A guide to Brian

Ferneyhough's music
His compositions are the ultimate in complexity. So
how to approach the works of this philosophically
demanding musician?
Tom Service
Mon 10 Sep 2012 16.47 BST

The thrill of musical extremity ... Brian Ferneyhough. Photograph: Charlotte

Oswald

Here's a question. What is complexity in music? Is there any music more complex than,
say, the six-part Ricercar, with its six independent but symbiotically related strata of
ever-changing musical information, from Bach's Musical Offering? Has anyone in the
20th or 21st century come close to demanding as much from his or her listeners and
performers than JS Bach did in that piece, or any of his innumerable fugues? Or what
about Beethoven's late quartets? Aren't they the acme of musical complexity, in the
sense of a rich stream of musical meanings and unpredictabilities, for the players just as
much as the audience? Or is the bar set still higher by Schoenberg's First Chamber
Symphony, that jam-packed single movement that compresses pretty well the entire
classical and romantic tradition of forms, structures and expressivity into 20 minutes?
Or what about the compressed atonality of Webern's early works, or the quasi-neural
network of multiple musical connections of his later music? The impossible canons of
Conlon Nancarrow, taking his player pianos to other dimensions in the Mexican desert?
Or the vertiginous sound and fury of the postwar avant-garde composers Ligeti,
Stockhausen, Boulez, Xenakis … ?

The reason I ask is 69-year-old Coventry-born composer Brian Ferneyhough. His works,
it is often said, are the ne plus ultra of musical complexity, in the sense of notational
overload, performing difficulty and even philosophical questioning. He is even,
supposedly, one of the godfathers of "New Complexity", although he rejects the term
(just like his fellow so-called complexists, James Dillon and Michael Finnissy). Here's a
good example of what I'm on about, including, thanks to flammesombres's YouTube
channel, a score of Ferneyhough's piano piece Lemma-Icon-Epigram as well as its
sounds. (And this is one of Ferneyhough's "simpler" scores, by the way.) The comments
below include some pretty polarised opinions on this piece, falling into a typical new-
music polemic, of "It sounds like a monkey throwing itself on the keyboard" versus "If
you don't get this, you're a philistine". If you're new to this music, though, you may need
some help in decoding the score. So let's have a wee think about how you might
approach the very first bar.

Firstly, the pianist has to play a group of 11 hemi-demi-semiquavers in the time of seven
in the basic tempo of quaver = around 50, followed by a single hemi-demi-semiquaver
rest and then a semiquaver rest. That volley of notes is followed by a group of 11 hemi-
demis in the time of eight, enclosing a triplet and dotted notes; then comes a group
where you need to count 10 hemi-demis in your head in the time of eight, but you also
have to subdivide them into one group of five against four in your new virtual tempo,
and then six against four, before a final hemi-demi rest in that overall scheme of 10
against eight. Got that? And that's just the rhythm. There's then, of course, the small
matter of the notes you have to play in this rhythm, the dynamics, and the huge variety
of expressive markings and pedal indications. And that's just to be able to get close to
playing the first five seconds of this 14-minute piece. It is, well, pretty complex!

So what does this kind of notational complexity mean? What does it produce in
performance, and what does it sound like? Virtually every single bar of Ferneyhough's
music poses these questions (his mature music, at least – he grew up playing in brass
bands in the Midlands, but left what he saw as the UK's musical provincialism for the
more experimental climes of Europe and the US, where he now lives and teaches). It's in
performance that the open-ended and endlessly fascinating answers are disclosed:
philosophical solutions that pile musical riddle on to musical riddle to push at the
existential limits of what a musical work might be.

Ferneyhough holds no compositorial guillotine of musical perfection over the heads of

his performers. Asking any of the musicians who regularly commission and play his
pieces – the Arditti Quartet, say, or pianist Nicolas Hodges, or violinist Mieko Kanno, or
cellist Neil Hyde – to perform them perfectly, according to the precise letter, dot, and
micro-indication of his scores, is not Ferneyhough's abiding aim. You see, the desire to
put all that information on the page is really the start of a dialogue, with the possibilities
of what the performer is going to do with the piece and with what the listeners will hear.
Even more fundamentally, the notation is a sort of scratching at the surface of what the
actual musical work of Lemma-Icon-Epigram might be.

The point is, if Ferneyhough wanted his scores (and check out the orchestral works, such
as La Terre Est un Homme or Transit if you really want your head to spin) to be a sort of
straitjacket for the performer, to determine precisely what they should be doing at every
micro-second of the piece, he would have become an electronic or electro-acoustic
composer. In that case, a single recording could and would represent the definitive
realisation of each of his pieces. In fact, as hundreds of composers have discovered in
the past, the more information you give for your performers to interpret, the more open-
ended rather than fixed the work becomes, as every expressive mark becomes
something that's played and interpreted differently by each different performer.

