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Contemporary Music Review

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Michael Finnissy — an overview
Richard Barrett

Online Publication Date: 01 January 1995

To cite this Article: Barrett, Richard (1995) 'Michael Finnissy — an overview',
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ContemporaryMusicReview, 9 1995 HarwoodAcademicPublishers GmbH

1995, Vol. 13, Part 1, pp. 23-43 Printed in Singapore
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Michael Finnissy- An Overview

Richard Barrett

A survey of the compositionsof Michael Finnissy as a single whole, assessing their place in a wider
cultural overview, with observations upon a selection of relevant headings.

KEYWORDS Influences,parallels, intervals, instrumentation, texts, theatre, montage, notation.

Introduction

Michael Finnissy's oeuvre is exceptionally large and wide-ranging, and critical

exegesis of it is at an early stage. So I have confined myself to presenting
observations upon a selection of relevant subjects or issues, mentioning as m a n y
works as possible and as it were setting the ball rolling. This is not the place to
begin an in-depth treatment of individual compositions, and it seemed more
appropriate to attempt the task, however difficult, of taking the works as a single
whole and assessing their place in a wider cultural overview.
The ordering of the following sections is unimportant; it is impossible to work
towards conclusions regarding a composer still in his mid-forties, and in Finnissy's
case a chronological survey would almost certainly prove fruitless, as explained
below. Also, I have thought it more important to relate some reasons w h y one
should experience this music for oneself, and w h y Michael Finnissy's work is a
singular and indispensable part of contemporary composition, than to cast a critical
eye over it, in the hope that m y o w n enthusiasm might prove infectious to those
more able, qualified and inclined t h a n I to take a more objective view.
Neither is the object of this exercise to write a biography: but it is worth bearing
in mind that Finnissy was born in London in 1946 - his Englishness is apparent
in all he does, albeit in unexpected ways, notwithstanding the obvious cosmo-
politan qualities of his work. We shall meet with a number of other such
contradictions in the following pages - they are the inevitable paradoxes in a body
of work at once all-embracing and utterly personal. Lastly, Finnissy's rate of
stylistic transformation has often been so vertiginous as to render most generali-
sations indefensible - the reader is asked to beware of w h a t m a y seem like
categorical statements.

Musical influences and parallels

Finnissy's musical personality has been individual from the outset: in his earliest
acknowledged work, Le dormeur du val [1] (1963-68), m a n y areas upon which he
continues to expand were already in place, and to a great extent untouched by
outside influence. However, influences and parallels are there to be sought out
23
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24 g~Ba~e~

and, characteristically, they stem from unlikely and idiosyncratic sources for the
most part. The convergence between Finnissy and Bussotti is mentioned elsewhere
in this essay; it is also possible to find echoes of a Boulezian sound-world in the
use of three keyboard instruments producing diffuse washes of sound and
occasional knotted outbursts in Le dormeur, also found later in World [15] (with
harp and cimbalom furnishing further reminders of Eclat). In both cases, however,
any direct influence has long since dissipated and plays little if any part in
Finnissy's more recent work. Additionally, the influence seems never to have
extended to actual formative techniques, be these serial procedures or statistical
distributions. Finnissy has tended to create structures arising from t h e individual
composition's internal dictates, rather than erecting (like Boulez or Xenakis or
Stockhausen, in their various ways) a kind of general field theory of which the
compositions are offshoots. No other composers of the 20th-century "mainstream"
seem to have had appredable effects on Finnissy's development. This is interesting
in itself: neither Stravinsky (for w h o m Finnissy wrote a short memorial piece in
1971 [7], adding viola and harp to a flute solo created for Stravinsky's 85th
birthday four years earlier), the composers of the Second Viennese School nor any
other of the venerated icons of the century have provided any discernible stimulus.
This fact has no doubt contributed to the misunderstandings his work has often
engendered in listeners, critics and other composers who search in vain for his
work legilimising itself by appealing to the officially recognised pathways of
musical history.
On the other hand, a number of composers outside these narrowly-defined
pathways are clearly recognisable (and acknowledged) as Finnissy's spiritual
forebears. Three such musicians are celebrated in his triptych for piano Ives,
Grainger, Nancarrow [24]. The visionary quality of Ives's work as well as his
uncompromising style of keyboard composition have obvious parallels in Finnissy,
whose Ives could almost, from time to time, have been written by its dedicatee,
alongside the Studies and the Five Takeoffs. Finnissy's career as a pianist in fact
virtually began with (and because of) Ives' Concord Sonata, which he admits to be
a key work in his own development. Elements of Ivesian pianism most obviously
influential for Finnissy include the stark juxtaposition and superimposition of
"opposing" musics (compare the vertigo of the Concord's second movement with
that, say, of Midsummer Morn from English Country-Tunes [37.2] whose initial
stillness gradually accumulates momentum before reaching full-blown eruption), a
virtuosity straining for the impossible, and the overstepping of clear harmony by
saturation to transform the piano into a textural instrument (the quintessentially
Ivesian gnarled chordal pileups to be found, for example, in the fourth movement
of the First Sonata have close descendants in many of Finnissy's piano parts). The
attraction to English folksong and to the art of piano transcription in Grainger may
be found in Finnissy also (and perhaps a touch of Grainger's and Ives' homegrown
experimentalism too), and Grainger was of course a celebrated and unorthodox
piano virtuoso in his own right, as well as being a spare-time experimenter with
electrical and mechanical means of producing music. Conlon Nancarrow's work,
however, being totally unknown in Europe before the late seventies, cannot be
counted as an influence but more as a felicitous discovery, an unsuspected parallel.
A later pair of piano pieces, G.F.H./B.S. [117], refer to Bernard Stevens
(Finnissy's first important composition teacher) and Handel, and both quote from
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Michael Finnissy - An Overview 25

their dedicatees, though the quoted fragments are almost unrecognisably sub-
merged in close-knit polyphonic webs (Figure 1). Giuseppe Verdi has also, of
course, been the subject of a Finnissy tribute, although neither he nor Handel
could be said to have contributed to the surface style of the music. Nevertheless,
Busoni and Godowsky (two more masters of the piano transcription) crop up in
Verdi Transcriptions [81] to provide the formal and gestural skeleton of the eighth
piece and the inspiration for the left-hand arrangement in {he fifth. * Some kind of
pattern may be dimly glimpsed here - a preference for lyricism and linearity over
counterpoint and self-reference: Handel rather than Bach, Verdi rather than
Wagner.
Other musics from the past occasionally contribute structurally to Finnissy's
compositions: Gregorian chant in The Undivine Comedy [122] (slowed down to
provide extended pedals, typically in the midst of the texture, almost as in the
organa of the school of Notre Dame) and Bach fugue-subjects (but not fugal

