Proms Saturday Matinee 3 ( 11.8.12): Britten Sinfonia

[edashtav]

Perhaps you have some examples then, because I certainly don't, and I think I'm reasonably well up on what composers around the world were doing at that time. Also I wonder why you come to the conclusion that the string writing in this piece showed an "inexperienced composer". If you didn't find yourself engaging with the music fair enough, but these two assertions seem to me completely without foundation.

Well, thank you for putting me on the spot, heliocentric - I feel I'm back at School. What was I listening to in the 70s (for surely some of the exemplars have faded from view)? I suppose, inevitably, some of Boulez's piano music, certainly the way Xenakis used the piano, and the more aggressive passages in the often serene Scelsi. Do I remember Bussotti's Lorenzaccio? I seem to remember some passages sounded similar to Finnissy's techniques but Bussotti's scores were more graphic - leaving more than Finnissy in the hands of his interpreter.

Let me explain my inexperienced composer remark. What I meant was here was a pianist-composer who knew the modern piano inside out but when he wrote for strings ( & flutes) his knowledge of contemporary techniques was, well... seemingly absent. But.. as this thread has gone on to suggest, maybe that was a deliberate abnegation.

[JohnSkelton]

Let me explain my inexperienced composer remark. What I meant was here was a pianist-composer who knew the modern piano inside out but when he wrote for strings ( & flutes) his knowledge of contemporary techniques was, well... seemingly absent. But.. as this thread has gone on to suggest, maybe that was a deliberate abnegation.

I'm certain it's what Finnissy wanted, not absence of non-piano instrumental 'technique'. I don't really hear anything anywhere from the 70s early 80s being very similar to Finnissy's music - in that there is an against the grain character to that music which aligns it more with Punk, or the poetry of John James, and the local, particular, situation of British politics at the time (Hence English Country Tunes with the pun that Hamlet also arrived at).

I don't know anything like everything by Finnissy, but the against the grain character seems to go out of some of the music from the later 80s on (though that may be my lack of knowledge / understanding: certainly of History of Photography in Sound). The 3rd quartet was where I found it again, and there's a wonderful otherworldly yet homemade poignancy about the recordings of everyday, garden birds that sound through the piece. Here's http://www.mdt.co.uk/finnissy-michae...artet-nmc.html the CD.

[heliocentric]

But I don't hear anything in the string writing of that piece that suggests any lack of knowledge of anything (is that too many negatives?)... you could just as easily suggest that because the pianist isn't asked to pluck the strings of the instrument Finnissy had no idea that such things were possible. Deciding what to leave out is as important as deciding what to put in. A composer who sets out to demonstrate everything he/she knows about every instrument in every piece is not likely to create anything distinctive, don't you think?

The Bussotti connection is certainly there. One early Finnissy piece called Babylon (written in 1971 but completely rewritten in 2001) used graphic notations which were obviously derived from Bussotti's, and some of his more recent scores (for example Sorrow and its beauty) return to such ideas. But the concept of encapsulating what one could call in another sense "graphic" instrumental activity in precise and complex notation is really Finnissy's own, and leads to something that sounds quite different from the results of most graphic notation - in particular, the sonic gestures tend to be much more nuanced and less stereotyped. Although the extreme virtuosity of Finnissy's piano writing can be compared to Xenakis, the actual sound of the music is completely different, I think, for example if you compare the piano solo at the beginning of Xenakis's Eonta with that of the Finnissy piece under discussion, and a crucial aspect of this is the gestural, intuitive and "graphic" quality of the Finnissy. I don't really see any meaningful connection with Boulez or Scelsi. By the early 1970s Finnissy had certainly acquired a much wider knowledge of contemporary music (and not only this) around the world than had most of his British contemporaries, but one of the things that makes his music special as far as I'm concerned is that its openness doesn't lead in any way to an "eclectic" quality but to something much more individual.

