brian ferneyhough
page two

We're speaking, I suppose, of identity and difference. Expression, you have said, is a progression "in which neither the presumptive beginning and end points are primary, but rather the 'no longer' and 'not yet' whose impressio they bear." But certainly these end points, in being presumed, are thus, by definition, primary. Innovation, in this model, would be determined by its distance from the end points of the shadowy, inherited frame of convention.

That's right. But which convention? My own position is, that it is largely up to the work itself to suggest the nature of these referential points without dimensions in and through the processes by which the distance between them is maintained. Hence my obstinate emphasis on stylistic continuity from work to work rather than specific sibling relationships between the individual work and other members of its stylistic 'family' in the world outside.  

How far do you pursue this emphasis? I read your answer, on one level, as a critique of what Foucault might have called the formal categories of knowledge; as a reminder to seek out, again after Foucault, the affective categories of power which might lie behind them; as a warning against taking culturally-determined 'stylistic families' for granted. Whereas I am not arguing for a single authority—a musical dictionary, if you like, dictating the interpretation of musical symbols—I nevertheless hesitate before the autonomy of a single work. I do, in fact, feel that the 'family' metaphor plays a valid role in interpretation: perhaps a better metaphor would be a system of orbits, a work surrounded by other works in a series of concentric circles. The listener, in the process of interpretation, leaps through these levels, all at various distances from the nucleus, like an electron; I often imagine meaning as a differential relation between the work in question and these virtual rings of convention. Does this contradict your notion of the individual work's responsibility?

I am certainly not arguing for the de facto autonomy of the individual work, even though there is much to be said for making the attempt to see it in that light as one facet of the reception process. It is precisely the moment of collision of work as irreducible quiddity and its adjunct status of cultural exemplar which renders a composition to us most fully. I don't see your image in being in any way irreconcilable with my own view of things; clearly, meaning is to be construed largely as a differential relationship, as you suggest. The individual work takes many of these received conventional values as givens; it is not necessarily true, though, that explicit stylistic reference is necessary for the successful execution of this procedure: associations and contexts may be evoked along many and devious routes. In my own recent String Trio I attempt to superimpose two quite different sets of formal strategies, both of which, ultimately, refer back to historical precedent. At the same time, these enriching allusions must necessarily fall short if not legitimated by the inner particularities of the work's argument, its immanent techné. In this particular instance, I was aiming at a reëvaluation of various types of microtonal intervallic structure and their implications for formal order which was only indirectly related to the issue of received genre.  

The hazardous equilibrium of a work embracing a foreign substance—one alien to the work itself, perhaps contradictory to it, perhaps highly dangerous—would seem to be the generator of meaningfulness that distinguishes, in Lachenmann's words, an "authentic" work from one merely "tautological." Yet there would seem to be a limit, even for an art preoccupied with boundaries and transgressions, beyond which a work reaches its breaking point and becomes an actual failure, a mere experimentation: the point at which the center moves far enough from the work's point of origin, the source of its own unity, that it is lost in the gravitational pull of an alien body.  

I like your choice of metaphor. Still, your argument implicitly assumes the ideology of the 'work,' understood as—at least in some sense—an integral, self-referential Lebenswelt with distinct boundaries, within which certain unchanging conditions for valid judgement apply. Even in this generally conservative age, not all composers would necessarily accept the initial premise. Even so, what might be the 'alien body' you mention? If it is contained within the work it must, to some extent, be subsumed to its prevailing conditions of identity; if not, then the conditions of identity of the alien body will necessarily become central, the remainder subsidiary. In either case, the conditions for global identity are maintained, even though the perceived identity itself of course changes.  

Surely, however, the presence of cultural categories, while quite possibly arbitrary, play a more important role. I hate to belabour this point, for I have no desire, unlike some professors with whom I have studied, to employ half-digested notions of Marxist criticism to expose social assumptions of so-called 'modernism' in all their shameful nakedness, like some smug celebrity attorney in the courtroom drama of modern culture. However the idea of a work whose frame entirely houses a totally divergent, 'alien' material does appeal to me, not because such I can imagine harbouring such a goal directly in my compositions, but because, abstractly, it would indeed imply a change in 'the conditions for global identity,' one suitable for a dramatic rendering of alienation. Having stated this, I do agree with you that on the practical level, something similar to this perspective has been frequently attempted in this century—I needn't name names—and that it very often isn't interesting.  

