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Michael Finnissy — an overviewRichard BarrettPublished online: 20 Aug 2009.

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Michael Finnissy- An Overview Richard Barrett

A survey of the compositions of Michael Finnissy as a single whole, assessing their place in a wider cultural overview, with observations upon a selection of relevant headings.

KEY WORDS Influences, parallels, intervals, instrumentation, texts, theatre, montage, notation.

Introduction

Michael Finnissy's oeuvre is exceptionally large and wide-ranging, and critical exegesis of it is at an early stage. So I have confined myself to presenting observations upon a selection of relevant subjects or issues, mentioning as many works as possible and as it were setting the ball rolling. This is not the place to begin an in-depth treatment of individual compositions, and it seemed more appropriate to attempt the task, however difficult, of taking the works as a single whole and assessing their place in a wider cultural overview.

The ordering of the following sections is unimportant; it is impossible to work towards conclusions regarding a composer still in his mid-forties, and in Finnissy's case a chronological survey would almost certainly prove fruitless, as explained below. Also, I have thought it more important to relate some reasons why one should experience this music for oneself, and w h y Michael Finnissy's work is a singular and indispensable part of contemporary composition, than to cast a critical eye over it, in the hope that my own enthusiasm might prove infectious to those more able, qualified and inclined than I to take a more objective view.

Neither is the object of this exercise to write a biography: but it is worth bearing in mind that Finnissy was born in London in 1946 - his Englishness is apparent in all he does, albeit in unexpected ways, notwithstanding the obvious cosmo- politan qualities of his work. We shall meet with a number of other such contradictions in the following pages - they are the inevitable paradoxes in a body of work at once all-embracing and utterly personal. Lastly, Finnissy's rate of stylistic transformation has often been so vertiginous as to render most generali- sations indefensible - the reader is asked to beware of what may seem like categorical statements.

Musical influences and parallels

Finnissy's musical personality has been individual from the outset: in his earliest acknowledged work, Le dormeur du val [1] (1963-68), many areas upon which he continues to expand were already in place, and to a great extent untouched by outside influence. However, influences and parallels are there to be sought out

23

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24 g~Ba~e~

and, characteristically, they stem from unlikely and idiosyncratic sources for the most part. The convergence between Finnissy and Bussotti is mentioned elsewhere in this essay; it is also possible to find echoes of a Boulezian sound-world in the use of three keyboard instruments producing diffuse washes of sound and occasional knotted outbursts in Le dormeur, also found later in World [15] (with harp and cimbalom furnishing further reminders of Eclat). In both cases, however, any direct influence has long since dissipated and plays little if any part in Finnissy's more recent work. Additionally, the influence seems never to have extended to actual formative techniques, be these serial procedures or statistical distributions. Finnissy has tended to create structures arising from the individual composition's internal dictates, rather than erecting (like Boulez or Xenakis or Stockhausen, in their various ways) a kind of general field theory of which the compositions are offshoots. No other composers of the 20th-century "mainstream" seem to have had appredable effects on Finnissy's development. This is interesting in itself: neither Stravinsky (for whom Finnissy wrote a short memorial piece in 1971 [7], adding viola and harp to a flute solo created for Stravinsky's 85th birthday four years earlier), the composers of the Second Viennese School nor any other of the venerated icons of the century have provided any discernible stimulus. This fact has no doubt contributed to the misunderstandings his work has often engendered in listeners, critics and other composers who search in vain for his work legilimising itself by appealing to the officially recognised pathways of musical history.

On the other hand, a number of composers outside these narrowly-defined pathways are clearly recognisable (and acknowledged) as Finnissy's spiritual forebears. Three such musicians are celebrated in his triptych for piano Ives, Grainger, Nancarrow [24]. The visionary quality of Ives's work as well as his uncompromising style of keyboard composition have obvious parallels in Finnissy, whose Ives could almost, from time to time, have been written by its dedicatee, alongside the Studies and the Five Takeoffs. Finnissy's career as a pianist in fact virtually began with (and because of) Ives' Concord Sonata, which he admits to be a key work in his own development. Elements of Ivesian pianism most obviously influential for Finnissy include the stark juxtaposition and superimposition of "opposing" musics (compare the vertigo of the Concord's second movement with that, say, of Midsummer Morn from English Country-Tunes [37.2] whose initial stillness gradually accumulates momentum before reaching full-blown eruption), a virtuosity straining for the impossible, and the overstepping of clear harmony by saturation to transform the piano into a textural instrument (the quintessentially Ivesian gnarled chordal pileups to be found, for example, in the fourth movement of the First Sonata have close descendants in many of Finnissy's piano parts). The attraction to English folksong and to the art of piano transcription in Grainger may be found in Finnissy also (and perhaps a touch of Grainger's and Ives' homegrown experimentalism too), and Grainger was of course a celebrated and unorthodox piano virtuoso in his own right, as well as being a spare-time experimenter with electrical and mechanical means of producing music. Conlon Nancarrow's work, however, being totally unknown in Europe before the late seventies, cannot be counted as an influence but more as a felicitous discovery, an unsuspected parallel.

