Brian Ferneyhough

Information about Brian Ferneyhough

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Brian John Peter Ferneyhough (born 16 January, 1943 in Coventry) is an English composer.

Biography

Ferneyhough was awarded the Mendelssohn Scholarship in 1968 and moved to Europe to study with Ton de Leeuw in Amsterdam, and later with Klaus Huber in Basel. As of 1999, he is William H. Bonsall Professor in Music at Stanford University.

Ferneyhough became closely associated with the so-called New Complexity school of composition, characterised by its extension of the modernist tendency towards formalisation (particularly as in integral serialism). Ferneyhough's actual compositional approach, however, rejects serialism and other "generative" methods of composing; he prefers instead to use systems only to create material and formal constraints, while their realisation appears to be more spontaneous. Unlike many more formally-inclined composers, Ferneyhough often speaks of his music as being about creating energy and excitement rather than embodying an abstract schema.

His scores make huge technical demands on performers -- sometimes, as in the case of Unity Capsule for solo flute, creating parts that are so detailed they are likely impossible to realise completely. Contrary to the widespread belief that Ferneyhough is merely attempting to tie down interpretative possibilities by stipulating everything with such precision, the purpose here is to give the performer creative freedom in deciding which aspects to focus on, which elements may be omitted and so on. As he acknowledges, numerous performers have refused to take his works into their repertoire because of the great commitment required to learn them and a perception that similar effects can be achieved through improvisation. The compositions have, however, attracted a number of advocates, among them the Arditti Quartet, the members of the Nieuw Ensemble, and EXAUDI Vocal Ensemble.

One of his latest works, an opera, Shadowtime, with a libretto by Charles Bernstein, and based on the life of the German philosopher Walter Benjamin, was premiered in Munich on 25th May 2004, and recorded in 2005 for CD release in 2006.

Ferneyhough was the recipient of the Ernst von Siemens Music Prize 2007 for lifetime achievement.

Works

Selected Works (with score samples from bmic)

Bibliography

A volume of Ferneyhough's articles and interviews has been collected which, despite his sometimes obfuscatory style, is invaluable in understanding his very dense, initially inaccessible works.
  • James Boros and Richard Toop, editors: The Collected Writings of Brian Ferneyhough Publisher: Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1995
  • Brian Ferneyhough: Brian Ferneyhough by Brian Ferneyhough Publisher: Paris : L'Age d'homme OCLC: 21274317 (French)

References

External links

About Brian Ferneyhough

Interviews

About works

Performers of Ferneyhough's works

Performances

January 16 is the 1st day of the year (2nd in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 0 days remaining.

Events


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19th century - 20th century - 21st century
1910s  1920s  1930s  - 1940s -  1950s  1960s  1970s
1940 1941 1942 - 1943 - 1944 1945 1946

Year 1943 (MCMXLIII
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Coventry is a metropolitan borough in the West Midlands of England. With a population of 303,475 at the 2001 Census (306,000 est. 2007), Coventry is the ninth largest city in England and the eleventh largest in the United Kingdom.
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Motto
Dieu et mon droit   (French)
"God and my right"
Anthem
No official anthem specific to England — the anthem of the United Kingdom is "God Save the Queen".
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composer is a person who writes music. The term refers particularly to someone who writes music in some type of musical notation, thus allowing others to perform the music. This distinguishes the composer from a musician who improvises or plays a musical instrument.
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19th century - 20th century - 21st century
1930s  1940s  1950s  - 1960s -  1970s  1980s  1990s
1965 1966 1967 - 1968 - 1969 1970 1971

Year 1968 (MCMLXVIII
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Europe is one of the seven traditional continents of the Earth. Physically and geologically, Europe is the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, west of Asia. Europe is bounded to the north by the Arctic Ocean, to the west by the Atlantic Ocean, to the south by the Mediterranean Sea,
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Ton de Leeuw (born Rotterdam, 16 November 1926 - died Paris, 31 May 1996) was a Dutch composer. He was known for his experiments with microtonality.

Taught by Olivier Messiaen and others, and influenced by Béla Bartók, he was a teacher at the University of Amsterdam and
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Amsterdam
Canal houses alongside the Prinsengracht

Flag
Coat of arms
Nickname: Mokum
Motto: Heldhaftig, Vastberaden, Barmhartig
(Valiant, Determined, Compassionate)
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Klaus Huber (born November 30, 1924 in Bern, Switzerland) is a Swiss composer. One of the leading figures of his generation in Europe, Huber has written extensively for chamber ensembles, choirs, soloists and the orchestra as well as the theater.
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Basel (British English traditionally: Basle [bɑːl] and more recently Basel ['ba:zəl][1][2]
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Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly known as Stanford University or simply Stanford, is a private university located approximately 37 miles (60 kilometers) southeast of San Francisco and approximately 20 miles (32 km) northwest of San Jose in Stanford,
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The New Complexity is a primarily British movement of avant garde classical music dating from the 1970s.

Music of the "New Complexity"

Though often atonal, highly abstract, and dissonant in sound, the "New Complexity" is most readily characterized by the use of extremely
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Modernism describes a series of reforming cultural movements in art and architecture, music, literature and the applied arts which emerged in the three decades before 1914.
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citation, footnoting or external linking.


For other uses of "serial or serialism", see Serial (disambiguation).
In music, serialism
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citation, footnoting or external linking.


For other uses of "serial or serialism", see Serial (disambiguation).
In music, serialism
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The Arditti Quartet is an internationally acclaimed string quartet founded in 1974.

The Arditti Quartet enjoys a world-wide reputation for their spirited and technically refined interpretations of contemporary and earlier 20th century music.
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Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin (July 15, 1892 – September 27, 1940) was a German Marxist literary critic, essayist, translator, and philosopher. He was at times associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory and was also greatly inspired by the Marxism of Bertolt
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Steven Schick was born in Iowa and raised in a farming family. For the past thirty years he has championed contemporary percussion music as a performer and teacher. He studied at the University of Iowa and received the Soloists Diploma from the Staatliche Hochschule für Musik in Freiburg,
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Steven Schick was born in Iowa and raised in a farming family. For the past thirty years he has championed contemporary percussion music as a performer and teacher. He studied at the University of Iowa and received the Soloists Diploma from the Staatliche Hochschule für Musik in Freiburg,
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