#michael finnissy

[sungazer111]

Michael Finnissy - Piano Concerto No. 3 (1978)

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Back on Earth, a composition by Michael Finnissy, 2004. Read more and listen here.

[yourdailyqueer]

Michael Finnissy

Gender: Male

Sexuality: Gay

DOB: 17 March 1946

Ethnicity: White - British

Occupation: Composer, musician

[elizabethanism]

From Michael Finnissy's "Back on earth"!

[conradtao]

gosh i so love this piece

[dctyln]

Michael Finnissy: Gesualdo: Libro Sesto, madrigal VI (2012-2013)

performed by EXAUDI

[dothemusicblog]

'The Grateful And The Dead' (1993) - directed by Jeff Gothro.

Although we moved house over three years ago, I am still reorganising my unruly collection of recorded music. Recently, I discovered a big box of minidiscs and VHS tapes. Among the videos, I found a recording of the documentary above, which concerns the unlikely link between certain British composers and the Rex Foundation, a charitable organisation set up by the rock band The Grateful Dead. Since 1984, the foundation has donated over $8.9m to over 1200 recipients.* The money has gone to a very wide range of good causes - there is a searchable archive on the foundation's website: http://www.rexfoundation.org/grantees/. Grant requests are not solicited, meaning that band/foundation members are able to allocate money to pet projects. The driving force behind the grants to British composers is bass player Phil Lesh, who himself studied for a while with Italian composer Luciano Berio. 

The British composers in question write or wrote in a variety of styles, although some of them (Michael Finnissy, Chris Dench, Richard Barrett and James Dillon) are often brought together under the tag 'The New Complexity.' Certainly, all of the composers aided by the Rex Foundation operate/d on the fringes of British musical life. The Grateful Dead were well out of the mainstream too, although they eventually went on to enjoy enormous financial success. They then felt a responsibility to help their fellow outsiders. As Phil Lesh puts it: 'Since our music is so lucrative, it behooves us to support music that isn't.' That their ticket money should go to fund obscure British classical music seems to come as no surprise to the band’s super-loyal fans (see 14'00" for the memorable response of one chemically-enhanced Deadhead). 

At the time I first saw the documentary, the majority of the composers featured were unfamiliar to me. I did know some of Robert Simpson's music, as a result of a time spent playing the euphonium in brass bands in the early 90s. Simpson was also involved with brass bands as a youngster, having taken up the cornet aged seven (just like his musical idol Carl Nielsen). Simpson composed a disc's worth of brass band music (http://www.hyperion-records.co.uk/dc.asp?dc=D_CDA66449). This kind of ‘serious’ music can only usually be heard live at one of the contests which are so central to the brass band tradition. For the purposes of contesting, bands are divided by ability into four sections. The bands in each section all perform the same test piece for a panel of adjudicators, who listen from inside a box, to avoid any suggestions of favouritism.** ‘Energy’ was the first Simpson piece I heard, when it was used as the test piece for the highest ('Championship') section in the 1991 National Finals. Here are a couple of performances of ‘Energy’, one of which took the top prize in a recent contest: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mnIQ92TC5J8 / https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xGZ5XXq3ogY. It is a quirk of the generally inward-looking brass band world that Simpson's music is often regarded as 'difficult' (musically, if not technically - the technical ability of top-flight bands is frequently astonishing). In the wider classical music world, Simpson's devotion to tonality and to forms considered dead by some (symphonies in particular) marked him out as a conservative, although Robin Holloway makes an interesting case for Simpson the radical here: https://goo.gl/jpCYm3. In the documentary, Simpson talks with evident bitterness about his place in English musical life (29′30″ onwards), and is also critical of his former day job in the BBC music department (see 35′50″ for a clip from a BBC meeting so starchy it could have been scripted). 

After ‘Energy’ and the rest of the brass band music, I moved onto Simpson’s 9th Symphony, in a recording part-funded by the Rex Foundation.  I can’t find a full performance of the 9th online, although I can recommend the Hyperion CD of the work (Bournemouth SO / Handley), not least because it includes an illustrated talk by the composer, which is very helpful in getting to grips with this Brucknerian monument. You could never mistake Simpson for anyone else, although the music of his composer gods is always there. In everything of his I’ve heard, the drive of Beethoven, the patience of Bruckner, and the hard-to-pin down melodic/harmonic quirkiness of Nielsen have been key ingredients. As a young man just discovering Bruckner and Nielsen, this music was bound to appeal. 