A later pair of piano pieces, G.F.H./B.S. [117], refer to Bernard Stevens (Finnissy's first important composition teacher) and Handel, and both quote from

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Michael Finnissy - An Overview 25

their dedicatees, though the quoted fragments are almost unrecognisably sub- merged in close-knit polyphonic webs (Figure 1). Giuseppe Verdi has also, of course, been the subject of a Finnissy tribute, although neither he nor Handel could be said to have contributed to the surface style of the music. Nevertheless, Busoni and Godowsky (two more masters of the piano transcription) crop up in Verdi Transcriptions [81] to provide the formal and gestural skeleton of the eighth piece and the inspiration for the left-hand arrangement in {he fifth. * Some kind of pattern may be dimly glimpsed here - a preference for lyricism and linearity over counterpoint and self-reference: Handel rather than Bach, Verdi rather than Wagner.

Other musics from the past occasionally contribute structurally to Finnissy's compositions: Gregorian chant in The Undivine Comedy [122] (slowed down to provide extended pedals, typically in the midst of the texture, almost as in the organa of the school of Notre Dame) and Bach fugue-subjects (but not fugal

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1 A more detailed description of this work and its methods of derivation may be found in Richard Toop, Four Facets of "The New Complexity", Contact 32 (Spring 1988).

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26 K Barre~

textures!) in Contret~nze [118] are two examples. The Gershwin Arrangements [123] for piano are more explicit tributes than any of these, standing in the long tradition of virtuoso keyboard transcriptions. Frequently they retain only the melody or bass-lines intact, with typically dense activity in the inner parts glancing at harmonic mannerisms from Ives to Scriabin (but mostly Finnissy), although Gershwin will nearly always be uppermost in the listener's mind (Figure 2). Another recent series of pieces, this time for different ensembles, exemplifying yet another model for the transformation of preexistent material, is the Obrecht- Motetten [129] which often consist of a mosaic of tiny fragments from Obrecht, rearranged into a typically nebulous tangle, almost like a sensuous version of one of Aldo Clementi's ascetic collages (Figure 3). Although Finnissy had betrayed scant interest in music of the Renaissance or earlier periods until this series (begun in 1988) and the (more symbolic) plainsong in The Undivine Comedy, a version of Machaut's Le Lay de la fonteinne [99] for mezzo-soprano and instruments, completed in the mid-1980s, seems a foretaste not only of this development but also, in its minimal additions to and distortions of the original text, of the recently increased interest in retaining rather than sublimating the character of his sources. One obvious development in Finnissy's music between the early works and the

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Figure 2 Gershwin Arrangements p. 47. Innocent ingenue baby, bars 1-8. �9 1990 Oxford University Press. Used by permission.

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Michael Finnissy - An Overview 27

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Gershwin and Verdi pieces is a greatly increased confidence in allowing the inherited materials to occupy more of the foreground. It is likely that this strand will continue to be important in forthcoming treatments of Johann Strauss, Berlioz

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28 ~ Ba~eff

and others (some of which are finally finding their way out of the closet after having been set aside, sometimes for many years, in favour of more palatably "contemporary" concerns).

The extent to which Western composers (and those others, such as Takemitsu, whose work is firmly embedded in the European art-music tradition) have been affected by non-European folk and classical musics is well-documented; either the musical sounds of other cultures, or an attempt to understand their philosophical basis, or both, are an obvious influence on contemporary composition of all stylistic persuasions, as are the folk and popular musics nearer to home. Finnissy is one of the rare cases of a composer able to transmute recognisably such elements into his own material without a hint of patronisation, seeing cross-cultural influences as an expression of brotherhood with creative musicians of foreign cultures, rather than as a convenient source of (currently fashionable) exotic colour. In the 1980s, it has been particularly the sounds of Middle Eastern and Eastern European traditions which have informed Finnissy's composition (and wrought far-reaching effects on his style beyond the more obviously referential works). The strident harmonies of Bulgaria or Macedonia are transformed into pungent microtonal textures, their assymetrical rhythms refracted into insistent percussive accompaniments as in C~tana [107] (the name of a Rumanian dance). Previously, the parallel layers of texture in Japanese gagaku music became a formative model for Alongside [52], although the flavour of the music is decidedly un-Japanese, apart from a Noh-inspired solo for cataclysmically loud bass drum strokes which aperiodically shatter a tense silence. A knowingly pseudo-Arcadian view of the "English folk tradition" surfaced in several works including Folk-Song Set [11] (where the texts are synthetic reconstructions of folk-ballads), Mr. Punch [33] and Green Bushes [65]. More recently Finnissy's two extended stays in Australia have borne fruit in over a dozen works from 1982 onwards, including two - Quabara [125] and Red Earth [124] (both 1988) - where the primitive and chthonic sound of the didjeridu is to be heard, confronted by an assemblage of "trash"-percussion in the former and periodically looming ghost-like out of a vast orchestral lament in the latter. The status of the Aboriginals as an oppressed people whose culture has been trampled on or mindlessly appropriated cannot have been far from the composer's thoughts here. The percussion in Quabara, typically consisting of soft-drink cans, hubcaps and other symbols of cultural imperialism, and the keening-like character of much of Red Earth, have a poignancy rare even in Finnissy's multiculturally-aware output. The very use of Sardinian dialect in the texts of Duru-duru [75] and Anninnia [91], and the derivation of Dilok [89] from Kurdish folk dances, also bespeak an empathy with cultures whose expression is either suppressed or marginalised.

