Brian Ferneyhough - Composing a Viable (if Transitory) Self

7/28/2019 Brian Ferneyhough - Composing a Viable (if Transitory) Self

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Composing a Viable (If Transitory) SelfAuthor(s): Brian Ferneyhough and James BorosSource: Perspectives of New Music, Vol. 32, No. 1 (Winter, 1994), pp. 114-130Published by: Perspectives of New MusicStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/833157 .

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COMPOSING A VIABLE(IF TRANSITORY) SELF

BRIANFERNEYHOUGHIN CONVERSATION WITHJAMESBOROS*

I SEEM TO RECALL your discussing the notion of musical complexity in termsof the dynamic transmissionof information and its relationshipto statesofstabilityand instability.Among other things, that's true. How to get a grip on the entire con-cept of "complexity" as applied to art has proven to be a major bone ofcontention. I have not been satisfiedby what I have understood concern-ing the algorithmic definition, which measurescomplexity in terms of thenumber of algorithmic operations required to analyze-out a given state.For one thing, that's not how the brainworks; for another, it's certainlynot how most art seems to work. My own interests have gravitatedtowards how our perceptual ordering faculties react when attempting to

*BrianFerneyhough, amesBoros.


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Composing a Viable (ifTransitory)Self

make sense of borderline states-that is, situations in which an apparentdisbalance between implied scale of observed system and actual appor-tionment of confirming or disconfirming subsystems conspires to createzones of instability in which linear modes of cataloguing incoming sti-muli are suspended in favor of sudden leaps, fractures,or twists of focus.All music deals with this issue on one level or another; it's just that moststylistic conventions aim at large-scale equilibrium between containingframe and degree of permitted deviation of component details, whereaswhat I am aiming at is pretty much the reverse, in that what, in othermusic, might be seen as enhancing embellishment is constantly causing ahigh level of uncertainty about what the implied scale of the relationship"frame/detail" might be. The way it does that is partly by exhibitinghigh levels of self-referentialityand embedding procedures (encouraging"sliding" from one self-similarlevel to another), partly by having infor-mation presented in highly energized, coherent streams or vectors tend-ing to offer concurrent, competing, and sometimes contradictorymiddle-ground "micro-narratives." t's not just a question of confusion,though: the sort of grid- or matrix-orientatedformal techniques I usuallyuse tend to bring about momentary clarificationswhere partialaspects ofindependently-moving patterns suddenly coincide, creating sudden,unexpected "windows." In fact, "complexity" in such cases is oftenincreased by such unpredictablenodes, since the sudden increase in per-ceived structuralhierarchymakespassive,generalized reception difficult.SteveMcAdams oncewrote:"A compositionof sufficient, controlledcom-plexity might ... beperceptually nfinitefor agiven listener."1WhenIfirstread this, I immediately thought of your orchestralwork La Terre est unhomme.I don't know in what context that statement was made, but, as itstands, it certainlycorresponds pretty closely to my own thoughts on thematter. Of course, "complexity"is alwaysrelativeto the implied positionof the observer; even superficiallyquite simple phenomena can easily be"deconstructed"into unimaginablycomplex and, in detail, unpredictableflow patterns. The point about La Terre .. is not that I am proposingsomething that, measuredaccording to some absolute metaphysicalscale,is quantitatively or qualitativelymore complex than many another pos-sible object of aesthetic appreciation,but rather that I am concerned withkeeping the listener constantly aware of complexity as an inescapablegiven. In a good performance, at least, it's not possible to retreat to someglobally undifferentiated impression: instead, the ear is constantlyentrapped in some fine- or rough-grained strand of activity, or elseengaged in the transition from one to another. That's why any givenstrand is highly detailed and defined according to its own internal frame

