New Complexity: Brian Ferneyhough And Michael Finnissy
New Complexity is a term originating from the 1980s, mainly applied to composers looking for a "complex, multi-layered interplay of evolutionary processes occurring simultaneously within every dimension of the musical material.” New Complexity describes a dense, difficult and rigorously academic method to Classical Modern works which became known in the 1980s. The term is used with English composers such as Brian Ferneyhough and Michael Finnissy, who taught at Darmstadt Summer Courses produced the 'first wave' of New Complexity composers.
New Complexity compositions are atonal, highly abstract and inharmonious in sound, and are perhaps most well known for their use of extremely complex notation, which requires extreme skills from the performer. A composition from Brian Ferneyhough would have a distinct dynamic and articulation for every note, requiring the musician to use …show more content…
difficult techniques to perform the score. This, coupled with microtonality, complex textures, highly disjunct melodic contour, layered irrational rhythms, abrupt changes in texture, and so on, has caused some critics to attack New Complexity for its 'unperformability'.
The term New Complexity refers to compositions that have artistic features such as polyrhythms, microtonal pitch articulations, and rapid sequences of different performance techniques.
The term often refers to compositions that have music within different aspects of sound (pitch, rhythm, timbre, articulation, etc.) both separately and at the same time. this techniques adds dimensions of musical development. The term New Complexity applies to the works of late 20th century and early 21st century composers that employ the aforementioned features in their music such as Brian Ferneyhough, Michael Finnissy, James Dillon, and others.
New Complexity involves densely notated scores that approach the restrictions of standard notation, and also the restrictions of performers. The level of detail specified in these scores challenges the capabilities of performers to produce interpretations that completely represent all of the information present in the score. The struggle of a performer's attempt to interpret such demanding repertoire often serves as an intended dramatic element of these
works.
“Casually to subsume these in a "school" is to obscure this variety and to deflect attention to relatively trivial surface similarities among composers, such as a taste for elaborate rhythmic notation, or the fact of performative difficulty. Certainly, one could hardly confuse, even on the most desultory acquaintance, the sonic and philosophical worlds of, for example, Brian Ferneyhough, Michael Finnissy, Chris Dench, and Richard Barrett...Even the "shared characteristics" listed above function quite differently from composer to composer: to judge from his recording of English Country Tunes, Finnissy's notation encourages virtuosic display and improvisatory expansiveness in a manner similar to rubato in Chopin and Liszt, whereas Ferneyhough's notation, through the articulation of structure by bar-lines and the proliferation of nested rhythms (which Finnissy uses rarely), stimulates a very different kind of performative energy.”
New Complexity has expanded beyond the Darmstadt Courses and is now international., composers such as Richard Barrett, Chris Dench, James Dillon, Mark Andre, Joël-François Durand and Jason Eckardt, their works are performed by groups such as JACK Quartet, ELISION Ensemble, Arditti String Quartet, and more. Though often atonal, highly abstract, and dissonant in sound, New Complexity music is characterized by the techniques which require complex musical notation. This includes extended techniques, complex and often unstable textures, microtonality, highly disjunct melodic contour, complex layered rhythms, abrupt changes in texture, and so on. It is also characterized, in contradistinction to the music of the immediate post–World War II serialists, by the frequent reliance of its composers on poetic conceptions, very often implied in the titles of individual works and work-cycles.
The physical and mental challenges that performers have during the learning process of
New Complexity works are intimidating and difficult to the majority of musicians. The technical challenges have complicated rhythms, successful execution of extended techniques, management of fast successions of contrasting material, effective communication of complex musical structure, and the physical coordination and endurance required to produce a competent interpretation. The mental challenges involve the analysis of the musical architecture, prioritization of elements, compositional decision-making, patience with the rate of the learning process, and mental endurance in performance such as maintaining focus and engagement. These performance issues require substantial and organized preparation process. The most efficient approach to mastering this type of music. In an interview with James Boros, Brian Ferneyhough explains that in order to perform his music they must be committed to a lengthy preparation process that uses the technical and artistic depth of the work:
“It seems to me no contradiction in terms to presuppose a specific interpreter for whom a lengthy and intense involvement with the artistic and technical demands and assumptions of a particular composer or group of composers would be an essential prerequisite for adequate performance activity. That's the performer who's willing to spend six months or so really trying to penetrate to the roots of a style, to focus in on the mental development of the composer during the act of creation so as to be able to actively counterpoint this against his own personal learning and reproduction dynamic.”
