Ferneyhough- Incipits (1/2)

Brian Ferneyhough's (b. 1943) Incipits for chamber group, consisting of string quartet, percussionist, clarinet and oboe. Ferneyhough's music is markedly pointillist, often splicing multiple motifs and ideas together simultaneously. His music is also noted for its complete lack of repetition, constant acerbity and extreme, technical demands required of the performers, often due to hyper-active and exceptionally precise notational methods. The most commonly noted example of this would be his early piece "Cassandra's Dreamsong" for solo flute, which only occupies two pages, yet takes fourteen minutes to perform. His music is frantic and busy, but is not typically dense, usually very airy.

In this piece, we are given a fairly discernible rhythm punctuated staccato on the wood block, as the pitched instruments play various, motivic phrases over each capitulation of the percussion, growing increasingly dense and frenetic with each gestalt, almost reminiscent of a conversation with more and more people adding themselves into it. This goes on for some time until all performers are playing what sounds like random cacaphony, before the pitched instruments slowly converge towards a single idea, which is rather climactic compared to the inaccessible and incomprehensible music up to this point. After they converge, there is a brief moment of redispersing, and the piece ends. The main drive of the piece is the rhythm of the percussion section, working as an adhesive to what would otherwise be brief instances of insanity, as well as the dynamic between the various groupings of instruments.

Performed by Ensemble Expose.

Category:

Music

Tags:

• Ferneyhough
• Percussion
• Strings
• Chamber

[coldanke]

"The most commonly noted example of this would be his early piece "Cassandra's Dreamsong" for solo flute, which only occupies two pages, yet takes fourteen minutes to perform. "

The Dreamsong is very untypical of Ferneyhough. 2 pages for 14 minutes? Normally it is almost the other way around. Take Unity Capsule for instance!

[John11inch]

I merely use that as an example of how dense his notation is. In the context of dense notation, it is a good example (as I used it), you must agree ;D

[trashse123]

any idea?

[trashse123]

i wonder what they did tell to one another, ferneyhough and this guy on the right.

[gustadrum]

Great picture!!!

[felixdevilliers1]

My favourite pieces are Funerailles which Ican't find on youtube.

[coldanke]

I think academic books/people use this score as an example because it has only 2 pages. That makes it less complicated ;-)

The density of the notation however is not very typical of Ferneyhough (compared to the Time and Motion Studies or other works from around that time) and also the controlled chance element is very untypical (although he uses the same procedure in 7 Sterne).

Unity Capsule is the most dense (and beautiful) score I've ever seen.

[felixdevilliers1]

Somewhere in a corner of the brain music still speaks. I love it more with every hearing.

[felixdevilliers1]

Wonderful to follow these refreshing 'manic' lines and figures

[pixaninny]

Thanks. Nice to hear more Ferneyhough on YouTube. I had dinner with the man over twenty years ago and it was one of the most illuminating nights of my life.