Finnissy's rejection of thematic and harmonic formations in favour of highly- characterised linear agglomerations ( 'heterophonies") in itself places him not only distant from the mainstream European tradition but also closer to those musics where the technical apparatus of evolving "organic" forms and voice-leading never developed. His music is in many ways a reminder that this apparatus, however spread worldwide by the pervasive "'civilising" influence of Western Europe and the United States, is in the end a (temporally and spatially) localised, specialised phenomenon. In Finnissy's work, the influences of Verdi, Gershwin, the more recent predecessors and the various "foreign" cultures not only coexist but do so on absolutely equal terms with one another, just as in his piano recitals

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Michael Finnissy - An Overview 29

his own densest explorations of keyboard sonority might coexist with the radical "simplicity" of Howard Skempton or Chris Newman.

Intervals

If Finnissy's output may in any way be divided into "periods" the most convenient basis for this might well be the use of characteristic types of intervals at various stages. From the earliest works he has displayed a readiness to work in diverse intervaUic frameworks, from diatonic modes, through chromaticism (as in the quite unhinged violin solo in Mr. Punch [33], Figure 4) to quarter-tones and, in at least

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Figure 4 Mr. Punch p. 4. Copyright �9 1986 Universal Edition (London) Ltd.

one suppressed work, twelfth-tones. Often these occur in the same work and frequently simultaneously, as for example in Beuk o'Newcassel Sangs [126] (1989) where a diatonic vocal part coexists with a chromatic piano part or a microtonal clarinet part - Figure 5. Along with variation of the type of "pitch-sieve", to use Xenakis' phrase, one could also discern characteristic usages of different sizes of interval in melodic lines, from a wildly-leaping atonal idiom (influenced in sound but not in generative technique by the shapes thrown up by integral serialism) to highly-compressed microtonal wanderings confined to narrow "frequency bands" (this time coming close to eastern European types of melodic behaviour, but differing greatly in the increased asymmetry of rhythm and phrase). Earlier pieces tend to occupy a great many intervallic worlds, which in Finnissy's "anti- thematic" style serve to articulate the large form of pieces like English Country- Tunes [37] (1977). In this work, three separable interval[ic areas are used: a monodic, modal movement (typically associated with wistful dynamics and blurred pedalling), a dense, tangled occupation of all pitches within a restricted registral space, and a music of sweeping, wide-ranging gestures which function in terms of colour rather than pitch (as do many of the devices Finnissy has developed in his piano writing).

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30 R. Barrett

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Figure 6 shows a characteristic example of each type. Each of the three reaches at some point its "climax" while at other times being juxtaposed or hybridised with

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Michael Finnissy - An Overview 31

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Figure 6b English Country Tunes. no. 8 [Come Beat the Drums and Sound the Fifes]. p. 55.

the others. Perhaps there is a parallel here with Stockhausen's scheme of blending and separating characters in Momente or Femeyhough's even more ramified plan in Sonatas for String Quartet, but neither is likely to be conscious. Even though English Country-Tunes and other works contain mixtures of intervallic types in this

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Figure 6c English Country Tunes. no. 1 [Green Meadows]. p. 1. Reproduced by permission of United Music Publishers Ltd.

way, the predominant feeling in the music up to and including Alongside is of generous use of registral resources, in which register itself is not being used as a foreground formal determinant. Finnissy has admitted that Alongside, in this and other respects, reached an extreme point along a line of development which he was not prepared to take further. Certainly, the music of the following few years is often as striking in the rigorous spareness of its sound as is Alongside in its "impossible" density. Wide intervals have largely vanished by the early 1980s, supplanted by a restless (usually quartertone) melisma, almost palpably suppress- ing the often brutal violence which had never been completely out of sight in the 1970s. However, already in the Australian Sea Shanties for amateur chorus [103.1] of 1983, the seeds of Finnissy's most recent modality has already been sown. (Music for amateurs has also become a prominent strand in Finnissy's work since then, notably with the series of East London Heys [116] for varying ensemble (1985-85).) Although, rather than "'modality", Finnissy's practice might be better described as use of diatonic materials without reference to modal or tonal implications, in other words in much the same way as he might use chromatic or microtonal materials. It is by no means a move towards more traditional ways of forming melodies, since he is always careful to avoid any motivic implications or

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Michael Finnissy - An Overview 33

to use melodic contour as a characterising factor. Nevertheless, the move into this new "'period", as in previous cases, may be broadly described as an expansion of the means available to the composer rather than primarily as a shift of position or focus. Figure 7 shows a characteristic solo passage from the latest, 1988 version of Independence Quadrilles [92].

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Figure 7 Independence Quadrilles, from section W. �9 Michael Finnissy. Reproduced bY permission.