I found two more Rex-funded discs on my shelves:

(Still searching for an online recording, although there’s plenty of other Dillon out there)

Both come from the ‘New Complexity’ end of things, and contain music that is by turns thrilling, harrowing and beautiful. Writing in the liner notes for the recording of ‘Helle Nacht’, Richard Toop offers Dillon’s own suggestion of what this work depicts: ‘a moment of searing darkness which in its intensity becomes unbearably bright.’ Toop himself adds that ‘a listener might equally have the impression of scanning a night sky, glimpsing distant constellations, and trying to bring them into closer focus.’ Perhaps inevitably, music this multi-layered tends to evoke different images for each listener. Playing the work again recently, my response was more nuts and bolts. It felt like a twenty minute workout, as my brain scrambled to piece the music together. At times, hints of earlier composers peeked through - nothing specific, just the odd familiar Romantic gesture. At others, the clock stopped while I inspected an impressive collection of high tuned percussion. At the end, my first instinct was to listen again immediately, to try to get closer to the work’s core. With music like this, though, I’ve found it’s sometimes best to take a step back, and bypass my long-learned urge to classify and compare, at least for a while.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M29v5h395fQ&list=PL_aGWG6CYht5HGZfTJf-yJQ8Bi2Cs4BZm

Richard Barrett is another composer ‘grateful’ for the attentions of Phil Lesh and the Rex Foundation (see 45′00″ onwards). Within new music circles, Barrett is well-known for coaxing unusual sounds from the usual instruments, by experimenting with different ways of playing them, and by pushing performers to the very limits of their ability. ‘Vanity’, which had its premiere in 1996, was Barrett’s first work for symphony orchestra (albeit an orchestra supplemented by electric basses, saxes, piano and cimbalom). Barrett is happy to try to explain what’s going on in his music, and has provided the ‘beginnings of an analysis’ of ‘Vanity’ on his website (http://richardbarrettmusic.com/VanityAnalysis.html). He suggests that this essay considers ‘only those aspects ... which might be immediately apparent on a first hearing.’ I’d be very impressed if someone could pick up even a fraction of this kind of detail first time round, but maybe I’m not giving the listener enough credit. In interview, Barrett has been at pains to make it clear he doesn’t underestimate the audience’s ability to deal with complexity. In a Guardian interview, he posed the question: ‘Is there any evidence that the human mind is any more rectilinear than the world it tries to grasp?’*** and elsewhere, once commented: ‘I’m trying to make the kind of music that I would want to hear were I in the audience, and I don’t regard myself as somehow on a higher plane of existence than the people listening.’**** Barrett’s work is always bound up with his political beliefs. These beliefs clearly colour his feelings on writing for orchestra: ‘I’m interested in the orchestra because it presents a double face to the world. One of those faces is as a very conservative organisation which is hidebound by rules and regulations that are very hard to shake. But the other side of the orchestra is that it’s one of the few examples of human endeavour in which a comparatively large number of people work closely together in pursuit of a common aim ... at its best, it’s a kind of microcosm of a society which is in balance, as opposed to the one we actually live in.’*** 

A determined non-specialist could probably have a good go at following Barrett’s analysis of ‘Vanity’. Even if some of the more technical sections prove hard to follow, the composer’s explanation of the ‘poetic’ idea behind the piece (’a contemplation of mortality, originally instigated ... by the vanitas still-life paintings of the seventeenth century’ - see page 2) may well help. As with Dillon’s ‘Helle Nacht,’ though, none of this can prepare the listener for the effect of this music in performance. I actually put off reacquainting myself with ‘Vanity’ for a few days, largely because I knew I was in for a 25 minute buffeting. When I finally plucked up the courage, the violent outbursts and sometimes terrifying accumulations of orchestral sound didn’t throw me off course. In fact, I was surprised just how easily I was swept along by the music. While the Haydn/Beethoven/Nielsen ‘current’ in Robert Simpson’s 9th Symphony is there in every bar, the ‘current’ in ‘Vanity’ is tougher to discern. I felt it was there, though, even through the section in which a 48-note microtonal string mass creeps slowly up and down. It probably says much about my musical preferences that a sense of forward motion seems so important, but I reckon that composers of this kind of music ignore that motion at their peril, running the risk of producing music that is dry and static, in danger of sinking under its own weight. In the 3rd movement of ‘Vanity’, the music’s tread gradually becomes more regular (Christopher Fox even calls it a ‘processional’ in the liner notes), before settling into a steady 2-in-a-bar pulse. There follows a ‘decayed’ version of a phrase from ‘Death And The Maiden,’ before the Schubert is quoted unaltered, breaking off mid-phrase. 

* The Grateful Dead formally disbanded in 1995, when lead singer Jerry Garcia died, but the foundation continues.

** I haven't been to a contest for some time now, so perhaps they've found a way around this. Leaving aside the adjudicators, I'm not sure there's any way to improve the event for impartial audience members: listening to the same 10/15 minute piece 20 times in a row isn't everyone's idea of fun.

*** http://www.theguardian.com/music/2005/feb/10/classicalmusicandopera1

**** From this article: http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/30044106?uid=3738032&uid=2&uid=4&sid=21106660155653, which I can’t find online.

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