Holloway and Ferneyhough at 60: Connections and constellations

Musical Times, Summer 2003 by Whittall, Arnold

ARNOLD WHITTALL celebrates two distinctive musical responses to the fleeting and fragmentary in modern life

BRIAN FERNEYHOUGH WAS BORN in Coventry on 16 January 1943, Robin Holloway in Leamington Spa on 19 October of the same year. These facts are the pretext for an exercise in comparing and contrasting which underlines the exercise's arbitrariness, while also inviting a response to the pleasures of allusion which it facilitates. Is it a 'striking coincidence' that the English Midlands should have given birth to two such different composers within the same calendar year, or is it a conjunction with no wider cultural significance? An analysis which attempted in-depth intrusion into the early environments of the pair might begin to indicate if such questions should be taken seriously. My analysis here has a very different orientation: certain quite recent compositions by Ferneyhough and Holloway are placed in perspectives which glancingly allude to Bildung - the emergence and evolution of creative character and quality.1

A career centred entirely on Cambridge (though taking in Oxford at the postgraduate stage) is certainly different from one that soon exchanged London for Amsterdam, Freiburg, San Diego and Stanford (California). Rooted conservatism appears to contrast with rootless radicalism - except that consciousness of traditions and models, established theories and practices, proves as essential to one as to the other. In both cases, awareness - and dependence? - on an academic environment indicates that talking and writing about music need not be shunned, and it is the first of many ironies thrown up by this enquiry that it is the 'hard-line avant-garde'2 Ferneyhough who has had his Collected writings published,3 while the elegant, often pugnacious, occasionally crudely offensive stylist Holloway's substantial essays on composers and issues in composition remain in limbo. Only Debussy and Wagner, arising from his doctoral dissertation, is of book length.4 A study of the pair in terms of their writings alone would be illuminating, fuelling many tendentious as well as eminently reasonable assertions about the possible relevance of such words to the music. But I forego more than a hint of such a study here.

Recent history makes clear that few composers, even from the 'hard-line avant-garde', can resist the lure of the stage. Some comments of Ferneyhough's first published in 1989 reveal his wariness about a genre so mired in convention, as well as 'the defining limitations of the opera house situation' (Writings, pp.345-46). But his major enterprise of the moment is the operatic project Shadowtime, due to be presented at the Munich Biennale in 2004, several parts of which have already been performed. Holloway might be expected to be more tolerant of operatic tradition, but his practical relationship with opera house establishments has evidently not been easy. Clarissa, based on Samuel Richardson's immense novel, was composed without commission in 1976, and not staged until 1990 (English National Opera). As Bayan Northcott has described it, Clarissa's 'failure to reach the stage for 14 years diverted Holloway's theatrical aspirations into hybrid concert projects, notably the "dramatic ballad" Brand (1981), after Ibsen's play, and a large "concert opera" on Peer Gynt'.5 Peer Gynt, which occupied him on and off from 1984 to 1997, is set out for 'solo voices, chorus, orchestra, actors, mimes, dance and film'.6 Neither of the Ibsen dramas has, to date, been heard or seen: nor has the opera buffa, Boys and girls come out to play (1991-95), an ENO commission.

On the evidence of the vocal score, Boys and girls is a substantial and striking piece of theatre. Inspired by the life and work of Cynthia Payne, brothel-keeper to the establishment, and with a libretto 'after the composer's scenario' by the veteran poet and humorist Gavin Ewart, it offers a species of relatively explicit domestic Dionysianism which links it with such staged successes as Ligeti's Le grand macabre, Osborne's Electrification of the Soviet Union, Turnage's Greek, and Ades's Powder her face - and indeed carries such Dionysianism further if the darker crudity of the accompanying projections, suggested by the score's stage directions, were to be included.

Boys and girls come out to play makes a neat antithesis to Clarissa in that Richardson's study of an oppressed, exploited female turns into a celebration of Emerald, a Payne-style dominatrix whose 'Ballad of the awful life' offers a bracingly liberated take on British hypocrisy and sexual timidity (the opera is set in the early 1970s). While Clarissa is in effect a music drama involving 'a post-Wagnerian flux of leitmotifs, symbolic key contrasts and quotations from Wagner, Debussy and Hugo Wolf as well as 'the surgings of a large orchestra and the transformations of an elaborate mise-en-scene, which Holloway confesses was partly inspired by the films of Fellini',7 Boys and girls lives up to the generic credentials of opera buffa with a linked succession of numbers, and a wealth of stylistic allusion without collapsing into a mere collage of quotations or parodies.8 The Holloway Voice dominates throughout, as it also does in the tirelessly elaborated Bach of Gilded Goldbergs for two pianos (1992-97). The proliferation of stylistic allusion in this work as a whole is immense: but even in variation 19, which makes the most explicit use of direct quotation beyond Bach (Haydn, Mozart, Mendelssohn, Schubert, Bruckner, Mahler, etc.) the crucial strategy is that all these 'vagrants' are brought - not least by transposition - within the ring-fence of Holloway's Landlerisation of Bach's 3/8 dance. The delicious harmonic ellipses, and the dissonant bashings which infiltrate the final cadence (ex.1), are challenges to stability which ultimately enhance stability, a contracting into abundance which is also a contracting out of chaos, disorder.