[heliocentric]

Well, thank you for putting me on the spot, heliocentric - I feel I'm back at School

PS - sorry if you think I'm taking that kind of tone, I don't mean to, I'm just a bit surprised and disturbed that anyone could hear that piece by Finnissy and then make the comments you did about modishness and lack of knowledge in instrumentation, neither of which I would ever have ascribed to this composer. But then on the other hand his work has somehow never gained the profile I think it deserves, so maybe it's me who's hearing it in an odd way.

(edit) But: having just checked a few facts on Finnissy's online worklist, I see that the Second Piano Concerto is numbered as work no.39; the earliest works in the list were composed more than ten years previously (and there are several even earlier works that I'm aware of, going back to the early 1960s) and already feature parts for string instruments; indeed the piano features in a small minority of Finnissy's compositions prior to the late 1970s, some of which are on a large scale like the orchestral work Offshore of 1976, which shows a highly original and confident use of its resources. (As I remember from a performance conducted by Knussen in 1982, which I see, looking at the worklist, was the premiere.)

[edashtav]

Thanks you for those comments, heliocentric & John, they are helpful. It's good to have music "validated" by those to whom it matters. I have to admit that I'm better acquainted with Xenakis and other continental models than I am with Finnissy. You're right that he hasn't been given sufficient airing - either in the Concert Hall or on radio. I spent lunch-time listening to bits of the 2nd string quartet ( & comments from the composer). I can see and hear a clever mind at work. I'm still wondering whether his message is fully digested & clear. Anyway, I've ordered the NMC CD of the 2nd & 3rd string quartets (thanks for that link!), and that should help. I hadn't realised that Finnissy had flirted with graphical notation - although it's obvious that to precisely notate something such as the piano part in the 2nd Concerto puts it beyond most pianists whereas graphical notation allows that degree of flexibility that the less able need - at the risk, as you state, of a loss of nuance and individuality. Furthermore of course, Finnissy does seem to want to give his players room to impose or create their view of his music ( i.e. more degrees of freedom than is implied by interpretative licence.).

[Serial_Apologist]

Thanks to the Finnissy devotees on here for putting a strong case on his behalf. I have to say, his music probably represents, for me - an old-fashioned Schoenbergian - a point beyond which I find myself lost. I did give the English Country Tunes broadcast of a year or two ago a go, but felt swamped by the amount of detail, which reminded me of Sorabji. In Ferneyhough the detail always seems somehow justified by the richness of perceivable interrelationships graspable by me on an initial hearing, and the sheer melodic inventiveness, and I'm just glad, despite my comments, that there are some who have not given up on the modernist visions unleashed by Boulez and others in the 1940s-70s, implying as they do some hope in a future, rather than resorting to a rose-tinted past.

So for me the Brian Elias piece so far not mentioned here summed up just about where my challenges most happily lie when listening to new music, though I found the Birtwistle highly satisfying, having wondered if his techniques would transfer over to the black and white. However independent from one-another his furnishing materials are, they always seem to keep sufficiently out of each others way to allow the listener to follow the different levels without fear of missing details; and there is some subtle connection with more popular vernaculars without giving way to emulation. I often wonder, given the strong rhythmic momentum to so much of his music, if Birtwistle has ever considered composing for jazz or improvising ensembles.

[edashtav]

So for me the Brian Elias piece so far not mentioned here summed up just about where my challenges most happily lie when listening to new music, though I found the Birtwistle highly satisfying, having wondered if his techniques would transfer over to the black and white. However independent from one-another his furnishing materials are, they always seem to keep sufficiently out of each others way to allow the listener to follow the different levels without fear of missing details; and there is some subtle connection with more popular vernaculars without giving way to emulation. I often wonder, given the strong rhythmic momentum to so much of his music, if Birtwistle has ever considered composing for jazz or improvising ensembles.

That's an interesting point that you make about Birtwistle + Jazz. Didn't he have connections to that world in his early clarinet-playing days?

[heliocentric]

In Ferneyhough the detail always seems somehow justified by the richness of perceivable interrelationships graspable by me on an initial hearing, and the sheer melodic inventiveness, and I'm just glad, despite my comments, that there are some who have not given up on the modernist visions unleashed by Boulez and others in the 1940s-70s, implying as they do some hope in a future, rather than resorting to a rose-tinted past.