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Perspectivesof New Music

of reference, as well as interlocking, on a higher level, with the activitiesand energies of other concurrent strands. This, together with the factthat I try not to prescribe more or less prioritized paths through thestructure, would seem to correspond pretty much with the tenor ofMcAdams's statement.In an earlier interview with Richard Toop,you recalledsomeveryvividdreams,and you described omeparts of La Terre ... that are "a verysha-dowyand distant reflection"2of scoreswhichyou found yourselfexaminingin thosedreams. I've also had the strange experienceof waking up in themorning with the solution to a musical problem ully formed in my head,handed to me, as it were,on a platter, all of which makes me wonderaboutthe roleplayed bytime spent asleep n relation to thecompositionalprocess.I wonder about it too, most often in terms of why solutions to particu-larproblems come to me when just about to fall asleep, or at the end of ahalf-waking period during the night-under circumstances,that is, prac-tically guaranteed to cause them to disappear again before I can writethem down. Personally,a night's sleep seldom seems to bring me nearerthe sought-after goal. On the other hand, it may be that I am simply notconscious of what is really going on. How does one tell? I have alwaysneeded much more sleep than the averageperson; maybe this has some-thing to do with the pressuresattached to the creativeprocess. But theseare such personal issues that I wouldn't even begin to draw general con-clusions.The most lasting effects of sleep on my composing have always beendreams-not the dreams in which actual sounds occur, but ones where Ifind myself leafing through a completed score. Some of these have beenextremely disturbing (as when one seems to be furiously devouring ascore, once lost, now found, about to be lost again); others have beenlastingly encouraging, making me aware of riches within, even in "dry"periods. I've never actuallyset out to transcribeor recreate any of thesescores in toto, but I've sometimes seen resemblances in areas of nuanceand detail buried in otherwise quite different works long after the fact.Even allowing for the distorting effect of the suspension of the criticalfaculty in such situations, I find it amazing that the subconscious cancome up with entire densely woven orchestral(or, in one case, orchestraland choral) scores in the space of a single brief dream. The score of minewhich, I suppose, comes closest to the aesthetic of these images is LaTerre .., but that took more than two yearsto compose.I find it interesting that you have collected a voluminous quantity of"compositional eferencematerials"overtheyears.I have alwaysritualisti-callydestroyeduchthings uponthecompletionofa work,perhapsas a way ofpurging myself:Other than creating clutter, what role does this materialplay in your life?

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Composing a Viable (if Transitory)Self

It's true that it does that! Certainlythose materials are not there to bereferredto by me in any systematic fashion. For one thing, they are in acompletely unordered and slowly decaying state as the result of manymoves and several accidents over the last twenty-five years, so that theyhave come to resemble a miniature Libraryof Babel, conceptually stimu-lating but referentiallyuseless; for another, the specific steps that led tocurrentpositions are, for me, at best anecdotallyinteresting. Perhapstheyrepresent a sort of repository of knowledge and belief, something like ashell, constantly growing and equally swiftly outgrown? In any case,transmogrifieddocumentation is part of tradition;it resembles somewhatin that respect our canon of fairystories or folk myths. Maybe such tracesare, to the individual, what prevailing communal paradigmsrepresent toa society? In this way, rather than "creating clutter," they are there butnot there, meaningful by dint of their functional absence.When I first started composing, there were very few byproducts of thissort, or else they were not consciously preserved. It's probably only sincethe earlyseventies that rough workings have accumulated, particularly orlargerworks, like FirecycleBeta (1969-71), where layersor groups wouldbe tested out in isolation before being inserted in the score. I've neverreallyproduced rough scores as such, owing to my habit of producing adefinitive score parallelto the sketching process, so that it would be diffi-cult, if not impossible, for someone other than myself to trace a paththrough the records that still exist. In any case, one should bear in mindthat not all works naturally generate a lot of sketch material; there aresome, too, where the level of definition of the sketches is too distantfrom the final result to be other than problematic as to attribution. In thecase of RichardToop's analyses3I was quite surprisedas to the things hecame up with-things that I no longer remember doing, but am, on thebasisof his evidence, preparedto admit that I reallydid!Probably it is less old sketches which are sometimes of utility than old,mostly unperformed compositions. As one's style develops consistency offocus and a strong sense of direction it is inevitable that some aspects ofone's initialpotential wither and fall by the wayside, or at least remain fal-low. Every few years I like to unearth some of those early scores and tryto relocate the beginnings of paths not taken. It is alwaysinteresting andsometimes creativelyenlightening. At the very least, it encourages me toview some of the efforts of present-day composition students with ahealthy portion of humility!Actually, it occurs to me now that there is one example of a sketchwhich was deliberately destroyed after a piece was written. At the outsetof FirecycleBeta I composed a worked-out score page for full orchestra,complete in every detail. After acting as the quarryfrom which all other

