Michael Finnissy

Michael Finnissy interviewed in Huddersfield, 22 November 2006

Given how frequently Michael Finnissy changes focus and direction as a composer, this interview is probably best seen as a snapshot of his thinking on that particular day, rather than as a permanent compositional manifesto. I spoke to Michael on the eve of the first performance of his Whitman for voice and piano, and as he was starting work on his Second String Quartet for the Kreutzer Quartet. I particularly appreciate the spontaneity and candour of his replies in this interview.

James Gardner: Which pieces, or composers, gave you “permission” to “go” – and to “go” quite extremely – in your earlier years with these exuberant pieces?  Pieces that seem to have come from nowhere – but presumably didn’t.

Michael Finnissy: I suppose the composers that first made me “go” – and made me think it was worth being a composer, rather than doing something else – were things by Satie, things by Varèse, things by Ives… I really can’t remember in the tangle of memories of 50 years ago how I came to these composers. Probably through the BBC, through reading books, through following stuff up through chance encounters in public libraries of one sort or another. But I finally got to a book on Satie by Rollo Myers – which was then the only book that was available – which covered the whole of his life. I was particularly interested in the later pieces: Socrate, the Nocturnes, the ballets. I wasn’t particularly interested in the Gymnopédies.

How old would you have been at this time?

10 or 11. I was given Rollo Myers’ book as a class prize for English Composition at school when I was 12. And I was given the Philips Modern Music series LP of recordings of Varèse conducted by Robert Craft, around the same time. And I’d listened to Antony Hopkins on the radio in his programme Talking about Music, [1] which was a wonderful thing for a child to have every Sunday afternoon – 4.30pm – somebody talking about a piece. And he talked about Ives’ Concord Sonata. So I asked for it for a Christmas present. So my poor parents had to chase this up, find the score…

The score, not a recording?

So far as I know there weren’t recordings… D’you know I don’t think I ever thought about it in those terms  – I mean things that were for the piano, like Satie or Ives, I thought ‘OK, right, well I’ll play them, then.’ I’ll get to them that way – through my fingers, through my fingers and ears. I think playing things, or being in the middle of them is probably much better than listening to them on a recording, in the long run. You get to inhabit them in a particular kind of way.

But when you got the score of the Concord Sonata did you go ‘Oh my God, I can’t handle this’ or did you just have a go?

Are you kidding? I’m far more arrogant than that – I just started at page one and worked through until I got to the end. And it seemed to me the kind of piece you could play – I  never think about music from the point of view of ‘has it got technical restrictions?’ or not. If it’s there on the page in some kind of way, and there’s some reason for coming to terms with it, I’ll jump and do it. I won’t think.

And that attitude was there, even at this early age?

Yes, I’ve been stupid that long.

[laughs]

So that’s some background – you then moved on to write a series of pieces that are quite extraordinary, the Song series [2]– particularly the piano ones, which are very exuberant and wild and extreme. How did those come about?

I think they actually came about through my contact with cinema, particularly the films of Stan Brakhage. There were a series of films of his which were called  Song  and I just stole the title. And these films were… I guess you would call them experiments, but I don’t think he’s actually experimenting. He was hand-painting a lot of them or trying different speeds of camera movement, editing techniques. They weren’t experimental just for the sake of it, because I actually don’t believe in that idea. I think you always have a necessity which you follow, and if it’s an experiment it means probably just that it’s more risky than if you’re making plans and you’ve got a customer whose interests you’re serving – so you kind of take their inside leg measurement as a safety measure. These films were made for himself, for his family, for his friends. They weren’t screened for a huge audience. But inevitably a huge audience can watch them, in the same way that you can watch anybody’s home movies and find them interesting because they are such wonderful things to see. The eye is educated by them.

And I thought that this would be…a possible analogue for music – that music could be made in that kind of way, simply as the record of a human experience, of a need. And I didn’t think about how I was doing it or what I was doing. I just did what I had in mind at that moment.

How did you arrive at the very distinctive calligraphy of those early scores?

