Ferneyhough & microtones

It is true that nearly all of his pieces, (where it's possible), involve
heavy dosages of quarter- or 8th-tones. It would be fair to say that it's
all in 24-tet or even 48-tet.

However, this really doesn't get at the juice of Ferneyhough's approach,
which a lot of the time isn't directly about pitch at all. It's about
getting instruments and their players into certain situations, where the
sounds that come out are unpredictable (at least from the point of view
of the player) usually involve a high degree of noise and gestural (i.e.
theatrical) content. (And of course, microtonality) And because the
player is trying to get out sounds but often not quite able to do so
(because of the way the piece is very intentionally written), the result
is often highly expressive.

I find this fascinating---this relationship he posits between
notation, telling the player what to do, but not notating the sound which
comes out, and then the sound wich DOES come out.

I think this is an interesting approach to compare to the thinking
that usually goes on on this list. Here, we are very obssessed with
tuning things exactly, in short, we are obssessed with pitch structure.
We construct pitch structures, and then, we struggle to
find instruments to realize them. Some of us (most of us) resort to MIDI
or other electronics, some of us build instruments to do it.

Ferneyhough starts with the instrument itself---what is structured
is the theatre of what the player is doing with the instrument, above
all. The result, with any instrument capable of microtones, is decidedly
non-ET music. Thoroughly (not ornamentally) microtonal, to be sure. It
also, in fact, has a very world-musicky character to it;
in fact I prefer it in this respect compared to, say, George Crumb,
because of what I mentioned in my last e-mail: Ferneyhough's working with
his own set of bizarre issues, which happen to "acidentally" sound like
PErsian Ney solo or what-have-you, now and then---this kind of
"accidentallity" of the "cultural influence" in his music I find more
powerful than what one gets with Crumb, who tends to "wear his
multi-culturalism on his sleeve."

Anyway, as a speaker/writer I find him kind of pompous and unable
to make any sense whatsoever, and I'm not too eager to hang out with the
new-complexity crowd, socially speaking, but I do like the music.

cb