Ferneyhough Week – La terre est un homme

Thanks for the Sarah Blasko recommendation — I have not heard of her before and will rectify that ASAP.

Assuming that some kind of historical consciousness survives what looks like a difficult time ahead for the physical survival of the planet, I’m convinced that the second half of the 20th century will be seen as a paradigm shift in music only equalled by the advent of polyphony in the 15th century and tonality in the 18th — in other words, as fascinating as post-WW II developments in notated music have been, the major innovation of the previous century was the advent of recording technology and its various effects on the very concept of the ‘work’. A work can be ascertained by reading a Ferneyhough score, even absent a recording. But recording has made possible 1) the fixing of jazz and improvised music in time where a performance assumes all the qualities associated with a ‘work’ and 2) the creation of ‘works’ in the recording studio bypassing notation and real-time performance altogether.

Now that Elliott Carter has died, I can think of only two equals who work from notation outwards (so to speak): Cecil Taylor and Anthony Braxton. Studio-generated works such as Julia Holter and Scott Walker’s are just as important to me; in the future, today’s opposition between notated and non-notated music is sure to become secondary to the qualities of the remaining works themselves.

‘Bish Bosch’ has been a pleasant surprise, although I still think SW lost something when he completely severed his ties with easy listening and accepted his rebranding as ‘sound artist’; for me ‘Tilt’ and ‘Climate of Hunter’ remain unsurpassed. The most recent Bob Dylan record is pretty astonishing as well!

Thanks again for getting me to track down the Holter records — for a completely different approach to the ‘pop’ song, I highly recommend Gary War, especially his most recent CD: there’s something there that I still find missing in his associates John Maus and Ariel Pink ….