Against our better judgement, several hundred of us went to the Barbican to see the BBC Symphony Orchestra play Brian Ferneyhough, as part of their increasingly-misnamed “Total Immersion” series. (One day! Two concerts! Can you handle it?) Like the late Milton Babbitt, Ferneyhough is one of those composers whose music is overshadowed by his forbidding reputation, and so I’d like to thank Ivan Hewett for writing programme that tried to sell the punters on enjoying the music rather than getting them to figure out what a “claustrophobic and marginally chaotic renegotiation of mutual priorities” might sound like.
It’s rare for Ferneyhough to write for a large orchestra, and even rarer for that music to be played. La terre est un homme, written in the mid 1970s, is the most unrelentingly violent piece I’ve heard by Ferneyhough. It is also the greatest. Its impact on the audience was like that of an explosion, sustained for a quarter-hour. Aesthetically, it could be comprehended only as an overwhelming force of nature, simultaneously filled with terror and beauty, carrying a wealth of intricate detail with unremitting ferocity. Luckily, the performers were able to project and contain the force needed to balance both of these contradictory impulses.
This brilliance in playing was also present in the 1986 piece Carceri d’invenzione III, for winds, brass and percussion. For all the refinement in his musical language, it’s in pieces like this that, for me at least, Ferneyhough threatens to live up to his daunting reputation. As all seven Carceri d’invenzione pieces are based upon the eponymous engravings by Piranesi, it’s unsurprising that the music contained within is often claustrophobically dense and obscure. Compared to his other works, I still admire more than enjoy them.
The early Missa Brevis for unaccompanied choir was a piece I didn’t know existed, and while Ferneyhough displays excellent craftsmanship he was unable to transcend certain avant-garde affectations that were fashionable in the 1960s. Similarly, the BBC Singers showed and excellent technical command of the music, without ever really appearing in full command of what they wanted it to say.
The other highlight of the night was the other orchestral piece and most recent on the programme, Plötzlichkeit (2006). Besides having the coolest brass section, Plötzlichkeit embodied most strongly the wishes that Ferneyhough has often expressed for his music, as to how it might be received by the audience. As most recently expressed on the Today programme:
What I want to do is for them to suspend disbelief for a little bit and therefore enter into a sort of Alice in Wonderland world – through the little hole by drinking the potion – and try to even in the most confusing and seemingly chaotic circumstances to try to hold onto something.
Plötzlichkeit combines the full, distinctive voice of the composer with the fragmentary structure of his Sonatas For String Quartet from 40 years earlier; its discontinuities are reminiscent of Varèse’s approach to composition, allowing distinct blocks of sound to run up against each other in a constant balancing act of contrasts. Instead of overwhelming or exhausting, the music invited a dialogue with the listener, inviting (or taunting) them to perceive fleeting details before they disappeared, and to make their own sense of progress from start to finish.
The performance felt as though it could be a little more focussed, although that may be a problem with either me or the orchestra getting some perspective of a piece which seeks to defy any appreciation of structure.
Filed under: Music by Ben.H
Tags: Brian Ferneyhough
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Total Aversion: Brian Ferneyhough
Saturday 26 February 2011
This evening I’m off to see the BBC Symphony Orchestra play Brian Ferneyhough, including the first British performance of his large work Plötzlichkeit, as part of one the Barbican’s Total Immersion days. Unsurprisingly, the BBC has been cross-promoting it through one of their news and current affairs programmes.
What is a surprise, however, is that the time dedicated to interviewing Ferneyhough and discussing his music on the Today programme yesterday seemed to strongly suggest to listeners that this was a concert they should stay away from. The Rambler has an insightful analysis of what happened on the show (followed by a good debate in the comments).
In summary: Ferneyhough’s music is sinister, pointlessly difficult, causes stress and sounds a bit like farts…. this is not responsible arts journalism at any time of day. It’s deliberately and offensively misrepresentative. It doesn’t promote the music, it doesn’t increase understanding, it doesn’t even offer a moment for people to make up their own minds (three minutes of just the music would have at least done that). It simply builds walls, closes ears and reinforces prejudices.
It’s infuriating, but hardly surprising any more, that mainstream media is so hopelessly crap at arts reporting, even on Radio 4 and other outlets that present themselves as more intellectual. If they can’t frame the story as a controversy or scandal (whether it is or not), the journalists are at a loss as to whether they should approach their subject as a case for uncritical boosterism, adversarial inquisition, or quirky human interest. The last case always involves some degree of condescension, and Today’s treatment of Ferneyhough was no exception.
