Brian Ferneyhough

[Quijote]

Originally Posted by Felix

Quijote; I'll let you know in time.

Meanwhile I don't think Scott wears a kilt so I would concentrate on his music which is well worth hearing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rpORPmYJ2Go

I have in no way forgotten Ferneyhough, but I'll have to take a step back for a while as I have other prose works to finish, but I'll keep looking around and possibly make some brief comments. This evening I want to finish a text on The Tragedy of German music, and then I have quite a bit of stuff about the Schubert sonatas which I should get onto that thread.

Regards, Felix

Oh Félix, I'm sure too that our "Good Scot" doesn't wear a kilt, not least because he told me so himself! I'm sure he doesn't wear a lumberjack shirt either. I will of course be checking out what's "under his kilt" [He continues the metaphor. Ed.] sometime soon.

[Scott Good]

Originally Posted by Quijote

Oh Félix, I'm sure too that our "Good Scot" doesn't wear a kilt, not least because he told me so himself! I'm sure he doesn't wear a lumberjack shirt either. I will of course be checking out what's "under his kilt" [He continues the metaphor. Ed.] sometime soon.

My goodness..my name has come up quite a bit here!

For the record: I love plaid shammies (lumberjack shirts). I love beer too, and saying "eh".

Ferneyhough is good too. I treat his music like I do bee-bop. Don't care for it much on recording - LOVE it live. I need to see/smell the sweat. Recordings are too sterile. But, I feel this way generally about most music (except pop - there, I like all the production)

[Quijote]

Originally Posted by Scott Good

My goodness..my name has come up quite a bit here!

For the record: I love plaid shammies (lumberjack shirts). I love beer too, and saying "eh".

Ferneyhough is good too. I treat his music like I do bee-bop. Don't care for it much on recording - LOVE it live. I need to see/smell the sweat. Recordings are too sterile. But, I feel this way generally about most music (except pop - there, I like all the production)

Hello Lumberjack/Kilt. [You're not remotely funny. Cut it out. Ed] I'll get back to you later (not tonight) about your violin/piano piece when I've had a chance to listen to it again. I'll repeat to you what I said on the Berg [?] thread : I may well have comments to make, but they might not be so effusive as Félix's. Still, it is always a privilege to speak to a composer directly, when the opportunity presents itself.

[Tarantella]

Felix, why not post some of your own lovely compositions on this forum: for example, some of those you sent to me?

[Scott Good]

Originally Posted by Quijote

Hello Lumberjack/Kilt. [You're not remotely funny. Cut it out. Ed] I'll get back to you later (not tonight) about your violin/piano piece when I've had a chance to listen to it again. I'll repeat to you what I said on the Berg [?] thread : I may well have comments to make, but they might not be so effusive as Félix's. Still, it is always a privilege to speak to a composer directly, when the opportunity presents itself.

Say what you need to say, Quijote. I posted, so, invite critique. My skin is fairly thick.

+ I can almost guarantee you wont say anything worse than what has already been directed to me. I've had some terrible reviews!

(funny, that for the same pieces, I've also had some raving reviews.)

[Felix]

I'm trying to keep a low profile so as not to embarrass Scott with my gushing. But when I feel enthusiasm it's real. Just a note; some, including Scott) complain about the combination of violin and piano. Well that is one of the first thing that grabbed me from the beginning. The piano growling low and the violin come from high, high up. the combination of instruments is inspiring. It has the kind of wit that one finds in Berg's postcard songs.

Talking of negative and positive critiques, on Facebook I got very enthusiastic responses:

Suzanne: Thank-you for this, Felix...moving - and passionate.
Sharon: Definitely passionate;-) and surprising too.
Sian: Marvellous and thrilling too. Thank-you Felix.
Another friend pressed the 'I like it button' which I find a bit pathetic, but she is a very busy woman.
I forgot I have two close friends in real life and on FB as, like me, they appear infrequently - Hugh is Director of our Conservatoire in Verona and his wife Paola is a cellist and is into forming eccentric Jazz groups. I will haul them in to listen to your piece too.

