Pre-Hear: Ferneyhough's "Sonatas for String Quartet"

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

My thanks for the Gramophone link, too, JS: Michael Oliver was such a peceptive listener - IIRC, when he wrote this review, the Score of the Sonatas wasn't yet published and his comments seem to be based entirely on his listening to the LP (with a few "prompts" from the liner notes). An astonishing achievement.

I think it's true that BF moved on to even greater things in his subsequent works, and he himself went through a period of regarding the Sonatas as "merely" or too literally expressing the structural elements of the material. But I am still in awe of this early work: and of the Diotimas' performance of it. I also hear much more of a single work than might be inferred from the BBC site with its emphasis on the "20 short movements" aspect: Ferneyhough originally planned a series of longer Movements (possibly closer to the "standard" four Movement tradition) before realizing the expressive potential of deconstucting the two Movements he had completed to make a sequence of re-assembled fragments. This he binds together with a sort of "cantus firmus" of long-held notes that progresses through the entire work and a chord built up of Fouths and Major and minor thirds which is also de- and re-contructed as the work progresses (I hear this most clearly in the link between the chord at 10'50" * which returns as a "climax" at just before 31': the Berne and Ardittis make more of this "climax" than do the Diotimas).

The overall structure is a series of continuously disrupted moments of repose, apparent on the short term within the movements and in the long term (the "Slow Movement" - my term, not BF's - between 22'30" and 27mins, rudely interrupted by the sequence of events that lead to the "climax"). And the turning point in this performance: the 4 minute 'cello soliloquy starting at 34'30", by turns grumpy, then reflective then (after a brief interpolation from the others) mournful ending on a "Perfect Cadence" to usher in the final moments of the work: and what a lovely, gentle, delicately consoling ending, leading back Eliot-like to the place where the work began, known for the first time.

AND the icy harmonics AND the glissandi transformed to "cantabile" portamenti at 10'15" AND the "scherzando" at 13'10" AND the transformation from tremelo to flurried notes AND the range of instrumental colours each structurally and expressively "telling" AND the hints of "Traditional Gestures" (such as the "rallying cry" of the 'cello at 42'30") immediately exposed as futile and empty (like Beckett's use of cliches) ...

And he was just 24!

(* = all timings taken from the i-Player podcast which includes the 3 minute introduction. Sorry: I can't find my copy of the score to give bar refs)

Best Wishes.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

For me it's among the greatest chamber music of the last century*, as rich in possibility as it is intense in inward working. *As are Lachenmann's works for string quartet, Kagel's first two (both of which predate Sonatas) and Holliger's 1st (also written for the Berne Qt.).

... and thanks, too, for the Kagel "correction"!

Best Wishes.

[Schrödinger's Cat]

I've just read the comments here with interest, having listened to the programme earlier this evening. I found the piece quite captivating (especially listening on headphones), which surprised me as I've never really got on that well with Ferneyhough's music. I acquired the Arditti's recording 10 years ago but I must admit I've never sat down and really listened to it, so I must dig it out and give it a go some time. I was also quite keen to hear the Diotima Quartet again, having heard them play live earlier in the month.

[Serial_Apologist]

I've just read the comments here with interest, having listened to the programme earlier this evening. I found the piece quite captivating (especially listening on headphones), which surprised me as I've never really got on that well with Ferneyhough's music. I acquired the Arditti's recording 10 years ago but I must admit I've never sat down and really listened to it, so I must dig it out and give it a go some time. I was also quite keen to hear the Diotima Quartet again, having heard them play live earlier in the month.

I strongly recommend that you listen to some of Ferneyhough's later works, SC; THERE I'm sure you will find endless fascination, if you do in this work... which, obviously given the strong redcommendations above, (for which, many thanks, particularly to our ferneyhoughgeliebte!), I shall get back to as soon as opportunity affords.

