Brian Ferneyhough

I interviewed Brian Ferneyhough in New York in December 2002. The Ensemble Sospeso were giving a portrait concert of the composer at Carnegie Hall – reviewed by Paul Griffiths for the New York Times HERE:

The orchestral piece, mentioned at the end, on which Ferneyhough had just started to work, was Plötzlichkeit.

Carnegie Hall, New York, 14/12/02

James Gardner: You’ve been working on Shadowtime for about three years now, I think?

Brian Ferneyhough: Yes, in fact everything that I’ve composed – with one exception, which was a little wind In Nomine piece which I wrote for the ensemble recherche In Nomine collection  This is the only thing that I wrote as it were, as a sort of little jeu d’esprit in between the rather large items which form Shadowtime.

Are you enjoying working on a longer-term project?

I’ve always liked working on long-term projects, you know you have to pace yourself. And the idea of just taking five or six commissions in a row for whatever instrumental combination somebody wants you to write for, it really is anathema. And so I’m always glad when I can fit those things into a larger concept. Doesn’t mean they’re less heterogeneous than they would have been already, but it’s much easier for me then to take, for instance, a unified basic syntax or a unified set of chords or something which will notionally give at least a composerly unity to the whole process.

So there is a peg to hang the whole thing on.

Yes. I think that’s important. Particularly since in this case, I had to confront again the issue of vocal music, both in choir and in soloistic form—what is recitation, as a principle? Can you use it? What sort of extended vocal techniques – if any – one uses. And then you have to remember also that I’ve worked in all sorts of microtonal systems in the last say, ten years, and I had to withdraw from most of that, at least in the vocal parts. And in the piece The Doctrine of Similarity, which is a piece in thirteen movements for forty-eight voices (although there is a sixteen voice version and a twelve voice version, which will be used in the opera), microtones were almost forbidden ­– one had to be very, very careful. I was pushing the envelope in any case for large choirs not experienced in the sort of rhythmic devices which I tend to use. So each one of the pieces has extended me a little bit. It’s also allowed me perhaps to admit things into my music which for years and years I’ve strained out.

Such as?

Well, there’s a wonderful passage, at least wonderful for me, at the end of the first scene, where Hölderlin is singing falsetto, in his tower, and it’s G major.

Real G major?

It uses the pitches of G major, and it finishes on G, so…

Then there is the challenge of writing an extended segment, say four hundred measures, which just has to go through as a dramatic unity, and I resorted, for instance, in my instrumental materials, in writing in a form of particell, in a form of expanded piano score, with all the instruments notated and so on, simply as a way to avoid writing too much music, in the sense of vertical density, which is one of my sadder tendencies. And it’s quite good, because what you couldn’t get in four lines you didn’t write.

It was a limitation.

It was an arbitrary constraint which I imposed upon myself for practical reasons.

What was it about this project which led you to “come out”, as it were and label it an opera, as opposed to music theatre, or some other term?

I don’t really label it an opera. It’s…what can you call it? It’s a scenic representation. Even Helmut Lachenmann started off talking about his Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzen as an opera, and later I found in the score, and on the CD, he doesn’t use the word, he used “music with pictures”.

He sort of recanted.

Yes, yes. And there was really very little dramatic structure in his work ­– it was a monumental effort, a wonderful piece of music, but it was not a dramatic work in any sense. And I think that’s not quite true of mine. I think there are at least two major parts of it: the first scene, which represents the hotel where Walter Benjamin killed himself in 1940, and a more phantasmagoric scene later on where his avatar descends into Hades and is questioned by various sorts of threatening star chamber groupings of fantastic and historically real creatures.

And that allowed you to introduce a fantasy scene, as it were.

Well the whole thing after his death is a fantasy scene, and the peculiar thing about this work ­– be it an opera or not – is that the main character dies at the end of scene one. And what happens after that is really the sort of sad drama, the mourning play of the survival and indeed growth of his ideas, how they affect the moral and ethic climate of late twentieth-century civilisation.

