brian ferneyhough
page three

I seem to remember reading a quote in an English translation of Adorno's Minima Moralia which went something like this: "Every work of Western music is about the death of Western music." But try as I may I cannot find the quote in the French translation I currently have with me. I hesitate, therefore, to use the quote here, but I do so anyway, since it is an interesting idea and perhaps you might even be able to tell me its real source.

In any case, I made a note of it at the time, and it reminded me of passage by Foucault (in La Naissance de la clinique):

Bichat a relativisé le concept de mort, le faisant déchoir de cet absolu où il apparaissait comme un événement insécable, décisif et irrécupérable : il l'a volatilsé et réparti dans la vie, sous la forme de morts en détail, morts partielles, progressives et si lentes à s'achever par-delà la mort même; . . . ce à quoi s'oppose la vie et ce à quoi elle s'expose; ce par rapport à quoi elle est vivante opposition, donc vie.

During a conference at Darmstadt in 1988, you proposed one view of complexity as an attempt to move closer, in musical notation, to the musical object; if I remember correctly, there was the suggestion that this was a process that has been going on for some time in the history of the art. This suggestion of a gradual, continuous movement over history, coupled with your conceptualization of structure as resistance, immediately brought these two quotes to mind. Does the European musical tradition play itself out over history "sous la forme de morts en détail, morts partielles?"

I suspect that the Adorno quote you had in mind is to be found in the passage of Minima Moralia entitled De gustibus est disputandem, where the author speaks of the hunger of the individual work to encompass the whole of Beauty in its own incomparable monadicity, thus implicitly annulling—annihilating—other works with similar pretensions. A form of musical Darwinism, perhaps. In other words, every work sets itself the goal of bringing History to an end in a catastrophic act of particularization, in light of which meaningful comparison of works or tendencies is, strictu sensu, impossible. Adorno imagines, if I interpret him correctly, the role of aesthetic critical theory to reside in 'saving art from itself' through an insistence on bringing strictly incomparable works together in relativizing dialectic frames.

The Western musical canon came about not merely by accumulation, but by opposition and subversion, both to the ruling powers on whom composers depended for their livelihoods and to other musics. More, perhaps, than in any other art form, music feeds off contemporary perceptions (and creative misunderstandings) of its own tradition. Composers dialogue—and obsessively, bitterly argue—with other composers, often over the span of several centuries. While there is an undeniable visceral attraction to the slow death theory—the contemporary artist sitting triumphally in state at the summit of a steaming midden—I would hesitate to adopt the image wholeheartedly. Still, it is true that any conscious critique implies the transcension of the critiqued, even if the latter is eventually to be recuperated in a new, presumably improved form, and the idea of a permanent 'art crisis,' at least since 1850, has fueled a lot of pens.  

Regarding montage and the use of past styles, you have written that "Ripping such [musical] units out of [their] contexts. . . [and] their integration into new montage forms demands the unimpaired semantic impact [of their innate expressive powers]." That impact is, of course, impossible to achieve in the absence of those units' contexts. But what if the composer's intention is to present a flat image of those units, divorced from their "expressive powers," to express a sense of exhaustion?

I could imagine contexts in which such a goal might be locally licit; the main problem, at least to my way of thinking, is: where do you go from there? As a necessary prerequisite to the creation of new forms of expression one might, I suppose, argue that current sensibilities respond uniquely to the notion of exhaustion as exhaustion, although that does de facto seem rather limiting. If one examines major developments in art over the last 150 years or so, one would certainly be hard put to avoid extremely articulate and ornate plaints and riffs on the idea of eschatological burnout in the relation of means and ends; the expressive power of so much restlessly energized negativity nevertheless conspires to transcend the notional object of its regard. But where do we stand with your suggested motivation? That composers aiming at this 'flat image' are working at one step removed from the originals is clear: my doubts concern precisely the nature and potential of that space separating original and de-auraticized image. In the free play of deracinated signifiers, what essential element is being brought by the artist to the encounter? There are forms of 'exhaustion in plentitude' (some of the early works of Richard Barrett come to mind as effective ambassadors here); also, there are juxtapositional strategies of a specifically autobiographical nature (as in many works by Schnittke whose dialectic only emerges in the confrontation of idiosyncratically subjective history with revered icons of the Enlightenment and its universalistic pretensions). From a previous generation, Zimmermann comes to mind as someone who took a lot of conscious risks upon himself in battling the Angel of History. All of these examples bring something of real substance to the act of re-inscription: an ongoing replay of 'happy exhaustion' by recourse to some form of (however elevated) sampling does not seem to be to offer even as much as Warhol's endlessly reproduced and minimally varied Monroe portraits or banalized rood screens of disaster images. So: we're all tired. Now what? Manuscripts written in Club Med sun block?  