S-A

[heliocentric]

I strongly recommend that you listen to some of Ferneyhough's later works

Although (pardon me for resurrecting this old thread but the Hear and Now messageboard has been looking so inactive for a while)... I find the earlier Ferneyhough much more interesting. I heard the Berne Quartet's recording at an impressionable age when it first came out and I found it endlessly fascinating, and subsequently Transit and Time and Motion Study II even more so, but by the time the Second Quartet came along I thought some of the radical qualities of those earlier pieces were being diluted into a fixed and somewhat circumscribed style, and this process has continued ever since to my mind. On one hand there's all the still often exhilarating complexity, but on the other there seem to be so many things that this music "isn't allowed to do" that it sometimes seems (appropriately) somehow "imprisoned". I must have another listen to the Sonatas now I've read this thread.

[JohnSkelton]

Without having any sort of comprehensive knowledge of Ferneyhough's music that makes sense to me (I'd add Funérailles I and II to your list of works that endlessly fascinated me, and listening to them again last night they still do). Is it that the earlier music is written with the urgency of against the grain (the Sonatas stand out against a European as well as local context: are they 'like' very much else?), whereas later works embody a manner as much as a method? I find Shadowtime very disappointing on many levels, including the instrumental works extracted from it. Don't know the 6th string quartet.

[heliocentric]

Is it that the earlier music is written with the urgency of against the grain (the Sonatas stand out against a European as well as local context: are they 'like' very much else?), whereas later works embody a manner as much as a method?

That is certainly one way of putting it. There's a sense in the 1970s works that anything is possible, and later on a sense of "good taste" seems to take precedence over the sense of single-minded necessity. Some might find this a positive step of course. Another way of putting it is that I suspect (having been personally acquainted with the composer since the mid-1980s) it has something to do with his seeing himself not at the beginning of a stylistic lineage but at the end of one; for example he once remarked to me that he's a member of the last generation of composers who didn't learn about music principally through recordings. For me Shadowtime is most seriously disappointing in completely ignoring the political dimension of its main character's identity.

Otherwise, I've enjoyed hearing things like Plötzlichkeit and Chronos-Aion but find myself completely unable afterwards to retain in my memory anything that happened in them (a bit like eating a meal and then immediately feeling hungry again). It might be said that this is an intentional feature of those pieces - the composer emphasises in his accompanying notes the number of sections they consist of - 112 in the case of Chronos-Aion - but I don't find that my memory and expectations are being confounded in an interesting way, nor do I much like the Deleuzian verbiage with which the music is "explained": "Aion is the past-future, which in an infinite subdivision of the abstract moment endlessly decomposes itself in both directions at once and forever sidesteps the present."

Sorry to go on - this post has ended up looking more negative than I was intending, but most critiques of Ferneyhough's music come from the standpoint of it being too complex and impenetrable, rather than from a standpoint where its complexity isn't the problem at all.

[Serial_Apologist]

Without having any sort of comprehensive knowledge of Ferneyhough's music that makes sense to me (I'd add Funérailles I and II to your list of works that endlessly fascinated me, and listening to them again last night they still do). Is it that the earlier music is written with the urgency of against the grain (the Sonatas stand out against a European as well as local context: are they 'like' very much else?), whereas later works embody a manner as much as a method? I find Shadowtime very disappointing on many levels, including the instrumental works extracted from it. Don't know the 6th string quartet.

From what I remember, eyes were turning very much towards other younger composers who at the time (late 60s) were turning away from the severe aesthetics of abstraction that had been practised by Boulez, Stockhausen, Berio, Maderna and Nono up to the beginning of that decade. I also seem to remember very little Nono or Xenakis on concert programmes or broadcasts, at least in this country - and remember, R3 did broadcast new music much more regularly then than it does now. Nutshelled thinking seemed to dictate that Berio's Sinfonia, Tavener's In Alium and The Whale, Stockhausen's Prozession and Telemusik seemed to then be what it was going to be "all about". Only cutting edge jazz seemed headed into abstraction when it wasn't taking on rock influences: SME, MEV, AACM, AMM etc.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Without wanting to go down the "composer period" route beloved of Musicologists from Beethoven onwards, I hear (so far) four areas of activity in Ferneyhough's output, all of which I find equally fascinating (if not equally "successful" in terms of my own "taste criteria"). JS and Sunny have identified the excitement - the friction and frisson - of the first decade or so of his work: an astonishingly gifted and original Musical mind discovering and creating new expressive vocabularies for (his own and others') Music.

