Michael Finnissy

Summary

‘I’m on the margins of a world dominated by commercial constraints.’

Michael Finnissy is the first composer I interviewed for this book, a fact that may have limited the usefulness of my encounter with him. Nervous interviewers, feeling the need to impress or at least to relax their subjects, can be tempted to concentrate on directing a smooth flow of conversation in which one topic segues neatly into the next, at the expense of listening sufficiently carefully to what's being said; and I may have fallen into this trap with Finnissy. I went to him armed with a list of standard questions to which he supplied some decidedly non-standard answers. It was only later, while transcribing our conversation, that I realised how patiently he’d interpreted my questioning to reflect his outlook and experience. Nevertheless, he later asked to make significant changes to his contribution because he felt that he hadn't expressed himself clearly enough.

As with Julian Anderson, I hesitate to say that he has enormous integrity both as a person and as an artist because this would imply that the other contributors don’t; but it's one of the qualities that I feel most strongly define him. And it's linked to what I perceive as his sense of being, or at least feeling, an outsider. Although he's firmly grounded in the real world, it contains much that he dislikes and disagrees with, and his musical responses to it can be demanding and provocative. Presumably it's this instinct that prevents him from suffering fools gladly and enables him to state, quite reasonably, that he sees no reason to waste his time on people who don't interest him.

He now lives on the north Norfolk coast, but at the time of this interview his home was on the edge of a small town in West Sussex; and it was there, on an unusually warm and sunny April morning in 2011, that we talked in the shade of his back garden. He spoke earnestly, analytically and sometimes obliquely, only once fazed by the insistent buzz of his next-door-neighbour's strimmer. I wondered whether his own garden – compact, orderly, densely stocked and full of detail – could have been said to resemble his music, but I was probably making connections for their own sake. Perhaps he simply had a small, neat, well-planted garden.