I realized after the fact that all of the titles except for the last movement have to do with time and the speaker’s relationship to time. 1st movement: subjunctive past; 2nd movement: present tense; 4th movement: past perfect; with the interlude referencing both infinite time and the end of time.
(1) What if this happened?
(2) I am now
Interlude: Everything was forever until it was no more
(3) An occupying army
(4) Decades had passed
Everything feels static right now, possibly because this current slow motion car crash leaves us in an endless nervous state that, when it ends, will cease to exist but will never end. My previous works were about a map that can tell the future and a man looking for the missing parts to his time machine, so time seems to be a general theme regardless of what’s happening in the world. Who knew?
One lesson of writing long form works: don’t rush to put every technique in one movement. I am trying to use a minimal palette to hold the movement together and am needing to frequently resist the urge to introduce a wider range of elements. This limitation will more clearly contrast one movement from another, and will allow me to instead rely on selective thematic repetition across movements to cohere the whole. This economy forces an explication of motifs rather than an explosion of many. Economy, repetition, and variation.
Today I received my copy of Ferneyhough’s Lemma-Icon-Epigram. It and Finnissey’s English Country-Tunes are iconic New Complexity works for piano (see here and here) that I’ve been listening to often over the past several months. Just after I wrote Three Pieces for Orchestra I received the English Country-Tunes score and have been obsessively studying it alone and while following Finnissey’s performance of the work. Fun fact: on a lark I transcribed the first measure of EC-T in MuseScore and not only was the app powerful enough to mimic the score nearly perfectly, Finnissey’s performance matched the MIDI output remarkably well. Stunning skill.
There are scant references online discussing Lemma-Icon-Epigram, but at about the fifth Google search page I found a PDF of a ~50-page paper written by Richard Toop analyzing the work. For it, Ferneyhough provided him sketches of the work as it was being developed and Toop uses those for insight into the composer’s creative intent.
Richard Toop (1945-2017) was associated with The University of Sydney and had a long history working closely with modern composers and analyzing their works. See here for more of his papers including discussions on Stockhausen–with whom he worked as a teaching assistant–Messiaen, and Boulez. In the Ferneyhough paper, he provides several direct quotes from the composer and uses them as affirmations and jumping off points for his analysis. Several of Ferneyhough’s approaches and ideas resonated with me and what I’ve been doing over the last two months.
The first part of the piece is this whirlwind of the not-yet-become, the idea of processes, not material, forming the thematic content of the work. So apart from the quite banal initial material, which we don’t even know is “initial material,” the whole thing is in a whirlwind of dissolution even before it has been created.
Richard Toop, “Brian Ferneyhough in Interview,” Contact no. 29 (Spring 1985): 9.
Further, speaking of the opening notes of the piece:
The piece has to start with some material, but it could have started with others; I simply wrote down a set of notes without thinking about them at all, and said, I will work with these. That’s how the piece begins.
(the Toop paper has part of this quote, I found the full quote found elsewhere)
In other words: begin with somewhat arbitrary material and develop your intentions off of those.
I’m maybe a week or two from finishing the 3rd movement An occupying army and from my notes will probably move on to the 2nd movement I am now next. I have ideas drawn from Finnissey and King Crimson’s song Lament as structural inspirations and am ready to begin producing that “initial material”. An odd concern I have is that I won’t finish this by election day. I realistically know that it may be a six-months-to-a-year effort (this Sunday marks two months), but would still like to complete the intent during this time of inspiration. With whatever will happen, will I still have the right frame of mind to continue?