Instrumentation

Finnissy's oeuvre encompasses everything from solo instrumental and vocal pieces to works for large orchestra, seemingly with no "preferred" categories (apart from the piano, for which there are obvious reasons: and now that Finnissy's place in the musical world is, belatedly, at least tolerably secure, his o u ~ u t for piano has lessened as performances of his work by others have increased2). The accent is upon "'invented ensembles", sometimes truly outlandish in their constitution (examples abound in the list of works) rather than traditional instrumentation - the series of Piano Concerti being deceptive in this respect (only no. 1 [26] is in anything resembling concerto form; nos. 4 [54] and 6 [66] have no accompaniment; nos. 5 [62] and 7 [69] and their peculiarities are described elsewhere in this essay). The instrumentation of a Finnissy work is an integrated part of its musical identity at every level both colouristically and structurally. It is in fact "composed" as much as anything else. His String Quartet [113] of 1984 might seem to be an exception to this, but as in other cases the composer has reacted to having the scoring forced upon him, as it were, by subverting completely the layout, ambience and internal relations of the quartet. For over a dozen pages at the opening, none of the instruments descends as far as the treble stave. Later, although their microtonal peregrinations all occupy the same tightly-defined register, they are not only playing soloistically but in different tempi, contradicting

2 As if to confirm the invalidity of generalising about Finnissy, he has produced a number of mostly short piano works in the period 1989-92. Nevertheless the prodigious flow of major solo compositions around the late 1970s appears to have abated somewhat (for the time being?).

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34 K Ba~e~

the generaUy-assumed purpose of the quartet as a musical unit; the form of the work is not polyphonic and discursive but improvisational and episodic. Both here and in other compositions the usage of the instruments is as individual as Finnissy's more idiosyncratic ensemble-instrumentations themselves. Although he avoids, for the most part, effects such as multiphonics, key-clicks, piano interior and so on, the saxophone part of Lost Lands [36] (1977) quite makes up for the shortage of expressionistic effects elsewhere, its solo coda inhabiting the same kind of sparse/brutal domain as the music of Hans-Joachim Hespos. Elsewhere, combinations with vertically-differentiated dynamics (opening of Alongside: dif- ferent instruments occupying dynamic strata as far apart as possible), unusual blendings and registers bring into being constantly surprising sound-totalities. This is true however few instruments are involved: Uzundara [95] (1983) for solo B fiat clarinet (there are also solos for E fiat, C and bass clarinets in Finnissy's output) improbably remains in an ear-splittingly high tessitura throughout; the opening sections of Verdi Transcriptions [81] on the other hand rumble implacably at the lower end of the piano for far longer than expected. There is a fine and discerning ear at work here, one which is able to differentiate between many "possible instruments" within a single sound-producing object, according to sets of (fairly) constant characteristics given to a passage or a whole part or a solo. Indeed, one of the most striking and widespread stylistic features in Finnissy's work is the way in which such characteristics are given time to project themselves as discrete structural units. (There are similarities here with the later music of Xenakis.) Paradoxically, Finnissy has also experimented with indeterminate instrumentation - Moon's Goin' Down [63] (1980) "for solo instrument or voice", and parts defined only by register in 'n' [10] (1969) and From the Revelation of St. John the Divine [2] (1970), the latter combining an unspecified instrument with soprano and strings - and indeterminate timbre in Ohi!Ohi!Ohi! [42] (1978) for solo voice, where the phonetic elements of the title may be used in any orders and combinations in conjunction with a precisely- (and heavily-) notated musical line.

Even in more-or-less "'normal" ensembles, long stretches of unlikely combina- tions of smaller groupings tend to occur, giving a work unique sonorous profile. As described in the String Quartet above, Finnissy is careful to avoid registral and timbral combinations which have any familiarity about them, so that there is something recognisable in a "Finnissy timbre" almost independently of precisely what instruments or voices are taking part. Ouraa [96] (1983) for a reasonably standard eleven instruments opens with keening glissandi on piccolo and a drum part sounding like a manic clockwork soldier. This is followed by changing juxtapositions of brass, strings and woodwind defined by register and rate of attack, later accompanied by slightly macabre, rattlesnake-like castanets and punctuated by solo viola passages. Eph-phatha [130] (1989) for orchestra is generally densely-scored (including a piano part largely confined to the lower registers) apart from two extraordinary sections (Stockhausen would call them "'sound-windows", as in his Mikrophonie II or Jubil~um), the second of which concludes the work, where the ensemble cuts off revealing an offstage trio of piccolo, horn and "cello playing softly diatonic melodies.

In short, one ubiquitous feature of Finnissy's work is its constant celebration of colouristic possibilities; no instrumentation (for example the didjeridu and "trash'" percussion of Quabara [125]) is so unpromising that his imagination cannot be brought to bear on it. The music challenges given notions concerning the function

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Michael Finnissy - An Overview 35

of instruments within ensembles as well as their expressive potential as "individ- uals", and makes nonsense indeed of the prevalent view of instrumentation as somehow peripheral to the central concerns of composition. Here comparison could be made with the later works of Morton Feldman, where the instrumenta- tion seems to generate the musical material - as well as the title! - almost automatically; neither composer could undergo "arrangement" without totally altering the expressive effect. It is hardly surprising, ~,'ith this penchant for exploring the "grain" of traditional instruments, that he has not felt drawn towards the resources of electronic music (though the accessibility Of such resources in the UK is not what it could be), except in the recent Nowhere else to go [131] (1989) whose ensemble features a synthesizer and an eleL'trOn~ drumkit, as well as a tape containing the other three instruments (clarinet, trumpet, 'cello) playing slow microtonal lines drifting past one another and transposed upwards by a digital harmoniser: the tape undergoes an inexorable crescendo while its live counterparts withdraw into barely-interrupted silence, a process lasting fifteen minutes and accompanied by a repeating, thudding bass drum pattern, producing one of Finnissy's most crushingly nihilistic statements (perhaps no "'celebration" of electronic sounds is possible for him). Unusually for someone working as sporadically in this area (but characteristically for him), he has selected a limited range of resources and appropriated them completely in the service of his own vision, much as his other writing transmutes the instruments of the European classical tradition into objects more rough-hewn, strident, unpredictable, even magical (in the original sense of the word).