GFH

C~.r~h~tr..o e.. piano [.I ~- S2, a.pp,-~.]

ii 9

7: ~ ,,, ~:4;, -7..6fr--

- - r-3"--~ v: 5:a,h---.-~ , ~:~-----

Figure 1 GFH (lae~ning). CollectedShorter Piano Works vol. 1, p. 30. 9 1991 Oxford University
Press. Used lay permission.

1 A more detailed description of this work and its methods of derivation may be found in Richard
Toop, Four Facets of "The New Complexity", Contact 32 (Spring 1988).
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26 K Barre~

textures!) in Contret~nze [118] are two examples. The Gershwin Arrangements [123]
for piano are more explicit tributes than any of these, standing in the long tradition
of virtuoso keyboard transcriptions. Frequently they retain only the melody or
bass-lines intact, with typically dense activity in the inner parts glancing at
harmonic mannerisms from Ives to Scriabin (but mostly Finnissy), although
Gershwin will nearly always be uppermost in the listener's mind (Figure 2).
Another recent series of pieces, this time for different ensembles, exemplifying yet
another model for the transformation of preexistent material, is the Obrecht-
Motetten [129] which often consist of a mosaic of tiny fragments from Obrecht,
rearranged into a typically nebulous tangle, almost like a sensuous version of one
of Aldo Clementi's ascetic collages (Figure 3). Although Finnissy had betrayed
scant interest in music of the Renaissance or earlier periods until this series (begun
in 1988) and the (more symbolic) plainsong in The Undivine Comedy, a version of
Machaut's Le Lay de la fonteinne [99] for mezzo-soprano and instruments,
completed in the mid-1980s, seems a foretaste not only of this development but
also, in its minimal additions to and distortions of the original text, of the recently
increased interest in retaining rather than sublimating the character of his sources.
One obvious development in Finnissy's music between the early works and the

Innocent ing6nue baby

Moderately fast (.tJ = 88)
6:4.b . ~ poco rail . . . . a tempo
~ , r ~)

#.--, L ' q-'--~"'B--T ............ ~"~'. . . . . .

.,~--'. '-J. ~2" ,.,.'o , -...... , -' "i '. i;- ,,,': "-',.....
., ,

.-o-..

: - : .'-~"
II. . . .
, o, "~: k'~. "'" ~-~. . . .lULl
9 ~ .
...
I . ~"
. .
h,J
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: L_.~ 1 '1 i

accel. . . . . . . . roll . . . . a tempo

~-~.~.! , , , , ~, ~I ~ ..... ~.~._.~" T ,',r'~py" ~-i

Figure 2 GershwinArrangements p. 47. Innocent ingenue baby, bars 1-8. 9 1990 Oxford University
Press. Used by permission.
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Michael Finnissy - An Overview 27

~o!>','. I1"--.

~.i.~i ,

(F) E-~lF- f~ -~' ;/- ,~.F [ i:[ '! ['-~ ,[ r-~rf" [1-------171

Tr~ a . . . . . . "

"I'e~. ~ ;
Trbn.

inde,,poade..n~ly

' ~ C F----r~r ~ ~-1t~-~

(~,,l,

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Figure 3 Obrecht Motetten V p. 33. 9 1992 Oxford University Press. Used by permission.

Gershwin and Verdi pieces is a greatly increased confidence in allowing the

inherited materials to occupy more of the foreground. It is likely that this strand
will continue to be important in forthcoming treatments of Johann Strauss, Berlioz
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28 ~ Ba~eff

and others (some of which are finally finding their way out of the closet after
having been set aside, sometimes for many years, in favour of more palatably
"contemporary" concerns).
The extent to which Western composers (and those others, such as Takemitsu,
whose work is firmly embedded in the European art-music tradition) have been
affected by non-European folk and classical musics is well-documented; either the
musical sounds of other cultures, or an attempt to understand their philosophical
basis, or both, are an obvious influence on contemporary composition of all
stylistic persuasions, as are the folk and popular musics nearer to home. Finnissy
is one of the rare cases of a composer able to transmute recognisably such elements
into his own material without a hint of patronisation, seeing cross-cultural
influences as an expression of brotherhood with creative musicians of foreign
cultures, rather than as a convenient source of (currently fashionable) exotic
colour. In the 1980s, it has been particularly the sounds of Middle Eastern and
Eastern European traditions which have informed Finnissy's composition (and
wrought far-reaching effects on his style beyond the more obviously referential
works). The strident harmonies of Bulgaria or Macedonia are transformed into
pungent microtonal textures, their assymetrical rhythms refracted into insistent
percussive accompaniments as in C~tana [107] (the name of a Rumanian dance).
Previously, the parallel layers of texture in Japanese gagaku music became a
formative model for Alongside [52], although the flavour of the music is decidedly
un-Japanese, apart from a Noh-inspired solo for cataclysmically loud bass drum
strokes which aperiodically shatter a tense silence. A knowingly pseudo-Arcadian
view of the "English folk tradition" surfaced in several works including Folk-Song
Set [11] (where the texts are synthetic reconstructions of folk-ballads), Mr. Punch
[33] and Green Bushes [65]. More recently Finnissy's two extended stays in
Australia have borne fruit in over a dozen works from 1982 onwards, including
two - Quabara [125] and Red Earth [124] (both 1988) - where the primitive and
chthonic sound of the didjeridu is to be heard, confronted by an assemblage of
"trash"-percussion in the former and periodically looming ghost-like out of a vast
orchestral lament in the latter. The status of the Aboriginals as an oppressed
people whose culture has been trampled on or mindlessly appropriated cannot
have been far from the composer's thoughts here. The percussion in Quabara,
typically consisting of soft-drink cans, hubcaps and other symbols of cultural
imperialism, and the keening-like character of much of Red Earth, have a
poignancy rare even in Finnissy's multiculturally-aware output. The very use of
Sardinian dialect in the texts of Duru-duru [75] and Anninnia [91], and the
derivation of Dilok [89] from Kurdish folk dances, also bespeak an empathy with
cultures whose expression is either suppressed or marginalised.
Finnissy's rejection of thematic and harmonic formations in favour of highly-
characterised linear agglomerations ('heterophonies") in itself places him not only
distant from the mainstream European tradition but also closer to those musics
where the technical apparatus of evolving "organic" forms and voice-leading
never developed. His music is in many ways a reminder that this apparatus,
however spread worldwide by the pervasive "'civilising" influence of Western
Europe and the United States, is in the end a (temporally and spatially) localised,
specialised phenomenon. In Finnissy's work, the influences of Verdi, Gershwin,
the more recent predecessors and the various "foreign" cultures not only coexist
but do so on absolutely equal terms with one another, just as in his piano recitals
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Michael Finnissy - A n Overview 29

