michael finnissy

I find both his music and his ideas fascinating. (And furthermore, I think they're fascinating for the same reasons -- meaning, his ideas actually come across in the music.)

A big part of his work deals with plurality. a bit like Charles Ives. There are numerous Finnissy pieces which are woven from chopped-up and distorted fragments of existing music. (In the Gershwin Arrangements, things stay relatively intact and the source material is easily recognizable. In the Verdi Transcriptions, you only occasionally catch a phrase from the source -- but the whole thing sounds grand and operatic. The Gershwin arrangements are harder to find these days, unfortunately, as the Gershwin estate is trying to suppress them. A friend of mine who plays them live prints something else in the program and then announces them from the stage.)

He has the most beautiful hand-written scores in the entirety of music history, incidentally.

Some recommendations:

I'll second "red earth"

Lots of the piano music is dazzling. Finnissy himself is an extraordinary pianist, although he plays less now that a younger generation of performers has taken up his work. If you can find his performance of English Country Tunes, it's worth hunting for (on Et Cetera, surely out of print by now). Etched with Bright Sunlight is my favorite of all the solo piano works -- mostly high-register piano

Another Et Cetera disc (also out of print, I'd guess) includes his fantastic string trio. Lots of densely-packed pitch spaces -- e.g. swarms of notes compressed into the space of a minor third. It's a BIG piece but never seems long, just beautifully paced.

The Sacred Motets are gorgeous and have been very nicely recorded on the Metier label, which has issued more Finnissy than any other label as far as I know. And there are numerous pieces which explore the sounds and tuning and rhythmic systems of various non-Western musical traditions; I'm not thinking of a lot titles at the moment but I've enjoyed some of this stuff. Well, I think Red Earth is sort of in this category -- wasn't it inspired by Finnissy's contact with music of Aboriginal Australia?

There are a few duds. I heard a saxophone quartet once that attempted to undo the mythology that surrounds The Great Classical Composers by creating a collage that included mundane riffs and everyday actions such as tooth-brushing and hair-combing. The idea -- playing with the political charges carried by the documents of musical history -- was typically Finnissy, but in practice it just sounded ... stupid.

And some of the piano music is, well, not quite empty virtuosity, but still so "flashy" that it's not really to my taste.

In between the greats and the duds? Finnissy can be very patient with whatever ideas and processes guide a piece -- he doesn't particularly feel a need to intervene and dress things up. So a lot of pieces (some of the string quartet music, for instance) just kind of take their time and go their own way and they can be fascinating but they don't always have a lot of surface appeal. Nothing wrong with that, but it's not the stuff I find myself wanting to come back to time and time again. (Chris Dench, incidentally, is another composer with this "let it be" attitude; but he tends to set up crazier systems and get more compelling results, IMO.)

I'll have to give Red Earth another listen, with the volume up; haven't heard it or thought about it in a long time. Cheers for starting the thread!

... a bit like Stockhausen's Klavierstucke IX, but Finnissy explores the gentle side as well as the aggressive side of this resource.

'A friend of mine who plays them live prints something else in the program and then announces them from the stage'

this is classic.

'wasn't it inspired by Finnissy's contact with music of Aboriginal Australia?'

yes the aboriginal didjeridu makes an appearance and I like it a lot.

another thing about 'red earth' is Ian Pace's lovely notes (have you heard finnisy's 'history of photography in sound'?).

Parts of it, but not the whole 5 hours or however long it is.

There's a book about Finnissy's music that Ian Pace co-edited, called Uncommon Ground (after the title of a Finnissy song cycle about AIDS). It's a compilation of chapters by different authors and kind of uneven, as these things tend to be. But interesting.

Oh, and here's a link to a page with a couple of extracts from Finnissy's musical manuscript, so you can see for yourself how extraordinary it is:

http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://fuwatm.hp.infoseek.co.jp/finnissy_strauss.gif&imgrefurl=http://homepage1.nifty.com/iberia/score_finnissy.htm&h=719&w=554&sz=50&tbnid=i0Ibzz2ckZQJ:&tbnh=139&tbnw=107&start=24&prev=/images%3Fq%3D%2522michael%2Bfinnissy%2522%26start%3D20%26hl%3Den%26lr%3D%26sa%3DN

Looks like there's an .mp3 excerpt or two as well, didn't check them out from here at work through...

on the hunt for red earth / sacred motets. thanks paul and julio.

(Well, the "warning" is just that the Motets won't give you a sense of how Finnissy typically sounds.)

just wanted to expand on the perc comment a bit: I sometimes to them in orchestral pieces and they sound like a flat attempt at colour. My imaptience toward some of it is prob to do with exposure to free jazz, which sounds so more integral in a group set. Finnissy takes care with it as with everything else.

who knows, I may do a thread abt james dillon one of these days :-)

I think you've hit on the most appealing thing, which is all the effective percussion writing. And yes, the really explosive interjections about halfway through and again near the end are quite powerful. I assume that's the "thunder" you're referring to, although there's a lot of menacing rumbles as well.

In fact the really loud bits are almost too explosive to seem like thunder. Cannon shots? (Not literally, but that's what they evoke.) Maybe I haven't experienced the right sort of storm. Anyway, it's cool how in both of these loud spots the percussion intrudes on especialy delicate stuff -- an exchange between two solo instruments the first time (flute and violin if I remember right) and a viola solo the second. I think it's the way this music draws you in that makes the subsequent explosions so hair-raising.

And to correct the title of a work I mentioned twice above (right words, wrong order): Etched Bright with Sunlight. Rhymes that way.

In other news I picked up 'ik(s)land[s]', the new chris dench disc (ELISON, NMC). Anyone heard this? again this will take its time but 'funk', his homage to coltrane's 'interstellar space' was the one that left the strongest impression. He pulls it off, i think.

I can't decide if it's intriguing or vaguely embarrassing that Dench cites Thomas Dolby's "Hyperactive" as one of the influence to be heard in Funk. (Well, I kind of like that Dolby track too.)

Interesting idea putting multiple performances of a piece onto the same disc, when the piece has significantly variable dimensions from one playing to the next. I can think of a few CDs that do this: Jeffrey Swann's recording of the Third Piano Sonata by Boulez (two renditions, with a Wuorinen sonata sandwiched in between), two versions of Feldman's Two Pieces For Clarinet and String Quartet (1961) on a Hat Art CD, I'm sure there are others.

just found the dolby track (a remix of it anyway) -- not bad, it warms my heart he likes stuff from the 80s synth 'glory years'.

Finnissy gives an excellent intro on it.

Ian Pace and Finnissy on their collaboration down the years:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/modernmuses

Want to be ill nd skip work to see this:

http://www.city.ac.uk/events/2016/february/ian-pace-piano

listening to the Gershwin arrangements now -- I guess they're not as hard to come by as they were when this thread was new, nineteen years ago -- they are interesting, and good, but I'm also not sure how to take them -- at times they sound like they want to divorce themselves from jazz, an error imo, but then some passages retain the swing that's an indispensable (imo) aspect of Gershwin. it reminds me of that Prokofiev sonata that sounds like it's quoting "American in Paris."

I'd like to understand Finnissy's music better, there's a lot of activity in these arrangements, it feels very bingeworthy to me