Brian Ferneyhough on Music and Words http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/bernstein/shadowtime/music&words.

html

Brian Ferneyhough on Music and Words

December 2004

Unlike my approaches to stylistic continuity in instrumental

compositions, I have always begun a new vocal work with a
certain amount of trepidation. This is, to be sure, partly to do with
entering the complex world of another artist as, as it were, an
overweening late-comer; whilst this is of course not to be
understated, it does not lie at the centre of my concerns, which is
to be found, rather, in the array of implicit or explicit fault lines
exposed by two world systems, those of verbal / conceptual as
opposed to musical discourse.

I have sometimes spoken of music as being, if not a language,

them amenable to being treated as if it were a language. This
primarily operative assumption aids my stylistic evolution to the
extent that it enables me to ignore wider philosophical concerns
which, because articulating more abstract issues, are likely to
stand in the way of concrete, context oriented enactments of
meaning production. One might imagine, I suppose, that this
would render the alliance of poetic texts and musical con-texts
less, rather than more, problematic: in fact, however, it is not
infrequently precisely this twofold emphatic emplacement of
aesthetic locality which gives rise to a fatal flaw or discontinuity
which the composer ignores at his peril.

Thus we are left with alternate but equally enervating states of

affair. On the one hand, the demands of 'standard received'
textual conventions - sentence structure, accentuation, case
agreements and the like - relentlessly conspire to undermine
optimal deployment of musically immanent parsing devices; on
the other, the very departure from these norms which
characterizes much highly-individuated poetic locution presents
the composer with the prospect of text-music discontinuities of
daunting proportions. Since it is usually music (as the aptly
named 'setting') which is imagined as faithfully serving the text
by displaying it to best advantage, the composer not prepared to
accept this ritual self-effacement is constrained to formulating
and realizing quite complex work-specific strategies. In effect, he
must accept, re-inscribe and thus empower this fundamental
fracture of communicative discursivity as the price of creative
liberty.

Let me offer here only two examples from 20th Century vocal
practice. Firstly, I would argue that the striking discontinuity
experienced when reading the George texts taken by Schönberg
for 'Das Buch der Hängenden Gärten' serves a double purpose.
Who does not experience the energized void, the ephemeral
flickerings of transience evoked by the musical rhetoric (if such
be the appropriate term for the undissimulated energeticism of

1 de 4 10-01-2007 23:28
Brian Ferneyhough on Music and Words http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/bernstein/shadowtime/music&words.html

expressive identity) in these songs? It is to be sure the transience

of the historically-bounded, the moment of ultimate
dematerialized release; at the same time we cannot by any
manner of means discount the fact that this release is achieved on
the basis of poetic incorporation of sultry, world-weary imagery
and extreme self-aware artificiality of structure. Who could argue
that this staging of symbolic re-absorbtion of the Romantic
subject into the luxuriously oceanic presence of voluptuously
tempting materiality does not provide the composer with the
opportunity to posit another, fleeting and yet potent sense of
Innerlichkeit, an inwardness of the moment? In the same way,
perhaps as the ubiquitous self-mirroring of the row forms in late
Webern frees us from the slavish reconstruction of redundantly
through-rationalized enactments of epistemological
legitimization, proposing to us a refreshingly uncloying
perspective of compositional liberty in other dimensions of
decision making, so the suddenness of Schönbergian expressivity
in this seminal work is predicated on the presence of George's
ultimate foregrounding of mediation.

My second example, also from Schönberg, is 'Pierrot Lunaire'.

here, musical and textual imagery go hand in hand. it is
sometimes impossible to say with certainty at which points the
transcriptive effusion of vocal usage flows over into the
circumambient instrumental environment. Here, one encounters
the composer himself applying himself with exuberant excess to
the creation of musical forms which both distance themselves
from, and ultimately consume (and, in restrospect, ironically
validate), the crude dandyish formality of the texts themselves.

Common to both these examples is the awareness of the

impossible fracture I spoke of at the outset. The composer who
ignores or seeks to cosmeticize this discontinuity can scarcely
avoid locating himself on one side or the other of this basic
divide. If, however, we succeed in finding new ways, no matter
how provisional or work-specific, of mapping and resonating the
divide this is still a challenge worth the candle.