his own densest explorations of keyboard sonority might coexist with the radical
"simplicity" of Howard Skempton or Chris Newman.

Intervals

If Finnissy's output may in any way be divided into "periods" the most convenient
basis for this might well be the use of characteristic types of intervals at various
stages. From the earliest works he has displayed a readiness to work in diverse
intervaUic frameworks, from diatonic modes, through chromaticism (as in the quite
unhinged violin solo in Mr. Punch [33], Figure 4) to quarter-tones and, in at least

VIn.

VIn.

Figure 4 Mr. Punch p. 4. Copyright 9 1986 Universal Edition (London) Ltd.

one suppressed work, twelfth-tones. Often these occur in the same work and
frequently simultaneously, as for example in Beuk o'Newcassel Sangs [126] (1989)
where a diatonic vocal part coexists with a chromatic piano part or a microtonal
clarinet part - Figure 5. Along with variation of the type of "pitch-sieve", to use
Xenakis' phrase, one could also discern characteristic usages of different sizes of
interval in melodic lines, from a wildly-leaping atonal idiom (influenced in sound
but not in generative technique by the shapes thrown up by integral serialism) to
highly-compressed microtonal wanderings confined to narrow "frequency bands"
(this time coming close to eastern European types of melodic behaviour, but
differing greatly in the increased asymmetry of rhythm and phrase). Earlier pieces
tend to occupy a great many intervallic worlds, which in Finnissy's "anti-
thematic" style serve to articulate the large form of pieces like English Country-
Tunes [37] (1977). In this work, three separable interval[ic areas are used: a
monodic, modal movement (typically associated with wistful dynamics and
blurred pedalling), a dense, tangled occupation of all pitches within a restricted
registral space, and a music of sweeping, wide-ranging gestures which function in
terms of colour rather than pitch (as do many of the devices Finnissy has
developed in his piano writing).
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30 R. Barrett

6low

~c

Pr

C~ I
A' ~ e net,r_.. owcr an' ow~r An'g the nect

~.~ ! ~ i, ~.J i~! ,,! ! L~-~. , I L- _. : ---~-~---~i

ovver a~-oyo~' A' ~e nt~ o ~ r an' ow- er,'lh(, p~&I-low~d~c

;~ ~'-- , ~.5'C, ___, c X_LJ.. i ~ '~, " ~ "~--~.. "-

Figure 5 Beuk o" Neucassel Sangs p. 11. 9 1990 Oxford University Press. Used by permission.

Figure 6 shows a characteristic example of each type. Each of the three reaches at
some point its "climax" while at other times being juxtaposed or hybridised with
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Michael Finnissy - An Overview 31

, 9 L , k-

Figure 6a English Country Tunes. no. 7 [My Bonny Boy]. p. 53 (lines 1-3).

~to (~)raa ben fitrna.to

t."~::-"."~'-~'---'~--'-:- ::.~-':': .......... -- :I"-L-: h~"

[' V:= ....."i ~'- ~; ~I I,,!, '"~li",'l ~ 'i 'i;~'LF: :-~ "-i ~~ ~'i ' ~

Figure 6b English Country Tunes. no. 8 [Come Beat the Drums and Sound the Fifes]. p. 55.

the others. Perhaps there is a parallel here with Stockhausen's scheme of blending
and separating characters in Momente or Femeyhough's even more ramified plan
in Sonatas for String Quartet, but neither is likely to be conscious. Even though
English Country-Tunes and other works contain mixtures of intervallic types in this
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32 ~ Ba~e~
!
Unse~|r.([ (viotcn; :,hA r~.c~Ir

('
!
t:$

:.?.~ ) '" r~is ~ott is 9 lacsimi~ ~' t~e co,,wos,~'s -~a.uscriat

Figure 6c EnglishCountry Tunes. no. 1 [GreenMeadows]. p. 1.

