Output details

Representing Benjamin: Brian Ferneyhough’s Shadowtime and Philosophy & Representing Benjamin (Part 2): Brian Ferneyhough’s Recent Music

This two-part output considers Ferneyhough’s most recent music. The first part evaluates the aesthetics of Ferneyhough’s ‘Benjamin Project’ (the opera Shadowtime) and the second part its distillation in the composer’s approach to form in his most recent works, stemming from Scene Two of Shadowtime, Les Froissements des ailes de Gabriel, a guitar concerto comprising over 100 tiny sections, each a few seconds in duration. These recent works in ‘fragment form’ are for varied forces (quartet, large orchestra, and chamber ensembles). Apart from Output 1, this is the first publication to address Ferneyhough’s music from 2000 onwards, but it differs from my monograph in that the recent music is here treated in a consolidated fashion, enabling fresh critical perspectives. Above all I seek to establish why a composer whose formal approach pre-Shadowtime was so classicizing should make discontinuity his principal concern. This leads to a discussion of a particular quality of ‘lateness’ of the recent music (Edward Said’s On Late Style is contextually relevant). This offers another perspective on Ferneyhough’s central concern since commencing work on the opera: time, and its perceptibility in the musical experience. To what extent do the music’s qualities bear out the philosophical principles central to the theorists on whose work Ferneyhough draws (Bohrer, Deleuze, Benjamin)? In the absence of substantial published discourse on Ferneyhough’s music after 2000, this study draws together analysis and reflective critique, and considers the listening experience. A possible conclusion is that whereas musicology is typically rooted in the perspective of ‘performer psychology’, Ferneyhough’s attention has shifted of late to a psychology of the listener. Dissonanz is a multi-language journal (reflecting its Swiss origin), which typically disseminates research originating at the Paul Sacher Archive. This study complements the extensive the archive’s Ferneyhough sketch materials, the latest of which is dated 1998.