HISTORY IN THE MAKING"The seats in the Duke's Hall at the Royal Academy of Music have passed the sternest of tests of their suitability for concert-goers' bottoms. Three concerts containing five and a half hours of new music for solo piano in a single day is a daunting prospect for both mind and body. When all this is devoted to the world premiere performance of a single work, Michael Finnissy's The History of Photography in Sound, anticipation is mixed with a healthy does of trepidation. That it should be performed by just one pianist, Ian Pace, seems downright implausible even for someone of his virtuosity.
Presented in eleven 'chapters', ranging from 15 to 75 minutes, grouped into five books, History is a work that, in the very best sense of the word, challenges. It is a critique of the entire tradition of still and moving images, but as much for the truth they mask as for anything they portray, and exposing the absurdity of the notion that 'the camera never lies'. Portraying images directly into music is in one sense an impossibility. However, photography is used in History as a metaphor for exploitation and Finnissy's music explores the feelings created by political and cultural truths that are hidden by our reliance on still and moving pictures.
In this exploration of how we understand and misunderstand cultural images, Finnissy manipulates and juxtaposes a plethora of musical fragments. In 'Unsere Afrikareise', for example, Vendan (South African) children's songs are given bass lines from Mozart and Schubert to underline the absurdity of cultural misappropriation; while 'My parents' generation thought war meant something' deconstructs 'popular' material in a moving portrait of the Forties as a decade in which the camaraderie and sense of united purpose were ultimately illusory. History also contains elements of retrospective, presenting the many facets of Finnissy's art, with, for instance, the left-hand, right-hand, hands-together study in virtuosity and transcription in 'Alkan-Paganini' recalling the spirit of the composer's earlier works.
That a work of the magnitude of History remains compelling throughout is a remarkable tribute to Finnissy's exceptional skill. The extreme length of History may initially gain it notoriety, but duration is ultimately a red herring. Even after a first exhausting hearing, it is apparent that Finnissy's pianistic Everest is endowed with manifold intrinsic strengths, which should ensure its status as something more than simply a very long work. With a work of such size, virtuosity and intensity, it is incredible that Pace could not only perform it in its entirety, but also give a true interpretation. Thanks to his herculean efforts, the future reputation of History has been given a firm foundation."
"At the Duke's Hall on 28 January Ian Pace gave the world premiere of this now complete piano cycle, begun in 1997. The problem with a piece of such breadth is how to review it in a finite number of words without belittling its impact. It eclipses, indeed critiques, the infrastructure we have for assimiliating it.The length of the piece - whose eleven sections last about five and a half hours - is justified by its breadth. It is a summatory exemplar of all that Finnissy has learned about conceiving and organizing his material by analogy with photography and the moving image. The quotations and allusions in the piece, drawn from a huge range of countries and traditions, are musical photographs, intended to function as emblems of historicism and mortality. Finnissy's treatment of them is akin to film editing: they dissolve into each other, are clear one moment and blurred the next, in the distance or in close-up, spliced together, distorted, compresed and so on. In this way, Finnissy has not attempted pastiche or recreated periods of history but extrapolated a complex, self-sufficient narrative: it is not the quotations and allusions that matter so much as the relationships between them. Even with Ian Pace's detailed programme note it is easy to miss the refernces most of the time, and after a while one's attention anyway shifts from the note-to-note intricacies to the kind of formal processes described. Thus one critic's assertion that the piece could be renamed The History of Music in Snapshots is unfounded. Nevertheless the spirituals, taken from Tippett's A Child of Our Time and appearing relatively unadorned in the third section ('North American Spirituals'), are heard for what they are: ciphers of hope and defiance in a pervasively bleak work.
Finnissy's presentation, development and transformation of his material are a kind of critique, not necessarily in the sense of criticism but of extensive examination, on the premise that music is a means, as he once wrote, of 'decoding the universe symbolically'. The titles of the sections disclose something of Finnissy's attitude to his material and therefore influence our understanding of the oblique, suggestive and ambiguous music. What does it mean to transcribe folk music to the piano, for instance? Further, what does it mean to transcribe someone else's transcription? Is it the case that Finnissy's distortion of elements of the baroque keyboard in the final section of 'Kapitalistisch Realisme (mit Sizilianische Männerakte und Bachsche Nachdichtungen)' serves to foreground or question certain values associated with the music? What does it mean when in 'My parents' generation through War meant something' he sets popular 1940s tunes to Mozartian minuet accompaniments? Finnissy's critique is so ambiguous that one is never sure of the extent to which he is commenting didactically on his material rather than merely playing with his properties.