It is difficult for me to completely separate my identity as a

composer from that of pedagogue. I find myself frequently asking
myself the same questions that I might pose to a pupil as a way of
surmounting a creative obstacle. When text is involved one
needs, above all, to acquire a sense of the degree to which the
active sense of its context is to be rendered account of in the
conjoined form. A certain degree of autonomy may be defined
along this path. On occasion, though, I am strongly persuaded of
the expediency of undertaking the assimilative process in several
discontinuous steps. If, for instance, the text to be set is viewed
initially as 'available material' there are many qualities
contributory to its aesthetic presence which can serve the
composer's purpose in, as it were, the prelapsarian space of

2 de 4 10-01-2007 23:28
Brian Ferneyhough on Music and Words http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/bernstein/shadowtime/music&words.html

fractureless innocence. Information gleaned from such

considerations can be deployed by the composer either as
conceptual regulators or as value-free quanta to be regarded as
equals in precompositional dispositions. The empowering aspects
of the fracture come increasingly to the fore the more the
communal materiality of text and music are invoked.

Each of my own vocal works has necessarily given rise to

lengthy reflections on such matters, and each work has succeeded
- or failed - on the innate degree of plausibility with which
sufficient aspects of the textual dimension are first of all
bracketed out, then folded back in at a later stage of the
compositional process. Text setting is always a process, in that
the expression of time passing in the sedimentation and mutual
infiltration of incommensurables contributes to the sense of
distance or proximity with which text and music speak to (or
past) one another. Vital concerns of a developing musical
language (however defined) must withstand the test of fire and
prove themselves equal, in any given work, to the formal or
pragmatic concerns of the text. They may be similar, they may be
(as in the first Schönberg example) crassly distinct; important,
above all, is the composer's awareness of the mutual
incomprehension.

At this point I should finally make the not insignificant

distinction between solo vocal and choral music. The latter is, in
my experience, somewhat easier to deal with than the former, in
that a single voice invariably engenders the impression of a
single individual who speaks. Oftentimes this impression proves
more powerful than whatever other aspects of the text the
composer is attempting to address. In choral music, in contrast,
the obvious degree to which the text is 'orchestrated' is a constant
corrective to overly simplified and assimilative modes of reading.

Most recently, work on my 'Shadowtime' has caused me to reflect

upon the conventions of characterization, the use of received
historical forms as mediational instances and the nature and
demands of libretti. Remembering my previous experience in
vocal music, I asked Charles Bernstein, my librettist, himself
fully awake to this complex of issues, to produce a text that at
one and the same time would accept manipulation (permutation,
repetition, mass exchange of segments) and be, in its own right,
an independent poetic text. This he achieved, so that I was able to
modulate with great fluidity between very diverse levels of
structure and music - text interaction. The first scene (the evening
of Walter Benjamin's suicide on the Spanish border in 1940) and
the fifth both accept the conventions of dramatic identity of
individual figures. In order to ameliorate this for me unfamiliar
intimacy of person and 'voice' I adopted two distinct strategies. In
Scene 1, although the action evolves in real time, several
independent layers of action, each with its own ensemble of

3 de 4 10-01-2007 23:28
Brian Ferneyhough on Music and Words http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/bernstein/shadowtime/music&words.html

voices and imagery, are superimposed, thus forcing the ear to

distance itself from the totality of what is heard in order to focus
on specific instantiations of character projection. Scene 5,
representing Benjamin (more precisely his post mortem avatar)
interrogated by a series of figures taken from history or
mythology also seeks to present each character through a specific
set of musical devices. Objectivizing instance here is the fact that
each encounter also adopts the conventions of a particular
historical musical genre (rondo, passacaglia, isorhythmic motet,
quodlibet etc.), whereby the succession of interrogations on the
stage is paralleled by an overview of the development of
occidental musical forms from the 11th to the 19th Century.
Perhaps the larger temporal scale involved in music theatrical
projects demands a more excessive or, at any rate, explicit, form
of fracture.

All other vocal music throughout 'Shadowtime' is choral in

nature, although 'The Doctrine of Similarity' seeks to maintain a
fragile sense of permanent recalibration of sense and mutual
dissent by being divided into thirteen separate movements, each
of which is both clearly set off from the rest by considerations of
choral / instrumental disposition and re-integrated in retrospect
by a slowly emerging large-scale set of formal correspondences.
Like the writings of Benjamin himself, 'Doctrine' concerns itself
in the first instance not with presentation but 're-presentation',
and it is this dimension which permitted me to continually
re-initialize the power of auratic distance from movement to
movement. The final scene is likewise for choral forces only. The
'other' in this instance is the addition of computer generated
sounds. On a more intimate level, two distinct texts are presented
simultaneously, vying for prominence and, in addition, there are
many abrupt interventions of settings of an artificial 'negative
vector' language of my own devising. On each level, therefore, I
sought to recall to the mind's eye the vital fracture of word and
world, of world within world which - nolens volens - lies at the
heart of all vocal composition.

4 de 4 10-01-2007 23:28