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elements and relationships were ultimately derived, this was made inac-cessible by burning. The actual page of origin was thus not incorporatedas such into the final work, which in any case remained a torso notincluding many of the instruments which that generating page specified.Looking back on it, the deed does sometimes seem gratuitously demon-strative;on other occasions it still makes a valid statement as to the mutu-ally consuming pyrrhic relationship between spontaneity and technicaldiscipline.

Theanalysesby Toopwhichyou describeabovemakeextensivereferencesoyour sketches;however,I have yet to read an analysis of one of your workswhichis basedonlyon what one hears,or what onesees n thescore,withoutresortto sketchmaterials.There is a problem common to most ventures of that sort, which, inthe analysiscourse I have lately been teaching, I term "appropriateness."How does one ascertainwith a reasonable degree of assurancewhat is arelevant way of approaching an unfamiliarwork?Sometimes general sty-listic attributes suffice to locate a piece and its concerns; at other times wecan referto the place the work occupies in the creativecareer of the com-poser, thus inferring something with respect to concerns and aestheticpriorities; on still other occasions the nature of the processes visibly/audibly at work permit a certain amount of legitimate extrapolativespec-ulation.There are also compositions, on the other hand, in which recognitionand articulation of a particularproblem or barrieraffords an entry into afield of possible discourse in which work and reception are intertwined. Istart from the assumption that "pure,"value-free listening would requiresome sort of cultural amnesia which itself would act as a significant bar-rier to meaningful apprehension and reflection. Thus, one is never start-ing from a single fixed point, but always from a binary relation, whosepoles are aural/visual stimulus and presumptive perceptual framework:the analyst just has to pick up some ball or other and run with it to seewhat happens. I am not by any means implying that analysesof the sortyou describe are not possible; simply that they are always something inthe nature of a poetic recreation whose ultimate degree of independencefrom its nominal object becomes itself an object of further reflectiveassessment.The usefulness of the odd concrete analysisof values and operationsactuallyemployed by the composer is useful in a quite different way thanone might initially assume, in that it provides a fairly stable point ofdeparture for more informed associative flights. A "free" analyticaldis-course on and around a piece needs, in my view, to take account of theentire availablework-process, by which I don't (necessarily) mean privi-leged access to the composer's workshop, but the chain from score image

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through various stages of the interpretational process right up until theact of reception itself. Anything less than that is not likely to be muchmore substantialthan the averagely ephemeral newspaperreview.Tou've used the terms "object" nd "process"n many different contexts.Forexample,I recallyour contrastingyour own music,and its concernwithathematter of the musical objectand its processualmanifestation,"4 withthat of ChrisDench, referring to his desireto createa flow of "nonobjects."Other composers,uch as Stockhausen,Cage, and Steve Reich, have used"processes"n verydifferent ways.How doesyour approachdiffer?I have no axe to grind with terminology. An "object," for me, is simplya span of experiencewhich is either sufficientlyconstant in itself, succeedsin defining its own outer boundaries with a reasonabledegree of credibil-ity, or balances out the conflicting demands of short-term memory andelapsed time so as to lock them into a unique perceptual frame and lendthe impression of a certain "out-of-time-ness." A "process," by the sametoken, is a musical activity in which these levels are not coordinated inthe same way, and whose complete identity is thus revealedonly by accre-tion and degradation, whereby middle- and short-term memory areinvoked to different degrees. Processes are interesting precisely becauseof the immensely rich interplaybetween memory and predictive imagina-tion they involve, but also because they extend the concept of "object"into more explicitly temporal domains. Process might even be said to bethe shadowsof objectsn time.Thelate Robert Smithson once wrote:"Objects re sham space,the excre-ment of thoughtand language. Onceyou start seeing objectsn a positiveornegative wayyou are on the road to derangement. Objectsare phantomsofthe mind, asfalse as angels."5Might it not depend on how false, and in what sense, you think angelsare? One could equally argue, I suppose, that thought and language arethe excrement of objects, to the extent that categories presuppose soci-etal objectivizations of self and other. Smithson was an outstandingthinker, especiallyin respect of his capacityto create and mobilize a mostimpressivearsenal of mental correspondences to deeply felt, but perhapsintellectually vague, communal perceptions. The very openness of someof his analogies is perhapstheir most potent advocate, while a number ofhis provocative linguistic conjunctions are quite electric in their release ofhitherto scarcelysensed bundles of "coherent intuition." There is some-thing of a parallelhere to the shamanisticinvocatory resonance of JosephBeuys, except that, with Smithson, the supersaturated quality of theobjects is almost invariablybathed in a brilliant,if still deeply ambiguous,Cartesian luminance. It is the obstinate persistence of Beuys's personalicons of experience in the world at large which renders them capable of