Pace never shied away from the interpretative problems inherent in all this. For example he could have ignored Finnissy's indications of pppppp and that passages be played 'without any sense of phrasing or continuity' in order to garner credit for conforming to stereotypical notions of pianistic excellence (projection and shape, in this instance); yet he, like Finnissy, preferred to 'tell the truth rather than don the mask', in Finnissy's telling phrase. That the title of the final section 'Etched Bright with sunlight' is taken from the unmade Derek Jarman film Sod 'Em seemed somehow appropriate. ...its affective impact was extraordinary - it stays in the mind indefinitely - due in no small part to Pace's singular, committed delivery. "
"Every bar of the five and a half hour composition for solo piano, History of Photography in Sound, shows that Michael Finnissy has snubbed pressures to become a 'career composer'. As pianist Ian Pace says in his programme book, Finnissy is everything a British composer is not allowed to be - provocative, challenging and passionate - and there's perhaps no other composer working in Britain today who has the artistic vision and philosophical equipment to bring off such an audacious project. Despite its title, the History is not a musical documentary about photography, but a treatise on composition. It makes the point that composer have always drawn on philosophy, literature, architecture and painting, and composers today have a similar relationship (or at least should do) with photography and cinema. For Finnissy, the experience of cinema has opened up a whole new repertoire of structural and referential possibilities - one that relates to the contemporary experience more keenly than old narrative structures. The analogy goes further - he sees the reference and source material he uses in the piece as 'musical photographs'. He wants to explore his own relationship to that material, and the way listeners decode and assimilate it. The History is therefore a deeply personal history of the 20th century, one with a strong autobiographical slant.The five books of Finnissy's piece pivot around the third chapter of Book Two, 17 Immortal Homosexual Poets, which clearly shows how he brings sound and photography together. The Greek film director Gregor Markopolus filmed a number of artists in their studios, gauging their personalities and interests by panning the camera over their possessions and books. Finnissy's musical parallel gives each of his 17 poets distinctive musical material that relates to their work and background. Alan Ginsberg is represented by parodies of blues and high modernism, and Jean Genet by the ragtime suggested in his play Le Balcon. Federico Garçia Lorca's music forms a trajectory from Spanish folk to Scelsi, and the material derived from Pier Paolo Pasolini relates to Italian folk music and Bach, suggested by his film The Gospel According to St Matthew. The sections are then cinematically 'edited' and intercut to produce an animated dialogue that suggests an extraordinary dinner party. As the juxtapositions come in and out of focus, our perception of a poet's character is highlighted by the context in which the corresponding material appears. If there is a direct cinematic link, it is in Nicolas Roeg's Insignificance, which sees Marilyn Monroe and Albert Einstein deconstruct one another in a hotel room.
Ian Pace's ability to keep the different strands of this labyrinthine 40 minute piece together was masterful, but what out the other five hours? After writing Poets, Finnissy worked backwards and forwards to produce a structure that is in effect a palindrome. The first piece of the cycle Le Démon De L'Analogie illustrates the slow camera pan aspect of the Poets section, and is suggestive of Hitchcock's slowly descending opening of Psycho or Orson Welles's introduction to Touch of Evil. It likewise sets out the essence of what is to come. As the cycle progresses through Landscapes to Portraiture and on to Documentation, the music becomes increasingly personal. If the opening represents a slow camera pan, then the music of Documentation is an intimate closeup. Chapter Three of Documentation Kapitalistisch Realisme (Mit Sizillianische Mannerakte Und Bachische Nachdichtungen) contains some of the cycle's most beautiful music - 'an epicentre of tenderness' as Pace puts it. This represents a triumph of creativity and human love over the bleak music in the first chapter of the book, which deals with the other Finnissy preoccupations of censorship, bigotry and commercial blandness.