When I was about 14 or so a friend of mine from school, Roddy Scott, and I used to go to exhibitions at the Tate Gallery – we went to a Max Ernst retrospective exhibition which the Tate was hosting at that time [1961]. And we also found our way –  I think largely by accident – to the London showrooms of Universal Edition, where I discovered the scores of Sylvano Bussotti. And Bussotti was interested in… well, if I say it’s musical graphics, it’s not really. It’s a kind of hyper-designed musical text – very elegant, very expressionistic. And the energy of the design – the way the notes appeared to be flung on to the page in the same way as Jackson Pollock action painting – inspired me a lot. So there was an element of that. And there was an element of Ives in the so-called “irrational” values. Which were a way of measuring how things coincided which weren’t in step with each other. So if two people walk down a street, of course they don’t step in the same tempo. They don’t think about not stepping in the same tempo, but they just don’t. And if you measured it you’d probably find that somebody stepped 22 times while somebody else stepped 25. And if you write that down as a proportion for musician, they go ‘Oh my God, how am I going to play 25 notes in the time of 22!?!?’ But as an idea, you’re just moving through space in a slightly faster tempo. Like driving a car – you see a gradient and you take account of it, and if you’re an experienced driver you do know what those gradients mean. In the same way that I would expect a good musician to know roughly what those gradients mean in terms of proportions in the score.

What were the precedents for those? Were any people saying ‘no, you can’t do that’?

Well, rather the contrary. There were plenty of people – to me, anyway – who were saying ‘yes, you can do that’. I mean there was Ives, for a start, and by the time I was writing the Songs I’d gone beyond the Concord Sonata to a lot of Ives orchestral scores, and if you look at ‘The Housatonic at Stockbridge’, the last of his Three Places In New England, the first violins have to play some pretty extraordinary “irrational” values. You find them in a lot of serial music – which I wasn’t interested in from the dogmatic point of view of being a Serial Composer, but the rhythmic proportions of, for example, Stockhausen’s first and second piano pieces, of Zeitmaße… the idea of those scores I took on board.

The use of those “irrationals” in your scores can be seen as a kind of notated rubato, but is it a bit too easy to look at them that way?

There might even be elements of that, too, because I have got a lot of time for the music of Chopin or Hummel, for example, who use those rhythmic values in a rubato kind of way, because often they’re doing grand sweeps of decoration all over the keyboard. And it’s easy enough to see what the effect is going to be because basically you’re playing against a regular pulse, which then maybe needs to be distorted slightly to accommodate the large numbers of notes involved in one part. So perhaps it does come from that. I’ve never really thought about it, or think it’s terribly interesting, so I don’t think about it much.

And the piano in your life, to misquote Feldman… was there something about the piano or was it just that it was there?

It was always there. It was always there when I was a child, like a… like a toy at first, and then more like a combination of confessional and tabula rasa. It’s just a big space which I know I can move around in comfortably – I don’t feel any kind of discomfort with the instrument at all. Which I do, for example, if I’m writing for the guitar, which I haven’t got the faintest idea how to write for [3].

The piano is one of the threads through your music – it appears in many guises. On the one hand as a quasi-orchestral instrument, but on the other as a very intimate instrument as well…

Well, in different contexts it would have different meanings. If you were writing for the piano in a chamber group, writing for it in the same way as you wrote for it as a solo instrument wouldn’t be particularly practical. Because it’s bloody noisy and can drown out even a string quartet if you wanted it to. So I would take account of that if I were writing with other instruments. And also because I’m interested in integrating it with other instruments in certain situations, and finding new kinds of integration for it. The combination of sounds which I find attractive other composers won’t, but if I were writing for it with harp and guitar, for example, I would feel I would have to write for it in a particular way to satisfy certain kinds of aesthetic demands, certain kinds of… sound landscapes which I hear beforehand and which I then want to realise in some way, so I find a way of doing that. Probably, in that case, writing for piano monodically, but using its sustaining pedal in a particular colouration, perhaps in particular registers to accommodate the other instruments and their resonance and their tone colour and qualities of attack.

