{"id":10924,"date":"2026-05-26T23:50:02","date_gmt":"2026-05-26T22:50:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/?p=10924"},"modified":"2026-05-26T23:50:02","modified_gmt":"2026-05-26T22:50:02","slug":"michael-finnissy-and-the-guitar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/2026\/05\/michael-finnissy-and-the-guitar.html","title":{"rendered":"Michael Finnissy And The Guitar"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/span>Michael Finnissy: Finnissy And The Guitar<\/em><\/a><\/strong> [First Hand]. “For this year, the usually anniversary-happy Proms have programmed sweet F. A.” I wrote this ten years ago<\/a> as a passing comment on Michael Finnissy turning seventy. Now he’s eighty, the Proms has again conspicuously ignored him; I’m not sure if that matters for the Proms, any more. Meanwhile, some new albums have been coming out, with M\u00e9tier adding another hefty volume of piano works adroitly tackled by Ian Pace (includes English Country Tunes<\/em>) and a complete collection of his organ works, played by Forrest Eimold. The latter is a less-known facet of Finnissy’s work, as are the works for guitar. Finnissy And The Guitar: Complete Works 1966-2022<\/em> is an especially rewarding compendium both for bringing these works to light and for displaying the great clarity in Finnissy’s compositional voice; a voice that once acquired a reputation for speaking a recondite language. This may be down to the eclecticism of his style, which mixes a feeling for the more abstract harmony and counterpoint of 20th-century Europeans (and so looked at askance in Britain) with references to the musics of other times and places. He combines these tendencies intuitively, with a traditionally English empiricism. <\/p>\n

The earliest work dates back to when Finnissy was about twenty: Two Cut-Ups of Three Fantasias by Alonso Mudarra<\/em> makes free use of William Burroughs’ cut-up technique to collage fragments from the 16th-century composer, creating a pair of studies which explore polyphonic implications within an “economy of gesture”. It’s a youthful work so it can be called ‘limpid’, favouring construction over direction to make two pieces which are immediate but obscure, opening up a new way to hear how sounds fit together. It also captures the tone of ambiguous melancholy that permeates many of Burroughs’ collages. This is a first recording, made by Sam Cave, who also unearthed the piece while compiling this collection; he’s done a superb job in conception and execution. Cave plays four of the seven pieces here, the others played by guitarists closely associated with the music; all but one have not perviously been recorded commercially, if at all.<\/p>\n

In the Two Cut-Ups<\/em> any continuity is of course self-constructed, and the subsequent works carry over a sense of continuity that is friable, illusory or complicated to varying degrees. Felix namque<\/em>, a compact work from 2012, carries over traces reminiscent of baroque lute and Spanish folk but metamorphoses between different expressions of one or the other, with sudden schisms and an abrupt end. The more elaborate but perhaps less refined Song 17<\/em> from 1976 contrasts flourishes of more esoteric language with moments of stillness and quiet, extended tremoloes. Cave takes those tremoloes to the threshold of hearing; his playing beautifully conveys Finnissy’s affection for the instrument, interpreting the music in a deceptively simple way, appearing not to take on a false persona for each piece or assume a burden of emotional strain on behalf of the avant-garde. (This is a more nuanced way of saying he makes it sound easy.) More particularly, Cave and the other musicians empathise with Finnissy’s observation that “one can become intoxicated with the sound, and forget about continuity and structuring”, giving attention to each moment while securing its place in the overall construction. Finnissy’s writing for guitar always makes time for the ear to linger on sensual details, even in the protean monologue of Nasiye<\/em> (1982), played with pointed momentum by Diego Castro Magas. It’s a piece which creates its own shape out of attempting to reconcile, or at least find balance between, its inconguities, without ever resorting to easy despair. The duo Normal Deviates<\/em> (2017), played by Daniel Bovey and Julian Vickers, who commissioned it, is even more of a headlong rush, with the two guitars locked in heated dialogue that alternately meshes and clashes. It’s complex, but never rushed to the point it feels like trivial scurrying; the Vickers Bovey Duo brings out its eloquence. Bovey also commissioned the guitar quartet Albion on the Road to Hell<\/em> in 2019: played by him with the Mela Guitar Quartet, it begins as a shocking study in brutal timbre with all four musicians ferociously plucking out a series of repeated chords in unison. After finally exhausting itself, the piece slowly rebuilds from quiescence into a hazy miasma of mingled voices. The final work is the most recent and the longest, with Cave playing Outcast<\/em>, a piece started during the Covid pandemic and finished in 2022. Both the most variegated and the most introspective in mood, Outcast<\/em> is a musical transcription of sorts, or a translation, of the 9th-century Welsh poem Claf Abercuawg<\/em> and so is in form another monologue. Cave imbues the work with tenderness, even in it’s bleakest moments and violent outbursts. It’s a pleasure to learn this music is now not so overlooked.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Michael Finnissy: Finnissy And The Guitar [First Hand]. “For this year, the usually anniversary-happy Proms have programmed sweet F. A.” I wrote this ten years ago as a passing comment on Michael Finnissy turning seventy. Now he’s eighty, the Proms has again conspicuously ignored him; I’m not sure if that matters for the Proms, any […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,44],"tags":[37],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10924"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10924"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10924\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10938,"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10924\/revisions\/10938"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10924"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10924"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10924"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}