Why does arts reporting so often fall into this charade? The immediate impression is the same one given by politicians and certain business leaders, that they need to be seen as “one of the people,” and in doing so find themselves pandering to a lowest common denominator, becoming a patronising charicature of their supposed inferiors. On further thought, the position of a broadcaster like Radio 4 is closer to that of Hollywood film studio execs and millionaire movie stars, who regularly turn out “heartwarming” films about smalltown folks who come to the Big City to find success and fame, before learning the truth that the true happiness they seek can only be found back home living an ordinary life, free of glamour or wealth. You do not want this, they say. Do not pursue the dreams we have achieved. You’re better off the way you are now.
I doubt the people who make the Today programme live glamourous, millionaire lifestyles, or even that they like Ferneyhough; but I bet they go to the theatre, museums, concerts and art galleries. You won’t see news reports on whatever latest production of Swan Lake, Mozart recital or gallery opening might be. Instead, when the arts are reported at all, it’s a scandal or a freakshow. This is culture. You do not want this. Best to leave it alone.
Filed under: Journalism, Music by Ben.H
Tags: Brian Ferneyhough
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Dusapin, Francesconi, Ferneyhough, and Kurtág; or Francesconi, Kurtág, Ferneyhough, and Dusapin; or Kurtág, Dusapin, Fransesconi, and Ferneyhough.
Wednesday 31 January 2007
After the interval, Irvine Arditti addressed the audience. “I gather that many of you haven’t the faintest idea what it is we’re playing.” He then added, “We often feel the same way.”
The program for the Arditti Quartet’s gig at Wigmore Hall last week claimed we would be hearing Dusapin, Francesconi, Ferneyhough, and Kurtág, in that order. Then, before the concert began, a silver-haired gentleman mounted the stage and announced that in fact we would be hearing the second piece first, the last piece second, the third piece where it was, and the first piece last. He then added, as an attempt at clarification, that this meant the running order was now Kurtág, Dusapin, Francesconi, and Ferneyhough. No, we said, after checking this against our programs, but the gentleman had already disappeared, leaving us to our confusion.
Interestingly, out of all the composers’ names, the one the locals had the most trouble pronouncing correctly was the Coventry-born Brian Ferneyhough.
I was glad I was too cheap to pay £3 for the program, seeing as it was useless for finding out what was playing when, and because I later learned that the notes for these compositions, by the composers themselves, were similarly confusing and unhelpful. They were in the much-parodied academic-speak beloved of the institutional avant-garde, who write everything as though it were a conference abstract.
Ferneyhough’s Fifth String Quartet is a “claustrophobic and marginally chaotic renegotiation of mutual priorities”; completely unlike his Second Quartet, which “realizes the projected possibility of a gradual coming together between objective coherence and receptive spontaneity”. Chalk and cheese, really. Both are significant advances over his earlier Sonatas for String Quartet, with its “dialectical tension between the elements with a deliberately rationalizing character and others of a more spontaneous gesture”.
I wonder if these types of program notes in today’s intellectual climate seem more quaint than alienating. This sort of hyperintellectual analysis doesn’t upset me as much as it does others: just about every artist is intellectually beholden to some personal philosophy that, on contact with the outside world, proves to be more or less bogus. Whether it’s poststructuralist discourse or catholicism, I don’t have to buy into the ideas that make a piece of music I enjoy listening to.
Oh yeah, the music was really nice. Contemporary classical music is alive and well etc. As Ferneyhough put it himself when discussing his Third String Quartet, “the multiplicity of values in the text rests on a coherent structuring procedure regulated by the relation between silence and eloquence. Such a postulate of art for art’s sake gives birth to a work that can only be conceived by self-reference: first in a metaphorical sense, but finally in a literal sense.” Which I take to be a particularly thorough way of saying: it is what it is.
What’s big in composition right now: sustained passages of rapid movement, played very quietly. Every new piece these days has to have at least one, it seems.
Wigmore Hall is Rock’n’Roll!
- One punter reeks of piss!
- Another punter reeks of stale booze!
- Yet another is swigging straight from their single-serve bottle of wine without using the glass provided!