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reshaping the experience of others on an appropriately preconsciouslevel, even as the ratio begins to come into focus: Smithson's work seemssignificantly more unstable and provisional (in a positive sense), evenwhen manifest through his most massive land art pieces. He was deeplyaware of how close even the most ordered fields of perception are to col-lapsing into chaos, and was, in consequence, concerned to name this pro-pensity as a condition of its creative harnessing. It is quite striking howthe sense of the transitory informs both his metaphors and his artisticproduction. In that respect he was admirablyconsistent. Yourcitation is acase in point-whether one agrees with (or even understands) him ornot. In any case, his statement is a quite extraordinaryone for a sculptorto make, don't you think?The work which has recently occupied me, for violin and eight instru-ments, is entitled Terrain: it might, I suppose, be considered a distantreflection of some of Smithson's "mental tectonics" imagery of theruined inner world, even though the title is in fact taken from a poem byA. R. Ammons which also concerns itself with meditations on geologicaland other natural phenomena as manifested in the living world aroundus.Terrain's ensembleof eight instruments is identical to that of Octandre.Is theworkin any waya tribute to Varese?I suppose one could call it the payment of a long-standing debt.Octandre was alwaysextremely important to me, for one because it wasthe firsttruly modern work I ever heard, for another because I, as a windplayer,could immediately appreciateand relate to Varese's sonic imagina-tion in that medium. I wrote a lot of quite extended pieces for combina-tions of wind instruments in the very earlysixties, some of whose texturesare all too clearlyderivativeof Varesianmannerisms,while unfortunatelydemonstrating little of his (in)formal acumen. So, once the idea of writ-ing for concertante violin arose, I immediately focused on the vision of aviolin/ensemble opposition towards which, apart from textural and pro-cessual distinctions, the color and weight of the Octandre combinationwould make a majorcontribution.

When you think about it, it's actuallyratherstrange that this groupingnever became a "standard"octet formation. It contains both a wealth ofpossible subensembles and an impressivelycutting "bite"when employedas a single mass instrument. What proved most useful to me, actually,wasthe vast palette of registrallydefined timbral nuances available:as well asmore or less stable chordal states defined by absolute registral distribu-tion, I was able to insert particular instruments in ways which wouldtransform the entire perceived tessiturarelationshipof individual chordalcomponents, thus allowing partial aspects of chords to be separatedout

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Composing a Viable (ifTransitory)Self 121

