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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 January 2016
Darmstadt Impressions, 1994 Elke Hockings
Osborne's Sarajevo Steve Sweeney-Turner
Lucerne Festival Peter Palmer
Tavener's Apocalypse Malcolm Miller
New Henze Works Guy Rickards
Ferneyhough's On Stellar Magnitudes Robin Freeman
David Johnson's Dawn Call Steve Sweeney-Turner
Oxford Contemporary Music Festival Roderic Dunnett
page 29 note * In the original draft of her review, Elke blockings described these statements ‘as a typical rhetorical refugee strategy’. Though she decided to withdraw the phrase, it led to correspondence with the Editor of Tempo; who considers some of her observations worth reproducing here:
‘Rhetorical refugee strategy’ indicates a typical attitude of helplessness. Scholars of all types find themselves confronted with exceptions to their assumptions. Their intellectual training has made them not only learn their lesson but also cope with helplessness. What is, for example, the implied pitch for the Schenkerians and the metaphysics for the post-structuralists is the sonic context for Robert Cogan's spectrum analysis. It is a good sign for trouble!
The convoluted rhetoric of over-generalization, arrogance and intolerance appears to be the refugee strategy of Adorno inspired German scholars. Saying that, though, one could get easily get caught as an opponent of Adorno's beliefs. Criticizing Adorno's legacy does not mean criticizing all his thoughts. Christmas is not a bad thing even after we discovered that Santa Claus does not exist.
In the case of Fox's objections in Darmstadt, a lot could and should be said. There are the issues he raised (Stravinsky, mass culture and intolerance). But for me, the reactions to his objections were even more interesting. They highlighted the gulf between German industrial philosophy and English positivism. While the English reprove that Santa Claus is merely wishful thinking the Germans speculate about the value of such wishful thinking. That's where the complicated language comes in, trying to reconcile the ‘immanent’ contradictions. There are people who call it dialectics. There are people who earn their money daily by attempting to reconcile the ‘immanent’ contradictions of music perception. That's what people call music business. And Darmstadt is on the calendar of any good German new music business man…
page 34 note * It was also featured in the Huddersfield Festival in November.
page 34 note 1 In fact Carter wrote the piece for Sylvia Marlowe's harpsichord quartet, to share programmes with Rameau and Telemann, before the baroque flute and oboe had been fully revived.
page 34 note † Premièred on 3 September at the Ancien réfectoire de l'Abbaye de Royaumont by Natalia Zagorinskaya (sop) and the Ensemble Contrechamps c. Zsolt Nagy.
page 34 note 2 Needless to say, I find the notion put forward (by, among others, Adorno) that Pierrot lunaire is an artist's critique of society totally wrong-headed. It is so no more than Herzgewächse or Das Buch der hängenden Gärten are. Verklärte Nacht, on the contrary, through its allusion to a poem by Richard Dehmel in which a man finds the courage and compassion to accept a woman after she tells him she bears a child who is not his own, does include a plea for the updating of morals, however tangential to the music.
page 35 note † The score is not yet published. Extracts from it given here by kind permission of Peters Edition Ltd.
page 35 note 3 Ferneyhough, Brian: ‘Pierrot lunaire pour les temps présents’, in Voix Nouvelles 94 Google Scholar.
page 35 note 4 The expression ‘accompanying instruments’ means that Ferneyhough takes Pierre lunaire to be an extended Klavierlied in the tradition of Schubert and Neukomm, Herzogenberg and Brahms. It also has implications for his own piece.
page 35 note 5 There is a definite mirage of chacony in Domaines by Boulez. Jay Bernfeld, the gamba player, recently told me, after his solo recital in the Ste. Chapelle, that the chaconne-rondeau was the greatest of baroque forms. It would have been firmly in Boulez's mind through Messiaen's analyses of Couperin. The situation in Ferneyhough is more (and appropriately) nebulous, though the warp would seem to have more persistent elements than the weave. One of these is the flourish mentioned below. Another is the inching figuration in the cello at bar 43ff – frayed flotsam perhaps, whether by design or not, of the cello part in ‘Nacht’.
page 35 note 6 Apropos of ‘whimsy’, those readers who would like to add Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear to the prompters of Ferneyhough's interstellar tomfoolery would be perfectly in the right.