Recently I’ve gotten pretty interested in some of Brian Ferneyhough’s ideas about music, especially what he has to say about his use of rhythm, duration and time. I have misgivings about a lot of his work, but I’ve become fond of Bone Alphabet, a piece for seven percussion instruments of indeterminate sound where adjacent instruments must not be of the same family. There’s an article by Steven Schick about the process of learning Bone Alphabet, which took him a maybe-not-totally-justifiable nine months. To get it right he cut up the score and pasted it on to graph paper so he could see the rhythms more clearly, did quite a bit of math to understand the polyrhythms, memorized stickings measure by measure, and other such feats of dedication and devotion. The result was, interestingly, a feeling of being deeply situated within his body. He talks quite a bit about the importance of bodily movement to the piece, mentioning at one point that an audio recording alone would not really convey the work. Here’s a good excerpt (Schick 1994):
My method of actually learning the piece involved first cutting out each bar and gluing it on graph paper so that I could better calculate rhythmical relationships. Then I made all decisions regarding sticking and mallet choice and memorized them before going on to the next measure. The advantage to this approach was that, by memorizing as the first and not the last step in the process, I could more quickly embed the material I was learning in the realm of physical gesture. As a result, from the first instant the piece became a theatrical arena where physical gesture was not the simple by-product of performance, but an integral part of a growing interpretive point of view. The instrument became a kind of stage for the enactment of, in Ferneyhough’s words, “a theatre of the body.”
Ross Karre has recorded his interpretation of Bone Alphabet and put it on YouTube. Unfortunately embedding is disabled, so to view it you’ll have to follow these links:
And, finally, a couple of quotes from Ferneyhough to round this all out. From his essay Duration and rhythm as compositional resources:
Whilst the impulse-structure and its audibility are clearly variably perceptible in concrete compositional situations, I maintain that enough of a correspondence is maintained in the middle to long term to enable the flow of space/density ratios demonstrated capable of carrying the main weight of formal organization. According to this principle, degrees of compression, distortion, convergence or mutual interference are calculable in respect of the degree to which the sense of clock time is supported or subverted by the specific tactility of impulse density setting the ‘inner clock’ of a particular metric space.
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As always in the discussion of matters artistic, it is not the clear-cut cases which prove most pertinent, but the ill-defined and fluctuating ‘grey zones’ where a given rhythmic phenomenon may be called on to assume multiple functional roles.
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