Finnissy and Ferneyhough of course always used to be bracketed together, although that happens less often now as it's become clear (though not to everyone, unfortunately) that the shared surface feature of "complexity" doesn't really imply any deeper kinship, as you say. For me what makes Finnissy's music (especially from the period around the piece under discussion) more engaging than Ferneyhough's is precisely that it goes beyond the kind of dialectical/discursive relationships that you mention, and also takes a much more (to my mind) imaginative view of structure, for example in the role taken by the "orchestra" in the Second Concerto, or the juxtaposition of extremes of density and sparseness, and extremes of expressive intensity and physicality, in many of his other compositions, as compared to Ferneyhough's concern for a traditional sense of formal balance (with some exceptions, also from the 1970s). It's a question of temperament and timing, I dare say. When I first heard Ferneyhough's music I found it fascinating and still do, but when I first heard Finnissy (both were around 1980) it changed the way I thought about music in a much more fundamental way.

It might be worth mentioning that Finnissy's music, to a greater extent than most other composers', has been informed from an early stage by experimental film and dance - the early Songs 1-18 were an explicit tribute to the abstract films of Stan Brakhage, and many of his earlier piano pieces were conceived to accompany dance performances. Anyway I'll stop rambling on: I was very pleased to see this piece being programmed, and performed so well, and I'm off to listen to it again now.

[Serial_Apologist]

Finnissy and Ferneyhough of course always used to be bracketed together, although that happens less often now as it's become clear (though not to everyone, unfortunately) that the shared surface feature of "complexity" doesn't really imply any deeper kinship, as you say. For me what makes Finnissy's music (especially from the period around the piece under discussion) more engaging than Ferneyhough's is precisely that it goes beyond the kind of dialectical/discursive relationships that you mention, and also takes a much more (to my mind) imaginative view of structure, for example in the role taken by the "orchestra" in the Second Concerto, or the juxtaposition of extremes of density and sparseness, and extremes of expressive intensity and physicality, in many of his other compositions, as compared to Ferneyhough's concern for a traditional sense of formal balance (with some exceptions, also from the 1970s). It's a question of temperament and timing, I dare say. When I first heard Ferneyhough's music I found it fascinating and still do, but when I first heard Finnissy (both were around 1980) it changed the way I thought about music in a much more fundamental way.

It might be worth mentioning that Finnissy's music, to a greater extent than most other composers', has been informed from an early stage by experimental film and dance - the early Songs 1-18 were an explicit tribute to the abstract films of Stan Brakhage, and many of his earlier piano pieces were conceived to accompany dance performances. Anyway I'll stop rambling on: I was very pleased to see this piece being programmed, and performed so well, and I'm off to listen to it again now.

Thanks, helio - sounds like a good idea!

[heliocentric]

Thanks, helio - sounds like a good idea!

For me to stop rambling on - yes you're right. But: encouraged by JohnSkelton's comments, I had a listen afterwards to Finnissy's Second and Third String Quartets. I take the point about the birdsong in the Third, but I think I find what the string quartet itself does in the Second more attractive; for me the slow neoromantic-sounding stretches in the Third get a bit much, I get the feeling (as in a lot of History of Photography in Sound that there's a complex play of references to other musics that I'm not getting, and that as a result I'm missing something important.

[bluestateprommer]

Just some quick general impressions, as I'm still several days behind on Proms and am trying gamely to catch up, with this Cadogan Hall PSM being another one that I caught just before the deadline. Excellent concert, sterling work from all artists concerned. To paraphrase one introduction that I remember from a past PSM that I actually attended in person:

"4 composers, all of them living, 3 of them here"

It was also nice to hear Brian Elias in a brief interview chat, as he's pretty much just a name to me, on this side of the pond (probably that would be the case pretty much all over the USA). It just goes to show what treasure the Cadogan Hall Proms are, in both contemporary works and more standard chamber repertoire, even though of course the "promming" aspect is absent.