The creation of the name "New Complexity" is created by Nigel Osborne, Harry Halbreich and Richard Toop, who wrote the article "Four Facets of the New Complexity”
The teaching efforts of Brian Ferneyhough and Michael Finnissy, at the Darmstädter Ferienkurse between 1982 and 1996, where Ferneyhough was in charge of the composition programme.
Bone Alphabet -
Schick's relationship with Bone Alphabet reveals a sympathetic approach to the highly complex notation employed by Ferneyhough. More importantly, however, Schick does not attempt to render a transparent relationship between score and performance through accuracy in all musical domains or view the score as a set of instructions: "Ironically, in a score which seems so rigorously determined certain idiosyncratic decisions on my part in the first few days of practice reveal a path through the thicket of Ferneyhough's notation that inevitably gives my interpretation of Bone Alphabet a wholly personal and rather intuitive aura."47 In giving up the need to "perfect" a piece before the premier, Schick is able to develop the piece over a longer time, he notes that after thirty- or-so performances he is "reminded of how different [his] mental conception of the piece
Bone Alphabet allows the performer to choose the instrumentation. The pitch of the work through differences in drum sizes. Within a rhythmically heavy music such as Bone Alphabet Schick focuses on the melodic aspects of the instrumentation.
The approach to learning and interpreting the piece revolves memorizing complex rhythms, and for some "cutting out each bar and gluing it on graph paper" to calculate the rhythms and memorizing each one individually. Three processes of simplification allow Schick to focus on projecting a melodic path from the mixture of complex rhythms. Working out the polyphonic lines and placing grids onto the score. Secondly, if the first approach does not work, then multiplying through adjusting the tempo. The third approach, involves casting one of the lines as a "strong foreground in nature against which other rhythmic lines act ornamentally”.
Ferneyhough's Etudes Transcendentales,is a song for soprano and chamber ensembles, shows many features found in New Complexity music. Being generally difficult to learn and perform, the pitch vocabulary makes use of microtones which are equal-tempered quarter tones. It contains tuplets of unusual ratios that have multiple layers. fast changes, from note to note, happen in dynamics, articulation, and playing technique, including techniques such as multiphonics on the oboe, glottal stops for the voice, and key-clicking for the flute. According to Richard Toop, the rhythm for the oboe part in the first song is almost totally determined by a strict system with five stages of complexity.
Redgate developed new techniques by using teeth with the reed. He admits such an approach might be seen as dangerous in performance, with the possibility of the note not sounding, the nature of the material allows for and even invites this sense of danger.
By 1997, the composers of New Complexity became international, Across North America, Europe, and Australia, with little or no connection with the Darmstadt courses, and with considerable different styles and techniques. This includes Blundenzer Tage from Austria
A movement that greatly influenced early music of Germany was Klaus K. Hübler. Hübler's music focused far less on the creation of elaborate pitch structures than did that of Ferneyhough or Finnissy, instead he created a polyphony of sound-producing actions for each instrument. For example, the cellist performs from a score with of three primary layers of action, each notated with independent rhythms: one for the left hand (fingerings) and two for the right hand (string changes and bow changes/dynamics/bow speed)
Modernism is a approach to the development in musical language that has occurred in the 20th century, reinterpreting older music, new ways of organizing and approaching harmonic, melodic, sonic, and rhythmic aspects of music, and changes in aesthetic worldviews in close relation to the larger identifiable period of modernism in the arts of the time.
The avant-garde is music that is experimental or innovative. Pushing the boundaries of what is accepted as normal music, for the most part culturally. The avant-garde is considered by some to be a hallmark of modernism, as distinct from postmodernism. Using unique or original elements to challenge audiences.
New complexity instruments -
This 3rd bridge instrument has six sets of chorused strings, and each string has independent tuning positions behind the bridge. The anchor points behind the bridge are fully adjustable with the maximum harmonic ratio being 1:3 and the smallest around 1:6. You can tune the notes behind the bridge to pretty much any scale you want. The harmonic sound is very full and consistent, not to mention controllable! Lots of sonic potential. Reso Harp
Reso-Harp, short for Resonant Harp Guitar, the latest creation from New Complexity. At its heart is a sustainer unit from Sustainiac, without which this design would not be possible. The sustainer pickup stimulates the inbuilt Harp with the ordinary guitar signal as the source, the result is blistering reverb, rich in harmonics. The Harp is tunable, so you can customize the key/sound of the resonant strings.
