Critical Perspectives on Michael Finnissy

Bright Futures, Dark Pasts

Ian Pace, Nigel McBride, Ian Pace, Nigel McBride

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780367729127
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351031523
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Musica

The composer and pianist Michael Finnissy (b. 1946) is an unmistakeable presence in the British and international new music scene, both for his immeasurable generosity as prolific composer for many different types of musicians, major advocate for the works of others, and performer and conductor who has also been a driving force behind ensembles; he was also President of the International Society for Contemporary Music from 1990 to 1996. His vast and enormously varied output confounds those who seek easy categorisations: once associated strongly with the 'new complexity', Finnissy is equally known as composer regularly engaged with many different folk musics, for working with amateur and community musicians, for a long-term engagement with sacred music, or as an advocate of Anglo-American 'experimental' music. Twenty years ago, a large-scale volume entitled Uncommon Ground: The Music of Michael Finnissy gave the first major overview of the output of any 'complex' composer. This new volume brings a greater plurality of perspectives and critical sensibility to bear upon an output which is almost twice as large as it was when the earlier book was published. A range of leading contributors – musicologists, composers, performers and others – each grapple with particular questions relating to Finnissy's music, often in ways which raise questions relating more widely to new music, and provide theoretical foundations for further of study both of Finnissy and other composers.

Section B

Finnissy’s identities

5 Marginality and Finnissian performance in the 1980s

Roddy Hawkins

Introduction¹

On 10 October 1977 Michael Finnissy gave a piano recital in Freiburg consisting mainly of new work by young British composers. Simply entitled Moderne Englische Klaviermusik, the concert was promoted by the Institute für Neue Musik at Freiburg’s conservatoire and took place in the gallery space of the old Black Monastry (Schwarzes Kloster) then run by the city’s vanguard Art Association (Kunstverein). On more than one occasion Finnissy has recounted how the Freiburg programme was sparked by his friend, pianist Ronald Lumsden who, along with the Society for the Promotion of New Music (SPNM), was puzzled by a dearth of new pieces composed for the instrument:

I said to them: ‘this is just ridiculous! The way you get composers to write for pianos is, you ring them up and you ask them to write pieces for you!’ But that was either too ‘complicated’ for the SPNM or Ron didn’t like the idea very much. But, anyway, I’d decided that that was what I was going to do. So I rang up all the composers I was currently friendly with, which included Ollie Knussen at the time and Robert Saxton and Jenny Fowler and Howard Skempton and various other people. My debut concert had the usual number of—about six or seven—world premières on it and that was the kind of programme I did. I used to get composers to write. […] So for several years that’s what I did.²

Though his commissioning and promotion of new work may have tailed off after the 1980s, Finnissy’s activity as a performer, and more broadly as an advocate, certainly extended beyond a period of ‘several years’. In 1997, for example, following his six-year tenure as President of the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM, 1990–6), and his participation in the then recently founded Contemporary Music for Amateurs (COMA, 1993 to the present day), Finnissy gave a recital for the Union of Composers in Moscow which included 19 works by 19 different British composers (see List of Performances). Though none of these was a first performance and not all owed their existence to Finnissy’s patronage or encouragement, the selection offered a fair reflection of Finnissy’s (by then) longstanding advocacy of and personal connections to a stylistically diverse range of composers that complicate what it means to say ‘British music’, especially to a foreign audience.

It is symbolically revealing that Finnissy’s advocacy and performance started in Freiburg and was forged during the 1980s – in parallel with his own growing reputation as a composer – in the context of two interrelated factors: first, a deeply conflicted relationship with ‘British music’, by turns nurturing and hostile; and second, the emergence of the label ‘new complexity’, which in the British context owes as much to Finnissy as it does to any other figure, and one with which he is notoriously uncomfortable. In short, to trace Finnissy’s performances during the period 1977–86, as I do here, is to grapple with his relationship to discourses and practices of virtuosity, complexity and Britishness, and the histories and groupings which they imply.

Context: a reluctant pianist?

Finnissy consistently refers to the Freiburg recital not only as the beginning of his activity as a concert pianist but as an accidental one, too.³ In a related manner, Finnissy has framed his commitment to contemporary music as one pursued in an ‘amateur’ spirit in the context of a career where income has been earned via work as a répétiteur, performer and academic. Claiming to have ‘utterly failed’ as a professional composer, he has said that ‘composing is, for me, an obsessive hobby, and I’m effectively an amateur’.⁴ In a variation on the same theme Finnissy admits that: ‘I am proud to consider myself an “amateur” of music. But the amateur has to be of a professional standard to pass the screening processes attendant on broadcasting.’⁵ This is a claim which deserves substantive attention in its own right, not least because the history of amateur participation in the arts and the meaning of the term is anything but singular, especially in the context of the British class system and the arts; I raise it here, though, in order to emphasise the way in which Finnissy and others have framed what amounts to a significant, acknowledged but as yet undocumented, contribution to the performance and advocacy of new music in Britain.

For example, in 1987, having remarked to Richard Toop that the Freiburg performance had taken place ‘by accident’, Finnissy expressed frustration about his virtuoso reputation and its attendant implications upon the production of his compositional work: ‘I curse the fact that I ever played the piano every time I practise for a concert, because it takes so much time. I fundamentally think of myself as a composer; I get up in the morning and I think of music paper, not the piano keyboard.’⁶ Toop earlier acknowledged that ‘Finnissy dislikes being thought of as a professional virtuoso pianist. Fine: in that case, one can say without fear of contradiction that he is one of the world’s most sensationally gifted amateurs.’⁷ In 2002 Finnissy echoed these sentiments in conversation with the pianist Marilyn Nonken, stating that although ‘[c]omposing and performing are inseparable […] I have always thought of myself primarily as a composer’.⁸ According to Ian Pace, it is a view of artistic labour that Finnissy shares with Liszt, Busoni, Rachmaninoff, Godowsky, Grainger and Sorabji: ‘they would have liked to concentrate their energies on composing […]. Several of these figures admitted to performing primarily by virtue of necessity, in a desire to enable both their own work and that of others they admired to be more frequently heard and understood.’⁹ The crux of the matter concerns the desire to be taken seriously, avoiding a situation whereby ‘mere virtuosity’ is privileged over formal and material considerations.¹⁰ Furthermore, when placed into a context in which virtuosity was often synonymous with the discourse of complexity which developed through the 1980s, it can, I would suggest, be taken as one of ‘the more polite words people will choose to basically say you don’t belong’ as described by Finnissy in Uncommon Ground.¹¹

More recently, and of particular interest in what follows, Finnissy told Jack Sheen that: ‘I’m not a ‘pianist’! I’m a composer who sometimes plays the piano, to make myself useful. I don’t play ‘piano repertoire’. I have simply given the first performance of more than 300 pieces because I liked, or loved, them and wanted them to be performed.’¹² Certainly from the point of view of music historiography and the sociology of music there is nothing simple about it. Not only has a focus on his compositional work meant that there has as yet been no attempt to document this activity: much of it (especially the solo recitals) took place beyond the purview of contemporaneous critics, u...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of figures
• List of music examples
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction
• Section A Finnissy’s aesthetics and styles
• Section B Finnissy’s identities
• Section C Compositional considerations
• Section D Contexts and case studies
• Index