Reproduced by permission of United Music Publishers Ltd.

way, the predominant feeling in the music up to and including Alongside is of

generous use of registral resources, in which register itself is not being used as a
foreground formal determinant. Finnissy has admitted that Alongside, in this and
other respects, reached an extreme point along a line of development which he
was not prepared to take further. Certainly, the music of the following few years
is often as striking in the rigorous spareness of its sound as is Alongside in its
"impossible" density. Wide intervals have largely vanished by the early 1980s,
supplanted by a restless (usually quartertone) melisma, almost palpably suppress-
ing the often brutal violence which had never been completely out of sight in the
1970s. However, already in the Australian Sea Shanties for amateur chorus [103.1]
of 1983, the seeds of Finnissy's most recent modality has already been sown.
(Music for amateurs has also become a prominent strand in Finnissy's work since
then, notably with the series of East London Heys [116] for varying ensemble
(1985-85).) Although, rather than "'modality", Finnissy's practice might be better
described as use of diatonic materials without reference to modal or tonal
implications, in other words in much the same way as he might use chromatic or
microtonal materials. It is by no means a move towards more traditional ways of
forming melodies, since he is always careful to avoid any motivic implications or
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Michael Finnissy - An Overview 33

to use melodic contour as a characterising factor. Nevertheless, the move into this
n e w "'period", as in previous cases, may be broadly described as an expansion of
the means available to the composer rather than primarily as a shift of position or
focus. Figure 7 shows a characteristic solo passage from the latest, 1988 version of
Independence Quadrilles [92].

5"z~
- . - . . . ,.

. i,'ll-,l I o"

t~ r', 1 ILr._t 171 i..l~_~" ~" ',r i ' ' , , ~-r,'r -~1~
i.,J 5.,,,.I..,~ "~ I.--r ~II V I

Figure 7 IndependenceQuadrilles, from section W. 9 Michael Finnissy. ReproducedbY permission.

Instrumentation

Finnissy's oeuvre encompasses everything from solo instrumental and vocal pieces
to works for large orchestra, seemingly with no "preferred" categories (apart from
the piano, for which there are obvious reasons: and now that Finnissy's place in
the musical world is, belatedly, at least tolerably secure, his o u ~ u t for piano has
lessened as performances of his work by others have increased2). The accent is
upon "'invented ensembles", sometimes truly outlandish in their constitution
(examples abound in the list of works) rather than traditional instrumentation -
the series of Piano Concerti being deceptive in this respect (only no. 1 [26] is in
anything resembling concerto form; nos. 4 [54] and 6 [66] have no accompaniment;
nos. 5 [62] and 7 [69] and their peculiarities are described elsewhere in this essay).
The instrumentation of a Finnissy work is an integrated part of its musical identity
at every level both colouristically and structurally. It is in fact "composed" as
much as anything else. His String Quartet [113] of 1984 might seem to be an
exception to this, but as in other cases the composer has reacted to having the
scoring forced upon him, as it were, by subverting completely the layout,
ambience and internal relations of the quartet. For over a dozen pages at the
opening, none of the instruments descends as far as the treble stave. Later,
although their microtonal peregrinations all occupy the same tightly-defined
register, they are not only playing soloistically but in different tempi, contradicting

2 As if to confirmthe invalidity of generalising about Finnissy,he has produced a number of

mostly short piano works in the period 1989-92. Nevertheless the prodigiousflow of major solo
compositions around the late 1970s appears to have abated somewhat (for the time being?).
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34 K Ba~e~

the generaUy-assumed purpose of the quartet as a musical unit; the form of the
work is not polyphonic and discursive but improvisational and episodic. Both here
and in other compositions the usage of the instruments is as individual as
Finnissy's more idiosyncratic ensemble-instrumentations themselves. Although he
avoids, for the most part, effects such as multiphonics, key-clicks, piano interior
and so on, the saxophone part of Lost Lands [36] (1977) quite makes up for the
shortage of expressionistic effects elsewhere, its solo coda inhabiting the same kind
of sparse/brutal domain as the music of Hans-Joachim Hespos. Elsewhere,
combinations with vertically-differentiated dynamics (opening of Alongside: dif-
ferent instruments occupying dynamic strata as far apart as possible), unusual
blendings and registers bring into being constantly surprising sound-totalities. This
is true however few instruments are involved: Uzundara [95] (1983) for solo B fiat
clarinet (there are also solos for E fiat, C and bass clarinets in Finnissy's output)
improbably remains in an ear-splittingly high tessitura throughout; the opening
sections of Verdi Transcriptions [81] on the other hand rumble implacably at the
lower end of the piano for far longer than expected. There is a fine and discerning
ear at work here, one which is able to differentiate between many "possible
instruments" within a single sound-producing object, according to sets of (fairly)
constant characteristics given to a passage or a whole part or a solo. Indeed, one
of the most striking and widespread stylistic features in Finnissy's work is the way
in which such characteristics are given time to project themselves as discrete
structural units. (There are similarities here with the later music of Xenakis.)
Paradoxically, Finnissy has also experimented with indeterminate instrumentation
- Moon's Goin' Down [63] (1980) "for solo instrument or voice", and parts defined
only by register in 'n' [10] (1969) and From the Revelation of St. John the Divine [2]
(1970), the latter combining an unspecified instrument with soprano and strings -
and indeterminate timbre in Ohi!Ohi!Ohi! [42] (1978) for solo voice, where the
phonetic elements of the title may be used in any orders and combinations in
conjunction with a precisely- (and heavily-) notated musical line.
Even in more-or-less "'normal" ensembles, long stretches of unlikely combina-
tions of smaller groupings tend to occur, giving a work unique sonorous profile. As
described in the String Quartet above, Finnissy is careful to avoid registral and
timbral combinations which have any familiarity about them, so that there is
something recognisable in a "Finnissy timbre" almost independently of precisely
what instruments or voices are taking part. Ouraa [96] (1983) for a reasonably
standard eleven instruments opens with keening glissandi on piccolo and a drum
part sounding like a manic clockwork soldier. This is followed by changing
juxtapositions of brass, strings and woodwind defined by register and rate of
attack, later accompanied by slightly macabre, rattlesnake-like castanets and
punctuated by solo viola passages. Eph-phatha [130] (1989) for orchestra is
generally densely-scored (including a piano part largely confined to the lower
registers) apart from two extraordinary sections (Stockhausen would call them
"'sound-windows", as in his Mikrophonie II or Jubil~um), the second of which
concludes the work, where the ensemble cuts off revealing an offstage trio of
piccolo, horn and "cello playing softly diatonic melodies.
In short, one ubiquitous feature of Finnissy's work is its constant celebration of
colouristic possibilities; no instrumentation (for example the didjeridu and "trash'"
percussion of Quabara [125]) is so unpromising that his imagination cannot be
brought to bear on it. The music challenges given notions concerning the function
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Michael Finnissy - An Overview 35