But how would this containment be assured? One could, I suppose, imagine some sort of vacuum retort implanted into the surrounding material which would effective isolate the alien entity from infection, but would this not diminish its alienating influence? If nothing is at risk, nothing is established. In a sense, the whole issue of autonomy is more aktuell here than in more obviously homogeneous stylistic circumstances. That said, I still remain reasonably persuaded that alienation is more efficaciously achieved by deconstructing and reassembling implied relationships within a particular well-established stylistic ambience (as, for example, in the kaleidoscopic re-ordering of expositional and developmental segments of a Beethoven symphony) than by drawing notional parallels between otherwise distinct stylistic zones. I am reminded of a recent Woody Allen film in which a Greek chorus is gradually transformed into a Broadway schtick routine. This sort of forced conjunction I don't need.  

You often speak of the impact of the creative impulse against a structural boundary, as in your description of "the innate resistance of structure to subjective self-assertion which provides the actual impulse for creation."

I can't help but associate this sculptural image with the Austro-Germanic tradition—"the exemplary Viennese dialectic of expression tempered in the furnace of formal stringency"— and contrast it to Boulez's practice of multiplication (in light of your own comments on the latter practice). The direction of energy in these two schemas seems to be opposite: on the one hand, the negative application of force against a musical object laden with latent energy, determining its release; on the other, the musical unit reproducing itself through a positive, outwardly-directed impulse. You reject this latter practice, but is not Boulez intentionally cultivating a certain dramatic poetics that finds its resonance in a (perhaps oversimplified) French tradition—the floating, unresolved dominant chords of Debussy; the positive, static accumulation of material in Stravinsky; the overtone series as the point of departure in spectralism—as opposed to a Germanic, romantic/expressionist one (the gradual buildup of chromaticism along the Bach—Beethoven—Wagner—Schoenberg line) in contrast to which it conveys meaning?

While I suggest this, the dynamic model you propose in "Il Tempo della Figura," which I have above called "negative," reminds me, in fact, of a model developed by a French philosopher, Gilles Deleuze, in Mille plateaux: the "machine assemblage" of a work of art arising from the intersection of strata ("lines of articulation or segmentarity") and the "body without organs" ("lines of flight," "asignifying particles or pure intensities").

Certainly Deleuze has been important to me since I read his book on Francis Bacon in 1980. However, I'm not sure that the passages you cite are specifically germane to my own practice. The idea of 'machine assemblage' is, especially, very alien to my sensibility, since it suggests a relative indifference of the strata to one another during the process of construction. In my model, important interference phenomena arise when individual strata come into contact. These chaotic fluctuations are, I suppose, what my music is really 'about.' At the other extreme, I am fascinated by parallel distortions effected on adjacent strata by some form of external formal force. An example from the outside world might be the complex tangle of bent, broken, and impacted roof beams left behind by a tornado hitting a wood-frame house.

With respect to the respective French and German traditions you are no doubt correct, although I am reluctant to see individual achievement reduced to archetypes. I'm perplexed, though, by your application of the term 'negative' to my figural imagery. I don't see 'lines of force' as being destructive, except to the extent that they are exclusively traceable through observance of the path of distorted material left in their wake. The same might be said of any modulation in tonal common practice, to the extent that certain torsional forces are applied to deflect the discourse from its 'natural' diatonic path.

You raise an interesting question with regard to Deleuze's (neo-) structuralist suppresion of the subject. If I remember aright, it was his Bacon book which approached this issue most pressingly, in that much conventional rhetoric of subjectivity was studiously avoided, being replaced by a sort of objective phenomenology of expressive force. I found then, and still find now, that particular approach seductively and differentiatedly subtle and would, with reservations, apply basically similar criteria to much of my own output. It is one of the most satisfying essays in squaring the circle that I know, and, being fundamentally generous of spirit, leaves many avenues open for further exploration.