Brian Ferneyhough

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Brian Ferneyhough

Brian John Peter Ferneyhough (born 16 January, 1943 in Coventry

Coventry

Coventry is a City status in the United Kingdom and metropolitan borough in the county of West Midlands in England. With a population of 303,475 at the United Kingdom Census 2001 , Coventry is the 9th largest city in England and the 11th largest in the United Kingdom....
) is an English

England

Composer

A composer is a person who creates music, usually in the medium of musical notation, for interpretation and performance. The level of distinction between composers and other musicians varies, which affects issues such as copyright and the deference given to individual interpretations of a particular piece of music....
of contemporary classical music. His complex, multi-layered music is always distinctive when performed, and led Pierre Boulez

Pierre Boulez

Pierre Boulez is a French composer of contemporary classical music and Conducting....
to refer to it as a 'polyphony of polyphonies'. His output spans many genres of contemporary music, from chamber works to orchestral pieces.

Life
He received formal musical training at the Birmingham School of Music and the Royal Academy of Music

Royal Academy of Music

The Royal Academy of Music in London, England, is a college or university school of music, Britian's oldest degree-granting music school and a constituent college of the University of London since 1999....
from 1966-7 where his teachers included Lennox Berkeley

Lennox Berkeley

Sir Lennox Randal Francis Berkeley was an England composer....
, a respected teacher though a conservative figure who preferred the works of French impressionism

Impressionism

Impressionism was a 19th-century art movement that began as a loose association of Paris-based artists art exhibition their art publicly in the 1860s....
to the internationalist avant garde.

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Encyclopedia

Brian John Peter Ferneyhough (born 16 January, 1943 in Coventry

Coventry

England

Composer

Pierre Boulez

Life

He received formal musical training at the Birmingham School of Music and the Royal Academy of Music

Royal Academy of Music

Lennox Berkeley

Sir Lennox Randal Francis Berkeley was an England composer....
, a respected teacher though a conservative figure who preferred the works of French impressionism

Impressionism

Impressionism was a 19th-century art movement that began as a loose association of Paris-based artists art exhibition their art publicly in the 1860s....
to the internationalist avant garde. Ferneyhough was awarded the Mendelssohn Scholarship in 1968 and moved to mainland Europe

Europe

Europe is, conventionally, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally divided from Asia to its east by the water divide of the Ural Mountains, the Ural , the Caspian Sea, and by the Caucasus Mountains to the southeast....
to study with Ton de Leeuw

Ton De Leeuw

Ton de Leeuw was a Netherlands composer. He was known for his experiments with Microtonal music.Taught by Olivier Messiaen and others, and influenced by B?la Bart?k, he was a teacher at the University of Amsterdam and later professor of composition and electronic music at the Sweelinck Conservatory in Amsterdam from 1959 to 1986....
in Amsterdam

Amsterdam

Amsterdam is the Capital of the Netherlands and List of cities in the Netherlands with over 100,000 people of the Netherlands, located in the Provinces of the Netherlands of North Holland in the west of the country....
, and later with Klaus Huber

Klaus Huber

Klaus Huber is a Swiss composer. One of the leading figures of his generation in Europe, Huber has written extensively for chamber ensembles, choirs, soloists and the orchestra as well as the theater....
in Basel

Basel

Basel is Switzerland's third most populous city . With 731,000 inhabitants in the tri-national metropolitan area , Basel is Switzerland's third-largest urban area....
. Between 1973 and 1986 he taught composition at the Staatliche Musikhochschule in Freiburg

Freiburg

Freiburg im Breisgau is a city in Baden-W?rttemberg, Germany, in the Breisgau region on the western edge of the Black Forest. It straddles the Dreisam river, on the foothills of the Schlossberg....
, Germany.