Reading this on mobile? Click here to listen

Ferneyhough has said as much himself in the trademark poetical convolutions of his
prose. "What can a specific notation, under favourable conditions, hope to achieve?
Perhaps simply this: a dialogue with the composition of which it is a token such that
realm of non-equivalence separating the two (where, perhaps, the 'work' might be said
to be ultimately located?) be sounded out, articulating the inchoate, outlining the way
from the conceptual to the experiential and back." I like that, because what
Ferneyhough's really saying is that the "work" is not to be found only on the printed
page (his "non-equivalence" phrase), but somewhere between and beyond the sum of
the score's indications and the sum of all of the possible performances that may result
from it – as well as being a record of Ferneyhough's own gigantically complex
compositional processes.

OK – now bear with this, because these general points will give you a framework at least
to begin to understand the rest of Ferneyhough's music, and have something to say
about the whole culture of classical music, too. What happens, then, when you hear a
piece of Ferneyhough's, in the process of communication from performer to audience?
While it's true to say that Ferneyhough does not expect perfection on the part of his
performers, he does expect them to try to get there, and part of the thrill of what you
hear in any performance of Ferneyhough's music is an experiential extreme of the
world's most virtuosic musicians pushing themselves to the boundaries of what they
can do – and sometimes beyond. (At least one of Ferneyhough's pieces, Time and Motion
Study II for solo cello and electronics, makes expressive play with that idea, virtually
strapping the cellist into a sort of musical electric chair in which one of the strictures
that binds the musician to the attempt to realise the work is the labyrinthine density of
the notation, sometimes written on five staves instead of the single stave that a cellist
usually needs.) There is no chance – not even if you're Pierre Boulez or Oliver Knussen –
of notating down what you hear when you hear a Ferneyhough piece. And similarly,
there's no chance that the mind-bending rhythmic density of that first bar of Lemma-
Icon-Epigram is heard as it is written. Here's what I mean: the effect of that first bar,
without the score, is of a coruscating burst of piano sound that propels the start of the
musical labyrinth of the piece; it isn't of 10 hemi-demis in the time of eight, or whatever
else the score says. So what's the point of all that "complexity"?

If you talk to the players who most often play Ferneyhough, they all say that his notation
has to be the way it is to achieve the results he wants in performance, even if there's a
vanishingly tiny possibility of all that information being communicated to the listener.
What we're getting as listeners is a trace of the score the performer is playing from,
which is in turn only a trace of the musical work that Ferneyhough has imagined. And
yet, because of the ferocity of concentration on the part of the musician, and because of
the range and imagination of what you hear, what you actually get when you hear a
performance of his music is something definitive, direct and undeniable – a sheer thrill
of musical extremity.

If you heard the BBC Symphony Orchestra's revelatory performance of La Terre Est un
Homme last February at the Barbican in London, you can't have escaped the elemental
power of this music, one of the most significant achievements in late 20th-century
orchestral writing, yet hardly known until that concert. (And it must be issued on CD
soon, if there's a record company reading this!)

All of that is a sort of gigantic upbeat to your own exploration of Ferneyhough's music.
Get stuck into his works for solo instruments or chamber ensemble. There's also an
unclassifiable music-theatre piece on Walter Benjamin called Shadowtime; there are
those gigantically ambitious orchestral pieces, including the most recent, Plötzlichkeit;
and there are some brilliant large ensemble pieces that grab you by the scruff of the neck
and don't let go. Try the Carceri d'Invenzione pieces, or one of my favourites, Terrain, a
kind of uber-violin concerto. Oh, and Ferneyhough has also written one of the most
important canons of string quartets in the entire literature, six of them so far.

One last thing: just what is it that Ferneyhough's music has to tell us about the entire
literature of western classical music? Well: that it's all essentially unknowable – it is as
difficult to answer the question of what Beethoven's Fifth Symphony really is as what
Lemma-Icon-Epigram might be, if you think about it for a second – and essentially
experiential, revealed in all of its elusive but definitive power through the evanescent
illumination of performance. In that fundamental sense, Ferneyhough's music is no
more and no less complex than any other classical music. Got there. I've only scratched
the surface of Ferneyhough's work here, of course: the rest is up to you!

Five key links

Terrain

String Quartet No 5

Carceri d'Invenzione III

Lemma-Icon-Epigram

Bone Alphabet – in performance and Ferneyhough teaching the piece

Next week: Jonathan Harvey

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