dramatically in the solos for the second violin and viola that frame the Third Quartet’s second half. Ferneyhough’s music offers an imposing model for younger generations of composers. His teaching has been influential for hundreds of musicians, not in forming a narrowly defined ‘school of Ferneyhough’, but instead, showing how it is possible to delve beneath questions of musical surface. His own assessment of his achievement sets the standards he tries to inculcate in his students: ‘there are two ways of reacting to a modernity in which everything, every musical and historical style, is simultaneously present. One is to put different styles together to produce a certain kind of meaning. The other is to go back into the depths of musical structuring, and to find out what gives rise to musical style in the first place – and it was this particular path I chose to follow’. But it is a path that is open to other composers as well, and suggests a sense of exploration that will be echoed, no doubt, in the day’s world premieres, including a piece by Dai Fujikura 'Fifth Station', one of the six participants of the Sinfonietta’s innovative Blue Touch Paper project, in which six composers have worked over months with the players to create their pieces. Designed as a corrective to the pressurised atmosphere in which many new works have their genesis, all six composers have had access to the full range of the London Sinfonietta’s resources, and given time to experiment with their ideas. Ferneyhough’s compositional path, meanwhile, continues to create new labyrinths of possibility for performers and listeners. As part of Inventions, the London Sinfonietta gives the British premiere of his Seven Tableaux Vivants Representing the Angel of History as Melancholia, a piece that will form the penultimate scene of his new opera Shadowtime, based on the life and philosophy of Walter Benjamin. The day concludes with the 1982 'Carceri d’Invenzione I', a work inspired by the engravings of fantastical dungeons by Piranesi, and music that embodies the energy and extremity that continues to define Ferneyhough’s compositional thinking. Tom Service For more details and online booking for the London Sinfonietta
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