of instruments within ensembles as well as their expressive potential as "individ-

uals", and makes nonsense indeed of the prevalent view of instrumentation as
somehow peripheral to the central concerns of composition. Here comparison
could be made with the later works of Morton Feldman, where the instrumenta-
tion seems to generate the musical material - as well as the title! - almost
automatically; neither composer could undergo "arrangement" without totally
altering the expressive effect. It is hardly surprising, ~,'ith this penchant for
exploring the "grain" of traditional instruments, that he has not felt drawn
towards the resources of electronic music (though the accessibility Of such
resources in the UK is not what it could be), except in the recent Nowhere else to
go [131] (1989) whose ensemble features a synthesizer and an eleL'trOn~ drumkit,
as well as a tape containing the other three instruments (clarinet, trumpet, 'cello)
playing slow microtonal lines drifting past one another and transposed upwards by
a digital harmoniser: the tape undergoes an inexorable crescendo while its live
counterparts withdraw into barely-interrupted silence, a process lasting fifteen
minutes and accompanied by a repeating, thudding bass drum pattern, producing
one of Finnissy's most crushingly nihilistic statements (perhaps no "'celebration" of
electronic sounds is possible for him). Unusually for someone working as
sporadically in this area (but characteristically for him), he has selected a limited
range of resources and appropriated them completely in the service of his own
vision, much as his other writing transmutes the instruments of the European
classical tradition into objects more rough-hewn, strident, unpredictable, even
magical (in the original sense of the word).

Texts/Theatre
One of the most striking features of the texts used by Michael Finnissy for his
many vocal and theatrical pieces is that they belong almost exclusively to past
centuries and other cultures, perhaps another aspect of his standing outside the
principal currents of modernism. It certainly has nothing to do with the ignorance
most artists have of more or less recent developments in other arts; if anything,
Finnissy has "'kept up" with the latest events in other disciplines more than he has
in music. The variety of language used, sometimes several in one work, is vast. The
alien (to an averagely linguisticaUy-competent European) sounds of Japanese
(Tsuru-Kame [17], Goro [47]), Javanese (Kelir [70]), Sardinian (Duru-duru [75],
Anninnia [91], Aboriginal Oqarara [82]), the Venda language of South Africa
(Ngano [106]), Rumanian (Cabaret Vert [114]) and Hebrew (Haiyim [109]) impart
characteristic colours to the musical strands as if bathing them in strange lights;
this colouration, for the composer as much as for the listener, contributes at least
as much as does the semantic content to the fascination of the music. This is also
true of many of the works which use more "'familiar" languages, although in both
cases the fact that there is a semantic dimension informs the expressiveness of a
performance in a way that abstract phonetic formations could not. Finnissy's music
is always rooted in the concept of breath and phrase, even when purely
instrumental; in many ways it harks back to the pre-classical ideal wherein
instruments aspire to the expressivity of the voice. Certainly his vocal parts
frequently achieve an almost baroque intensity of ornamentation and a tendency
to florid melisma worthy of Caccini or Monteverdi. There are indeed settings of
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36 K Ba~e~

Tasso (Horrorzone [3], Song 1 [4.01] and Petrarch (Song 16 [4.16]) delivered with
thoroughly Italianate lyriscism, and even an early work which uses parts of
Alessandro Striggio's libretto for Orfeo.
The avowedly "autobiographical" World (1969-74) for voices and instruments
forms a kind of internal self-portrait, speaking in the words of Mayakovsky,
H61derlin, Rimbaud, Blake, Tennyson, G. M. Hopkins and Dante. H61derlin and
Rimbaud raise their heads elsewhere in Finnissy's work, 'the former i n . . . fairest
noonday . . . . [57] (1979) for tenor and piano and in The Undivine Comedy [122] (a
remnant of a previously planned setting of Der Tod des Empedokles) and the latter
in Le Dormeur du Val [1], in the title of Cabaret Vert [114] and as the subject of an
(as yet?) unrealised music-theatre project. The classicist nostalgia and Apollonian
otherworldliness of H61derlin, the nocturnal menace and violet, brooding imagery
of Rimbaud, both lurk beneath the surface of Finnissy's music more often than
they inform his vocal parts, and the same could be said of the Grand Guignol
which erupts in Mr. Punch [33] (1976-77) for voice and instruments, more earthy
and less abstract than Birtwistle's opera on the subject (and, in its economy of
resources, more appropriate for a real puppet-theatre), or the transcendental
idealism of Whitman in the work bearing his name [94] and in the wistful mezzo-
soprano aria of Vaudeville [98] (1983). One could, given more space, continue with
a list of all those writers whose work Finnissy has set, tracing his response to their
words beyond the specific settings themselves, for he is both widely-read and
sensitive to the nuances of literary style, and his rate and methodology of
composition allow a text-setting to be a highly spontaneous welling-up of forces
which are "beneath the skin" of a larger part of his output.
Finnissy's range of theatrical reference is equally wide, from the medieval ritual
of the Mysteries [19] (1976-79, a two-and-a-half-hour cycle most of which still
remains unperformed) to the quasi-expressionist histrionics (often seeming like
one "'mad scene" after another) of The Undivine Comedy, the music hall-like
sequence of "displaced" characters from operatic history in Soda Fountain [105]
(1983) for four voices and the birth-to-death procession of stylistic parodies in
Vaudeville. H~ music-theatre style is characterised by efficient exploitation of
theatrical means (Peter Brook's "rough theatre") and by deep connections to the
ritual theatre of ancient and folk tradition. The works thus possess an atavistic
expressive strength beyond their enforced status as manifestations of high art.
Mysteries is a good example, in which monumental, seemingly archaic blocks of
musical texture perfectly reflect the rugged and unpolished old English text as well
as the simple grandeur of the drama. Moreover, on the strength particularly of The
Undivine Comedy, Finnissy does not regard opera as an outmoded and irrelevant
genre fit only for avoidance or cynical subversion (as might be stated by most
composers as musically "radical" as he is), but as an inexhaustible source of
theatrical vitality and a still powerful and significant institution. I suspect that The
Undivine Comedy is scored for chamber forces for no reason other than expediency
(which is not to deny its success in wielding those forces over a whole evening of
music without one wishing for more than its nine players), and that there is no
ideological reason why Finnissy should not turn his hand to truly "grand" opera.
It is of great relevance in understanding Finnissy as a theatrical composer that the
operas he admires most are those of Verdi and Handel, which consists of
sequences of more or less fixed forms (and are therefore ultimately rooted in the
formal severity of ritual) rather than the long-range seamless structures of Wagner
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Michael Finnissy - An Overview 37

