9/5/2015

AguidetoMichaelFinnissy'smusic|Music|TheGuardian

A guide to Michael Finnissy's music

Few composers face up to the creative responsibilities of the freight of musical history as sensitively
as this prolific musician
Tom Service
Monday 23 July 2012 15.24BST

I'm listening to Michael Finnissy's piano music. And my ears and my brain don't know
where to start. In particular, I'm listening to Nicolas Hodges' recording of Etched Bright
with Sunlight, the final chapter of Finnissy's massive cycle for solo piano, The History of
Photography in Sound. The effect it makes is a coruscating brilliance, a dazzle of texture
and shimmer that's an aural analogy of the intensity and pain-pleasure of looking directly
into the sun. But then the music slows, stops, descends, and goes down again, right to the
depths of the piano's register, and now there's an inchoate, frightening sense of the
uncanny, the despairing. Those are just two extremes in about five minutes of music, and
for the next 25 minutes, the piece is pitched at all the expressive and pianistic points in
between of speed and slowness, density and translucence, of simplicity of melody and
untameable teem of polyphony and counterpoint.
Reading this on a mobile? Click here to view
But the music of Michael Finnissy who was born in Tulse Hill in south London in 1946,
and studied as a pianist as well as composer isn't ever just about the way things sound.
His gigantic output of piano and chamber music, vocal and choral works, ensemble and
orchestral pieces, is a testament to a lifetime's interrogation of what it is and how it is that
music means something, how the notes he writes down on his manuscript paper connect
with culture, with our emotions, with our personal and social identities. Take that pianistic
magnum opus, The History of Photography in Sound, for example. Finnissy sums up his
aims in compiling this gargantuan, five-and-a-half-hour cycle of pieces: "the 'History' (that
which is always being forgotten and newly remembered) of 'Photography' (which records
things as they seem to be) in 'Sound' (the magma of music before the 'obscene formulae' of
Plato and those who follow)". Got that? That's just a scintilla of Finnissy's complex thought
in and about music.
Reading this on a mobile? Click here to view
Because there is a complexity in Finnissy's music. But this isn't an ideological complexity, a
difficulty for difficulty's sake. (However, Finnissy's scores are astonishingly labyrinthine: I
remember seeing a score of the piece that Nicolas Hodges will play at the Proms on the 11
August, his Piano Concerto No 2, and having my mind boggled and fingers fried by the
attempt to understand how it was humanly possible to imagine and realise the astonishing
http://www.theguardian.com/music/tomserviceblog/2012/jul/23/michaelfinnissycontemporarymusicguide

1/3

9/5/2015

AguidetoMichaelFinnissy'smusic|Music|TheGuardian

intricacy of Finnissy's rhythms. He often asks the pianist to play irregular groups of notes
against one another I could just about cope with three against two, but the 17 against 30,
15 against 29, that Finnissy demands? How could anyone actually hear that, let alone play
it, co-ordinate it between your hands? Impossible! And yet pianists like Hodges and Ian
Pace whose remarkable world premiere performance of the complete History at the Royal
Academy of Music a decade ago was an epic revelation of the "magma" of Finnissy's music
manage this kind of pianistic feat all the time.)
In fact, the real difficulty of Finnissy's music is the richness and complexity that's really
part of all music if we choose to hear it. Finnissy's transcriptions of other composers'
music prove the point. His versions of tunes by Gershwin and operatic melodies and scenes
by Verdi might seem, when you first hear them, to be in a different universe from the
originals, since he often surrounds a melody like Gershwin's They Can't Take That Away
From Me with dense clouds of virtuosic modernist chiaroscuro. But these pieces are about
writing down how Finnissy hears Gershwin, the labyrinth of meanings and associations
and implications this music has for him. They're also, incidentally, directly inspired by
Finnissy's love for what Fred Astaire and Judy Garland did with Gershwin. In fact, one of
Finnissy's Gershwin realisations, Limehouse Nights, is "a mixture of camp chinoiserie and
polyphonic razzmatazz", Finnissy says, "turned on as much by the opening sequence of
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom as by Gershwin's early show tune". And that
endless web of associations is actually how all of us hear music: nothing is ever in isolation,
our ears and our brains and our bodies are always making connections between any new
work we hear and every other piece of music and cultural experience we've ever heard and
had. It's just that Finnissy is able to make music from that process with infinitely greater
subtlety, sensitivity, and virtuosity, than the rest of us.
Reading this on a mobile? Click here to view
And transcription, for Finnissy, is the key compositional principle: whether he's using and
transforming folk tunes from Britain, as in his Folklore pieces for solo piano, or thinking
about Australian Aboriginal music, as in his awe-inspiring orchestral piece Red Earth;
whether he's transfiguring Verdi or completing Mozart's Requiem in a version that employs
the whole sweep of music history, of styles, periods, and references from 1791 to the
present day (a piece he premiered in Southampton in November last year), Finnissy's music
is a continual exploration of where this music comes from, a revelation of the essential fact
that there is nothing that you can do that's properly new as a composer. All you can really
do is put what's already out there together in new combinations. Few composers face up to
the cultural, creative, and political responsibilities of the freight of musical history as
sensitively as Finnissy does and few composers working today have managed to connect
contemporary music's expressive power as convincingly with its critical, intellectual
potential. Finnissy's avowedly spiritual recent choral works, inspired by his religious faith,
embody that connection. There's a lifetime of listening in Finnissy's music, an encounter
with a way of hearing and relating to the whole of today's world, not just its music just as
there's been a lifetime of writing it for its composer.

Five key links

http://www.theguardian.com/music/tomserviceblog/2012/jul/23/michaelfinnissycontemporarymusicguide

2/3

9/5/2015

AguidetoMichaelFinnissy'smusic|Music|TheGuardian

Red Earth - the world premiere at the Proms in 1988

Etched Bright with Sunlight
O, Schner Mai this beautiful, haunting piano piece, based on Johann Strauss, with the
score, too
English Country Tunes performed by Finnissy himself
Finnissy plays two of his Gershwin transcriptions
More blogposts

Topics
Classical music

Save for later Article saved

Reuse this content

http://www.theguardian.com/music/tomserviceblog/2012/jul/23/michaelfinnissycontemporarymusicguide

3/3