Brian Ferneyhough's String Trio: Analysis 

A new Andreyev analysis means it's gonna be an ok day.

Bravo! It is rare to find composition information of this caliber in the format of a video talk. It is appreciated.

I have been waiting to find a channel just like yours. Thank you.

Thank you for distilling a complex aesthetic for us lay people; it is very much appreciated. I was struck by your thoughts ~4:20ff on the inability to be perfectly accurate when playing Ferneyhough, and the resultant need on the part of a performer to synthesize or emphasize different aspects. The generation of "new perceptive spaces" reminds me of Wordsworth's comments that a poet must "create the taste by which he shall be appreciated." Thanks for taking the time to put this together. The quality and density of the analysis deserves much more exposure in this medium. Hopefully the channel grows!

i'm glad you're analyzing Ferneyhough's music, i've never understood it very well

Hey Samuel - wonderful video! You mentioned a book during your analysis and I missed the name of it and sifted through the comments to see if anyone else had asked. I would love to get my hands on a copy. Thanks so much for this video. Ferneyhough's music is so wonderfully brilliant and not explored enough, in my opinion, in the theory universe.

"it's a complexity that comes from the mutual interaction & interference of different strands... you might have 3 or 4 different materials going on in a piece, they're evolving at different speeds & in different directions at the same time, and so while any one of these individual lines might be fairly straightforward, what happens is he crashes them into each other" -- this could easily describe Frownland

Thank you so much for this! Wonderful to hear such a lucid description of his compositional approach. Although it's incredible to hear him talking about his own work, it's often difficult to know exactly what he's referring to in terms of his processes, especially when it comes to how they're implemented and developed in open music. His use of language in his writing and in conversation is just as fascinating and complex as his music, but often hard to grasp. Your channel and videos are inspiring and I deeply appreciate what you're doing. Thanks again.

Nice introduction to OpenMusic and Ferneyhough, always wandered how the heck he comes up with all that rhythms. A great inspiration for my composing process!

Thanks for this. I appreciate your clarity. Really helpful.

A good Christmas present. I have admired Ferneyhough for some time. Sometimes, with such difficult music I sit at some distance from the loudspeakers and just let the sounds speak for themselves like crazy, funny creatures beating and scrambling at my window pane but then one needs to return to analysis. I can imagine how the bombed city affected him but like other composers, he is reflecting on a shattered world.

Thanks again for a great analysis. I might even grow to like Ferneyhough one day... I would love to hear your analysis of women composers too, especially of Gubaidulina, Chaya Czernovin and Saariaho

Thank you very much for you work! Great topics, exellent explanations and presentation!

Great video. I'm much more open to this music because of your analysis videos. Thanks!

Absolutely spectacular analysis as always; it really changes my opinion of Ferneyhough's music from being a straitjacket to performers, forcing them into certain rhythmic and tonal atmospheres that cannot differ between performances, to a music whose incredible variety and humor coalesce in the formal impossibility of an accurate concert. On a completely separate note, you mentioned that you were writing a cantata for voice and ensemble and had recently completed Iridescent Notations (to which I hope to hear a recording of or, if the stars aline, a performance in concert). Whenever I consider writing a vocal work with any sort of modernistic aesthetic, I always think of Elliott Carter and sometimes feel uncomfortable writing in a style that relates to Carter, as I believe his settings of the voice to be the perfect combination of formal and emotional structures, and my desire to reflect Carter's "perfected" language makes it difficult to produce a piece that I think is of a worthy standard as I use a borrowed artifact. Therefore, do you ever feel like you are constrained in writing in a particular genre as there is a sort of "shadow" that hovers over it by a composer whose influence on your own thinking makes it difficult not to imitate?

Great as always! you should do more about patchwork!

Excellent, thats my sunday morning sorted - thank you

Such a wonderful youtube and your analysis...

