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Two composers on Music
Posted by Jeffrey Lague on August 15, 2023, 5:40 pm
The first composer is Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873-1943) : "What is music? How can one define it? Music is a calm moonlit night, a rustling of summer foliage. Music is the distant peal of bells at eventide. Music is born only in the heart and it appeals only to the heart; it is Love ! The sister of Music is Poesy, and its mother is sorrow."
And here's Brian Ferneyhough (b.1943) :
"The more the internal integrity of a musical event suggests its autonomy, the less the capacity of the "time arrow" to traverse it with impunity; it is "bent" by the contact. By the same token, however, the impact of the time vector "damages" the event-object, thus forcing it to reveal its own generative history, the texturation of its successivity: its perceptual potential has been redefined by the collision. As the piece progresses we are continually stumbling across further stages in this catastrophic obstacle race. The energy accumulation and expenditure across and between these confrontational moments is perceived as a form of internalized metronome, and in fact it is a version of this procedure which most clearly fuels the expressive world of Mnemosyne: the retardational and catastrophic timeline modifiers are employed equally to focus temporal awareness through the lens of material."
It's a great pity that Rachmaninoff didn't live for another twenty-five years; he might have met Ferneyhough and have realised where he'd been going wrong all those years.
Quite extraordinary; Mr Ferneyhough's word salad gobbledygook, devoid of any comprehensible meaning as it is, surely wins a prize for Pseuds' Corner pretentiousness.
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The first composer is Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873-1943) : "What is music? How can one define it? Music is a calm moonlit night, a rustling of summer foliage. Music is the distant peal of bells at eventide. Music is born only in the heart and it appeals only to the heart; it is Love ! The sister of Music is Poesy, and its mother is sorrow."
And here's Brian Ferneyhough (b.1943) :
"The more the internal integrity of a musical event suggests its autonomy, the less the capacity of the "time arrow" to traverse it with impunity; it is "bent" by the contact. By the same token, however, the impact of the time vector "damages" the event-object, thus forcing it to reveal its own generative history, the texturation of its successivity: its perceptual potential has been redefined by the collision. As the piece progresses we are continually stumbling across further stages in this catastrophic obstacle race. The energy accumulation and expenditure across and between these confrontational moments is perceived as a form of internalized metronome, and in fact it is a version of this procedure which most clearly fuels the expressive world of Mnemosyne: the retardational and catastrophic timeline modifiers are employed equally to focus temporal awareness through the lens of material."
It's a great pity that Rachmaninoff didn't live for another twenty-five years; he might have met Ferneyhough and have realised where he'd been going wrong all those years.
I'll second that. This competes with all the gobbledegook on the world stage at the moment, and that's saying something.
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Quite extraordinary; Mr Ferneyhough's word salad gobbledygook, devoid of any comprehensible meaning as it is, surely wins a prize for Pseuds' Corner pretentiousness.
Previous Message
The first composer is Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873-1943) : "What is music? How can one define it? Music is a calm moonlit night, a rustling of summer foliage. Music is the distant peal of bells at eventide. Music is born only in the heart and it appeals only to the heart; it is Love ! The sister of Music is Poesy, and its mother is sorrow."
And here's Brian Ferneyhough (b.1943) :
"The more the internal integrity of a musical event suggests its autonomy, the less the capacity of the "time arrow" to traverse it with impunity; it is "bent" by the contact. By the same token, however, the impact of the time vector "damages" the event-object, thus forcing it to reveal its own generative history, the texturation of its successivity: its perceptual potential has been redefined by the collision. As the piece progresses we are continually stumbling across further stages in this catastrophic obstacle race. The energy accumulation and expenditure across and between these confrontational moments is perceived as a form of internalized metronome, and in fact it is a version of this procedure which most clearly fuels the expressive world of Mnemosyne: the retardational and catastrophic timeline modifiers are employed equally to focus temporal awareness through the lens of material."
It's a great pity that Rachmaninoff didn't live for another twenty-five years; he might have met Ferneyhough and have realised where he'd been going wrong all those years.
It seems that Mnemosyne dates from 1986 so Mr. Fernyhough was certainly in the avant garde when it comes to writing incomprehensible gobbledygook.
The fact that Mr Fernyhough gives many of his creations titles like Prometheus and Funerailles (1 & 2) (is he a fan of Liszt?) indicates that he doesn't regard them as Choses en Soi (Things in themselves) like Prokofiev in his op.45 but that they are intended to evoke extra-musical associations in his listeners.
Bearing this in mind I listened to Funerailles ( 1 & 2 ) on YouTube but wasn't put in mind of bells at eventide, rustling leaves or even anything funereal. The best I could conjure up was a couple of Tom-cats exploring the dustbins in some dingy alleway, but the moonlight was, at least, part of the picture. The evocation of the old lady in dressing gown and curlers opening her bedroom window to throw a bucket of water over the moggies which occurs somewhere in the middle of the piece(s) - 1 & 2 seem to form a continuous structure which hasn't been bent by contact so remains an undamaged event-object - was, however, was very moving.