Your guitar piece Kurze Schatten II refers to Benjamin’s writings, but what was it which drew you to him not only in a general sense, but specifically as the subject for an opera.

Well I’ve always been interested in limits, be they high or low limits, be they loudness or quietness limits, what we can hear, what we can’t hear, limits of complexity that lead to chaotic states, and reduction of audible differentiation of materials present; how far can you get away with writing almost nothing over a ten-minute span and seeing how it holds together. All these things are important to me, and I think what I like about Walter Benjamin is the thing that as most tragic for him, of course; that as one of the archetypal intellectuals of the pre-war period, he really took no interest whatever in politics, in contradistinction to his leftist, or more conventionally leftist colleagues. And it seems emblematic for me that he died in this no-man’s land between two countries. And so this idea of limits is something which I wanted to investigate in this music. And hence the possibility or impossibility of crossing a boundary and looking back from the new side back to the old side and seeing what has changed. Maybe it’s the same thing, but you have changed to the extent that you now perceive it differently.

So in a sense Benjamin is a peg on which to hang the subject of liminality.

Absolutely, yes, yes. Besides which, however, I like him. I’m rather fond of him as a character, because he was extremely chaotic, and almost never finished anything, and his mind was incredibly labyrinthine. He was a sort of poet without being a poet. I mean he didn’t have poetic talent, but he had a great insight, and his verbal capacity of course was enormous. So you can pile up all sorts of aperçus, and in a sense you get a mass, or a convolute, as he used to call them, but you don’t get a finished book. The Paris Passages for instance is the most famous example of that. It’s wonderful. And I’m fond of him as a character because he is chaotic, whereas someone like Theodor Adorno wasn’t, for instance.

And this is also referential with respect to other intellectuals of the time, that they didn’t make an effort to consistently oppose what they saw coming, unless it hit them personally. And I’ve tried in my own thinking and in my music, to extend this idea of responsibility through to the present day, in the sense we’re in a sort of…not anti-moralistic period but an a-moral period where moral norms are still recognisable in the way the world constrains us, but at the same time they really have no internal self-sustaining power. That moral standards, moral codes are quoted in the same way as objects or sensibilities are quoted in the world around us.

Given that you’ve written many verbal texts yourself, what led you to choose another person to write the libretto, and why Charles Bernstein in particular?

The reason for choosing somebody else was that I didn’t want to go back and read all those Walter Benjamin books that I’ve read already! And I’m not writing a dissertation. And also I’d written a piece, in fact being played in the concert here in New York this evening called On Stellar Magnitudes which does set my own text. And I swore at the end of that rather difficult task that I would never do it again. I need some objective measuring rod, and Charles is someone I’ve found very sympathetic, because he’s one of the leading sort of post-Gertrude Stein experimental poets in America, he belongs to the same generation as myself. He is Jewish, which I am not, and that aids us, I think, in coming communally to terms with that situation. Interestingly also, I’m fluent in German, and he can’t speak it at all, so our roles are sometimes one way…

Jack Spratt.

…yes, exactly…and reversed the next time. That’s been very good, and the only conditions I placed upon him were certain numerical constraints in the length of lines, in the number of syllables and so on; the possibility – in principle – of permutability, that lines or words could be moved to a different place or cycled round without losing their main significance. And the most important limit that I placed upon him was I said “I don’t want your texts if you cannot publish them as poetry.”

You wanted them to be self-sufficient.

