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Brian Ferneyhough: Postmodern Modernist

This article takes as its starting-point Paul Griffiths’ description of Ferneyhough as a rarity, a ‘postmodern modernist’. Ferneyhough himself insists on his commitment to ‘the furtherance of the modernist project’, but although he attempts to find compositional solutions to what he perceives as contemporary stylistic impasses, he does so according to ‘the needs of the moment’ (Griffiths), rather than by articulating any longer-term vision. A distinctive theoretical context is presented in support of the thesis that Ferneyhough’s personal style draws on aspects of both modern and postmodern sensibilities, as exemplified by his engagement with Theodor Adorno’s dialectical theory of musical material and concepts central to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s critique of power structures (Capitalism and Schizophrenia). The meaning of the term ‘immanence’ for these thinkers is evaluated: for Adorno, the rationalization of musical material in the composer’s struggle to dominate it bespeaks modernist progress; for Deleuze/Guattari, rationalization is limiting, suppressing natural forces and plurality. Concepts important to Adorno and Deleuze (such as subjective identity) and their relevance to Ferneyhough’s thinking are placed in dialogue with one another in an effort to interrogate the fundamental tension identified in Griffiths’ epithet. A range of Deleuze and Adorno’s writings is explored, mainly less well-known texts (for example, Adorno’s ‘On Some Relationships Between Music and Painting), affording an unusual perspective on a composer too often uncritically assimilated with arch-modernism. There is some reflection on the concept of the figure, central to one of my other outputs (above), but invoked in a different context (relating to Deleuze’s concept ‘Body without Organs’) as a means of critiquing Adorno’s discourse on rationality. A surprising number of correspondences between Adorno’s and Deleuze/Guattari’s thinking emerges (some obvious differences notwithstanding), leading to the conclusion that Ferneyhough’s self-styled ‘recuperative modernism’ is conceivably (in Deleuze/Guattari’s terms) a re-territorialized modernism.