11 - Michael Finnissy’s Instrumental Music Drama

Summary

At the risk of seeming to strain for analogies, there is a case for suggesting that, if Michael Finnissy (born in 1946) has remained close to the ‘complex’ ethos established and sustained since the mid-1960s by Brian Ferneyhough, he has complemented Ferneyhough's avoidance of British associations – and residence – with an embrace of them. Not only did Finnissy manage to survive for more than a decade as professor of composition at Southampton University, but he has shown how his music can accommodate itself to community activity of a quintessentially British kind, a kind dear to Benjamin Britten's heart. Finnissy's extended cantata, called This Church (2003), was written to mark the 900th anniversary of a church in New Shoreham, Sussex, where Finnissy's partner was organist and choirmaster. It was conceived as a collaborative enterprise, involving amateur as well as professional performers, and its musical roots are in the kind of chant-based materials suggesting links with Britten's church operas as well as with certain scores by Peter Maxwell Davies. Though such characteristically complex compositions involving ‘music about music’ as the English Folk Tunes, Verdi Transcriptions, Folklore and The History of Photography in Sound often transform their found materials out of all easy recognition, Finnissy has not normally gone as far down the route, adopted in This Church, which leads to a hymn tune in the work's final stages – a modal, five-in-a-bar setting of George Herbert's ‘Teach me, my God and King’ (Example 11.1).

The way Our Church migrates between Finnissy's usual, intricately patterned manner and its more instantly accessible opposite encapsulates the pluralism that has invaded serious music since the mid-twentieth century, and is even more active in the twenty-first – the margins impinging on a notably diverse centre. But Finnissy is too much the edgy modernist to find convergence, fusion and balanced compromise remotely attractive. Writing in 2005 about a setting of William McGonagall's ‘Forget-me-not’ which he made as a 13-year-old in 1959, Finnissy identified a precociously uncompromising modernist stance when he says that at the end ‘the music breaks up into fragments (intended to evoke distress and discomfort), leaving the upper voices alone and seemingly disoriented’.