Texts/Theatre

One of the most striking features of the texts used by Michael Finnissy for his many vocal and theatrical pieces is that they belong almost exclusively to past centuries and other cultures, perhaps another aspect of his standing outside the principal currents of modernism. It certainly has nothing to do with the ignorance most artists have of more or less recent developments in other arts; if anything, Finnissy has "'kept up" with the latest events in other disciplines more than he has in music. The variety of language used, sometimes several in one work, is vast. The alien (to an averagely linguisticaUy-competent European) sounds of Japanese (Tsuru-Kame [17], Goro [47]), Javanese (Kelir [70]), Sardinian (Duru-duru [75], Anninnia [91], Aboriginal Oqarara [82]), the Venda language of South Africa (Ngano [106]), Rumanian (Cabaret Vert [114]) and Hebrew (Haiyim [109]) impart characteristic colours to the musical strands as if bathing them in strange lights; this colouration, for the composer as much as for the listener, contributes at least as much as does the semantic content to the fascination of the music. This is also true of many of the works which use more "'familiar" languages, although in both cases the fact that there is a semantic dimension informs the expressiveness of a performance in a way that abstract phonetic formations could not. Finnissy's music is always rooted in the concept of breath and phrase, even when purely instrumental; in many ways it harks back to the pre-classical ideal wherein instruments aspire to the expressivity of the voice. Certainly his vocal parts frequently achieve an almost baroque intensity of ornamentation and a tendency to florid melisma worthy of Caccini or Monteverdi. There are indeed settings of

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Tasso (Horrorzone [3], Song 1 [4.01] and Petrarch (Song 16 [4.16]) delivered with thoroughly Italianate lyriscism, and even an early work which uses parts of Alessandro Striggio's libretto for Orfeo.

The avowedly "autobiographical" World (1969-74) for voices and instruments forms a kind of internal self-portrait, speaking in the words of Mayakovsky, H61derlin, Rimbaud, Blake, Tennyson, G. M. Hopkins and Dante. H61derlin and Rimbaud raise their heads elsewhere in Finnissy's work, 'the former i n . . . fairest noonday . . . . [57] (1979) for tenor and piano and in The Undivine Comedy [122] (a remnant of a previously planned setting of Der Tod des Empedokles) and the latter in Le Dormeur du Val [1], in the title of Cabaret Vert [114] and as the subject of an (as yet?) unrealised music-theatre project. The classicist nostalgia and Apollonian otherworldliness of H61derlin, the nocturnal menace and violet, brooding imagery of Rimbaud, both lurk beneath the surface of Finnissy's music more often than they inform his vocal parts, and the same could be said of the Grand Guignol which erupts in Mr. Punch [33] (1976-77) for voice and instruments, more earthy and less abstract than Birtwistle's opera on the subject (and, in its economy of resources, more appropriate for a real puppet-theatre), or the transcendental idealism of Whitman in the work bearing his name [94] and in the wistful mezzo- soprano aria of Vaudeville [98] (1983). One could, given more space, continue with a list of all those writers whose work Finnissy has set, tracing his response to their words beyond the specific settings themselves, for he is both widely-read and sensitive to the nuances of literary style, and his rate and methodology of composition allow a text-setting to be a highly spontaneous welling-up of forces which are "beneath the skin" of a larger part of his output.

Finnissy's range of theatrical reference is equally wide, from the medieval ritual of the Mysteries [19] (1976-79, a two-and-a-half-hour cycle most of which still remains unperformed) to the quasi-expressionist histrionics (often seeming like one "'mad scene" after another) of The Undivine Comedy, the music hall-like sequence of "displaced" characters from operatic history in Soda Fountain [105] (1983) for four voices and the birth-to-death procession of stylistic parodies in Vaudeville. H~ music-theatre style is characterised by efficient exploitation of theatrical means (Peter Brook's "rough theatre") and by deep connections to the ritual theatre of ancient and folk tradition. The works thus possess an atavistic expressive strength beyond their enforced status as manifestations of high art. Mysteries is a good example, in which monumental, seemingly archaic blocks of musical texture perfectly reflect the rugged and unpolished old English text as well as the simple grandeur of the drama. Moreover, on the strength particularly of The Undivine Comedy, Finnissy does not regard opera as an outmoded and irrelevant genre fit only for avoidance or cynical subversion (as might be stated by most composers as musically "radical" as he is), but as an inexhaustible source of theatrical vitality and a still powerful and significant institution. I suspect that The Undivine Comedy is scored for chamber forces for no reason other than expediency (which is not to deny its success in wielding those forces over a whole evening of music without one wishing for more than its nine players), and that there is no ideological reason why Finnissy should not turn his hand to truly "grand" opera. It is of great relevance in understanding Finnissy as a theatrical composer that the operas he admires most are those of Verdi and Handel, which consists of sequences of more or less fixed forms (and are therefore ultimately rooted in the formal severity of ritual) rather than the long-range seamless structures of Wagner

