Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Brian Ferneyhough's String Quartets

2014; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 33; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/07494467.2014.975545

1477-2256

Lois Fitch,

Diverse Music Education Insights

AbstractAs a body of work, Ferneyhough's string quartets offer a panorama of his entire compositional career to date, including his first (unpublished) engagement with the genre in the early 1960s. This article examines his approach to the medium, drawing on sketch materials and charting the development of his style, his relationship to the quartet tradition and contextualising the quartet in relation to wider trends in his œuvre. Theoretical perspectives, including an evaluation of Ferneyhough's relationship to language, Adorno and Schoenberg, are also explored.Keywords: Adorno, Theodor (1903–1969)Arditti QuartetCreative ProcessFerneyhough, Brian (1943–)GestureString QuartetTexture Type AcknowledgementsMy thanks to Fabrice Fitch and John Butt for comments on drafts of this article.Notes[1] The fourth movement of the first quartet was performed once at Royaumont by the Arditti Quartet in 1992 (q. v. Toop & Boros, Citation1995, p. 274).[2] The quotation is from J. W. von Goethe in a letter to C. F. Zelter, 9 November 1829.[3] The Sonatas for String Quartet were underway in their earliest form in 1965, although not published in their final form until 1967.[4] Ligeti's and Carter's quartets, whilst constituting sets, are each very different from one another. Stockhausen avoided the genre for years precisely because of the historical precedents and associations, but was persuaded after a commission and, he claimed, a dream, to produce the Helikopter-Streichquartett which forms part of Samstag aus Licht. Lachenmann continued to investigate his concept of musique concrète instrumentale with the quartet, exploring a form of tablature notation also used in his Pression for solo cello. Ferneyhough's notation remains conventional, for all its complexity.[5] Sketch materials for the Sonatas for String Quartet, held by the Paul Sacher Stiftung, Basel.[6] See, for example, Sereno e chiaro, b. 479 ff.[7] Exordium is also composed in numerous small fragments, and bears a strong visual resemblance to the Sixth String Quartet.[8] Sketch materials for the Third String Quartet, held by the Paul Sacher Stiftung, Basel.[9] The translation is taken from an English translation of Ferneyhough's interview with Meyer, enclosed in the programme for the performance of the opera Shadowtime, given as part of the Festival d'Automne à Paris, Théâtre Nanterre-Amandiers, 26 and 27 October 2004. The page number relates to the German version of the interview.[10] Q. v. http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/bernstein/shadowtime/les-froissements-notes.html, accessed February 10, 2013. My emphasis.[11] Sketch materials for the Second String Quartet, held by the Paul Sacher Stiftung, Basel.[12] Ferneyhough tends to refer to the Neue Einfachheit as the Neue Romantik, although this appears to be a term of his own devising, rather than the more usually used New Simplicity.[13] Sketch materials for the Fourth String Quartet, held by the Paul Sacher Stiftung, Basel.[14] Ferneyhough read Francis Bacon shortly after its publication at the very beginning of the 1980s, q. v. Deleuze (Citation1981).[15] Ferneyhough's increasing use of computer programmes to generate pre-compositional permutations of material obviates the need for as much handwritten sketch material as pieces written before the mid-1990s.[16] This is arguably a reference to the second violin in Elliott Carter's String Quartet No. 2, which performs a ‘timekeeper’ role.