Wow ! The nested tuplet rhythms kills me ! What a challenge now I'm falling into Ferneyhough's world . My music will be changing in ways I might not ever have come up with ! I knew there had to be some type of systemization behind all that notation and performance direction on page . Idea of intervention disrupting the music : Ifine idea . Now I'm gonna try this ! I can't believe Ferneyhough has been in the U.S. all this time . it's taken me so long to get to his music . I loved the way it looks on the page when I first saw it 25 years ago but didn't know what I was listening to . Now because of Architecture , film theory and some ideas in physics ( I know very little technically ) I get and care very much about what he explores and gives us !

RU-vid needs more people like you. And it also needs a Galina Ustvolskaya explanation video.:-)

hello .im taking advantage of this nice video on ferneyhough to ask you if its possible for you in the futur to do a video on nested rythms? thx

Excellent clear and concise explanation of the construction of some very esoteric music and how to approach it. Nice explanation of OpenMusic too, been trying to use graphs and grids to analyse a friend's art to generate compositional form, and each time I return to it I end up revising something about my method (which gets in the way of the actual act of writing music) - this program seems like it could be a perfect time-saver on that front. Saw Ferneyhough in November at HCMF, where he did a talk along with James Dillon, and then later had a performance with Ensemble Modern (which made novel but beautiful use of steel drums). Have definitely had worse evenings than that one.

I love this guy and his music too . Ferneyhough ,Finnissy and the others ! Unbelievable music !

Thanks! Amazing.

Hello! I am a composer from Japan. Your analysis and your thought on Contemporary music is amazing! I was wondering if I could add Chinese subtitles to your videos and repost them on a Chinese content-sharing website Bilibili? Please let me know if you would be comfortable with this. Thank you!

Very informative and analytical. I would very much like to hear your analysis of works by other "complexity" composers, namely Chris Dench or James Dillon...

We could get the same effect that Ferneyhough accomplishes by playing-say- Bartok on your PC, Shostakovitch on your HiFi, Stravinsky on your radio and Ligeti on an MP3 player...simultaneously.

Thank you so much

This is a wonderfully illuminating and demystifying video! As for the paucity of 20th century string trios, I particularly enjoy Jean Cras' String Trio. It has kind of a rustic feel. Also you should check out Akira Nishimura's String quartet no 2 (the score is on youtube) -- maybe I'm over reaching but I can hear Bartok, Penderecki, and Radulescu in it.

I love your channel, Samuel! One small bone to pick: I don't understand why one would notate the first rhythmic variation (A) with nested tuplets. Only single-tuplets are necessary (for beats 1 and 2, 3:2 and 9:4, resp). The "6" can just be written as a half note. Note: Variation E is not written with any tuplets.

Bravo!

so, in the end, ferneyhough does very simple things, and gives all the real work to a) the computer, b) the performer, c) the listener. it would be far better if he just wrote all this by himself during several weeks, rather than just arranging the complex results of simple thoughts. this basic rhythmic permutations are interesting, but it would be great to actually hear them and their relation to each other in a more simple, accessible way.

Wow! Thanks!

Fantastic as always, thanks for making this so detailed yet accessible. What is the title of the book you hold up during the polyrhythmic analysis section?

Any information about where the harmonic structure for the chords in the 3rd intervention come from? Are they related to the harmonic field of the viola or are they generated through some other processes in Patchwork?

Thanks for this! Do you have any plans to do Arvo Pärt or Rachmaninoff analysis?

Thanks for your video! Just a couple of observations. I think in the rhythmic trees are missing some brackets and 'mesto' does not signify exactly 'melancholic' in italian, it is an emotional state that has to do more with affliction with resignation than melancholy.

Thank you! I allways avoided Ferneyhough because I cant pronounce his last name.

Can you do a video on Ben Johnson's quartets?

Great video. Just wanted to ask, if you know how were the rests determined?

I really enjoy your channel, Samuel. Have you checked out Common Music, written in LISP?

Maybe a bit nitpicky, but in the section on nested tuplets, shouldn't the two thirty-second notes before beat four be a thirty-second note quintuplet followed by a dotted thirty-second note quintuplet?

Wonderful video!!!! Just out of curiosity, what’s the outro music?

Thanks for your analysis. Please, could you write down the name of the book and the article where you got the information about the rhythmic procedures?

