1. The text: Ferneyhough wrote one of the poems spoken in \u201cOpus contra naturam\u201d; the other is by Charles Bernstein, who did the libretto. I think it is pertinent to judge the poem by standards of contemporary poetry, and to judge the opera\u2019s subject, the death of Walter Benjamin, by standards of contemporary cultural criticism. From those perspectives, Ferneyhough\u2019s work is at the same level as a beginning graduate student: his poem is precious and ostentatiously intellectual. (\u201cWhat\u2019s the cube root of a counterfactual? \/ An almond\u201d — lines that obliquely but inaccurately refer to Mandelbrot.) Ferneyhough\u2019s theme, Benjamin\u2019s death, is a clich\u00e9 in cultural studies. Ferneyhough says he hopes that \u201cgiven [Benjamin\u2019s] fascination with the Surrealistically orderly disorder manifest by Parisian passages, I imagine that Benjamin himself would not have been entirely unappreciative\u201d of his, Ferneyhough\u2019s, \u201caesthetic strategy\u201d of \u201challucinatory imagery.\u201d This is pompous and hagiographic, as in some graduate student work; it\u2019s also inaccurate, because Benjamin didn\u2019t admire the \u201cParisian passages\u201d (an obscure way of referring to the passagen,<\/i> the covered malls) because they had \u201cSurrealistically orderly disorder\u201d but because they were visual tokens of the state of bourgeois culture. So in terms of the writing and the subject, if Ferneyhough weren\u2019t a composer, his work wouldn\u2019t be taken seriously.<\/span><\/p>\n 2. The music: there\u2019s a lot of talk about the virtual impossibility of performing Ferneyhough\u2019s scores; the usual strategy is to parse them into individual beats, learning them beat by beat, bar by bar, like a new language.<\/span><\/p>\n This is clearly a strategy made possible by computer software, which makes these kinds of divisions fun and easy. There are signs that Ferneyhough plays with the software, and is guided by it: the measure numbers are printed very small and close to the stave markings, which is an artifact of the software and would have been corrected in older music engraving; and the title page says \u201cThis score is a facsimile of the composer\u2019s manuscript.\u201d The consequence is that it\u2019s entirely reasonable to say there are musical forms here that are suggested by the software: therefore the software should be part of the criticism of the music.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n This doesn\u2019t mean Ferneyhough doesn\u2019t hear what he composes. On the contrary, it implies he hears it very precisely, because that\u2019s what happens when you work with the software in this fashion: you make incremental adjustments, and hear each one. That in turn implies that criticism of his work should concentrate on very brief passages, and attend to them in detail.<\/span><\/p>\n I think there\u2019s a connection between the text and the music, as I\u2019ve described them here. They both show a myopic concern with detail: fragments, tiny images, evanescent forms. They share an obliviousness regarding large-scale structure and meaning; both are obscured by the hope that attentiveness to microscopic textures can result in large-scale significance. The expression, \u201cNew Complexity,\u201d is perhaps more accurate than it sometimes sounds: it\u2019s a particular species of complexity, an understanding of what complexity is, that works by tunneling under the meanings of longer and larger structures. For example the libretto and composer\u2019s statements about \u201cShadowtime\u201d don\u2019t touch the reasons why people find Benjamin significant; and in the same way the detail here doesn\u2019t approach the questions of larger scale that caused modernists such as Carter or Boulez. to create some of their more complex passages. Their sense of detail isn\u2019t Ferneyhough\u2019s: that\u2019s why it isn\u2019t accurate to call Ferneyhough a modernist. What\u2019s interesting about his work is the psychological effect of putting so much hope into the precise reading of an image, a moment, a beat: hoping that they can be knotted, compressed, and finessed so as to produce not only new meaning but a way forward for music after modernism. I don\u2019t think Ferneyhough\u2019s hypertrophied attention to details (either textual or musical) often produces new meaning on a larger scale, and I also don\u2019t see how it is a way forward after modernism: but the tremendous effort of the attempt is itself expressive.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As the exemplar of the \u201cNew Complexity,\u201d Ferneyhough has been one of the most discussed composers from the 1970s to …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jameselkins.com\/pianofiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/476"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jameselkins.com\/pianofiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jameselkins.com\/pianofiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jameselkins.com\/pianofiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jameselkins.com\/pianofiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=476"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.jameselkins.com\/pianofiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/476\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":478,"href":"http:\/\/www.jameselkins.com\/pianofiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/476\/revisions\/478"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jameselkins.com\/pianofiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=476"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Screen](\"http:\/\/www.jameselkins.com\/pianofiles\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/09\/Screen-Shot-2014-09-28-at-11.40.18-AM-1024x685.jpg\")
The first measure of this piece, for example, is 7\/16. Those 7 beats are bracketed, and the bracket is labeled 11:7 — that is, eleven beats in the time of seven. Three of those 11 are bracketed with the label 5:3, meaning 5 beats fit in where three had, but those three are in an 11:7 ratio with the original 7. And within the 5:3, there are two divisions, a group labeled 5:3 and one labeled 7:4; and within the first of those, there is a further division 5:3. So the second sixteenth note of the piece is actually in a ratio of (5\/3) \/ (5\/3) \/ (5\/3) \/ (11\/7) in relation to the original beat.<\/span><\/p>\n![\"Screen](\"http:\/\/www.jameselkins.com\/pianofiles\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/09\/Screen-Shot-2014-09-28-at-11.41.03-AM-1024x702.jpg\")
<\/span><\/p>\n![\"Screen](\"http:\/\/www.jameselkins.com\/pianofiles\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/09\/Screen-Shot-2014-09-28-at-11.41.18-AM-1024x825.jpg\")
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