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Michael Finnissy - An Overview 37

or Strauss. Also of course the operas of Verdi and Handel place the onus of drama and characterisation on the voice rather than the orchestra. In The Undivine Comedy there are frequent stretches of unmistakable recitative, accompanied by slow-moving drones whose function does not seem far removed from that of the basso continuo. At the other end of the spectrum there are reflective, aria-like sections with ecstatic coloratura passages, these forms strongly delineated by the rapid, unblended changes in instrumental texture, and the avoidance of transition, familiar from Finnissy's smaller-scale works. The uncompromising virtuosity of the instrumental parts (Finnissy was able to write for a hand-picked ensemble of performers familiar with and fluent in his demanding idiom) creates a flexibility and variety of colour fully equal to the articulation of what must be an unprecedented timespan for an ensemble of this size; nevertheless they have no autonomous function but serve to accompany and punctuate the vocally- mediated drama. It might still be felt, however, that there is no real confronta- tion with the demands of large-scale formal thinking, that at least in purely musical terms the opera consists of a string of Finnissy's chamber pieces whose connecting strand, the gradual contraction of each act's formative interval from a fifth to a unison, cannot bear the structural weight assigned to it, especially given that the vocal writing sometimes tends to obscure an already complex textual argument. On. the other hand nobody will be heard to complain of the lack of "connecting strands" or the extensive use of text-warping embellishments in Handel. Here as elsewhere we find an enigmatic relationship to tradition: a new and individual approach to musical means in almost every respect, which at the same time arises unexpectedly from a deep intimacy with cultural paradigms distant in both space and time. Finnissy's large and rapidly growing body of work, rather than delineating a diachronic "'development", seems to be expanding into a self-contained "folk culture" all of its own, in which the enactments of theatre play a fundamental r61e, embodying its primeval and ceremonial centre.

Montage

It is not that Finnissy's work resists the application of analytical thinking - Richard Toop 3 has carried out (with characteristic thoroughness, sympathy and clarity) such excavations on the String Trio [120] and parts of Verdi Transcriptions [81] - but that such endeavour seems to cast less light on the composers's psychology, and that of the works themselves, than in many other cases such as the quasi- cabbalistic extrapolations from admired names in Chris Dench's recent music. Finnissy's techniques on the micro-compositional level are largely concerned with permutation, for example of pitches within a given range, singly or in chords, and such procedures are really identifiable in many cases. The ordering of elements within a permutation may be "assisted" by the application of random numbers, although such procedures do not arise from either a Cageian ideology of non-intervention or a Xenakis-like probabilistic rigour. Rather, they emphasise an essential lack of interest in the niceties of structuring tiny unitary events when these will seldom if ever be perceived as such. That a description of procedure gives, in my opinion, little insight into what constitutes the heart of the music, is

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due to this very reduction of the status and function of the "note". 4 This is not to say that the analytical approach to these means of generation is not useful and interesting in itself, of course , but with Finnissy we are never dealing with "composed out" internal relationships of a basic material. Any small-scale internal relationships that are perceptible, it is implied, are more like incidentally beautiful points in a natural process than the results of a rationalised Durchf~hrung. Nevertheless, it rapidly becomes obvious that Finnissy (flying in the face of Cageian orthodoxy!) remains ever vigilant for the felicities (and infelicities) which chance may put his way.

Permutations and orderings like this are potentially endless processes and, particularly when applied in different ways to, for example, pitch and duration, can imply little in the way of directionality and (therefore) closure. 5 (That they could imply such things is one of those myths taken as gospel by the serial approach to composition, which also often insists on the memorability of the kind of unitary events Einnissy's usage subsumes into larger complexes.) This ataxic quality, however, is not a limitation of Finnissy's material but rather is essential to the uses to which it is put, to the concentration of musical significance on other structural levels: since such material can be generated indefinitely and cut or edited, like lengths of tape, or, more appositely, of film, it may be assembled into a montage-like structure whose individual "shots" take over the function of unit elements from the mirco-events of which they consist. Finnissy is enthusiastic and knowledgeable on the subject of film, which has been an explicit point of reference in several works: the eighteen Songs [4] (1966-76), short pieces for varying soloists and ensembles, refer in their overall title and individual structural features to a series of brief films by the American experimental film-maker Stan Brakhage (another in that "anti-category" of American artist, vigorously single-minded and largely unsung, which is of particular importance to Finnissy: Ives, Nancarrow, Whi tman . . . ) - in other words the idea of a "'song" has become highly abstracted from its usual definition (although a few of the Finnissy pieces are vocal). Similarly Rushes [81.15] (a solo piano work written for choreography by Siobhan Davies, now relocated and retitled as Verdi Transcription 15 is the name given to lengths of film prior to final edi~ng, and has no connection with aquatic vegetation; Reels [73] for piano, however, refers to Scottish folk-dancing. In many other works the cinematic influence (or parallelism) is apparent and pervasive, as in the alterna- tions between "scenes" or "angles" in, for example, C~tana [107], Contret~nze [118], Piano Concerto no. 3 [46], not to mention an almost universal Finnissy technique of abrupt "cuts" between textures of widely divergent instrumentation, rate of attack, register, "harmonic" content, articulation and (most obviously) dynamic. Interestingly, an attempt to re-adapt cinematic techniques to their own derivations in Finnissy's music was made in the video production of Dust in the Road, which was written in 1987 for a BBC2 Omnibus programme directed by Barrie Gavin. The programme also contains a useful discourse by Finnissy on his compositional techniques, one of the few occasions so far upon which he has

4 Herein lies the difference between Finnissy's "random" procedures and those of Birtwistle, where the notes are essential formative elements in a melodic structure, and (presumably) the substitution of one number for another would have a correspondingly greater effect.

