Brian Ferneyhough - Funérailles I & II (1969-80) for seven strings and harp скачать в хорошем качестве

Brian Ferneyhough - Funérailles I & II (1969-80) for seven strings and harp

Funérailles I & II (1969-80) for seven strings and harp Composer: Brian Ferneyhough (b. 1943) Performers: Arditti String Quartet; ensemble recherche, dir. Lucas Vis 0:00 Funérailles I 11:10 Funérailles II _________________________________________________________________________________ " 'A ceremony taking place behind a curtain or far away': thus Ferneyhough on the emotional setting for these two works composed between 1969 and 1980, although the title is deceptive because this music is not intended to be funereal in character, nor was, the composer setting out to write anything programmatic. Rather, Ferneyhough appears bent on delving deeper into his own compositional abilities and approaches and on discovering what he could do with sound material structured like a ritual, not simply as regards its organization but principally the emotional response which it can draw. And so it might be said that Funerailles is not so much music for a rite as the anatomy of a rite... Its overall pace is undoubtedly slow yet there are often also quick sections suggesting the speed which enables the memory to recall and put together events which actually occurred at different times. This process builds up emotion through the contrasts between memories and the present. Various times are drawn together in a similar manner during a rite when the non-present becomes the here and now and the present contains all variants of past and future. The uniform, indeed monotonous, timbre of the instrumental lineup plunges the listener into a soundworld where everything is hazy and opaque and any notion of becoming in this music is achieved through slashing that soundworld to pieces and putting it back together rather than through any changes in instrumental colour. Activity takes place below the surface and sounds swell as the result of goings-on within. The lineup calls for seven strings divided into a trio of violin, viola and cello and a quartet of violin, viola, cello and double-bass plus a harp. The latter both maintains its own identity and also holds the strings together. Being a plucked instrument, the technique required is similar to the strings when they are played pizzicato, although the harp produces a softer, more rounded tone, hence Fernyhough's use of it here to strengthen the pizzicato in the strings and to take that sound somewhere else. Certainly, during the first part of Funerailles I what the harp plays is so similar in sound to the strings that it is virtually indistin-guishable. Neither is this accidental, because the score has a specific demand by the composer for the performer to play in this manner. Funerailles I has no real separate sections, being a continuum in which the sound is at times dense and at others more dilated. The dynamics are generally piano, the strings are muted and both these characteristics reinforce the idea of distance intended by Ferneyhough. This work has a dense, swollen sound as though bristling with activity on the inside yet unable to let it out, its perennial instability the result of being caught between moving forward and falling back. Fragmented melody lines fail in their attempts to rise above the thick web of polyphony, the latter conjuring up images of molecular particles hurtling around in subatomic worlds. [...] Funerailles I may thus be seen as the process by which sound material is subjected to a continuous effort to hold it in check. Composed some three years after Funerailles I, II is a sort of commentary on it or recomposition. Ferneyhough has stated that II is neither a wholly new work nor a second movement of I. The com-poser's strategy is to reorganize his material - and this process of reorganization is variable in nature and has an interesting effect on the music - within a framework, i.e. Funerailles I. II appears to shine a light into what might be termed the nooks and crannies of I and where I was intended to outline a ritual, the purpose of II is to expose what lay hidden in shadow by subjecting the sound material to the equivalent of a process of vivisection. In purely sonic terms, the tension seems to have slackened somewhat and the material feels less tightly-knit. In I, the sounds appeared to bun-dle themselves up nervously whereas in II they resemble well-rounded curves, almost like sine waves, although the sensation remains that it would take little for them to close the circle and shut themselves up once more. The greater sense of openess about the sound also gives the harp more room, not simply acoustically but also in its instrumental role, almost to the extent that it sounds like it is taking the lead in a concerto. [...]" ~Matteo Pennese (translated by Nicholas Boini) Source: CD booklet _________________________________________________________________ For education, promotion and entertainment purposes only. If you have any copyrights issue, please write to unpetitabreuvoir(at)gmail.com and I will delete this video.