His profile rose in the middle of the 1970s, as the Royan Festival of 1974 saw the premiere of Cassandra's Dream Song, the first of several pieces for solo flute, as well as Missa Brevis, written for 12 singers. In 1975, performances of his opera Transit and Time and Motion Study III were given; the former piece being awarded a Koussevitzky prize, the latter performed at the prestigious Donaueschingen

Donaueschingen

Donaueschingen is a Germany town in the Black Forest in the southwest of the States of Germany of Baden-W?rttemberg in the Schwarzwald-Baar district ....
festival. In many of these events he was twinned with fellow British composer, Michael Finnissy

Michael Finnissy

Michael Finnissy is an English composer and pianist born 17 March 1946 in Tulse Hill. He served as president of International Society for Contemporary Music from 1990 until 1996....
, whom he became friends with during his student days.

Between 1987 and 1999 he was Professor of Music at the University of California at San Diego. As of 1999, he is William H. Bonsall Professor in Music at Stanford University

Stanford University

Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private university research university located in Stanford, California, California, United States....
. For the 2007-08 academic year, he was appointed Visiting Professor at the Harvard University Department of Music. Between 1978 and 1994 Ferneyhough was a composition lecturer at the Darmstädter Ferienkurse and, since 1990, has directed an annual mastercourse at the Fondation Royaumont in France.

In 2007, Ferneyhough received the Ernst von Siemens Music Prize

Ernst von Siemens Music Prize

The international Ernst von Siemens Music Prize is an annual music prize given by the Bayerische Akademie der Sch?nen K?nste on behalf of the Ernst von Siemens Musikstiftung , established in 1972....
for lifetime achievement. Despite not having any recognizable followers or school, Ferneyhough is well respected for the craft and quality of his composition. Incidentally, he was born on the same day as another prominent English composer, Gavin Bryars

Gavin Bryars

Richard Gavin Bryars is an English composer and double bassist. He has been active in, or has produced works in, a variety of styles of music, including jazz, free improvisation, minimalism, experimental music, avant-garde and neoclassicism....
.

Works

Ferneyhough's initial forays into composition were met with little sympathy in England. His submission of Coloratura to the Society for the Promotion of New Music (SPNM) in 1966 was returned, with a suggestion that the oboe part should be scored for clarinet. However, whilst Ferneyhough did find it hard, one source of support came from Hans Swarsenski who saw the same thing happen to Cornelius Cardew

Cornelius Cardew

Cornelius Cardew was an England avant-garde composer, and founder of the Scratch Orchestra, an Experimental music performing ensemble. He later rejected the avant-garde in favour of a politically motivated "people's liberation music"....
; Cardew enjoyed a prestigious continental reputation, but a poor one in his homeland. Swarsenski said of Ferneyhough: 'I've taken on an English composer who is I think is enormously talented. If this doesn't work, this is the last time'. Ferneyhough continued to struggle, but the aforementioned Royan festival marked a breakthrough for Ferneyhough's career.

From here, Ferneyhough became closely associated with the so-called New Complexity

New Complexity

In music, the New Complexity is a term dating from the 1980s intended to categorize primarily United Kingdom composers seeking a "complex, multi-layered interplay of Developing variation processes occurring simultaneously within every aspects of music of the musical material" ....
school of composition, characterized by its extension of the modernist tendency towards formalization (particularly as in integral serialism). Ferneyhough's actual compositional approach, however, rejects serialism

Serialism

In music, serialism is a technique for Musical composition#A musical composition that uses Set to describe Aspect of music, and allows the Permutation of those sets....
and other "generative" methods of composing; he prefers instead to use systems only to create material and formal constraints, while their realisation appears to be more spontaneous. Unlike many more formally-inclined composers, Ferneyhough often speaks of his music as being about creating energy and excitement rather than embodying an abstract schema. His pieces rarely use 12-note rows, but do include microtones and frequent use of glissando

Glissando

A glissando is a glide from one pitch to another. It is an Italianized Musical terminology derived from the French glisser, to glide....
.

His scores make huge technical demands on performers; sometimes, as in the case of Unity Capsule for solo flute, creating parts that are so detailed they are likely impossible to realize completely. As he acknowledges, numerous performers have refused to take his works into their repertoire because of the great commitment required to learn them and a perception that similar effects can be achieved through improvisation. The compositions have, however, attracted a number of advocates, among them the Arditti Quartet

Arditti Quartet

The Arditti Quartet is an internationally acclaimed string quartet founded in 1974. The quartet is associated particularly with contemporary music....
, ELISION Ensemble

ELISION Ensemble

The ELISION Ensemble is a chamber ensemble specialising in contemporary classical music,concentrating on the creation and presentation of new works....
, Nicolas Hodges

Nicolas Hodges

Nicolas Hodges is a United Kingdom pianist and composer. He specializes in avant garde music. He was educated at Christ Church Cathedral School, Oxford, Winchester College, and the University of Cambridge....
, the members of the Nieuw Ensemble, and EXAUDI Vocal Ensemble.