or Strauss. Also of course the operas of Verdi and Handel place the onus of drama
and characterisation on the voice rather than the orchestra. In The Undivine
Comedy there are frequent stretches of unmistakable recitative, accompanied by
slow-moving drones whose function does not seem far removed from that of the
basso continuo. At the other end of the spectrum there are reflective, aria-like
sections with ecstatic coloratura passages, these forms strongly delineated by the
rapid, unblended changes in instrumental texture, and the avoidance of transition,
familiar from Finnissy's smaller-scale works. The uncompromising virtuosity of the
instrumental parts (Finnissy was able to write for a hand-picked ensemble of
performers familiar with and fluent in his demanding idiom) creates a flexibility
and variety of colour fully equal to the articulation of what must be an
unprecedented timespan for an ensemble of this size; nevertheless they have no
autonomous function but serve to accompany and punctuate the vocally-
mediated drama. It might still be felt, however, that there is no real confronta-
tion with the demands of large-scale formal thinking, that at least in purely
musical terms the opera consists of a string of Finnissy's chamber pieces whose
connecting strand, the gradual contraction of each act's formative interval from a
fifth to a unison, cannot bear the structural weight assigned to it, especially given
that the vocal writing sometimes tends to obscure an already complex textual
argument. On. the other hand nobody will be heard to complain of the lack of
"connecting strands" or the extensive use of text-warping embellishments in
Handel. Here as elsewhere we find an enigmatic relationship to tradition: a new
and individual approach to musical means in almost every respect, which at the
same time arises unexpectedly from a deep intimacy with cultural paradigms
distant in both space and time. Finnissy's large and rapidly growing body of work,
rather than delineating a diachronic "'development", seems to be expanding into
a self-contained "folk culture" all of its own, in which the enactments of theatre
play a fundamental r61e, embodying its primeval and ceremonial centre.

Montage
It is not that Finnissy's work resists the application of analytical thinking - Richard
Toop 3 has carried out (with characteristic thoroughness, sympathy and clarity)
such excavations on the String Trio [120] and parts of Verdi Transcriptions [81] - but
that such endeavour seems to cast less light on the composers's psychology, and
that of the works themselves, than in many other cases such as the quasi-
cabbalistic extrapolations from admired names in Chris Dench's recent music.
Finnissy's techniques on the micro-compositional level are largely concerned with
permutation, for example of pitches within a given range, singly or in chords, and
such procedures are really identifiable in many cases. The ordering of elements
within a permutation may be "assisted" by the application of random numbers,
although such procedures do not arise from either a Cageian ideology of
non-intervention or a Xenakis-like probabilistic rigour. Rather, they emphasise an
essential lack of interest in the niceties of structuring tiny unitary events when
these will seldom if ever be perceived as such. That a description of procedure
gives, in m y opinion, little insight into what constitutes the heart of the music, is
3~,~.~.
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38 K Ba~e~

due to this very reduction of the status and function of the "note". 4 This is not to
say that the analytical approach to these means of generation is not useful and
interesting in itself, of course , but with Finnissy we are never dealing with
"composed out" internal relationships of a basic material. Any small-scale internal
relationships that are perceptible, it is implied, are more like incidentally beautiful
points in a natural process than the results of a rationalised Durchf~hrung.
Nevertheless, it rapidly becomes obvious that Finnissy (flying in the face of
Cageian orthodoxy!) remains ever vigilant for the felicities (and infelicities) which
chance may put his way.
Permutations and orderings like this are potentially endless processes and,
particularly when applied in different ways to, for example, pitch and duration,
can imply little in the way of directionality and (therefore) closure. 5 (That they
could imply such things is one of those myths taken as gospel by the serial
approach to composition, which also often insists on the memorability of the kind
of unitary events Einnissy's usage subsumes into larger complexes.) This ataxic
quality, however, is not a limitation of Finnissy's material but rather is essential to
the uses to which it is put, to the concentration of musical significance on other
structural levels: since such material can be generated indefinitely and cut or
edited, like lengths of tape, or, more appositely, of film, it may be assembled into
a montage-like structure whose individual "shots" take over the function of unit
elements from the mirco-events of which they consist. Finnissy is enthusiastic and
knowledgeable on the subject of film, which has been an explicit point of reference
in several works: the eighteen Songs [4] (1966-76), short pieces for varying soloists
and ensembles, refer in their overall title and individual structural features to a
series of brief films by the American experimental film-maker Stan Brakhage
(another in that "anti-category" of American artist, vigorously single-minded and
largely unsung, which is of particular importance to Finnissy: Ives, Nancarrow,
W h i t m a n . . . ) - in other words the idea of a "'song" has become highly abstracted
from its usual definition (although a few of the Finnissy pieces are vocal). Similarly
Rushes [81.15] (a solo piano work written for choreography by Siobhan Davies,
now relocated and retitled as Verdi Transcription 15 is the name given to lengths
of film prior to final edi~ng, and has no connection with aquatic vegetation; Reels
[73] for piano, however, refers to Scottish folk-dancing. In many other works the
cinematic influence (or parallelism) is apparent and pervasive, as in the alterna-
tions between "scenes" or "angles" in, for example, C~tana [107], Contret~nze
[118], Piano Concerto no. 3 [46], not to mention an almost universal Finnissy
technique of abrupt "cuts" between textures of widely divergent instrumentation,
rate of attack, register, "harmonic" content, articulation and (most obviously)
dynamic. Interestingly, an attempt to re-adapt cinematic techniques to their own
derivations in Finnissy's music was made in the video production of Dust in the
Road, which was written in 1987 for a BBC2 Omnibus programme directed by
Barrie Gavin. The programme also contains a useful discourse by Finnissy on his
compositional techniques, one of the few occasions so far upon which he has