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and functionally distinguished by being heard as "high" or "low" irre-spective of their actual registrallocation.Actually, Octandrestrikes me as being reallyratherrelevant (again?)atthe present time, for quite other reasons. Perhapsone of the few thingsthat the brief flourishing of "postmodern" style collage has left behindhas been an increased sensibilization to how the edgesand points of con-tact of systems (in the wider sense of comportmental taxonomies) areusefully defined. It is interesting to observe young composers turningincreasinglyaway from collagetowards montagetechniques, in which theformal ploys integral to certain types of stylistic and proceduralhomoge-neity are objectified, isolated, dissected, and, ultimately,dynamicallysub-verted by seemingly alien trajectories and rhetorical categories beingextracted from them. It is perhaps one way of registering "decentered"deconstructivist formal innovation while resisting its implicitly highmodernist residualvocabulary.In this sense, both consistency ndfracturecan be made to seem interestingly complementary, rather than simplystaring resentfullyat each other over an unbridgeablevoid.Unlike some of the composer's laterpieces, both of these principlesarepowerfully at work at point-blank range in Octandre. Just look, forinstance, at how the "cut and paste" interchanges in the first movementset about demolishing the linear emphasis of the various harmonic strataso explicitlyproposed in the opening measures, the way our sense of timepassing skitters confusedly over the surface of that fast-but-immobiledyad at the beginning of the second movement, and the weird "time-machine" quality of the fugato which opens the last movement. None ofthese experientialfault lines would have functioned half as well if the har-monic frameworkhad not been so obviously and coherently consistent inits setting up of transitional situations whose good graces are then soperemptorilyoverridden by extreme texturaldisjunction.Your description of Terrain makes me think of Mnemosyne, which, tome, is a frighteningly bizarre landscape,a slowlysolidifyingtemporalooze.Whenlistening to thepiece, I experiencea strongsenseof persistentqueasi-ness; t's as if I'm being repeatedly ossed nto the air and forced to "hit theground running," always at a different speedand angle, to continuallyadjust my mentalframe of referenceas bestI can. Thetreatment of time inMnemosyne also raises the old question of whetherconsciousnesss merely"aspectatorwho experiencesnothing but an 'action replay' of the wholedrama."6 Whatareyourfeelings?I see my own view of things as being more dynamic than that, withconsciousness resembling more a novelist, so furiously writing the"supreme fiction" of perception that he has no time to stop and rereadwhat he has written. It depends whether you accept the now somewhat

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discredited image of a little person inside your head riding herd over aflood of value-free, unordered incoming data. I reckon the process ofconstructing a viable (if transitory) self to be extremely conflictual andchaotic in nature, so that the sort of desperate struggle to stay afloat inthe turbulent "delaywake" of listening which I envisage strikes me as apretty adequate paradigm for the engenderment of self-awareness.If thequestion is suggesting that the "innerwitness" makes sense of an experi-ence after the event by replayingit in more or less unaltered form, then Icannot agree. Whatever one actually experiences during a performance,the "piece" that one subsequently retains in the memory is usually acomplete recomposition-edited, filtered, and reordered. That, in part, iswhy rehearing a composition is extremely important: you have thechance to actively map real-time and memory-time experiences onto oneanother. The shocking discrepanciesthat one sometimes encounters arefurther defining aspects of a notional topology of consciousness.To get back to your comments regarding Mnemosyne:n a sense, thepiece works as a mirrorimage of what I said about time flow in my musicin general. It emphasizes what I term elsewhere the "tactility"of time,where one senses ruptures or unevennesses in the temporal flow almostas much a form of physicalcontact as the sonic events themselves. I com-posed the relationship between the rate of harmonic change and the den-sity of surfacefiguration so as to encourage the mind to move "too fast"and, as a result, find itself constantly pulled up short by the slightly coun-terintuitive viscosity of information presentation. As the piece goes on,the lineardimension is progressivelyimprisoned, its impetus absorbed byan ever-tighter lattice of vertical referencepitches. The more insistent thepresence of harmony as passive obstacle, the more the mind begins tofocus in on time in terms of momentary degrees of resistancerather thanspaces within which it naturally unfolds. The more claustrophobic thissituation becomes, the more temporal flow manifests itself as physicalsubstance rather than a relationalframe of referencewithin which materi-als are sequentiallydisposed. That's how I feel it, anyway.Have you explored hisapproach n any otherpieces?

