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Brian Ferneyhough: Ästhetik der Figur (Published in German)

Ferneyhough’s seven-part Carceri d’Invenzione cycle is the most surveyed of his works in the published literature. This fact is explained by the sketch material, which is the most complete for any work in his output, and which permits detailed insight into its musical structures. There is, however, little published research that considers Ferneyhough’s aesthetics in relation to this cycle, composed between 1981 and 1987. The research questions considered here arose from Ferneyhough’s theoretical writings during this period, in which he developed for the first time the interrelated concepts of ‘gesture’ and ‘figure’, both means of organizing abstract parametric materials into expressive events. While the dialectical relationship between the two concepts has been examined previously (Paddison, Toop, Mahnkopf), my article proposed that the terms in which Ferneyhough conceptualizes the ‘figure’ relate to a main concept (also ‘figure’) in Gilles Deleuze’s critique of Francis Bacon’s paintings (Francis Bacon: Logique de la sensation), published in French in 1981 (the year in which work on the cycle began in earnest), whose relevance to his thinking at the time Ferneyhough has acknowledged in a few places, but only obliquely. The article seeks to show the extent to which Ferneyhough’s compositional style was influenced by Deleuze’s reading of Bacon, notwithstanding the apparent disjunction between Bacon’s figurative (representational) style and Ferneyhough’s highly abstract one. Ferneyhough’s decision to name the cycle after another example of visual art altogether (Piranesi’s Carceri d’Invenzione) is instructive, for although the latter has some bearing on its overall form and instrumentation, details of its local articulation may more readily be interpreted in the light of the Deleuzian context mentioned above. Part of a volume dedicated to Ferneyhough’s music, the approach in this article complemented other analytically orientated contributions, including one that evaluates Carceri in exclusively structural terms.