A ghost spider stalks around on a pillow full of hotly held breath, poking gaps in the cloud with its little legs until puffs of fierce air whistles out – is that how to describe Brian Ferneyhough's solo flute virtuoso piece “Cassandra's Dream Song” (1970)?

Dietmar Dath

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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Two sheets of text that obligate a lung and two hands to play a few hard-to-read lines of music in a fixed order and, on top of that, to cross or cut all sorts of other material that is also notated there: This composer is so hard on individuals, but ensembles are fine not much better for him;

as evidenced by the stage opus “Shadowtime”, which premiered in Munich in 2004 and abducted the conceptual poet Walter Benjamin from the death trap of his final hours.

Hardly has the first scene defined the framework of historical events, which is to be left in the following, when the angel of history (whose wings are beating a guitar) is told his difficult walk in broad spurts, which stirs up a snowstorm swarm of musical ideas that no conductor can conduct could ever catch again.

He himself declared some of the actions that Ferneyhough ordered in his sound literature to be impracticable;

there is interference between options, making the ears into interferometers when listening, living sensors of distance, akin to the theatrical distinction between the art of language (say, the text of Shakespeare's Hamlet) and the art of speaking (say, David Tennant in the Hamlet role).

Only those who play or listen to Ferneyhough in the knowledge of the insurmountable limitations of textual realization can do him aesthetic justice.

But it is also part of this art that it never settles completely in the aesthetic, but calls into extra-artistic forms of the intelligible like a voice into an echo channel.

Tensions between sheet music and performance

She thus stimulates criticism and research, both of which, once they are up to the task, can quickly take on the character of art, such as the beautiful study by Pavlos Antoniadis and Frédéric Bevilacqua from 2016, which compares a Ferneyhough piano piece with the illuminate the text with recording data and gestural, machine-recorded performance details as well as other parameter settings of the audience's attention control so meticulously that in the end one thinks one recognizes the snapshot of reverberation rooms in which one has to find out not only in the concert hall, but also at the mobile or fixed workplace, whether For example, computer programs actually still execute human commands or have long been automatic command outputs that instruct people to forget their names,because they do not meet the security standards for passwords.

Sound can deal with such things if it takes the unity of the difference between playing and storing seriously, be it in the form of tensions between sheet music and performance, be it in the pinch of hardware requirements for MIDI-capable modules or in the form of a graphic Idioms like Ferneyhough's colleague Cornelius Cardew, who eventually found ditties that even the most jaded memory can remember, but originally came from the same British conservatory world that brought up Ferneyhough.

At the end of his life, Cardew showed some courtesy to the dilettantism of amateur music, while Ferneyhough preferred to demand and promote the greatest efforts from professionals, which were accepted as insufficient from the outset.

If you told him that nobody could play that,

"Bulkyness" is modernity's ambiguous harping on a very old knowledge of art that, if necessary, if banality threatens it, it can defend itself against all attempts by executive and representative, critical and scientific powers to usurp the helm, which freely to seems to twist until one realizes that the material disciplines itself even if one can only give it a formal idea.

In extreme cases, music wants to experience written tones as the embodiment of thought that is necessary in nature, instead of just as the socially obligatory shell of a mood.

At the end of the 1960s and beginning of the 1970s, when Ferneyhough laid the foundations for a school in Amsterdam and Basel, which critics and musicologists soon called "new complexity", mathematics, thanks to Ray Solomonoff, Gregory Chaitin and Andrei Kolmogorov, was just beginning to find a new exact measure of the Complexes: The complexity of an object has now been defined as the length of the shortest program that can generate that object in a given calculus engine.

A little later, when Ferneyhough was lecturing in Freiburg, coloring in the blank areas of his vision, the mathematician Judea Pearl was busy teaching electronic automata what “probability” is.

Meanwhile, Pearl says he wanted to teach them causality, that what was accomplished was actually only an approximation, which Big Data found its satisfaction for problematic reasons.

The computer music by Iannis Xenakis says that consistency wants to be more than stochastic plausibility.

In the second voice of the epochal antiphonal song about a core question of engineered human skill, Brian Ferneyhough's complete works present the appropriate idea that complexity wants to be more than economy in coding.

This Monday, its creator will be eighty years old.