Going to a much lower side track - Tarantella asked me why I didn't Publish some of my own music. Firstly I can't really call myself a composer, as I composed intermittently. Secondly there may be technical difficulties. I can post some pieces as attachments in e-mails.I realised early that I had missed the train as a modern composer. At my university's music department, atonal music was completely ignored. It's only thianks to a - how could it be otherwise - to a Jewish friend that I was gradually introduced to Mahler and the atonal composers. I wanted to have Stockhausen, Boulez, electronics under my belt in order to have composed as I would like to have. When I composed my 12tone invention it took me a whole week, and I realised that if I wanted to go on composing I would have had to drop everything else, which I couldn't. Most of my other comps are Gebrauchsmusik for children, ballet exercises. a late romantic cello and piano piece for a friend's play. - I won't deny that some of the pieces have a certain flair to them, but they are pennies in the gutter compared to real composers.

Scott I couldn't be-bop to Ferneyhough, but you can to the Brandenburg Concerti. You are lucky if you can listen to Ferneyhough live ....if I were still living in London!....but here there is no chance, so I depend on recordings which are better than nothing.

Best wishes

[Quijote]

Originally Posted by Scott Good

Say what you need to say, Quijote. I posted, so, invite critique. My skin is fairly thick. + I can almost guarantee you wont say anything worse than what has already been directed to me. I've had some terrible reviews! (Funny, that for the same pieces, I've also had some raving reviews.)

Dear Scott, don't worry about bad reviews, every composer has had them (Beethoven, Bruckner, Mahler, the list goes on and on...). And bear in mind what Beethoven once scribbled in the margin of a newspaper page with a bad review of one of his works (I have to paraphrase from memory, but I think it was cited in a book by William Kinderman): "Even what I put on paper after wiping my bum is worth more than what you have written".
I don't need to say anything, of course, but I did feel under a slight obligation to do so on Félix's urging. My opinion of the piece in question is, finally, irrelevant.
There is one thing perhaps I could say that is pertinent, and that is to say that there is a massive gulf between the YouTube performance and the rather too-short Amazon audio sample. But all these comments are on the wrong thread! Let's get back to Ferneyhough...

[Felix]

Yes, sorry for slipping into another albeit interesting direction. My apologies to Ferneyhough.

Best wishes

[Mambo]

I'd like to hear a comparison on two "Brians" -
Brian F. and
Havergal Brian, whom i am just starting to look into more

[Felix]

Mambo, I have just hear some portons of Havergal - Thanks for the suggestion - and I was taken completely by surprise by Havergal, what a rich, fervent, turbulent imagination. He seems to have contained a Pandora's box of musical spirits ready to blast the world and which he could open at will to produce one Symphony after the other
I admire him more than the other still basically tonal composers that reached into our century (except for Mahler, of course). That wonderful opening of the 14th Symphony with the basson solo! I am not in a position to form anything except snap judgements and I would have to hear more, whole Symphonies. I wonder if, despite the indubital riches, hearing the same sort of thing going on and on might not become monotonous. And he truned out Symphonies as Haydn did. Alban Berg also had I think even more of a Pandora's box in him but in his orchestral pieces there is a greater crystallisation of an essential form.

Havergal is prolix, the other Brian is more essentialist.

Havergal sounds like Hope and Glory turned inside out; Ferneyhough - seems to me to have found a last corner of the brain that can still speak musically, free of traditional bagage.

I need hardly explain to people on this thread that the one composer is still tonal while the other isn't.

I was going to say, I dreaded the Te Deum that is 'threatened' in the notes for the Gothick Symphony, but I have just found a piece of it on youtube and was quite impressed, especially by the chromatic harmonies and lines after the first entry of the choir, but it also seems like a perfect piece on the stage while a Hitchcock drama is going on in and behind the scenes.

What a composer in the extracts I have heard! But it's the other Brian for me.

Best wishes