Probably the first movement of my Third String Quartet (1987)would come the nearest, even though the means employed are scarcelycomparable. The movement is composed of some twenty-three "types"of activity,some of which arerelativelystable (such as, for instance, a par-ticular nontransposing chord), others being much more fluid in theirpotential for variable realization (such as "glissando," which can beadapted to the specificneeds of many contexts). The entry, duration, anddensity of type-superincumbence for the first two-thirds of the discoursewere planned in advance, with the values being mirror-reversed for the

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final third. The essential difference was that not only was the orderreversed, but the actual types themselves were exchanged with theiropposite numbers at the other end of the chain; i.e. type 2 became type22, type 3 was replaced by type 21, and so on.The effect of this reversalwas to thrust me into a situation where whathad initially been a relatively "natural" flow of material (where thecharacteristicsof each type had largely been reflected in their temporalextension) became a series of abrupt accommodations and stratagems,attempting to fit types into spaces and combinatorially specified roleswhich were often completely counterintuitive, having in no way beenforeseen at the outset. I personally feel this "unease" of the materials atfinding themselves in inappropriateor downright alien temporal environ-ments quite audible and disturbing.Tournotion of a "viable(if transitory) self' bringsto mind a commentbyAntonin Artaud: "Whatis difficult is tofind one'splace and to reestablishcommunicationwith one'sself."7 Thisdifficultyariseseachtime I sit downto write music! For example,while working on thefinal section of my mostrecentwork,which tooksometwoyearsto complete,I found myselfbecomingincreasinglyuncertain as to whoor what my "self'was, at that particularpoint in both "compositional"and "real"time, in relation to the "self"whichbegan thepiece.Somuch had changed!There are many twentieth-century works which address (consciouslyor unconsciously) the temporality of the compositional act as a percep-tual transformation of the locus of self-awareness. The major composerwho comes immediately to mind here is Bernd Alois Zimmermann. Notonly did he seek to define self in almost theological terms as the zeropoint of intersection at the center of his "Time Sphere," in which all peri-ods and styles are notionally reconciled; he also produced at least onework, Die Soldaten, in which frequent simultaneity of discrepant strandsof dramatic action powerfully conspire to suggest dimensions of "tem-poral harmony" and "dissonance." If one listens to the entire opera oneis immediately struck by the stylistic mutation that its language progres-sively undergoes. To me, this suggests a quite different sort of temporal-ity, in which an entire era of compositional perception and techniquepasses in ever more intense and personal review-almost, on a muchlargerscale, like the famous Bergian "color crescendo." Apropos of suchconsiderations, what about the impact made by the Prelude as it collidesfull tilt with the opening of the first scene? Since the Prelude seems tohave been composed last of all, the effect of temporal reversal s like someapocalyptic time machine or centripetal mechanism attempting to thrustall those explosive energies back into the genie's bottle.

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Interestingly enough, I have on occasions been forced to composepieces backwards-perhaps one might speculate that the discourse'spolarityhad somehow been reversed?How wereyou 'forced"to composehembackwards?Refining the precompositional processes involved in Terrain, it justhappened that a useful level of definition was arrived at for the secondhalf of the piece first. I'd sketched out the entire form (measure lengths,sectional paradigm switches, tempi and texture strategies, and so on)fairlyrapidly,and it was the progressivegrowth of this momentum whichbrought supplementaryideas into play as I approachedthe end. So that'swhere I started. It was quite interesting to approach the opening violinsolo from that perspective, rather than allowing everything that followsto emerge, as it were, from it. It's lucky for us that time is reversible, atleast during the compositional act.You've recently written several percussionpieces (Fanfare for KlausHuber (1987), Bone Alphabet (1991)). Why hisseeminglysuddeninterestin percussion?Just circumstances, as it happens. After listening, increasingly unwil-lingly, to severalgenerations of the sort of percussion piece requiring anextensive "kitchen" of instruments disposed in entire labyrinthsof standsand other paraphernalia so that you can alwaystell when the performeris getting round to the tam-tam . .), I swore never to compose for per-cussion alone. What changed my mind in the first place was the requestto compose a one-page piece for my old composition teacher's sixtieth-birthday festschrift. Rather than composing a solo flute piece or some-thing similar, I decided to address the issue of free instrumentationwithin very specificallystated constraints. If you look at the score (con-forming to the one-page edict, but only just . ..),you will see that twocategories of timbre are defined: (1) sonorities capable of being groupedin reasonablyhomogeneous gamuts of high and low (like wood blocks,or tom-toms), which change every couple of measures, and (2) a wholeseries (over thirty, I think) of so-called "unique sounds," each of which isto be played once only. The piece can be performed several times in thesame concert, rather like a "motto" or interlude (my model being thefanfare beginning both the 1610 Vespers and the later operas of Mon-teverdi), but each time, a new set of unique sounds must be selected.Since each performer is instructed to select his instrumentariumwithoutconsulting the other player,it's clearthat all sorts of strange conjunctionscould arise-rather like renga-form poetry, or certain practices of theSurrealistwriters who composed collaborative texts, like The MagneticFieldsof Breton and Soupault. Given the original constraints, it seemedto me that only the percussion medium could give me such flexibilityof