4 Herein lies the differencebetween Finnissy's "random" procedures and those of Birtwistle,
where the notes are essential formative elements in a melodicstructure, and (presumably)the
substitution of one number for another would have a correspondingly greater effect.
5 Finnissyappears not to organise other "parameters" in this way but will use, as discussed
above, timbre and dynamic (and instrumentation) as larger-scale formal determinants.
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Michael Finnissy - An Overview 39

"gone public" on the subject) to take the quasi-filmic procedures evolved by

Finnissy for composition, and apply them after his "refraction" again to moving
pictures. The films of eastern European folk-dancing and of the performance of the
Finnissy piece were cut up, superimposed, filtered and distorted in an idiomatically
Finnissyesque manner, although falling prey to the inevitably over-explicit nature
of television in general and an "'anecdotal" banality which Finnissy's own
folk-montages so successfully avoid.
It is true that the cinematic influence on the music has lessened in more recent
works; the alternating jumpcuts which became a fully-fledged Finnissy mannerism
in the 1980s have receded in favour of longer "scenes" with less jolting transitions.
Red Earth [124] is a good example - but then, orchestral forces lend themselves
more easily to "dissolves", as does the music's evocation of vast, unbroken
Australian desert landscapes seen from the air (which I can testify is a powerful
experience). But it is safe to say that the characteristic articulation of time and
drama by the medium of film is often close to the surface in Finnissy's music, and
is in many cases an essential key to its genesis and structure.

The "Problem" of Notation

Michael Finnissy's music has often been characterised by (and criticised for) an
exhaustive exploitation of so-called "irrational" rhythmic subdivisions. His explo-
rations of the potential of such notations are often the first aspect of the music to
strike the eye upon opening a score. Indeed his use of subdivisions is entirely
individual, and is to be distinguished from the use of superimposed subdivisions
in, say, Erber, Femeyhough or Redgate, where the "'nesting" implies an accretion
of different levels of metrical working applied to a single line, like a series of prisms
through which a heavily-refracted image is visible. In Finnissy's case the
subdivisions often span much longer durations, or at least have much larger
denominators, and are seldom re-subdivided; what is often a consistently flowing
passage in more-or-less equal note values is stretched and compressed in a vastly
expanded version of the "'notated rubato" found for example in the works of the
19th century piano virtuosi. In all. fall. down. [38] (1977) for piano this technique
is augmented by two staves operating in different and changing time-divisions, by
means of a kind of "'prolation'" notation (reminding us that this feature also refers
back at least to the "'new complexity" of the 14th century) - for example 13 units
in the right hand against 10 in the left. Also the first section of Obrecht-Motetten
// [129.2] (1988) for mandolin, harp and guitar alternates between proportions
such as 28:26:331/2 (!) and general pauses in conventional time signatures. But it
should not be thought that Finnissy's rhythmic notation inhabits this exotic world
to the exclusion of all else; it has a specifically aural function to fulfil which could
not be achieved by other means, and takes its place within a vocabulary of
notational manners each tailored to its structural and psychological purpose in the
scheme of a composition. (One might say that the notational "ambience" of a piece
contributes to its eventual character in almost the same way as would an
idiosyncratic instrumentation.) Whole passages of gracenotes, as well as their
interpolation within otherwise precisely-placed attacks, occur frequently, often in
the piano music generating blurred cloud-like aggregates. The almost graphic
descriptiveness of the exquisitely-poised sound masses in Snowdrift [16] (1972),
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40 R. Barrett

VeryF~ ..ar~c44

~- i~+-~'~- - ~x,.~L~ .~"~',.'[~_.

moae.,.. , ~ , , ~ : p o i n t ...
(~,~) ,, . / - - -

s.,o,~ PP }
(,,,n' ,~ ,,i,)

Figure 8 Snowdriftp. 3. 9 1975 Edition Modem,Munich. Used by permission.

containing chords and dusters as well as single pitches (a link to Stockhausen's

Klavierst~cke VIII and X?) is a characteristically "extreme" example (Figure 8).
These swathes of gracenotes might act as extended upbeats or as autonomous
bursts of activity, a distinction sometimes made explicit by notational differentia-
tion. Other works, for example Andimirronai [77] (1981) for solo 'cello and large
stretches of The Undivine Comedy [122] go no further into rhythmic exofica than
triplets. Passages such as pages 3-5 of Teangi [85] (1982) and the opening of
Alongside [52] (1980 mentioned above as one of the most complex and variegated
-

moments in all Finnissy's works), both for large chamber ensembles, superimpose
instruments playing in precise and imprecise rhythm. Cabaret Vert [114] contains
passages for flute and cor anglais in undulating glissandi whose turning-points are
only approximately indicated, while mezzosoprano and percussion operate within
a precise metrical framework. There are many other such examples. Despite
surface appearances, Finnissy's rhythmic notation in its various guises is not only
a practical but actually economical solution for the expressive tasks it is called upon
to fulfil.
Frequently, rhythmic values are chosen in such a way as firstly to negate an
overall pulsation and secondly to avoid coincidences of attack between instru-
ments or (in piano music principally, but sometimes even in violin parts, as in the
String Trio [120] - Figure 9) different layers or lines on the same instrument. On
the other hand, the first half of Nowhere else to go [131] is almost entirely in
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Michael Finnissy - An Overview 41

[ • Com~ da ~incipio
- t ~ ~;.++,j. +.+~_

+.._~= +i-~_. _ ~ _ .. _

~ ~ : s J ~ __ ~, T:~-'----'t-'~ 0 -- _ 7~--------~ ,

~
+ a a , . , , 7~ , ~ ~- - - ~. P P P ,----r- . . . . . . . . . . . _.._ ~ -_ ,'" -~-::=

Figure 9 String Trio p. 32. R e p r o d u c e d b y p e r m i s s i o n of U n i t e d M u s i c P u b l i s h e r s Ltd.