Greeeeeat!!

This encourages me to attack this piece this year, thank you so much !!!

You're discussion of this trio is much more interesting than the piece itself.

You might be interested in Russo-Canadian composer Nikolai Korndorf's String Trio - titled "In Honour of Alfred Schnittke (AGSCH) , Trio for Violin, Viola, and Cello" . I'm sure that A-S-G-C-H is some sort of musical cryptogram that is central to the work. It has some rustic, microtonal, folky, drony, and minimalistic vibes to it. The recording is on RU-vid, of course. You make awesome videos! - All The best.

How can anyone feel these complex rhythms and play them on an instrument, let alone in an ensemble? I can't get my head around that...

This is great, Thank you! Can anyone point me to the book Mr Andreyev refers to 29.30 ish?

It would be good to cite the articles from which you drew upon, for the research that went into making this video.

It sounds like everything was speeded up like a tape recording. Wonder what it sounds like slowed down?

I can understand how that guy composed music, but i don't understand the purpose of it, what mindset you should have to appreciate it and for how long you have to learn music to understand its structure by just listening. This kind of music isn't very complex in mathematical sense, but its too obscure to my ear.

Hi Samuel, You mention towards the end of the video that those who listen to Ferneyhough's music will be struck by the sensuality and physicality of the music. This is coincidentally something that I have been focusing on immensely recently, and I wanted to ask of your opinion of this supposition: I think that, at the very least, all music can/should be appreciated for it's physicality/sensuality. Obviously this isn't to say that the only way to listen/appreciate music should be for its physicality/sensuality, but I do think that it acts as a crucial foundation for any given piece of music. With this, one could hypothetically listen to and appreciate any given piece of music despite what it is and who it was composed by. This isn't to say that the appreciation of the piece/s that one might listen to will be appreciated for what it ought to be, (appreciating a piece by Mozart should be appreciated for different reasons that of a piece by Ferneyhough), however I think that every piece of music could be appreciated through its physicality and sensuality (and of course, there can be various opinions/definitions that people may pose on what exactly constitutes as 'sensuality' and 'physicality', but lets use the example you gave about Ferneyhough as I believe the same thing.) I would be interested to hear what you would have to say (I would be interested to discover music that you might think that cannot/should not be interpreted in such a way), since it is incredible to have a committed and conscientious lecturer/musicologist/composer on youtube to post interesting and insightful videos :) Thanks!

Inventions--Cool.

". . . the inability to be perfectly accurate" - I wonder if BF would condone/encourage improvising around the written score during rehearsals, before honing the sections for performance. In which case the trio members would have the tapes/cameras running! Very grateful for this, Samuel!

I don't understand why you would say you can't fit 12 notes in 4 beats? Instead of writing 12:8 you could just have triplets every beat. Considering that the second half of A is half the length of the bar, the awkward dotted half would just turn into a half note. The first two notes of the bar are a quarter of the bar so that's just an eight note plus a quarter in a triplet. Then in the third beat you can still keep this overly complex 9:6 which basically almost the same as writing two eight notes with a gracenote before the second note but sluring it to that note so it will be played a bit earlier... Still nice analysis though

But when does anyones music sound as unusual as it looks . I've long wanted to put some pages of the Finnissey's music on my wall . Now ,I think this String Quintet deserves that action . hese curlies , dots, numbers and all manner of formalisms ae great non-painted visual works full of information that an only be decoded by specially skilled musicians . Like non-artists see Kline ,Motherwell rothko ,Rheinhardt differently than the artists themselves would .

Shouldn't the two demi-semi-quavers (32nd notes) in example E be quintuplets or is that just too short a note value for it to matter?

Recent works sound like neoclassical works. why is that?

It's 3am and I don't know if I just watched a music lecture or a maths lecture

I want to ask Ferneyhough why, but he'll probably respond with "why not?" and that's valid.

i think its pronounced FerneyHUFF. but i could be wrong. my friend is a Ferneyhough and he pronounces it HUFF!