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interpretation. I like the idea of totally unforeseen sonic results;unfortu-nately, although the piece has been played a lot in Europe, I have yet tohear it.And Bone Alphabet?Bone Alphabet had an odd history, too. When Steve Schick, whom Ihad known some yearsearlierin Europe through his forming a duo withthe pianist James Avery, came to teach at UCSD, he asked me to writehim a piece which would also utilize an extremely restricted group ofinstruments. His idea was to have something with which he could tour,and which would not be dependent on unreliable or nonexistent localinstruments. Initially I was not attracted to the idea but, the more Ithought about it, the more I came to see this limitation as a challengequite different from those arisingfrom my lengthy occupation with more"normal" instruments, which were capable of extremely subtle inflec-tional and timbral nuance. Since we had agreed on a maximum of seveninstruments, all with similar attack and decay characteristics, I deter-mined to compose a truly polyphonic piece in which the performerand Iwould have to address the problem of realizing up to four complex linessimultaneously,each line being able, in principle, to include any or all ofthe seven basic sounds. Again, I opted not to choose the instrumentsmyself; instead, I placed certain limitations on the choice available.Forinstance, no two adjacent instruments could belong to the same basicfamily of sonorities. I did this so that the frequently occurring tremolibetween neighboring instruments would assure rich sonic results. Nothaving particularsonorities in my mind as I composed (which actuallyinvolved a certain amount of disciplinedrenunciation) meant that I couldconcentrate entirely on the formal issues at hand.Did yourfamiliarity with Schick'sperforming abilities have any influ-ence on thefinal outcome?Steve has a really inimitable playing style, almost balletic in terms ofhow he stores and then releasespackets of "bodily memory." The way Ibrought that into play was to demand multiple superimposed rhythmiccycles, the coordination of which would require just such actionisticallymnemonic triggers. In that sense, it is a piece that needs to be seen aswell as heard.The stripped-down nature of BoneAlphabet'ssonic world encouragedme, too, in my furtherinvestigation of some of the concerns I mentionedearlier, in particular,linear versus nonlinear modes of formal organiza-tion. The piece was composed on the basis of a thirteen-layer rhythmicmatrixarticulatinga form subdivided, both by process and tempo differ-entiation, into thirteen sections. Each of these, with the exception of, Ithink, three, were further subdivided. I set out by associating each of

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Composing a Viable (ifTransitory)Self 127