I wanted them to be self-sufficient. Two types of text, I think, one’s seen in musical history. One has been the rather banal or simplifying of early classical opera. Full of conventions, and terrible language, really. I’m leaving out at the moment the Monteverdi operas ­– I think the texts there are really wonderful. And there have been operas in recent years where over-intellectualisation of the subject has led to the texts being so complex that there is really no way you can hear them in the music. Or the music and the text don’t really meet on some deep, confrontational level. And in something like The Mask of Orpheus, the Birtwistle opera, for instance, I think the texts…or his Punch and Judy ­– those texts were extremely interesting and witty, but they seemed to me to be not suitable for operatic setting. So I wanted something that would move across genre boundaries, and that’s much easier to do in poetry than it is in music. And so he [Bernstein] can write in one line vernacular and another line it’s a translation of Heine, which he’s putting in without announcing it. All sorts of things can be put in there, moving from the most ridiculous to the sublime, and it’s a challenge to me. I didn’t follow the text. What I did was write the music and then fit the text in. That’s sometimes necessary, because four solo voices are singing at once in the first scene, two of whom are Walter Benjamin! And four solo voices is quite a dense texture, so you have to make sure that the musical structure is sufficiently translucent so that it won’t collapse under its own weight and become just a mess of porridge. But I’ve nearly always done that. I’ve written a musical texture, I’ve written the rhythms ­– which conform to whatever structural principles I’m using at that moment – and it’s interesting to take the words and mould them ­– maybe turn them round slightly, maybe leave out a repetition here, or add a repetition there. And it’s a concrete musical handworkly challenge, which I think we etiolated spirits in fairyland – as speculative composers, and artists of any ilk – need to hold our feet on the ground.

Your early experiences of music, I think, were essentially in wind bands and marching bands and so forth.

Yes. In fact – well let’s be specific. It was the British brass band, which has a very set instrumentation; sometimes marches, on demand, but mostly does not. 

At that time would you have had some kind of engagement on a practical level with more popular musics?

Well that came in later, I think. When I was playing in brass band, it was in the early to mid-1950s, and I think that popular music had not advanced to the stage where one would think at that time that one would want to make brass band versions of it. What you got were 19th century French overtures. You got arrangements – very good arrangements too, I have to say – of quite substantial symphonies, like Tchaikovsky, and you got standard marches; Sousa and all the rest of them. And sometimes you got arrangements of musicals, you know “The Best Tunes From…” with a vamping two-measure transition and then you’re in another one. And so one did get to hear quite a lot of classical music. Before playing in brass band, I’d certainly not heard any at all, or any sort of music, for that matter. And so it was an education for me, particularly, because – unlike my colleagues – I liked to move around from instrument to instrument, so I got quite a good insight into how the individual parts in that sort of context function.

What was your relationship with popular music a little bit later, then, and what would you say it is now, if indeed you have one.

 [unequivocally] None; none.

 [laughs]

None whatsoever.

Do you think it’s possible for popular musics to inform Western Art Music...

Well it already has!

...in more substantial and meaningful ways than just appropriating stylistic surfaces?

One of my students was writing an end-of-term paper the other week on Frederic Rzewski, and was really sweating blood – with all good will – trying to understand how his admittedly differentiated dialectical posture with respect to political engagement could be translated into these sort of Sunday-afternoon-Aunt-Ada-at-the-piano sets of variations. And I’m not sure she’s come to any conclusions on the subject. Another composer who came up – and I found for her a couple of articles which seemed apropos – was Cornelius Cardew, who I think late in life was an extremely sad case, in that the political took over completely his sense of musical appropriateness...

...so you get those insipid songs...

Well, and also he did all this sort of bourgeois variation music. He did some very good things, but they were always in transition from one sort of concretized political situation and another. And it would have been interesting to see what would have happened if he had lived of course.

Yes, indeed. Do you think it is possible for a composer to engage, in their work, with wider society, or is it just enough to be a sort of skilled artisan producing artefacts for a niche market, so to speak?

Oooh you’re...lot of loaded terms in that question, aren’t there?

“When did you last beat your father?” [laughs]

Pass?

No, no I won’t pass. That would be irresponsible.