To me, listening to this string trio is like traversing a snowstorm. It's cold, vaguely irritating, and completely homogeneous in texture. There's beauty there, but only if you quite literally scrutinize each snowflake (or measure of music) under a microscope, as was done with this analysis. It's fascinating, in its own way. But if I step back and just listen to the music, there's nothing that inspires me to contemplate humanity or the world we inhabit.

For me, the actual score seems to be more interesting than it's realization. If the three musicians were to play this particular trio perfectly in a rhythmic sense, one would never know it, even following the score. I'm reminded of the two recordings I own of Elliott Carter's Night Fantasies, one played by Charles Rosen, the other by Paul Jacobs, two of the pianists who commissioned the work. They both interpret the last measure of the work rhythmically differently. Perhaps this and Ferneyhough's String Trio are to be performed as improvisations, approximating what's on the page. Then again, the resulting harmony is another discussion.

Wow .. Beefheart to Ferneyhough ... you must have some seriously interesting thoughts about postmodernist genre obfuscation .. it seems to me they (Brian & the Captain) actually have much in common structurally .. with a greater/lesser technical comprehension/application of their own compositional processes. It is easy for me to imagine 'Trout Mask' in particular as a purely serious work for small ensemble & voice (it is tempting to attempt to recompose this as such!), yet I am so much closer to Ferneyhough's 'Time & Motion studies' etc. The irony is that the sound world is not necessarily much different once translated into a '3rd party' instrumentation. Is it of interest to you to discuss the intersection of cross-genre music/s from the perspective of contemporary classical/art music? I hope so .. it would be fascinating to digress into the realm of modernist/post-modernist/pop/traditional aesthetics .. perhaps from a technical standpoint .. but, more interestingly, from a purely aesthetic viewpoint. I would be fascinated to see what, if anything, you have to contribute to the understanding of this confluence of musical genres/idioms & their relative quotients of cerebralism vs visceralism.

New wine in old bottles.

Coventry is pronounced "COV-in-tree"" not cuv-in-tree". Thanks for your fascinating lecture. Incredibly articulate...but I don't think Ferneyhough would agree with your comparison to Rembrandt

do xenakis

Those unbalanced brackets makes me sad.

It all says so little to so few - sad really. An interesting film though.

Interesting enough. It just seems like a heck of a lot of textual density for the sake of generating effects that could be scored far more simply. There is little point weaving together differing strands of material that is basically so undefined with no aural contrasts between main and counter material, you just end up with a grey wash made up of seemingly random sonic events. The nearest I can get to it is by seeing it as an acoustic re-representation of 1960's sound labs. His own writings on his music are similarly absurdly overwritten. As for making it possible for differing performers to interpret the work differently, it introduces a marked bullshit factor. It is hardly fair to describe music as "possibly the most difficult to play" when the scores have built in factors enabling performers to cheat to such an extent. Works like Mereaux's "Bravura" Etude or the "Opus Clavicembalisticum" may be considered far more difficult as there is no "random sounding" escape clause built into them. Still at least somebody has provided a concise explanation of the oeuvre. It's very hard to come by such things and makes one very suspicious of all things "nu-complexity" wise.

Rembrandt? (and in the comments we hear him compared to Wordsworth).Never in the history of criticism has somebody so great compared to somebody of such scanty and paltry interest to such little effect.

No... I just can't, I really tried, but noooooo.....

Sounds like communism. LOL. With the perspective of time, this approach strikes me as a musical revolution. The actual future of "Serious" music. The possibilities are not limited at all, so I would expect this to find its way into pop applications as well.

There were times when neurotics of both sexes were cured of the sort, now such people would be proclaimed heroes. I prefer the former attitude, honestly... Sick composers should be cured, not praised. Thanks for the analysis, though. Peace, love, sane adequate art everyone!

I fell asleep on 3rd minute :_)

Thousands of words about thousands of notes, on and on and on. Does anyone listen to this music? Does anyone care? Nope.

Short analysis: pretentious noise. Ferneyhough is a phoney.

I don't buy this shit. Sorry. I call this imposture.