I think you’ve talked elsewhere about the piano being a sort of neutral canvas, that there are some aspects of sound that you’re not having to deal with. Is that true too?

Well, I never studied composition until I went to the Royal College of Music, although I’ve always composed music since I was a kid – since I was about four. And so the only aesthetic background was in visual arts, and to me the piano is more like working with pen and ink than it is working with oil paint or tempera or other things. So the piano is a sort of readily available medium and one which I can sit down and basically perform the music, which of course with a symphony orchestra I couldn’t.  I couldn’t book a symphony orchestra and have them in the front room (they wouldn’t fit), so it’s like instant gratification with the piano.

Does the pen-and-ink analogy and your interest in graphics explain to some extent your preoccupation with line, with independent lines?

I think that came really from reading about Hokusai and the way he interpreted… because there is an art of writing Japanese, the Japanese language, which interprets the ideograms to make them expressive. And Hokusai said, very famously, that what he was trying to capture was not the external appearance of something but its internal behaviour. In other words what he was capturing was the energy, the action, of the thing depicted as well, perhaps, as what it looked like to the outside eye. And so the piano is a kind of tool, and I think of it both as a solo instrument and as a member of an ensemble and I would write for it differently depending on what context I was writing in. I just feel freer writing for it because I can get my own hands round it. And I know its register intimately. I know what the A-flat below middle C actually sounds like as a colour, as a sound – what potential it has. In a way that I wouldn’t… I’d have to think very seriously (not that I’m reluctant to do that, of course – I’m perfectly happy to do that), but I’d have to think more about it if I were doing it for a bassoon.

One of the features of your writing is a multiplicity of lines – that seems to be one of the constants in your work.

I’m more interested in line than anything else than I am in anything else. I’m not so interested in vertical coincidence or even with making things coincide vertically, particularly – rather the reverse. I try and make things not coincide. To me the single line contains the life of the human being. It is what somebody can be represented by, and if I were a painter or a graphic artist, I think I would be drawn to pen-and-ink drawing as a way of capturing…reality, appearances, what things are. And to me music’s no different from that except that it does it with sound.

And yet, although you have a sense of flowing lines co-existing, a lot of your music has abrupt juxtapositions between blocks of material. Does that come from a musical reference, say Stravinsky or Messiaen, or is it more cinematic?

Much more cinematic. I mean, you get to the end of a page, or you get to the end of a  thought, or you get to the point where you have to realise some kind of punctuation.  Or your thought disappears, or you lose the thread… something I would say quite natural happens. And so there are… well, one would dress it up, I suppose, if one were feeling fancy about it – it was a sort of rhetoric. There are rhetorics about what to do on those occasions – what sort of punctuations you would use; how long you would pause, blah, blah, blah, blah. So those kinds of actions in the music that I write – loud bangs, sudden silences, diminuendos, crescendos, accelerations, decelerations – are part of my knowledge of that through talking to people, through listening to people, through watching and so on.

In most of your work, I think, there tends to be more of an emphasis on the jump cut, as it were, than the dissolve – although you get those too.

I’m interested in both. I like jump cuts, and one of my earliest cinematic experiences was becoming aware of the films of Jean-Luc Godard, which used jump cuts rather a lot. Because I think he wanted to say ‘this type of transition is possible, it doesn’t have to be the Hollywood crossfade’, you know, where you gently bleed from one scene to another and it all seems to be OK. The world’s not an OK place to me. And so my way of depicting that, or revealing that, in music, is to use more sudden transitions.

You say the world’s not an OK place… it seems to me that over the last 15 years or so, the expression of “the world not being an OK place” has become more explicit in your music or at least in choice of titles, and the choice of texts. Would you like to say more about that?

You mean have I become more politicized over the last 15 years because of world events?

Partly – you may have always been like that but it seems to have become more explicit.