Certainly at least one motive among many in the widespread appropriation of musical units in new contexts is, rather than attempting to quickly cash in on the same hard-earned expressive potential that these units enjoyed in their original contexts, to explore the ambiguity of interpretation that confronts the performer, the audience, and the composer in such an instance. For the listener (as you have pointed out), even the most abstract, locally-contextuallized, formally-derived musical unit will have some potentially meaningful relationship with traditional semantics; and on the other hand, a unit of familiar music will not present itself without showing some traces of its own process of engendrement. For the performer, the confrontation with different codes of interpretation would not necessarily result in the impossibility of the interpretative choice but would instead add another relief map to the work, of different musical periods' "distances" between the notation and the performed result. All of this would be interesting for a composer who feels that just these kinds of ambiguities—the spectre of immanent and transparent style haunting authentic formalism—have already been created through, to pick just one example, mass advertising. Would you imagine it possible to develop a positive aesthetic around this attitude, or is it simply a negative stance leading to a dead end—"the directionless, featureless ethical field proposed by proponents of post-Hegalian ahistoricity?"  

I don't want to seen to be preaching: of course, any artist is free to approach previous materials in any way that seems interesting. I have never suggested that the way I compose should be seen as in some way especially normative (even though there are those who have espoused that interpretation). Perhaps it is true that compositions are imaginable, at least in principle, whose notational conventions—derived more or less directly from, and deliberately manipulating, received traditions of interpretation directly derived from particular historical styles—address and motivate directly the practical and theoretical insights of contemporary performers. I have myself emphasized the fact that no notation is value-neutral. There are many scores of the 60s and 70s which incorporate multiple forms of notation (space, graphic, and the like); the assumption behind this strategy might be crudely summarized as 'whatever works, use it.' Mostly, though, with notable exceptions, the pieces concerned did not manifest a differentiated awareness of the active role notation itself plays in a composer's selection of expressive or structural priorities. Actually, I feel that Early Music interpretation has recently been doing a lot of work at least as interesting, instructive, and not ungermane to our artistic considerations today as anything emerging from trans-stylistic workshops. I do agree, though, that the issue of 'active interpretation' is very much alive and needs to be explored further. As to your final point concerning aesthetic attitude: the overpowering and stifling omnipresence of camp, parody, and 'take-offs' as modes of communication in entertainment and advertising, even leaving aside the problematic and depressing aspect of incestuous imagistic cannibalism thus celebrated, suggests that a further distancing of critical regard would be a difficult feat at best. But then, in art, it's the only difficult (by which I don't necessarily mean the technically difficult or virtuosic) that's worth doing, even if the result sometimes seems astonishingly effortless.  

You write that visual arts might better handle such manipulation of elements taken out of context. Perhaps you would agree with Boulez's comment that, whereas montage might work well in the visual arts, the material of a Beethoven sonata is not "neutral" like material from the history of painting is: visual art indeed has "a priori conventions" that music does not share. As you have also stated, there are important differences between words and musical building blocks. Do you sanction such practices in literature—here I am thinking, for instance, of a book I just read, Gaddis's The Recognitions—or do you feel that literature, too, should content itself with the search for specific, "consciously constructed ideolects?"  

Whether one should or not is moot, since many clearly do. I have myself been stimulated by the confrontation of mutually incompatible realms of discourse in the field of literature. At the same time, it is still true that it is easier to compose a poem in the form of a manual for adjusting a VCR than it is to write a piece using just tuning as a symphony. By reason of weird translation, many such sets of instructions read like poems anyhow. One has to remember that language, as the medium of everyday communication and human concern, has by definition infinitely more local purpose-specific ideolects available than does music, where such concerns, in the absence of binding environments, can usually be blocked in only the most crude outline if they are to be recognized, and hence rendered semantically effective. Apropos, it has been extremely instructive to me, of late, to listen to a broad spectrum of music from the turn of the century by lesser-known composers, and to hear this music from the perspective of the saturation-level acquaintance with a limited number of 'masterpieces' of the period hitherto typical. One presumes that the listener of the day would have approached stylistic cross-referencing and assimilation from the other side than that to which we are accustomed to consider normal, i.e. rather than finding fleeting and disturbingly evanescent shadows of particular compositions ghosting unpredictably through otherwise only generally identifiable material.  

More generally, I am curious as to how you regard philosophy and theory. Do you consider yourself a 'student' of philosophy? Do philosophical texts ever directly influence your compositional work? Should a composer read such texts?

I would not say that I was, these days, a 'student' of philosophy, although in my youth I was quite deeply involved with certain aspects of the British pragmatists. These days, I tend to read philosophy much like I might read other forms of literature—for the 'jouissance factor,' the pleasure of momentary or cumulative surprise. As to whether composers 'ought' to read philosophy: apart from the whole sweetly ironic reversal of Platonic strictures regarding the deleterious moral effects of music on youth that the thought implies, I recall reading a short while ago a stimulating comment by Marjorie Perloff, in her book Wittgenstein's Ladder, to the effect that Wittgenstein's coment that philosophy should ideally be read as poetry could equally well be reversed, i.e. that poetry could/should be read as philosophy. Maybe the same is true of music, too?

In any case, the fewer boundaries that exist hindering free movement between all forms of articulate human cognition, the better.

The hardest saved for last! No unified answer, I'm afraid. I suppose, ultimately, I find beautiful whatever stimulates, brings forth positive inner turmoil, makes me feel momentarily more intelligent, spiritual, etc., than I otherwise am: transmits a breath of Luft vom anderen Planeten.