Of course it’s possible for music to engage with something. Whether that thing is a public, in an abstract sense of head-count in any given place, be they humans, sheep or those millions of Chinese terracotta soldiers they dug out a few years ago – these are all head-count groupings. How much they’re interest groupings I suppose depends upon your metaphysical theories of selfhood, but...I don’t know how to answer the question simply because I don’t know what the target is. How many people does one write for? Five? Ten? Mostly they react to you, sometimes they don’t, sometimes you don’t like what they say, but they’re basically the people you work for.

I think it’s fascinating that the audience today is not an audience, not even as much as it was in the nineteenth century, but is a tremendous number of sub-culture audiences, and does that make them more elitist? If you have a hundred groups enjoying certain musics, rather than two groups enjoying certain musics, as people have often claimed in the last few years ­– classical as opposed to popular – does that make each of those groups elitist? Yes it does. Every one of those groups is elitist, because it sets limits and demarcation lines between what it accepts as purposive and significant for them, and everybody else’s no doubt useless and mistaken activity. We can all belong to different, as it were, chatrooms of music. One of my great areas of consolation as a composer and as a listener has been the Renaissance, and I don’t think that has any relation whatsoever to my composition, other than in the sense of my getting a certain sense of optimism from it in the same way as you do from mid-late Stravinsky, even the serial works, on occasions. You think “wow, the...yeah, I feel better!” [laughs]

But even completing a work has a sense of hope, as does the act of composition in itself, surely.

Yeah, I think so. I mean if one didn’t have this sense of optimism that something was going to happen to it for somebody, would you still do it? Yes, because I can’t do anything else, except teach about it, of course , or think about it, or try to link it to other artistic manifestations of a non-sonic nature. 

We have to take as read the niche culture in which we live. That one can cross from one coding of social need to another, directly or indirectly is a presupposition of this particular way of parsing culture.

And indeed many popular music sub-cultures are extremely exclusionist anyway.

Oh yes, absolutely. My wife loves heavy metal rock and punk culture. And anything else that came between then and now is relegated to the dustbin of history.

Coming back to tonight’s concert – you were talking before about the difficulty for you of the concerto format, one you are not particularly drawn to. But despite this –presumably as a result of commissions – you’ve actually written quite a few. What do you find problematic about the genre, and in what ways have you overcome it?

What I find problematic about it is what I find problematic about our entire existence in society, which is “what is the composed and listening, cognating subject?” Who are we, in other words. The nineteenth century produced the sort of Aunt Sally of Romantic Subject/Subordinate Collective, so that even up until Brahms and Tchaikovsky – and Sibelius, one might say, and perhaps Rachmaninoff – you are dealing with an unquestioned integral self which can express ideas which firstly have been enunciated in a more collective form. And that is not an available strategy, I think, for contemporary composing. What is the subject, what is the collective? The collective is made up of subjects also, presumably being paid to play the piece whether they like it or not.

So in a sense, you’re – as much as anything else – objecting to the hierarchical model of society as reflected in the concerto format, much as, perhaps, some of Cage’s or Wolff’s works question it in the actual set-up of their compositions. Is it to do with that?

I think it’s a little bit to do with that. I said to somebody yesterday I don’t want anybody playing my music who doesn’t want to play it, which pretty much excludes orchestral works. So I work with specialist ensembles, and it’s much more interesting to work with an ensemble of ten or fifteen players reacting to one of their number, or one of almost their number, in ways which are encodable as social paradigms.

Do you accept the notion that the disposition of players and the way they work together can serve as a model or metaphor for society – a better society?

Well I think that was certainly more generally accepted in the 1960s and 70s than it is now. People like Kagel or Dieter Schnebel, as well as the composers you mentioned, from a different language and cultural background, indeed did assume that a piece could function as an extended metaphor for social interaction and critique.

And in order to get there, the piece had itself to be almost self-reflecting. In other words the piece had to open its viscera to us for inspection, and its digestive tract.

Like one of those Vesalius engravings...

Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. And there was something fascinating to me about this way of composing, that musical language would sort of be auto-revelative. And that was what interested me, I think, far more than the actual social paradigm as such. I think the self-reflection and self-critique of a historically given musical language which suddenly grabs itself and pulls itself up by its own bootstraps is tremendously seductive.

But that sense of music pointing outside itself is something which I think comes across in your music ­– not only is it an interesting sonic experience, but it also has those other levels, and perhaps what I find less rewarding about other kinds of music is that they tend to concentrate on one to the exclusion of the others.

Well I like to get my hands dirty. I like to get the clay in my fingernails when I’m composing, but one has to be careful here, I mean there are works which reflect upon things outside themselves in a fairly illustrative sense, and we could take, I don’t know...Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht, which follows the Dehmel poem almost measure by measure. I think it’s become more complicated now in recent years to latch on to philosophical or sociological termini and prod them sufficiently to make them squawk and produce music. I have tried to do that, but generally I try to take experiences that I have made with other art works and try to make them fungible, in the sense of inducing me to enter the state of producing sound.

But sometimes it’s poetry, sometimes it’s painting, and sometimes it’s just a word. I can read a philosophical tractatus of some sort and come across a little phrase which for the author was just thrown off [clicks fingers] the cuff, and it’s something that sticks with me. For instance one of the sub-pieces in Shadowtime, of which we were talking, is called Les Froissements des Ailes de Gabriel – the shuddering, or flickering of Gabriel’s wings – and I’m dealing with the whole concept of Angelology for one thing, right the way through from the ancient Greeks up to, I suppose, Rilke. And...

And presumably Klee, because of Benjamin’s picture...

Indeed, of course that makes the connection to Benjamin...and the whole idea of History as appended on to that, of course, in the Benjamin Auslegung [interpretation/exegesis] of that particular picture, Angelus Novus. And I’m more interested in this particular piece, however, in the concept – which I get from various commentaries, out of a five or six hundred year period – that angels are essentially deaf to time. In other words they were created in time, but unaware of it. And so theirs is an eternal present, whereas the present for us is always fleeing into the past or into the instrumental future. And so I’m writing a piece in which there are about 148 sections in nine minutes, and each section is carefully composed, with a certain degree of uniqueness, to be slightly “too short”, so that the listener doesn’t quite have time to assimilate and bring up-to-date, as it were, their awareness of what’s happening in the piece before the next section begins.  So they’re always running a little bit behind the piece, and it’s that little empty space between the piece – as phenomenon – and the location of the fragile self-evolving subject who’s listening, that is the subject of the piece. It’s not quite a vacuum, but it’s the gamma rays and bosons, or...

...virtual particles....

All these little bits, yes, which are shooting around in ways which we can’t understand. And time can be reversed, which on the macro scale of course it can’t. 

Coming back to the concerto problem and how you overcame it, could you say something about the two concerto-like pieces which are on the programme tonight? 

Well, La Chute d’Icare is based upon the painting by Breughel – which is in, I believe, the National Gallery in Brussels – which is a very interesting picture because in many ways the notional subject of the painting – the Fall of Icarus – is really relegated to an extremely small, not to speak negligible and problematic, region of the painting. The painting represents a bucolic sea and landscape, a peasant with his oxen ploughing the ground, a wonderful gleaming white city in the background, the sun shining down over the inlet where there is a sailing ship, a wonderful sailing ship under full sail. And you say “Fall of Icarus?”

And then you notice on the surface of the water there is a little white “v”. And then you suddenly understand it’s the two legs of Icarus. He’s already fallen, landed in the water, and his legs are sticking out. And above him there are little white splotches, and these are the feathers of the wings which have now been released by the wax, because the wax was melted by flying too close to the sun – perhaps reflecting at that time a very imperfect understanding of the sort of the calorific consequences of high-altitude aviation on the part of the poets and philosophers. But nevertheless, the action has already taken place. And that interested me in a wider sense to thinking “what would happen if one started a piece at the exact point where it ought to have finished?”