I think maybe I respond now slightly differently, because of what’s happened in world events recently. The danger, always, in the arts is to retreat to some kind of Olympian standpoint and play safe and bury one’s head in the sand and say ‘oh well, of course, I’m writing music, so I don’t have anything to do with security checks at airports’ and such like. But of course the neurosis and the paranoia that is communicated by politicians and the media and inevitably percolates down to every last soul on the planet, percolates down to me. And in my way, small as that is – and I’m not being overly modest about this – it is a small response to it, but I feel I have a responsibility to take some sort of action about that. I resent deeply the thought that we have to be placed in danger to get things right, because so much is wrong – so much is wrong economically, so much inequality… I believe I should, and must, enact that in my music. It’s an imperative.

And what about the critics who might say ‘that’s all well and good, but actually the music that you write gets heard by very few people, generally middle-class white people in small halls or small festivals in London’…

I don’t suppose it’s heard by fewer people than are making the decisions at the so-called top. They are even less numerous than the people who hear my music – remarkable though that might seem to some.

Has your embracing the Christian faith also fed in to these more explicit statements?

Well there were personal reasons for that and that’s nothing to do with anybody except me, really. But the enactment of faith is part of what you practice every day as a composer, you have to have faith in what you’re doing. And in the larger frame I wanted to experience at first hand what it was like, because I felt that this was going to become an important feature of life – along with an increased politicization comes also a sense of different kinds of community, different kinds of tradition, which are also requiring…though you’re not obliged to become a Christian or a member of a religious denomination. But I didn’t feel good about commenting about people who were, from the outside. I wanted to be inside that and know what that was like – for better or worse, and sometimes it’s a bit of both – so that I could say, well, yes, actually I am experiencing this as that, rather than adopting again a sort of Parnassian, anonymous position. You know, the newscaster who doesn’t belong to any political allegiance – so they say – or any spiritual allegiance, but is somehow able to give you an overview. Does anybody believe that? I didn’t believe it, so I had to do something about it.

So at some point you had to pin your colours to the mast, effectively.

Yes, indeed so, in the same way that I’ve had to do that musically as well in various ways

You were saying that for you as a composer you have to have faith in what you’re doing, yet we were talking before [the interview] about these so-called crises. Could you talk a bit about those, because it seems to me that you’re quite a confident person and you have a very large output – you’re somebody who keeps on doing it. So it’s difficult for me to understand the nature of these crises – before the “Australian” period, and again in the works of the early 90s.

Well, writing music for me is my way of dealing with my experiences and my way of encountering the world – that’s the only way I’ve got. That’s what I was put here to do, apparently, and that’s what I enjoy doing. So I go on doing it. But it’s interesting that you say confident. Confident? I’m not in the least confident about it. I feel battered every time I get a bad review or a bad comment, and it makes me halt in my tracks, and I think ‘have I done this right? Have I got it wrong? Why doesn’t this person understand?’ And there can be plenty of other people – you know what it’s like – there can be plenty of people who tell you the sun shines out of your bottom, but the one person who tells you ‘well, I’ve got severe doubts about the way you did this’ – of course you believe them rather than all the others because in some kind of way you have to put yourself to the test. And that’s not the central thread of what I’m doing – I don’t go about the place testing myself, but I do work out my dilemmas, and what I see as the dilemmas of life in the early 21st century, in my music because that’s the only means I have of doing it.

And the productivity is two things. First, because – thank God – people still ask me for pieces, so I satisfy the demand as best I can. And second because I really love writing and I would miss it terribly if I couldn’t do it. And so there is a turnover. But in fact even if you say I’m producing six to eight pieces a year that’s still less than one a month, and not all of them are very big – some of them are quite small, and some last less than a minute. OK, some of them are very big too – some of them last five-and-a-half hours!, but then they take six years to write…

I just don’t think about that.

So what were the nature of these crisis moments, then? I guess the first one was in the late 70s, after what – on one level – are some of your most extreme pieces.

Well I think, to be quite honest, partly being put up against “competition”, when younger composers came along who wanted to do, or were doing, or were drawn to the same sort of music – or something like the same sort of music – that I was writing. And, like rutting stags, they were fighting for space. And rather than do – as I said to you earlier – the alpha male thing of standing my ground and putting my antlers up and fighting them off, I thought ‘well, actually I’ve done this, so I don’t really need to protect it, and there are other things to do and I’m quite happy to go on and do them.’ So if you want this territory you can now have it and I’ll go and find somewhere else.