5 Finnissy appears not to organise other "parameters" in this way but will use, as discussed above, timbre and dynamic (and instrumentation) as larger-scale formal determinants.

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Michael Finnissy - An Overview 39

"gone public" on the subject) to take the quasi-filmic procedures evolved by Finnissy for composition, and apply them after his "refraction" again to moving pictures. The films of eastern European folk-dancing and of the performance of the Finnissy piece were cut up, superimposed, filtered and distorted in an idiomatically Finnissyesque manner, although falling prey to the inevitably over-explicit nature of television in general and an "'anecdotal" banality which Finnissy's own folk-montages so successfully avoid.

It is true that the cinematic influence on the music has lessened in more recent works; the alternating jumpcuts which became a fully-fledged Finnissy mannerism in the 1980s have receded in favour of longer "scenes" with less jolting transitions. Red Earth [124] is a good example - but then, orchestral forces lend themselves more easily to "dissolves", as does the music's evocation of vast, unbroken Australian desert landscapes seen from the air (which I can testify is a powerful experience). But it is safe to say that the characteristic articulation of time and drama by the medium of film is often close to the surface in Finnissy's music, and is in many cases an essential key to its genesis and structure.

The "Problem" of Notation

Michael Finnissy's music has often been characterised by (and criticised for) an exhaustive exploitation of so-called "irrational" rhythmic subdivisions. His explo- rations of the potential of such notations are often the first aspect of the music to strike the eye upon opening a score. Indeed his use of subdivisions is entirely individual, and is to be distinguished from the use of superimposed subdivisions in, say, Erber, Femeyhough or Redgate, where the "'nesting" implies an accretion of different levels of metrical working applied to a single line, like a series of prisms through which a heavily-refracted image is visible. In Finnissy's case the subdivisions often span much longer durations, or at least have much larger denominators, and are seldom re-subdivided; what is often a consistently flowing passage in more-or-less equal note values is stretched and compressed in a vastly expanded version of the "'notated rubato" found for example in the works of the 19th century piano virtuosi. In all. fall. down. [38] (1977) for piano this technique is augmented by two staves operating in different and changing time-divisions, by means of a kind of "'prolation'" notation (reminding us that this feature also refers back at least to the "'new complexity" of the 14th century) - for example 13 units in the right hand against 10 in the left. Also the first section of Obrecht-Motetten // [129.2] (1988) for mandolin, harp and guitar alternates between proportions such as 28:26:331/2 (!) and general pauses in conventional time signatures. But it should not be thought that Finnissy's rhythmic notation inhabits this exotic world to the exclusion of all else; it has a specifically aural function to fulfil which could not be achieved by other means, and takes its place within a vocabulary of notational manners each tailored to its structural and psychological purpose in the scheme of a composition. (One might say that the notational "ambience" of a piece contributes to its eventual character in almost the same way as would an idiosyncratic instrumentation.) Whole passages of gracenotes, as well as their interpolation within otherwise precisely-placed attacks, occur frequently, often in the piano music generating blurred cloud-like aggregates. The almost graphic descriptiveness of the exquisitely-poised sound masses in Snowdrif t [16] (1972),

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40 R. Barrett

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Figure 8 Snowdrift p. 3. �9 1975 Edition Modem, Munich. Used by permission.

containing chords and dusters as well as single pitches (a link to Stockhausen's Klavierst~cke VIII and X?) is a characteristically "extreme" example (Figure 8). These swathes of gracenotes might act as extended upbeats or as autonomous bursts of activity, a distinction sometimes made explicit by notational differentia- tion. Other works, for example Andimirronai [77] (1981) for solo 'cello and large stretches of The Undivine Comedy [122] go no further into rhythmic exofica than triplets. Passages such as pages 3-5 of Teangi [85] (1982) and the opening of Alongside [52] (1980 - mentioned above as one of the most complex and variegated moments in all Finnissy's works), both for large chamber ensembles, superimpose instruments playing in precise and imprecise rhythm. Cabaret Vert [114] contains passages for flute and cor anglais in undulating glissandi whose turning-points are only approximately indicated, while mezzosoprano and percussion operate within a precise metrical framework. There are many other such examples. Despite surface appearances, Finnissy's rhythmic notation in its various guises is not only a practical but actually economical solution for the expressive tasks it is called upon to fulfil.

Frequently, rhythmic values are chosen in such a way as firstly to negate an overall pulsation and secondly to avoid coincidences of attack between instru- ments or (in piano music principally, but sometimes even in violin parts, as in the String Trio [120] - Figure 9) different layers or lines on the same instrument. On the other hand, the first half of Nowhere else to go [131] is almost entirely in

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Michael Finnissy - An Overview 41

[ • Com~ da ~incipio - t~ ~;.++,j. +.+~_

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Figure 9 String Trio p. 32. R e p r o d u c e d b y p e r m i s s i o n of U n i t e d Mus ic Pub l i she r s Ltd.

