Brian Ferneyhough and the Politics of Time

Abstract:

Ferneyhough’s practice is commonly situated as a synthesis of modern and postmodern concerns. By reading his music through a Marxist critique of the politics of musical temporality in 20th-century compositional practice, these tensions can be further contextualised within the antagonism between temporality and spatialisation. This allows for a reimagining of the implications of well-documented frictions and drama in his music between structure and contingency, and between meaning, identity and their dissolution. Seen in this way, the composer’s work gains an immediate political relevance to our historical moment, one marked by a related, though disempowering, reconciliation of its preceding two general periods: where the postmodern sense of perspectival multiplicity combines with an older, monad-like individual certainty. Ferneyhough provides us with an almost complete inversion of these regressive trends, whereby rigorous yet disorientating objective structures become paramount to the maintenance of subjective freedom: one that is seen as a fluid, dynamic series of perspectives. Central to this is the striking musical wager that processive logic and developmental direction may exist as paradox, multiplicity, and fractured, broken discourses. This paper outlines the critical framework with which to apprehend this idea, by combining elements from a tradition of political thought that grapples with the interplay between material conditions, ideology and aesthetic form: through re-readings of Marx, Lukacs, Adorno and Jameson, it traces the effects of changes in our experience of time under late capitalism. An examination of John Zorn’s Cobra and Earle Brown’s Novara will demonstrate this phenomenon at work; then, by following Ferneyhough’s development from the influence of that tradition through three key stages, this paper suggests how it can be seen to originate in and transcend those limitations. In doing so, it explores the relationship in his music between notation, gesture, bodily physicality and temporal experience, and offers reflections on the significance of this in the context of recent philosophical materialisms.