And that’s one kind of crisis.

The other kind of crisis has very much to do with self doubt. Because – I think anyone could imagine – if you write a large number of pieces the amount of territory you cover compositionally is quite extensive. And so therefore the extent to which you might look at something and say ‘My God, I’ve done that before!’ becomes larger the more you do. So there are quite a lot of things that I’ve done before, and I don’t want to duplicate, so I would have to move on to something else. Now, it’s not always so easy – there’s a lot of research involved, maybe, in moving on to other areas of musical enquiry. I’ve managed, I think, to keep my mind quite open about that. I don’t always go where people think I ought to, but that’s partly cussedness.

I enjoy exploring with music. It’s those sorts of things.

Could you talk about the ‘Australian period’ – what those pieces meant to you, and why you felt you had to do them at that time?

At the time – that was another crisis point – I’d been with Universal Edition for about 18 months and they suddenly decided they didn’t need me any more, because they’d adopted a policy whereby the last composers they’d signed were going to be the first for the chop rather than the first composers. I never did understand the logic of that, but there we are. So I got the push from them. I’d got no work – I was apparently unemployable in England – so I cast around my friends who are widespread across the globe, fortunately. And one of my old college friends, a lovely guy by the name of Richard David Hames – who at that time was running a composition programme at the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne – said yes, we can find a place for you to come and be artist-in-residence and do some composition teaching, coaching, and conducting and playing, blah blah blah – whatever you want. Get on a plane and we’ll expect you in August or whenever it was. So I did! And it was the furthest I’d ever travelled, and I wanted to relay that to myself, to make a memory for myself of that. So I thought, well, what will it be like to be in Australia, and what is Australia?

And when I got there, one of the things I did was to do a lot of research into Aboriginal music, Aboriginal painting, Aboriginal writing, and imagine myself to be there before the white man had come. And of course anybody who’s done that kind of study knows how absolutely wonderful and beautiful are those artefacts, those ideas, that mythology. It was an absolutely extraordinary experience, becoming  absorbed in that. And my response to that was half a dozen, maybe eight, pieces [4]. All of which I gave Aboriginal titles to, as a way of saying ‘this is Michael Finnissy being an Aboriginal Australian – take it or leave it.’

But you didn’t incorporate any Aboriginal music as such into them?

The only piece I did, finally, incorporate didjeridus into – and then only after much heart searching – was the orchestral piece Red Earth where in fact they don’t have a major role to play. Although they are a kind of focus in the texture because they act as a kind of… or their sound-world acts as a kind of drone from the beginning until the end of the piece.

Could you talk about that piece a little more, because it’s probably the only orchestral piece of yours we’ll be able to play [on the radio][5], sadly.

It’s the only one that’s on CD. Can I talk about it? I was very unhappy to be leaving Australia, when it was eventually time to go because I was going back to a place that didn’t want me and in which there was no place for me to be – there was no work. And travelling across the centre of Australia – I was looking out of the plane, feeling well and truly miserable, and saw this landscape that to me looked like a flayed corpse, in every respect, I think. And I again imagined myself to be that flayed corpse. This was a place I’d grown to love and I was having to leave it. I didn’t do anything about it at the time – I wrote some things down in a letter to some friends in Australia and when I got home I posted it back to them. I don’t know whether they kept it or not. The act of writing it down was a way of engraving it on my mind in a particular way and some years later – about six years later – I was asked by Roger Wright on behalf of John Drummond, who was then running The Proms if I would be interested to write an orchestral piece for a 1988 Promenade concert. And I said yes, I would, of course. And this idea was the first thing that came to my mind – the recollection of that idea. It was mainly the colour – not that I saw it as orange or red, though I used the title Red Earth afterwards. It was more a register, somewhere in the middle, and a sound rather like high bassoons and muted violas and stuff. Which will sound monumentally pretentious to anybody who doesn’t think in those ways, but that’s how I think, I’m afraid – sorry about that. And I just heard that sound world, and indeed a kind of sliding glissando pattern around those notes – C and A and B in the middle register – and that’s pretty much how the piece is.