And so I started with this wonderful sort of heterophonic unison...

...coming from an F...

...yes, this up-and-down scale there, that’s the two little legs, the “v” shape [sings inverted approximation of opening clarinet lick].

Very simple. And this is the point at which you would normally, in a classical piece, arrive at The Final Statement Of The Theme. It’s been recomposed before your eyes. Now you see it, now you don’t...

Like starting at the last page of a whodunit...

Yes. And so that’s where I started. And all that can happen after you start where a piece should finish is that it starts decaying. And it’s rather like the Postmodern period, where people persuade us that everything is available all the time, but I think it’s not. I think you have to root around in the garbage pail to come up with something that sniffs interesting. And so things are not all equal. Maybe in an instrumental sense or manipulative sense – what we do with them – of course they can be equal. 

So what’s happening in this piece is that rather like a flag or a banner that’s been shot up in a battle, holes appear, and through those holes, tiny little universes are visible. And so in a sense you’ve got this one flat landscape at the beginning, but by the gradual decay, and destruction, and rendering incoherent of this landscape, other landscapes, sub-landscapes, micro-landscapes, para-landscapes are available for our perception. And that’s what the piece really does. It starts from this unified structure and breaks up into a quite large number of well-defined little sub-structures, each with its own sort of character.

And the relationship of the solo clarinet to the rest?

The relationship of the solo clarinet to the rest is that the clarinet presents this material most unambiguously at the beginning. But it’s an instrument which I’ve worked with a lot, and when I wrote that piece in 1988, I was quite moved to use it again, examine it again, particularly in terms of its microtonal potential. So there’s not any particular reason of it being the clarinet, it just happened those were the sounds I had in my head when it came to start writing the work. But the other piece is a bit different. the other one is Terrain, for violin and the Octandre combination of seven wind and double bass. It has various points of departure. One of those is a poem of the same name by the now unfortunately deceased A.R. Ammons. And what interested me about his poetry has always been that he is someone who applies to the minutest examination of nature, and natural things ­­– shells, trees, leaves – an extremely evolved intellectual regard. And sometimes they get out of balance with one another, and it’s wonderful to see that happening. So that’s really what I feel my music is like.

In spite of the fact that A.R. Ammons uses an essentially conservative literary language, I nevertheless have always been tempted to do something with it. And I was going to set it in my fourth quartet, but I found that I couldn’t make the music fit the sort of regularised, standardised word order, sentence structure, concept evocation which he employed.

So I came across this poem Terrain, which is very interesting. It talks about prehistoric time or archaeological time, millions of years ­– a vast vista of immobile nothing; and of now-time, which is fecundity, Brazilian rainforests, this sudden growth, flourishing and death of innumerable awarenesses and sub-awarenesses in creatures and plants. And Terrain really works with both of these layers, so the first part of the piece is really about the establishment of what you might call stratified archaeological time – you go to the Grand Canyon and you see layers which have been laid down in various prehistoric periods. And the same is true in the first part of this piece, that you get the violin, then you get the piccolo and double bass, and then you get the clarinet and bassoon, trumpet and horn and so on, each contributing a sort of sub-plot to the stratified nature of pasthood. The second half of the piece is rather block time, but an innumerable number of creatures – animalculae – is quivering and shredding, popping, and gurgling. So I put these two things together. On the one hand you’ve got the frozen nature of historical time, of prehistoric time, and on the other the now-time, the no-time almost, of what is happening at the instant, in this large block...

That’s after the cadenza, when it comes in with that sort of grey, mud-like material...

That’s right, you have this mushy material which, if you break it down, you see there are at least five different things going on among the eight instruments that are playing at that moment.

And that was deliberately designed to be a sort of greyness which gradually individuates itself over time.

Yes. What happens there is that some of the instruments spin off to their own little fanfare figures, and some of them are shredded in their turn, become etiolated and are no longer capable of living. Perhaps not enough oxygen in the air or something, and they lose their colour and fall apart

And the function of the solo violin? Were you just working with the exigencies of a commission?

