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Brian Ferneyhough: La chute d’Icare (1988)

From the album La chute d’Icare, Superscription, Intermedio alla Ciaccona, etc.

One of the most successful and notorious composers working in an unapologetically modernist idiom in the second half of the 20th century, Brian Ferneyhough is a British composer who has lived in California since 1987.  

Ferneyhough’s intention is to write scores of such extreme complexity that they are, in many cases, literally unperformable.  The perfect realization of the notes as written becomes an impossible ideal which the musician can at best asymptotically approach.  Playing this music thus becomes a sort of self-abnegating spiritual exercise, in the course of which the performer is likely to become, in the composer’s words, “lost in the forest of his own imperfections.” (Ferneyhough’s scores, which resemble musical labyrinths, remind one of the German word for a maze: Irrgarten, literally ”garden of error.”)  This all sounds rather sadistic, but musicians who have dedicated themselves to the interpretation of Ferneyhough’s work have attested to the exhilaration that comes with each new attempt: these pieces can never be “mastered,” which means they always present new challenges to the intrepid performer.

The title of this work, meaning “The Fall of Icarus,” was taken from a rather strange 16th-century painting by Pieter Brueghel.  La chute d’Icare can be heard as a relatively rare example of modernist program music, with the clarinet part representing the erratic and ultimately doomed flight of Icarus.  To my ears, in spite of its fearful complexity this music has a verve and playfulness far more sincere than that of much other, simpler music which also aspires to these ideals.

June 16, 2010, 8:46am