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these main sections with a type of "texturalcomportment" which woulddictate both type and density of activityand the specificlayersof the orig-inal matrix to be mined for material. Each section was then composedstraight through in its totality, and the thirteen sections composed from1 through 13, with the result that a certain quasilineardevelopment ofavailableresourcesemerged.Having arrivedat this relativelyconventional narrativestructure, I thencut up each section into its constituent subsections (some as short as onemeasure in length) and redistributed them according to a plan whichestablished a new "story line" for each type. For instance, type 1 ("two-voice, iterative, asynchronous figures") was redistributed by length, thelongest and shortest versions coming first, then moving graduallytowards the median durations as the end of the work approaches. Theother, less frequently appearing types were reordered according to otherprinciples,and the totality of segments was arrangedin subcycles of alter-nately three and four elements. As with the Third Quartet, the insertionprocess began relatively simply by reason of the fairly large choice avail-able; as I began to exhaust certain types, however, aesthetically satisfac-tory local solutions were increasinglydifficult to find. It is here, too, thatthe single-instance types were interjected, still furtherconfusing the issuewith their seemingly unmotivated outbursts.. .. Whichbrings us back to your responseo my initial question,and toyour tendencyto eschew raditional, straightforwarddevelopment n favorof asuddeneaps, ractures, ortwistsoffocus."Why his needto, asyou put it,"confusehe issue," o court the "counter-intuitive"?

I think I must have a pretty confused brain-or else a notably suspi-cious nature. Let's put it the other way round: I can see why someonemight want to compose a "what you see is what you get" sort of music,in which the motivating issues involved have a very clear, immediate, andrelativelystable relationshipto materialand operational identity. Some ofit is as bracing, say, as a good crossword puzzle; some might even openthe door to new perceptualvistas by virtue of its abilityto tackle transfor-mation in very small, constantly repeated steps. In the latter case,though, some sort of anamorphosis s almost inevitably at work-somedistortion sensitizing our receptive antennae to discrepancies or faultlines in the correspondence of implied concept and realized manifesta-tion. A lot of the later Feldman pieces typically work in this way, con-stantly defamiliarizing(by odd numbers of repetitions, extreme duration,or slight phase decoupling, for instance) things which have become sofamiliar a part of the weave as to be almost invisible. That, in itself, is aform of "twist of focus," don't you think? It's a temptation, I know, toconsider the qualities you mention in your question as attributesof a style

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ratherthan characteristicsof pretty much universalvalidity.It's true thatmy music happens to highlight insistently some of the more unstable andseemingly arbitraryfacets of current compositional thinking: that neces-sarilyfollows from what happens to interest me, which is the expressivepotential of ambiguous and volatile states. It would be a mistake, though,I feel, to assume that "continuity" on some level or other is not a pre-requisite of my approach-no fracture or twist can be perceived per seunless it is a fractureor twist of something,at least one of whose constitu-ent defining qualities or fundamental assumptions is understood as pro-viding a referential constant. I make two assumptions of this sort at thevery outset-firstly, that unity and continuity of style are necessary inorder to define and unleash these structural dissonances and, secondly,that analogical frames of reference categories of "seeing something as')are freely transferrable between articulative levels of whatever order ofmagnitude and formal scope. So, it's all very relative. Although I obvi-ously see the area I'm working in as located at the center of where cur-rent sensibility is moving, in terms of how art can make an activecontribution to how we come to see the world as we do, I'd be the lastperson to suggest that foregrounding this aspect is the only strategyavail-able. I hope not!

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NOTES

1. Stephen McAdams, "Hearing Musical Streams," Computer MusicJournal 3, no. 4 (Winter 1979): 42.2. Richard Toop, "Brian Ferneyhough in Interview," Contact 29(1985): 9.3. See, for example, "Brian Ferneyhough's Lemma-Icon-Epigram,"Perspectivesof New Music 28, no. 2 (Summer 1990): 52-100, or"Superscriptiopour flute piccolo solo," Entretemps 3 (February1987): 95-106.4. Brian Ferneyhough and James Boros, "Shattering the Vessels ofReceived Wisdom" Perspectivesof New Music 28, no. 2 (Summer1990): 38.5. Robert Smithson, cited in Gregoire Muller and GianfrancoGorgoni,TheNew Avant-Garde (New York:PraegerPublishers, 1972), 17.6. Roger Penrose, TheEmperor'sNew Mind (New York:Oxford Univer-sity Press, 1989), 443.7. Antonin Artaud, Selected Writings (New York: Farrar,Straus, andGiroux, 1976), 82.

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Brian Ferneyhough - Composing a Viable (if Transitory) Self

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