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42 K Ba~e~

rhythmic unison for three of the five instruments. (Finnissy is ever generous in
providing exceptions to any "constants" one may care to postulate, although I
cannot think of any places - so far - where he has made use of repeated n o t e s . . . )
But this is not the whole story; the notation also imparts particular qualities to the
strands themselves. This is apparent not only in solo works for melody
instruments but in, for example, Piano Concerti nos. 5 [62] and 7 [69] where
individual complex lines begin simultaneously and uiafold independently in
different tempi with their own accelerandi and diminuendi. On both, the piano will
always finish last, only because its part is sufficiently longer than the others even
taking into account inevitable variation in the durations of all parts.) A particular
tension is created between the "solipsistic" instrumental or vocal parts and the
shifting fields generated by their superimposition, and of all Finnissy's piano
concerti these are the two in which the piano appears in its most ambiguous, least
soloistic r61e. Unsynchronised parts (and the absence of a score, the composer
refusing even to suggest a "'correctly" lined-up version) are also features of
Nobody's Jig [67] (1980-81) - "for 2 violins, viola and 'cello" - which perhaps
significantly also undermines a "received" genre.
The expressivity of different notational elements in Finnissy's work, while being
primarily a personal radicalisation of many of the implications of traditional
notation, exhibits some similarities with the music of Sylvano Bussotti (whose
opulent textures have also sometimes exerted an influence on Finnissy). Although
the use of more flamboyant graphics was an early and passing phase for Finnissy
(as in Babylon for voice and chamber orchestra (1971) -- since withdrawn), he
shares with Bussotti a tendency to invent idiomatic notations for specific musical
situations, and an obviously intense engagement with the physical act of creating
the score (including immediately recognisable calligraphy), both of which possess,
or should possess, an important degree of suggestivity for the performer. Almost
the opposite of this effect is also possible: the six sections of Transformations of the
Vampire [8] (1968-71, title after Baudelaire, for clarinet, violin, viola and 3
percussionists) explore diverse points along the coordination/independence axis,
section 5 and 6 consisting merely of a paragraph each of verbal instructions for
improving a defined yet formally amorphous texture - "do not contrive a formal
layout of the material (no climaxes - unfocused)". The emphasis remains on sound
rather than process, drawing attention only to the result and not the act of
improvisation. Finnissy has little interest in improvisation per se; although he
compares the piano writing of his Piano Concerto no. 3 [46] to the playing of Cecil
Taylor, any parallels between the two are confined to a general feeling of explosive
energy, as is also the case with the solo piano piece Jazz [32] (1976). Even so,
Finnissy's methods of composition have an improvisatory quality (not least in the
speed at which his "abstract improvisation" is able to generate new compositions)
which reveals itself in his music's characteristic spontaneity and unpredictability.
There are important implications for performance practice in Finnissy's dynamic
and articulational notation, especially concerning the works of the last ten years in
which non-European traditions have gradually supplanted Western music history
in providing his articulational models. What this has meant in practice, apart from
the obvious differences in pitch-material, is that the amount of information in the
score related to dynamic and phrasing has been reduced to a minimum. It is
important to remember, that this is not an invitation to perform blankly "as
written" (whatever that may mean) in which case the result will be bland,
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Michael Finnissy - A n O v e r v i e w 43

monochrome and amateurish, but an invitation to interpret the notated features of

the part with a range of subtle inflections, sculpturings, even roughnesses. (There
is an analogy here with the efforts of performers such as Reinhard Goebel to
re-inject an almost folk-like immediacy into the bald texts of Baroque music -
although I dare say that in Finnissy's case the necessity is for a somewhat subtler
relaxation of interpretative reverence.) It should of course be superfluous to draw
attention to matters such as this, but the belief is all too com~non that all this music
is "about" is its own notational complexity. I hope to have show in this essay that
the opposite is the case. The relationships between composer, score, performer,
instrument, sound and listener are and have always been more complex than can
be summarised by the phrase "'playing the notes"; there is no reason why this
should be any less true in Finnissy than in Mozart. The idea that everything
necessary to an idiomatic realisation must be contained in the score is not only
impossible to implement but also ultimately deadening and undesirable.

In place of a conclusion

Any composer with an immediately recognisable stylistic trait leaves his or her
work open to thoughtless imitation by less mature admirers; one need look no
further than the blatant way in which the music of Franco Donatoni and Salvatore
Sciarrino has been taken up and halfheartedly misappropriated by countless
younger Italian composers. Michael Finnissy, too, has his share of imitators who
(like imitators in general) seem to have failed to grasp the essential identity
between his (ultimately and necessarily personal) expressive aims and the stylistic
means by which they are made audible. But in fact there is no one "'Finnissy
style", even though the indescribable personality of the music is ever-present. The
most "complex" aspect of his work, and one of the most fascinating, is its sheer
inclusiveness, almost as if we were not dealing with one composer but with an
entire (relatively small!) musical culture, with its own modes of expression for
public and private occasions, recreational, educational and ceremonial uses, and so
on. One of the few other composers of recent times to have tended in this direction
was Paul Hindemith, whose immediacy of expression was eventually subsumed
by an increasing enslavement to his own systematising academicism. Finnissy, on
the other hand, is the opposite of an academic composer; his antagonism to any
kind of musical orthodoxy (even his own) is a constant and deeply-felt feature of
his personality in all its manifestations. It is this aspect of Finnissy that other
composers would do well to look to as an example.