Relationships between material, duration and form

This non-teleological aspect of their music manifests itself through a blurring of the large-scale structure; form cannot be perceived as a linear and logical

succession of sections or movements. In the case of Ferneyhough, the discourse is always shifting from one thing to the next: sections are too short (or, rather, too contrasted on a medium-to-small duration-scale) to allow the listener to perceive a clear formal development. In contrast, in the late works of Feldman, the scale is extended beyond the standard limits of the perception of form. For instance, in his piece Piano and String Quartet (1985), a breathing-like alternating gesture (a notion which will be further discussed in Chapter 7.3.1) emerges in the second half of the piece. However, given that the work is almost ninety minutes long, the binary nature of the form is not perceptible (at least certainly not in any traditional sense). In both cases, albeit at vastly different scales, the listening experience is not guided by equation with traditional forms.

What makes the two composers so drastically different here is also paradoxically what connects them: the rate of change in Ferneyhough’s music is excessively high, while in Feldman’s it is sometimes almost null. In both cases the rate of change is, nonetheless, fairly stable, and contributes to a ‘disorientation of memory’5, which I have often sought to reproduce in my own work. For instance in my Percussion Quartet (Chapter 4.2), the implacable frenzy of fragmentary repetitions is in my view evocative of Ferneyhough’s music, although the musical syntax is quite different. Reference to Morton Feldman’s formal procedures is arguably more explicit in the pieces presented in Chapter 7, where slow repetitive materials are extended over long periods of time. In both cases, the absence of narrative or drama in my own music aims for a treatment of memory and musical time in which I recognise the two mentioned composers very much.

2.3.1 Feldman and the notion of scale

Feldman’s use of repetition is not inherited from traditional rondos, dance forms, or any repetitive forms of Western Art Music. Rather, it evokes the repetitions of visual art (such as the Oriental rugs which fascinated him in his later years), Beckett, or even (in respect of its temporal extremity) Satie’s Vexations, a piano piece which requires 840 identical repetitions of the same chord sequence. Feldman’s music, therefore, resists conventional analysis. As Dora A. Hanninen suggests, it necessitates the invention of new tools and methods in order to be properly understood:

5

These terms are borrowed from the article ‘Crippled Symmetry’ (in Feldman & O’Hara, 2000, p.137).

I encourage analysts to rethink the role of repetition in music analysis, such that repetition is no longer (only) a goal, but becomes a point of departure. (Hanninen, 1999, p. 1)

In order to analyse Feldman’s late works, Hanninen introduces two new concepts: population and scale, applied respectively to his radical uses of fragmentary orchestration and duration. A population is understood as a set of segments in the orchestral piece Coptic Light (Feldman, 1986). The segments themselves are smaller entities of, for instance, two notes in a single part. ‘Populations are more than collections of segments; they are individuals with emergent properties’. Among these properties may be distinguished ‘range of variation’ and ‘distribution’. According to the author:

Analysts might reconsider part-whole relationships in music analysis, and use the idea of ‘populations’ (with their attendant features of range of variation and distribution) to develop a non- reductive (...) approach to scale.(Hanninen, 1999, p. 1)

Analysis, for Hanninen, is more concerned with interpretation than definition. Her ‘non-reductive approach to scale’ seeks to expand rather than condense the musical experience, thus revealing a contrast with Schenkerian analysis, which aims for reducing the material to its simplest forms, and in which notions of

Ursatz (fundamental structure) or Urlinie (fundamental line) are of central

importance. The notion of scale discussed by the musicologist should be understood in Feldman’s own terms:

Up to one hour you think about form, but after an hour and a half it’s scale. Form is easy – just the division of things into parts. But scale is another matter. (Feldman [1970], 1994)

The concepts or tools Dora A. Hanninen developed exclusively for this music provide new insights on the orchestration found in Coptic Light. Also, taking repetition as a point of departure, they help understanding the extreme durations (or scale) Feldman explored almost systematically in his late works. Finally, this new terminology illustrates how traditional methods of analysis are ill-suited for such innovative relations between material, duration and form.

2.3.2 Ferneyhough’s perpetual short-term articulation

Ferneyhough is a great lover of Renaissance and Baroque music. The articulation of his music, its ornamentation, and also its rhetorical quality, derive a great deal from the Baroque tradition. According to Nikolaus Harnoncourt, ‘music prior to 1800 speaks, while subsequent music paints’ (Harnoncourt, 1988). Indeed, the analogy with articulated language appears to correspond better to Ferneyhough’s aesthetics than that of 19th-century painting or their contemporary large-scale symphonic structures.

His orchestral work La Terre est un Homme (1979) is reminiscent of late 15th century Franco-Flemish polyphony, and of Tallis’ Spem in Alium (c. 1570), because of the extreme density of its counterpoint. In this piece, despite the presence of contrasting materials, the score is of such density that the listener perceives one continuous and global stream. Ferneyhough’s chamber and solo works, on the other hand, are perceived as constantly changing material. These pieces are reminiscent of word painting in Renaissance madrigals, where musical texture may change abruptly upon the utterance of a word of significance. In both situations, a musical passage is neither perceived to be a consequence of, nor in contrast to, what was heard before, in the narrative sense. Rather, the music immerses the listener in a perpetually unstable world of sound.

2.3.3 Conclusion

Thinking of the notion of rate of change in relation to Morton Feldman and Brian Ferneyhough almost inevitably places most of my recent works stylistically closer to the one of the New-York composer: the polyrhythmic processes used in my

Percussion Quartet (2011), Three Painted Walls and a marbled ground (2013),

or the Piano Quintet (2013) (to which I will come back to in Chapter 4.1.3, Chapter 4.2.2, and Chapter 7.3.3), are responsible for a slow, even, and continuous rate of change in my own music, and remind in this sense of some of Feldman’s repetitive passages.

Reflecting on the notions of material, form and duration in Feldman and Ferneyhough’s works has helped me defining interesting structural relationships in my own music. More specifically, the notion of scale, as developed by Morton Feldman and critically examined by Dora A. Haninnen, is here most apropos: indeed the above-mentioned passages extract from my own music present

almost identical materials on vastly different scales (or temporal dimensions). For instance, Three Painted Walls and a Marbled Ground only lasts less than four minutes, and yet this short piece is based on polyrhythmic structures resembling the ones used in the Piano Quintet, which is over half an hour. Thus, the same compositional technique allows for the generation of contrasting musical characters whilst maintaining stylistic coherence.