• Mark André (de) (France) • Joël-François Durand (France) • Jason Eckardt (USA) • James Erber (UK) • Matthias Pintscher (Germany) • Saman Samadi (Iran) • René Wohlhauser (Switzerland)
New Complexity compositions are atonal, highly abstract and inharmonious in sound, and are perhaps most well known for their use of extremely complex notation, which requires extreme skills from the performer. A composition from Brian Ferneyhough would have a distinct dynamic and articulation for every note, requiring the musician to use …show more content…
difficult techniques to perform the score. This, coupled with microtonality, complex textures, highly disjunct melodic contour, layered irrational rhythms, abrupt changes in texture, and so on, has caused some critics to attack New Complexity for its 'unperformability'.
The term New Complexity refers to compositions that have artistic features such as polyrhythms, microtonal pitch articulations, and rapid sequences of different performance techniques.
The term often refers to compositions that have music within different aspects of sound (pitch, rhythm, timbre, articulation, etc.) both separately and at the same time. this techniques adds dimensions of musical development. The term New Complexity applies to the works of late 20th century and early 21st century composers that employ the aforementioned features in their music such as Brian Ferneyhough, Michael Finnissy, James Dillon, and others.
New Complexity involves densely notated scores that approach the restrictions of standard notation, and also the restrictions of performers. The level of detail specified in these scores challenges the capabilities of performers to produce interpretations that completely represent all of the information present in the score. The struggle of a performer's attempt to interpret such demanding repertoire often serves as an intended dramatic element of these
works.
“Casually to subsume these in a "school" is to obscure this variety and to deflect attention to relatively trivial surface similarities among composers, such as a taste for elaborate rhythmic notation, or the fact of performative difficulty. Certainly, one could hardly confuse, even on the most desultory acquaintance, the sonic and philosophical worlds of, for example, Brian Ferneyhough, Michael Finnissy, Chris Dench, and Richard Barrett...Even the "shared characteristics" listed above function quite differently from composer to composer: to judge from his recording of English Country Tunes, Finnissy's notation encourages virtuosic display and improvisatory expansiveness in a manner similar to rubato in Chopin and Liszt, whereas Ferneyhough's notation, through the articulation of structure by bar-lines and the proliferation of nested rhythms (which Finnissy uses rarely), stimulates a very different kind of performative energy.”
New Complexity has expanded beyond the Darmstadt Courses and is now international., composers such as Richard Barrett, Chris Dench, James Dillon, Mark Andre, Joël-François Durand and Jason Eckardt, their works are performed by groups such as JACK Quartet, ELISION Ensemble, Arditti String Quartet, and more. Though often atonal, highly abstract, and dissonant in sound, New Complexity music is characterized by the techniques which require complex musical notation. This includes extended techniques, complex and often unstable textures, microtonality, highly disjunct melodic contour, complex layered rhythms, abrupt changes in texture, and so on. It is also characterized, in contradistinction to the music of the immediate post–World War II serialists, by the frequent reliance of its composers on poetic conceptions, very often implied in the titles of individual works and work-cycles.
The physical and mental challenges that performers have during the learning process of
New Complexity works are intimidating and difficult to the majority of musicians. The technical challenges have complicated rhythms, successful execution of extended techniques, management of fast successions of contrasting material, effective communication of complex musical structure, and the physical coordination and endurance required to produce a competent interpretation. The mental challenges involve the analysis of the musical architecture, prioritization of elements, compositional decision-making, patience with the rate of the learning process, and mental endurance in performance such as maintaining focus and engagement. These performance issues require substantial and organized preparation process. The most efficient approach to mastering this type of music. In an interview with James Boros, Brian Ferneyhough explains that in order to perform his music they must be committed to a lengthy preparation process that uses the technical and artistic depth of the work:
“It seems to me no contradiction in terms to presuppose a specific interpreter for whom a lengthy and intense involvement with the artistic and technical demands and assumptions of a particular composer or group of composers would be an essential prerequisite for adequate performance activity. That's the performer who's willing to spend six months or so really trying to penetrate to the roots of a style, to focus in on the mental development of the composer during the act of creation so as to be able to actively counterpoint this against his own personal learning and reproduction dynamic.”
The creation of the name "New Complexity" is created by Nigel Osborne, Harry Halbreich and Richard Toop, who wrote the article "Four Facets of the New Complexity”
The teaching efforts of Brian Ferneyhough and Michael Finnissy, at the Darmstädter Ferienkurse between 1982 and 1996, where Ferneyhough was in charge of the composition programme.
