Brian Ferneyhough Words and Music

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 Schnberg for 'Das Buch der Hngenden Grten' 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 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 Schnbergian expressivity in this seminal work is predicated on the presence of George's ultimate
foregrounding of mediation.
My second example, also from Schnberg, 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 circum ambient 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 workspecific, 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 per suaded 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 ma terial' there are many qualities contributory to its aesthetic presence which can
serve the composer's purpose in, as it were, the prelapsarian space of 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 Schnberg
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 conven tions 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 modu late 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
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 / in strumental disposition and re-integrated in retrospect by a slowly emerging largescale set of formal correspondences. Like the writings of Benjamin himself, 'Doc trine' 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.