From around the time of the Second Quartet, I hear a consolidation of this work, leading up to (and from) the Carceri d'Invenzione cycle, which I believe to be the composer's finest achievement so far. The "view" of the early work is focussed internally; making an individual world of the individual piece; the '80s pieces make connections between and comment on/criticize each other. After the cycle, the language gets more fragmented, sparer, colder - there is a definite feeling of wanting to start again, to redefine aesthetic aims, to avoid repeating himself - to try something new.

This "sharding" process culminates in Shadowtime, a work I find very difficult to "get". To be honest, it's only Ferneyhough's achievement before and since that persuades me to keep at it: I have the score and the CDs, but whilst I enjoy the individual pieces much more than I did earlier, I cannot yet either hear the connections I hear in Carceri, nor hear the convincing dis-connections that are a part of his subsequent works (Plotzlichkeit, Chronos Aion or the Sixth Quartet, for example).

But this is good: the composer is following where the Music takes him, rather than his using the Music to maintain a coterie of enthusiasts. It is perpetually challenging and (I find) perpetually rewarding.

[heliocentric]

consolidation

This for me is the problem in a nutshell.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

This for me is the problem in a nutshell.

Ah!

From the composer's situation, though, the choice was to continue what he was doing (repeating himself) and possibly/probably dissipating the achievement of the earlier work in subsequent pieces, or identifying what those earlier works didn't do and seeking ways of moving on to new means of expression. The (as I hear it) astonishing achievement of the Carceri cycle just isn't possible with the methods of the Time & Motion pieces - indeed, I suspect that it was this earlier (magnificent) cycle that made clear to the composer what was needed to "move on" to the works of the next decade. (ie in the sense that Unity Capsule can be heard as another Time & Motion Study - had the composer decided to re-name the flute work and include it in the T&M cycle. But in no way could, say, the Second/Third S4tets be heard as part of the Carceri cycle.) I can see that someone might feel disappointed that the modular aspects of the '70s works weren't persued, but I so love the later cycle - and think it an "advance" (ie I prefer it!) even on those tremendous works - that I cannot share this disappointment.

[heliocentric]

This is a matter of taste about which I expect we will have to disagree, but as far as I'm concerned Carceri d'invenzione, however impressive it is, has at the same time a sense of closure about it, a sense of trying to be a selfsufficient "masterpiece"-type work if you like, which backtracks from the more open, less "classically"-conceived music he wrote previously. I think the post-Second String Quartet works repeat themselves to a far greater extent than the previous works, which were more concerned with finding and pushing at limits. I would describe the "choice" at a certain point, bearing in mind that one shouldn't really try to read an artist's mind and intentions, as having been either to "consolidate", or to find new limits to push against. To my mind the less interesting route was taken. A definitive decision appears to have been made about what is and isn't (Ferneyhough's) music: sonic instability, structural disintegration, electronics, aleatoric/improvisational elements, extreme performance situations etc. are largely or completely jettisoned from then on, for example.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Yes, fair enough: I can see your position even if I don't share it.
('Though, to be picky, electronics are used only in T&M II & III - and in Mnemosyne and Shadowtime - and aleatoric features in Cassandra's Dreamsong and Sieben Sterne: both from the late '60s, so the "jettisoning" here occured earlier.)

It'll be interesting to hear the work of his eighties, though?

[heliocentric]

Yes, fair enough: I can see your position even if I don't share it.
aleatoric features in Cassandra's Dreamsong and Sieben Sterne: both from the late '60s, so the "jettisoning" here occured earlier.

Apart from the aleatoric elements in Time and Motion Study II and Transit from the mid-70s. Later on, Mnemosyne uses prerecorded parts rather than "electronics" as such, and can be played by an ensemble of bass flutes without the "tape", as I expect you know. The electronic component in Shadowtime is indeed an exception, but it's pretty rudimentary in comparison with the rest of the work, as well as with other composers' use of the medium (and Ferneyhough's own use of it in the 1970s!).

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Apart from the aleatoric elements in Time and Motion Study II and Transit from the mid-70s.

To which I can only reply "Doh!" - you're absolutely right, of course (and I take your point about electronics in that piece whose name I can't remember and Shadowtime)!