Not really, I wanted to do this too, but...

You have to give solo parts their own reason for being, and so in most of the cases ­–not La Chute d’Icare – but the others, I wrote the solo parts separately. And I felt that this gave me an integral vision, an almost claustrophobic, repressive aspect to the material. And so in this particular case the violin goes burbling on, from beginning to pretty much to the end, and interlocks with the ensemble only at certain moments. So really it’s almost like asking the question “Can the subject survive only in a modified and rather dysfunctional autonomy?”

It seems clear from what your descriptions that you have almost a tactile or a sculptural idea of the music in your mind. Do you set up systems specifically to create some of the things that you already have floating around in your mind or do they arise as epiphenomena from the systems you already have in place?

That’s an interesting question, and of course you can answer it in both ways. What I would do would be to choose a third possibility which is that I build systems and local contexts within which I can move more freely. So in other words what I’m doing is not composing the piece, first of all, I’m composing my innate predilections in a particularly what I think is a well-ordered fashion in such a way that the piece may come about.

But are you in the situation of designing a machine to produce something you want, as it were?

No. To set up a situation – a biosphere is often the term I use – in which I can compose. We’re only ourselves, and we can’t do more than we have innately in us, except under very extraordinary circumstances, so what I say often to students is “Well – you can’t change who you are, so inevitably you will keep on doing what you do. But – since that is the case – we want to blast you into a different environment, such that your innate normal behavioural patterns take on a completely new significance when brought into an interface situation with these hitherto unknown exigencies.”

Like being parachuted into an unknown land.

Yes. Absolutely, yes. So that’s frequently what I do. I find ways of blasting my old, tired and conventional self – which I know to some extent now, and I know what it can do, and what it likes doing – into an area which is alien. Maybe negatively alien – in which case I have to fight – maybe positively alien in which I am inducted into all sorts of mysteries – “of the organism”, one might say, which were not available to me previously.

And presumably that’s one of the functions of the set-up with Shadowtime. As you were saying before, you have restricted situations, or constraints, be they practical or conceptual, within which you then have to function.

Oh that’s true, yes, and you asked me whether I liked doing big projects, and I said yes, but I would have to make that a little bit more precise; I do not like creating monolithic large-scale forms. All my large-scale works have been works of works. That is, parenthesis of parenthesis of parenthesis. This one consists of seven segments, five of which also function as independent pieces of music. And some indeed have been performed already. That serves both the interests of utility, and satisfying commissioners, but also – perhaps in a less cynical vein – it forces me to re-evaluate the central core of what I feel the work itself is about in these different situations which arise, be they instrumental in nature, be they philosophical in nature; what happens when fifteen instruments is suddenly replaced by a 48-voice choir? –how much of the original concept or of the material is it possible to retain, and how much is it desirable to retain when rolling the dice in that way?

For quite a few years now, you’ve produced your scores using Finale notation software. In what ways has that changed the way in which you work, or in which you approach things, and are you ever tempted to go back to the Rotring pen on occasions?

Oh good lord!  Well actually what I did do from about 1989 onwards, was to use a Macintosh computer to provide me with the rhythmic mapping of pieces. That was not calculated, I calculated those by hand, but I typed them into computer and saved me doing all these awful pocket calculator and ruler measurements with graph paper and so on, finding exactly where certain notes come; this was done more-or-less for me, it was just a way of working. But the scores were still copied by hand

From about 1995 onwards, I began to start experimenting with doing the scores in Finale, simply because I had arthritis in my right hand, and I can’t hold a pen for more than ten minutes, particularly the sort of intense pressure allied to fineness of motion which the use of architects’ pens in musical manuscripts demands.