Bone Alphabet -
Schick's relationship with Bone Alphabet reveals a sympathetic approach to the highly complex notation employed by Ferneyhough. More importantly, however, Schick does not attempt to render a transparent relationship between score and performance through accuracy in all musical domains or view the score as a set of instructions: "Ironically, in a score which seems so rigorously determined certain idiosyncratic decisions on my part in the first few days of practice reveal a path through the thicket of Ferneyhough's notation that inevitably gives my interpretation of Bone Alphabet a wholly personal and rather intuitive aura."47 In giving up the need to "perfect" a piece before the premier, Schick is able to develop the piece over a longer time, he notes that after thirty- or-so performances he is "reminded of how different [his] mental conception of the piece
Bone Alphabet allows the performer to choose the instrumentation. The pitch of the work through differences in drum sizes. Within a rhythmically heavy music such as Bone Alphabet Schick focuses on the melodic aspects of the instrumentation.
The approach to learning and interpreting the piece revolves memorizing complex rhythms, and for some "cutting out each bar and gluing it on graph paper" to calculate the rhythms and memorizing each one individually. Three processes of simplification allow Schick to focus on projecting a melodic path from the mixture of complex rhythms. Working out the polyphonic lines and placing grids onto the score. Secondly, if the first approach does not work, then multiplying through adjusting the tempo. The third approach, involves casting one of the lines as a "strong foreground in nature against which other rhythmic lines act ornamentally”.
Ferneyhough's Etudes Transcendentales,is a song for soprano and chamber ensembles, shows many features found in New Complexity music. Being generally difficult to learn and perform, the pitch vocabulary makes use of microtones which are equal-tempered quarter tones. It contains tuplets of unusual ratios that have multiple layers. fast changes, from note to note, happen in dynamics, articulation, and playing technique, including techniques such as multiphonics on the oboe, glottal stops for the voice, and key-clicking for the flute. According to Richard Toop, the rhythm for the oboe part in the first song is almost totally determined by a strict system with five stages of complexity.
Redgate developed new techniques by using teeth with the reed. He admits such an approach might be seen as dangerous in performance, with the possibility of the note not sounding, the nature of the material allows for and even invites this sense of danger.
By 1997, the composers of New Complexity became international, Across North America, Europe, and Australia, with little or no connection with the Darmstadt courses, and with considerable different styles and techniques. This includes Blundenzer Tage from Austria
A movement that greatly influenced early music of Germany was Klaus K. Hübler. Hübler's music focused far less on the creation of elaborate pitch structures than did that of Ferneyhough or Finnissy, instead he created a polyphony of sound-producing actions for each instrument. For example, the cellist performs from a score with of three primary layers of action, each notated with independent rhythms: one for the left hand (fingerings) and two for the right hand (string changes and bow changes/dynamics/bow speed)
Modernism is a approach to the development in musical language that has occurred in the 20th century, reinterpreting older music, new ways of organizing and approaching harmonic, melodic, sonic, and rhythmic aspects of music, and changes in aesthetic worldviews in close relation to the larger identifiable period of modernism in the arts of the time.
The avant-garde is music that is experimental or innovative. Pushing the boundaries of what is accepted as normal music, for the most part culturally. The avant-garde is considered by some to be a hallmark of modernism, as distinct from postmodernism. Using unique or original elements to challenge audiences.
New complexity instruments -
This 3rd bridge instrument has six sets of chorused strings, and each string has independent tuning positions behind the bridge. The anchor points behind the bridge are fully adjustable with the maximum harmonic ratio being 1:3 and the smallest around 1:6. You can tune the notes behind the bridge to pretty much any scale you want. The harmonic sound is very full and consistent, not to mention controllable! Lots of sonic potential. Reso Harp
Reso-Harp, short for Resonant Harp Guitar, the latest creation from New Complexity. At its heart is a sustainer unit from Sustainiac, without which this design would not be possible. The sustainer pickup stimulates the inbuilt Harp with the ordinary guitar signal as the source, the result is blistering reverb, rich in harmonics. The Harp is tunable, so you can customize the key/sound of the resonant strings.
• Mark André (de) (France) • Joël-François Durand (France) • Jason Eckardt (USA) • James Erber (UK) • Matthias Pintscher (Germany) • Saman Samadi (Iran) • René Wohlhauser (Switzerland)