Monday 28 February 2011

Garth Knox: Viola Spaces


Garth Knox: Cleverly hidden amongst a group of other musicians (from Jean Francois Charles's site).

Just a quickie, if you head over to Garth Knox's website you'll find a most excellent collection of YouTube videos featuring performances of his Viola Spaces; a set of eight viola studies composed by Knox which explore various extended techniques.

In his own words...
Interpreters of classical music can study technical exercises (scales, arpeggios, finger exercises, etc.) confident in the knowledge that these patterns will be useful in playing classical pieces. Due to the extreme diversity of styles in new music today, it is now more often a case of constructing a new technique to reply to the demands of a new piece. There are however recurring techniques which can be studied, among these the so-called “extended techniques” (usually meaning classical techniques taken a little further). I had the idea to write a series of pieces which explore these techniques.

Each piece (or « space ») concentrates on one specific technique, and exists in a solo version, and in a duo or trio version, the other viola parts using the same techniques, but in a simpler way. In this way, a player can learn the technique on the simpler part, then progress to playing the solo part himself.
Great to see Knox himself perform these pieces and even without the score they're most informative (I'd call them didactic but that seems to be a dirty word these days, wasn't in my day, personally I blame immigrants and violent rap music).

The score is published by Shott and can be purchased here.

TinyURL for this post: http://tinyurl.com/6kq6onb

Wednesday 23 February 2011

Another Quote (more Kurtág, same book, yes, I know)


Ligeti and Kurtág: Old hands.

So, first scene (central-on the podium):

Christmas Eve 1957-according to a telegram I still have, at 11.02 p.m.-Paris-Gare du Nord. Ligeti arrives in Paris for the first time in his life. I wait at the station. The pianist György Szoltsanyi, my friend and our host that evening, finds it strange that someone would want to travel so late on Christmas Eve. He invites Ligeti as well to his home at 48 Boulevard Garibaldi.
"The metro is still running," I say.
"No, let's walk!"
And without hesitating Ligeti leads me through the streets of Paris, I who have lived here for over six months-naming every intersection and the streets beyond.

(back corner, top, left):
Ligeti's early childhood. His obsessive pastime: perusing maps and memorizing them by heart-among them the map of his dream city, Paris-while already working on his fictitious country, Kylwyria.

(front, top, right):
The spirit of the Kylwyria construct seems to be hereditary-also in his early childhood, his son Lukas spent years writing the encyclopedia of his invented planet, with examples from its scientific history, literature, fine arts, and music.

György Kurtag, Mementos of a Friendship, György Kurtag on György Ligeti. (Three Interviews and Ligeti Homages, B.A. Varga).

TinyURL: http://tinyurl.com/6zsatfq


48 Boulevard Garibaldi

Monday 21 February 2011

A Quote (Because it's so good).


György Kurtág and his wife Márta Kurtág: György displaying his Olympic gold medal (Luge, 1960. A little known classical music fact, or is it?).
'For me, harmony is melody pressed like a flower.'
György Kurtág: Three Interviews and Ligeti Homages, Bálint András Varga.

TinyURL for this post: http://tinyurl.com/66b5a9l

Barrett on Ferneyhough


Ferneyhough, Cage and, someone else (from the Virtual Museum).

Recently picked up the 1992 edition of Contemporary Composers at my local Oxfam bookshop and I must say it is rather good. This entry on Ferneyhough by Richard Barrett is the best summary I can remember reading on the great man (Barrett isn't just a good composer so it seems).

Thought it worth sharing here. Also it's Ferneyhough's turn to be Totally Immersed at London's Barbican on Saturday, also broadcast on the BBC.

................................................

It often seems that either Brian Ferneyhough's music is talked about more than listened to or performed, or that his name embodies some kind of numinous idea with scant reference to the compositions with which is it presumably connected. To his critics he often represents all that is most esoteric and pointless in the compositional ivory tower; to many of his supporters he appears as the torch carrier for centuries-old mainstream of "progress" in musical thought.

Ferneyhough has no doubt inadvertently supplied support for both arguments in the often impenetrable verbal apparatus with which he surrounds the music. To dispose of this aspect first, closer examination of almost any of his published statements reveals a coherence, and indeed reasonableness, of which the more woolly-minded among composers would do well to take notice. For performers and listeners alike, the "difficulties" presented by Ferneyhough's music are mainly to do with depth and span of attention. The music resists casual listening as surely as it does sight-reading, but there is a great difference between this and, on the one hand, lack of interest in the sound itself, or on the other hand lack of sensitivity to performing resources (Ferneyhough is assiduous in researching instrumental possibilities, as many players eventually agree).

Ferneyhough's music certainly has its roots in the tradition of serial thinking, or, to be more general, "parametric" thinking, where the different (and differently defined) aspects or dimensions of a sound or complex of sounds may be not only organised, but organised independently. The density of sound and notation in most of his music is a result of applying such principles to many more and much subtler "parameters" than he had previously. An instrumental line will hardly ever be free of layer upon layer of superimposed articulations, ornamentations and so on, which almost function as "counterpoints" to each other and to the pitch-contour itself (if indeed the latter remains discernible).

The finished score is the "sounding trace" of a vast and contradictory network of processes and permutations, a network constructed to draw together and solidify what Ferneyhough has called an "unformed mass of creative volition". The title of his seven-part cycle Carceri d'invenzione ("prisons of invention") not only recalls Piranesi's etchings of imaginary dungeons, but also the process by which the composer might set up more or less systematic restrictions in order to channel initially inchoate compulsion or desire. Nevertheless, however abstractly formulated these restrictions, Ferneyhough's music processes abundant stylistic "signatures". It would be over-simplifying to talk of a "Ferneyhough sound" when one of the music's most obvious features is a refusal to arrive at a point of unequivocal statement, but on a "microscopic" level there are any number of characteristic gestures which occasionally emerge from his typically hyperactive polyphony.

Ferneyhough's earliest mature works date from the mid-1960s, when in the Sonatas For String Quartet, for example, disparate compositional means (serial and non-serial) coexist without fusing. The work is also typical in its fragmentary overall form; nearly all of Ferneyhough's longer compositions are either made up of separate, shortish movements, or divided into at least notionally discrete sections (24 in the Sonatas). The following works brought about increasingly complex relationships between deterministic and empirical composition, which are paralleled in the diverse degree of notational exactitude in Transit. At the same time, tendencies towards "parametric polyphony" in writing for solo instruments reached their apogee in Unity Capsule, where the superimposed layers of notation for parameters such as embouchure position and vocal activity threaten to marginalise the (traditionally paramount) pitch structures.

The most recent works, while retaining and even building upon these characteristics, also embody a new openness to formal clarity (relatively speaking), exemplified in the gradual disintegration of a sharply-defined initial situation in La Chute d'Icare, the starkly juxtaposed textures towards the end of the Third String Quartet or the series of etude-like miniatures which constitutes Kurze Schatten II. In these pieces, a more important structural role is played by contrasts in overall texture, although an essential ambiguity is retained, that sense of an endless recursion of qualifications around every statement, which is at the same time one of the most frustrating and one of the most rewarding features of Ferneyhough's work.

Richard Barrett. Contemporary Composers, Morton & Collins, St James Press 1992.

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