Recently, he has started writing works which allude to past composers; His Dum transisset are based on Elizabethan composer Christopher Tye

Christopher Tye

Christopher Tye was an England composer and organist, who studied at University of Cambridge and in 1545 became a Doctor of Music both there and at Oxford University....
's works for viol

Viol

The viol is any one of a family of bow , fretted, stringed instruments musical instruments developed in the 1400s and used primarily in the Renaissance music and Baroque music periods....
. In addition, the fourth string quartet references Schoenberg

Schoenberg

Schoenberg is the surname of several persons.* Arnold Schoenberg , Austrian-American composer of 20th Century music* Isaac Jacob Schoenberg , Romanian mathematician...
. One of his latest works, an opera, Shadowtime, with a libretto by Charles Bernstein

Charles Bernstein

Charles Bernstein is an United States poetry, Theorist, Editor, and Literary Scholar. Bernstein holds the Donald T. Regan Chair in the Department of English at the University of Pennsylvania....
, and based on the life of the German philosopher Walter Benjamin

Walter Benjamin

Walter Bendix Sch?nflies Benjamin was a Germany-Jewish Marxist literary critic, essayist, translator, and philosopher. He was at times associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory and was also influenced by the writings of his younger contemporaries Bertolt Brecht, who developed Marxist aesthetics of dialectical materialism, and G...
, was premiered in Munich on 25 May 2004, and recorded in 2005 for CD release in 2006.

Selected works

Carceri d'Invenzione I for fl,ob,2cl,bn, hn,tpt,trb,euphonium, 1perc, pf, 2vn,va,vc,db [1121, 1111.2111] (1982) (inspired by the "Carceri d'Invenzione by Giambattista Piranesi).
Etudes Transcendantales
Etudes Transcendantales

Etudes Transcendantales is a song cycle in 9 movement for mezzo-soprano and chamber ensemble composed by Brian Ferneyhough between 1982 and 1985....
(1985)
Kurze Schatten II for solo guitar (1989)
Bone Alphabet for solo percussion (1991)
Allgebrah for Oboe and 9 Solo Strings (1996)
Unsichtbare Farben for Violin (1999)
The Doctrine of Similarity for Chorus (SATB), 3 Clarinets, Violin, Piano and Percussion (2000)
"Shadowtime" (1999-2004)
"5th String Quartet" (2006)
"Plötzlichkeit" for large orchestra (2006)
"Chronos-Aion" for large ensemble (2007-8)
"Dum transisset I-IV" for string quartet (2007)
"Exordium" for string quartet (2008)
"Renvoi/Shards" for quarter-tone guitar and vibraphone (2008)

Bibliography

James Boros and Richard Toop, editors: The Collected Writings of Brian Ferneyhough Publisher: Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1995
Brian Ferneyhough: Brian Ferneyhough by Brian Ferneyhough Publisher: Paris : L'Age d'homme OCLC: 21274317 (French)
Ulrich Tadday, editor: "Brian Ferneyhough" Publisher: Munich: Edition Text+Kritik in Richard Boorberg Verlag, 2008 (German)

External links

by Steven Schick
Steven Schick

Steven Schick is a percussionist from the USA, specializing in contemporary music. He teaches at UCSD and at the Manhattan School of Music. He is currently the Music Director and Conductor of the La Jolla Symphony Orchestra....
(published in )
- includes biography, works and selected discography
[https://www.evs-musikstiftung.ch/en/01_stiftung/pressem.html Brian Ferneyhough wins 2007 Siemens Prize for Music]
(SOSPESO)
Open questions for Brian Ferneyhough (also applicable to other composers of our day) - turned into an interview, since Ferneyhough replied (Stanford IP address...)