So – yes, now ...I still, when I go places...[slightly conspiratorial sotto voce] sometimes I go into graphic stores, and I’ll go in, and I’ll buy a pen, or I’ll buy a box of pens, or I’ll buy the little cartridges which you put in the pens, or perhaps I’ll buy some red instead of black, and I’ll take them home... [full voice] I’ve got piles of these things at home! It’s a relict of ritually starting a new pen at the beginning of every composition. But I’m sure I shall never use these things again. It’s such a pity, I so enjoyed working with these things.

Has it changed the way you approach things? You said looking back on some of the scores that are being performed tonight that they have a certain quality which you don’t get in the current scores. Could you elaborate on that?

Well the test of fire was the String Trio, which will be the first piece in the concert tonight. This was the first score which I wrote from beginning to end in Finale. And indeed it was backbreaking to get that right. I solved many, many problems that way, and with a version of Finale that was perhaps not as amenable to the sort of thing that I do now as the present versions are. Although they still have that character, I suppose, that particular character. Yes, I think one thing that has changed is that I no longer think of the image as part of the work. There is a certain sameness, which comes by using the same fonts and the same graphic conventions.

Extreme examples of your graphic individuality would be Unity Capsule, or Time and Motion Study II...

Yes, yes. It’s lucky now that I don’t do certain things that I did then, because it would be very difficult to do those in a purely musical notation form. So in a way it was fortuitous that these things came together, and I think now I can do pretty much everything I want to do, and pretty much as fast as, or if not faster than, doing them by hand. But of course a manuscript is a sort of archaeological trace, a palimpsest of undertaken action, and it’s readable – its lineaments are readable – in the way material groups itself on a page, which is no longer true. 

Your rhythmic processes, your rhythmic practice, obviously evolved over time, but was there a point where an encounter with either a particular work or a particular composer made you think “yes I can go that far”, or “I can keep pushing it”?  If so, was that then confirmed either by your own convictions or experiences with performers?

Well what I did was always confirmed or disconfirmed in the crucible of reality, mainly with – then – performers of my own generation who were also intellectual live wires and understood the context of what I was trying to do, why I was trying to do it, not just the what. 

No, I do not think there were pieces which I could point to and say “oh yes I can go that far”. There are, however, things that I didn’t invent. If you read the Henry Cowell book, New Musical Resources, there are many things that he just threw on the table speculatively. What I call irrational metres, for instance, which really were not taken up until quite a bit later, in the 1950s or 60s. So those are things which people think are characteristic of the sort of invention that I pursue, but in fact I did not invent. I just made use of them as circumstances dictated. 

Was there a point early on though, when you thought “Oh no I can’t possibly do that, that’s just too much”...

No, because I wasn’t getting...

...or did you just think “Oh well I’ll do it anyway”

Yes. I wasn’t getting performed, so I could do what I wanted. And the early flute music I could play myself, so no – I just wrote the stuff. And there are some things I would do differently now, particularly in the larger pieces. I think I wouldn’t do...

Pieces like La terre est un homme or Firecycle Beta?

Yes, those two specifically I perhaps wouldn’t do again, although it’s nice to have done them.

Do you think, perhaps, that you overestimated what was practically possible with orchestral players, an orchestral context?

Oh yeah, I’m sure that’s true, yes, yes.

You’ve got an orchestral piece in the pipeline. How are you thinking about that, if you are indeed thinking about it?

Well I’m trying to think about it but I’m afraid at the present, I’m not very close to it. 

I see what you’re saying. It will certainly not be a piece which epitomises most directly, a sort of multiplicity aesthetic. It will be one, probably in a series of small movements, with different instrumental combinations. It will try to define and pull out, draw out, the consequences of particular strange points of departure. So I’m going to set up a lot of little points of departure, and see where they want to move to. And we’ll see then how that works, But certainly yes, certainly I will be working with less immediately obvious surface complexity.

L-R: James Gardner, Charles Bernstein, Mark Menzies, Richard Carrick, Mary Oliver, [unknown], Joshua Cody, Brian Ferneyhough, Johan Tallgren

New York, December 2002