Naturally such idealistic music requires a very special sort of performer and Ian Pace's understanding goes beyond mere interpretation into a far deeper relationship with - and relish for - the incredible demands of the work. If there is one thing that binds together the preoccupations and sources of the History, it is Finnissy's belief that art needs to be idealistic. This is reflected in the North American Spirituals section of Landscapes, which celebrates the defiance of blues and gospel, and makes links with Cage and Tippett. The music also makes great demands on its audience, perhaps even beyond the extended 'tune in and chill out' works of Morton Feldman. Apart from the intense concentration needed to listen to it, the many reference points and transmuted ideas assume at least a willingness to engage with the philosophy behind it. There is nothing quite like it in British music, and being saturated in such a rich and unique music for a whole day was a privilege."
"The History of Photography in Sound is Michael Finnissy's most ambitious piano work to date: an epic lasting more than five hours, divided into five books of self-contained pieces, of which the inner three are further divided into several 'chapters'. Yet although the individual items are self-standing, they also form part of a complex network of cross-references which unify the entire conception.The title can also be regarded as a metaphor, enabling the composer to approach the project cinematically, or in the manner of a snapshot. For instance, the overall style often involves rapid 'cuts' from one sonic image or allusion to another, and there are episodes which provide brief glimpses of the composer's past, and perhaps specific memories.
From Ian Pace's indispensable introductory pamphlet, which outlines the structure of the work and discusses questions of interpretation, it is clear that on one level The History of Photography in Sound is substantially autobiographical. My Parents' Generation Thought War Meant Something reflects Finnissy's experience of seeing snapshots his parents made of friends during the Second World War. His style of pianism, stemming from the 19thC virtuoso tradition is most clearly illustrated in Alkan-Paganini; other pieces recall his encounters with the cultures of the USA, Australia & parts of Southern Africa.
On another level, Finnissy responds to issues within contemporary British society, such as problems of censorship, or rampant commercialisation. Capitalist Realism is the most significant piece in this category. Lasting 75 minutes, it is the most extended single span of music Finnissy has so far attempted (nearly matching in duration Ronald Stevenson's 80 minute Passacaglia on DSCH played at Wigmore Hall last week).
Finally, there is the strictly creative level, though this is not restricted to musical influences. While Finnissy has been composing for the piano throughout his career, the Gershwin Arrangements and Verdi Transcriptions appear to have been particularly important, enabling him to expand his vocabulary of transformation techniques to the point where they could be utilised in such an ambitious project as The History of Photography in Sound. In essence, the work is a gigantic palindrome, almost entirely based on the intervals of minor and major thirds. Structurally, it is laid out as a series of waves, but at the core of the scheme is the section entitled 17 Homosexual Poets, in which the composer has sought to establish a musical correlative for many of his literary interests. Ian Pace's essay describes each poet's musical portrait, but the seventeen sections are intercut, and spliced together to create an extended collage which avoids any suggestion of linear construction. Thus, the hub of the work is a tightly organised piece, which provides the model on which the whole enterprise is built.
The History of Photography in Sound is a score of such rich content that its five-and-a-half hours duration does not seem too long. ...there is bound to be some speculation as to whether the work should be classified as 'modern' or 'post-modern'. In fact, it does not fit comfortably into either category, though the stylistic consistency Finnissy has achieved, notwithstanding the disparate sources, undoubtedly stems from a modernist aesthetic. There are few composers who have embraced so many cultures within a single work.
It would be difficult to over-emphasise the importance of Ian Pace's mastery of this daunting score and convincing interpretation of the music in his complete performance at RAM, and he is to be congratulated on a monumental achievement. His CDs of The History of Photography in Sound are eagerly awaited."
"...a pianistic event that seems destined for the Guiness Book of Records... He began at 1 pm and ended at 9.50pm. A nonrepetitive piano piece lasting as long as five-and-a-half hours has probably not been publicly given before, even if longer piano works (by Sorabji, for instance) exist.Organised as five books, the middle three in three chapters, this magnum opus is an intensely literary conception, its object evidently to convey (albeit in tones) everything that Finnissy (b. 1946) knows. It is insatiably allusive, and to a multiplicity of art forms, photography being only one. Cinema, with its flux and montage, is closer to what goes on in music...
Pace's steely control of the idiom and sheer athletic power were deeply impressive..."
"The scale of History is monumental, both in length and the physical and technical difficulties the work poses for an interpreter. In accepting the herculean challenge, Pace - long one of Finnissy's closest collaborators - ensured his status as one of the most adventurous pianists of his generation... "