CARCERI D'INVENZIONE (complete cycle) w/score [1981-86] | Brian Ferneyhough 

this man speaks the truth

They are so called irrational time signatures (while actually not being irrational). The nominator in the 10 is equivalent to an 8th note quintuplet. 12 is the equivalent of an 8th not sixtuplet and 24 is equivalent to sixtuplet 16th note. There are a number of reasons why to use it. The most utilitarian reason is for example you have a measure with 4 notes of a quintuplet and not five - how do you notate this in a 4/8 measure when the quintuplet is incomplete? Better to have it than in lets say a 4/10 measure where the underlying grid is the quivalent of an 8th note quintuplet. The more important reason to use them should be concerned however with the meaning or the musical content and structural implications. They create seismic shifts and extended force fields to that can push or pull the musical discurse abprubtly into new directions. This can be a very powerful expressive moment.

Obfuscation.

@@philipphenkel2218 In which case why use barlines anyway?

​@@egapnala65 Well because a lack of Barlines is quite a different thing for a piece. The Barlines here (as does the meter) creates almost a sort of restraining force that displaces the shape of the figure or the musical gesture. You can compare them pretty well to seismic shifts (at least this is an allegory that I like to use) and they are also very helpful for orientation and readability. But not just for reading also for actually comprehending the piece from a players perspective. The lack of Barlines would have a different effect. It would be the opposite of restraining. It would create a sort of void in which the gesturality of the piece (or in the case of Ferneyhough, "figures" would operate in). For the flow of the piece as well as the directionality it's a big difference. For this piece the restraining force of the barline is important, where as in other pieces it might not be a consideration, hence they leave out the barlines. A different way you haven't mentioned would be to resort to some kind of space notation. Which would be even more extreme than the lack of meter. The articulation of time in such a piece than becomes even more vague and it's hard to operate with such directional force in that way, as does Ferneyhough here in this piece. A famous example of this approach is Berios first Sequenza for Flute. Though he later changed the notation to a more standard metered version since he was actually unsatisfied with the lack of directionality in the performances of the Sequenza prior to his revision and indeed it becomes a completly different piece. Of course all those approaches are valid approaches and giving the context might be the right choice for notating a piece depending on the intention.

@@philipphenkel2218 That's all purely symbolic and metaphorical however. A structured use of notation which would embrace these "seismic" fluctuations would not be beyond the bounds of reason. The listener would not notice any particular difference given that what is being played is, intentionally, only an approximation of what has actually been written here.

Brenda Mitchell

Brava!

Contemporary music performance in a nutshell

@@alexnobrasil3062 Well that is highly unjustified!

"literally unplayable as written" if that's the case there ought to be a HUGE discrepancy between one performance and another. This isn't the case.

@@MorganHayes_Composer.Pianist Similarity of gesture does not equate accuracy of score reading. If these scores were fed into a computer programmed to ead them my guess is that would sound nothing like any human performance. Besides groups like the Arditti actually painstakingly translate this stuff into convention forms of notation so as to make it more playable,

There are a series of etchings by Giovanni Piranesi (1720-1778) so titled: "Imaginary Prisons." Piranesi was by trade a draughtsman, that is a technical or documentary illustrator. In these illustrations, he intentionally pushed his craft, whose techniques differ from today's well-understood notions of perspective drawing, to an extreme of form and detail, creating impossible geometries which are a chief inspiration of these works of Ferneyhough's. The title also bears significance to concepts within psychology and sociology.

@@aproc_ I know the Piranesi drawings, but I'm not sure how they relate to the sound of the piece, or the notation. Perhaps the incredible precision of the drawings are reflected in the precision of the score construction, but to me a title should reflect what is heard...do you feel it does?

@@williambland5515 I think you're definitely onto something about the precision. I personally find the title very well-reflected in the works, although maybe less so in the Trancendental Etudes.

OK who let johnzielinski9951 loose in the RU-vid comment section?

Well that's just a silly thing to say.