I remember one in Sydney a while back which was reviewed as 'about exciting as watching people knit'.

Although it's a little more complicated than that, because (as I have just discovered from the tattered
xerox on my shelf) the 3/48 bar (it's on the first system of p. 6) is preceded by two 3/24 bars, and thus the "triplet" pulse has had, in theory anyway, some time to establish itself.  Of course, the first of the 3/24 bars consists of a dotted sixteenth (sorry, semiquaver...) followed by a dotted sixteenth (sorry, semiquaver...) rest.  Oh dear. 

The point is simple though: that second dotted note in the 3/48 bar is "syncopated," or in fact merely syncopated without quotes.  One ought to do a composer the courtesy of assuming that his or her notations mean something, after all.

In that context, sure. In a context like a string quartet, however, e.g. where the C is the leading note in D flat major, I believe the sharpness of the C would be calibrated more intuitively.


Well, the noticeable nature of inaccuracy is ultimately a major factor in this entire debate; very few listeners will notice whether you switched around pages 8 and 9 of Time and Motion I in a concert, let alone whether the figure in bar x was articulated correctly. That would make most New Music "easier" than traditional music, as there's little or no corrective; but obviously I'm not accepting faking it as a valid mode of performance.

But with the parametric detail in "complex" music such things as the Waldstein build-up can be multiplied, e.g. the sort of thing you get in Richard's Tract, where the pianist has 3-4 voices following different dynamic curves, and each is supposed to be smooth.


I'd say that your experience is actually a significant factor here; you've been playing such music longer than most, so some of the challenges that differ so greatly from more traditional music are familiar to you. My music uses some similar parametric configurations, and I've worked both with performers experienced and inexperienced in these things, so I can compare the experience. The less experienced performers, if they are sufficiently open to take the plunge, tend to feel slightly out of their depth, but often experience an exhilarating sort of self-transcendence as a result of being pushed to places they hadn't conceived of. But such performers, in my experience, are certainy fairly tied-up mentally, and will need a lot of pointers from me as to "expressive" matters, if they're even free to act on them.

Also, the discussion of notation so far seems to have tacitly assumed a solo context, but with the sort of rhythmic complexity we're dealing with here, coordination and balance in ensemble music are a whole other can of worms.


Sure, I wasn't actually stating otherwise. But for the novice, the priorities tend to be more pragmatic, and the expressive functions of different physical parameters might not yet be understood. Or, for example, the notion that a crescendo on a particularly "weak" microtonal fingering is intended to highlight its sonic instability, as a way of reflecting the instrument's unique constitution, rather than simply being a result of the composer's ignorance. These realisations are going to take some time and analysis if the composer isn't at hand to point them out directly.



Of course, though I do wonder whether you'd hear that without having seen the score (not that that would invalidate it).

Ha, I knew you'd say that! But I'm sure you could improvise a convincing page 9 for those not in the know...

Well, there at least is a concrete example, but isn't it a rather artificial one?

In any case I would indeed say that on pianos or other instruments with sharp attack the example you've listed is indeed not a great deal harder than straight quavers, depending of course on the tempo. I think you're overlooking the fact that deviation from the kind of regularity transparent to any listener is perceptible in a way that deviation from the exact notation of a complex demand is not. I maintain that that's a musical reality.

Talking about 'difficulty' in the abstract is rather, well, difficult when perception plays such a part and in music there's no way out of that. Musically speaking if a task can be done perfectly then it has to be - it's not that listeners suddenly become less forgiving people when listening to Mozart, just that they generally know all the notes and that a deviation from them automatically will be distracting to the listener's perception in a way that already, for example, a smudged note in a passage of Liszt double octaves won't be, let alone whether my 19:16 was really closer to 19:15 1/2. It's a two-way street.

And yes, I have played (and conducted) Berg and I have played (and conducted) recent Ferneyhough, and I wouldn't say the latter is more musically demanding. Apart perhaps from the need to use a calculator to find where the beat is relative to the notes because the performing materials for Brian's music aren't proportionally notated, but I don't see that demand as inherently musical.

Hm. Sort of my point really - mental and motoric challenges separated from music aren't particularly interesting to me in themselves.

At some level of measurement you'd be hard put to find two notes anywhere, played by anyone, in any repertoire, that were exactly the same length or dynamic. But sometimes they're exactly the same on the page. So what does 'inaccurate' mean? Back to perceptions. I don't think you can divorce the two. Not without implying a degree of rigidity to musical notation that I suspect no composer or musician has ever expected or been capable of (or interested in!).

Is rubato 'inaccuracy'? What about emphasising downbeats in many areas of the repertoire? Perhaps one can say that in certain repertoire it's encoded into the notation by convention. But then how much is 'inaccurate'? And so on. Isn't the construction of a viable framework for engaging with the notation, which will almost always involve deviation from the exact temporal proportions it presents, a huge part of what musicality is all about?


Oh, right, well, not much point my saying anything then.

And conversely, prior to 1600 there are no barlines at all in most music - how should that be interpreted?  I am not trying to hijack this thread in the direction of HIP, but any discussion of the "meaning" of barlines must also cover their absence...  are they just a visual aid to numeric note-groupings, or do they imply interpretative elements such as "downbeats".  We ought to remember that in principle barlines are convenient, but play no role at all and could in theory be omitted from printed music... as they once were.

I don't have time right now to get into this too fully, but I wanted to leave one thought:


Consider this: I would posit that in any relatively "modern" music (modern meaning post-1800, say), there is a certain amount of mental and motor activity, and fineness of that activity, that goes into performance.  I don't think that amount varies as much from one composer to another, or one century to another, or whatever, as it may seem.  The question of how much is specified in the score adds another layer to the process of learning, of course, but it is a relatively trivial one, musically speaking (which is not to say that the results are trivial!). 

When BF adds expressive markings and rhythmic nuances and dynamics and articulations to a passage that other composers, or older composers, would be content to leave with a slur and a crescendo, I am still not convinced that he makes the act of performance any more difficult.  He makes the act of reading the score more difficult, and the act of internalizing the various indications more difficult for the trivial reason that there are more of them; but when it comes time to apply finger to keyboard or fingerboard or trill key, I think the amount of effort is more or less the same.

Another way of putting it: the "difficulty" of Ferneyhough's music (too bad for him, incidentally, that he has become enough of an ex post facto figurehead to always be the go-to proper name in conversations like this!) is, as has become pretty well understood, the result of an attempt to encode a performance practice within a particular work that is sufficiently subtle and flexible, mutatis mutandis, to "compete" affectively with that that is implicit in earlier music.  The problem, then, is a matter of learning; of performers' musical education.  Which is not to say that it isn't real; but it is to say that it isn't inherent.  The fact that Herr Sudden or Ian have, after years and years of performance of this repertoire, internalized its difficulties, seems to me to show quite conclusively that those difficulties are fundamentally illusory.  You say that OS is not a typical case; that is true; but, after all, the technical challenges of Mozart's piano sonatas are terminally daunting to beginning players.  It's just that the category of "beginning players" when it comes to Ferneyhough is much, much larger, and much more professionally accomplished on average!