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rhythmic unison for three of the five instruments. (Finnissy is ever generous in providing exceptions to any "constants" one may care to postulate, although I cannot think of any places - so far - where he has made use of repeated no tes . . . ) But this is not the whole story; the notation also imparts particular qualities to the strands themselves. This is apparent not only in solo works for melody instruments but in, for example, Piano Concerti nos. 5 [62] and 7 [69] where individual complex lines begin simultaneously and uiafold independently in different tempi with their own accelerandi and diminuendi. On both, the piano will always finish last, only because its part is sufficiently longer than the others even taking into account inevitable variation in the durations of all parts.) A particular tension is created between the "solipsistic" instrumental or vocal parts and the shifting fields generated by their superimposition, and of all Finnissy's piano concerti these are the two in which the piano appears in its most ambiguous, least soloistic r61e. Unsynchronised parts (and the absence of a score, the composer refusing even to suggest a "'correctly" lined-up version) are also features of Nobody's Jig [67] (1980-81) - "for 2 violins, viola and 'cello" - which perhaps significantly also undermines a "received" genre.

The expressivity of different notational elements in Finnissy's work, while being primarily a personal radicalisation of many of the implications of traditional notation, exhibits some similarities with the music of Sylvano Bussotti (whose opulent textures have also sometimes exerted an influence on Finnissy). Although the use of more flamboyant graphics was an early and passing phase for Finnissy (as in Babylon for voice and chamber orchestra (1971) -- since withdrawn), he shares with Bussotti a tendency to invent idiomatic notations for specific musical situations, and an obviously intense engagement with the physical act of creating the score (including immediately recognisable calligraphy), both of which possess, or should possess, an important degree of suggestivity for the performer. Almost the opposite of this effect is also possible: the six sections of Transformations of the Vampire [8] (1968-71, title after Baudelaire, for clarinet, violin, viola and 3 percussionists) explore diverse points along the coordination/independence axis, section 5 and 6 consisting merely of a paragraph each of verbal instructions for improving a defined yet formally amorphous texture - "do not contrive a formal layout of the material (no climaxes - unfocused)". The emphasis remains on sound rather than process, drawing attention only to the result and not the act of improvisation. Finnissy has little interest in improvisation per se; although he compares the piano writing of his Piano Concerto no. 3 [46] to the playing of Cecil Taylor, any parallels between the two are confined to a general feeling of explosive energy, as is also the case with the solo piano piece Jazz [32] (1976). Even so, Finnissy's methods of composition have an improvisatory quality (not least in the speed at which his "abstract improvisation" is able to generate new compositions) which reveals itself in his music's characteristic spontaneity and unpredictability.

There are important implications for performance practice in Finnissy's dynamic and articulational notation, especially concerning the works of the last ten years in which non-European traditions have gradually supplanted Western music history in providing his articulational models. What this has meant in practice, apart from the obvious differences in pitch-material, is that the amount of information in the score related to dynamic and phrasing has been reduced to a minimum. It is important to remember, that this is not an invitation to perform blankly "as written" (whatever that may mean) in which case the result will be bland,

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Michael Finnissy - A n Overv iew 43

monochrome and amateurish, but an invitation to interpret the notated features of the part with a range of subtle inflections, sculpturings, even roughnesses. (There is an analogy here with the efforts of performers such as Reinhard Goebel to re-inject an almost folk-like immediacy into the bald texts of Baroque music - although I dare say that in Finnissy's case the necessity is for a somewhat subtler relaxation of interpretative reverence.) It should of course be superfluous to draw attention to matters such as this, but the belief is all too com~non that all this music is "about" is its own notational complexity. I hope to have show in this essay that the opposite is the case. The relationships between composer, score, performer, instrument, sound and listener are and have always been more complex than can be summarised by the phrase "'playing the notes"; there is no reason why this should be any less true in Finnissy than in Mozart. The idea that everything necessary to an idiomatic realisation must be contained in the score is not only impossible to implement but also ultimately deadening and undesirable.

In place of a conclusion

Any composer with an immediately recognisable stylistic trait leaves his or her work open to thoughtless imitation by less mature admirers; one need look no further than the blatant way in which the music of Franco Donatoni and Salvatore Sciarrino has been taken up and halfheartedly misappropriated by countless younger Italian composers. Michael Finnissy, too, has his share of imitators who (like imitators in general) seem to have failed to grasp the essential identity between his (ultimately and necessarily personal) expressive aims and the stylistic means by which they are made audible. But in fact there is no one "'Finnissy style", even though the indescribable personality of the music is ever-present. The most "complex" aspect of his work, and one of the most fascinating, is its sheer inclusiveness, almost as if we were not dealing with one composer but with an entire (relatively small!) musical culture, with its own modes of expression for public and private occasions, recreational, educational and ceremonial uses, and so on. One of the few other composers of recent times to have tended in this direction was Paul Hindemith, whose immediacy of expression was eventually subsumed by an increasing enslavement to his own systematising academicism. Finnissy, on the other hand, is the opposite of an academic composer; his antagonism to any kind of musical orthodoxy (even his own) is a constant and deeply-felt feature of his personality in all its manifestations. It is this aspect of Finnissy that other composers would do well to look to as an example. D

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