What led you to choose the didjeridus after all, ‘after much heart searching’?

I couldn’t find anything else that sounded like them. And also they do, of course, enshrine Australia in a particular way, don’t they? In the same way the guitar and castanets enshrine Spain in a particular way – it’s the tourist packaging. But also it’s something you can make use of – there’s no point in ignoring it and pretending it doesn’t exist. I didn’t do it because there was “mileage” in it, but simply because the sound was so haunting and was so beautiful. It would have taken a very long time to have dreamt up something else to do it. I’m not that clever!

You’ve written so many pieces – which of them would you not want to be left out of a survey of your work?

Well, they’re my children – I love them all. I suppose the large-scale piano pieces are very, very personal… my father was a photographer and one of the things he did after the war, documenting the rebuilding programme in London, was that he photographed the entire collection of the Iveagh Bequest and the things that he particularly loved were Rembrandt’s self-portraits – and there are many of these. And of course I don’t think many composers think about self-portraiture, but I did, because I was brought up with the idea that music wasn’t something apart; music was like everything else was. And so the idea that these big piano pieces are in a way like portraits of me – self-portraits. But I didn’t really write them for any other purpose except simply to give vent to those feelings at that time. And there are different periods of my life – English Country-Tunes was written in 1977, and The History of Photography in Sound [6] between 1996 and 2002, and so they cover a large period of my life, and I suppose to some extent I would be very upset if I thought they would be lost – it would almost be like losing the family photograph album. And I would lament that far more than if I lost my “valuable” collection of something else – you know what I mean? Something like Red Earth, which is more a public statement, it wouldn’t worry me so much, in a funny kind of way. And I think the music theatre pieces, which also cost me dear in terms of effort, I would not want to see ignored. But one doesn’t have any choice, so it doesn’t really matter.

What are your current preoccupations – what are you working on at the moment? –The concert tomorrow has to do with film, and then you have the new Whitman setting [Whitman] Could you talk about that – and also the “kit” pieces [7], because that seems like a fairly new development.

Well, the kit pieces are an extension of a work called ‘n’, which I wrote in 1969, so that’s not really very much of a new preoccupation – which is non-specific, non-co-ordinated instrumental parts existing in the same musical space. Which to me is another kind of human action – it’s what people do when they’re together in a space. They don’t walk at the same speed, think at the same speed, talk about the same thing. And so I like to make pieces which are like that, and which contain, of course, a communality of ideas but not necessarily all regimented and stuck together so that they have to vertically coincide at regular pulse intervals. And the kit pieces are like that. They’re sort of like boxes of chocolates, which you open up and there’s lots of different things in there and you take what you like and you can play it and it becomes a piece of music. They’re like treats. Because often ensemble playing – to a musician – can not be much of a treat. You know – if you’re rehearsing and somebody says ‘Oh no, you’re 5/32 of a beat late’ and you think ‘Oh no, we’ve got to go from the top again – how embarrassing, my mistake’, blah, blah. So you don’t have to worry about that, playing these pieces – you can just do your own thing.

Whitman is not a new piece either. That was started in the early 1980s and I never got it right, because I think I probably wanted it – in my foolish ambition – to be a song cycle with orchestra, but I couldn’t get anybody to commission me to do that. So it wound up being a song cycle with piano. Of course the reason it wouldn’t have been commissioned was that it was nearly an hour long, and that it was a portrait of Whitman, with all the bumps left in – all the bad bits, which the biographies leave out.

And I love the piece dearly. I haven’t heard it yet. [pause] I’m scared, actually. I’m scared it won’t now live up to my dream of it, because it’s taken such a long time to…finally have it performed.

Were you tempted to write it for more than just piano and voice, or did that combination come to seem appropriate?

No, there are lots of versions of it for different instrumental groups, and it was only really three or four years ago when Nic Hodges said to me ‘would you do this – would you please finish this piece, because I’d really like to do it’ that I sort of pulled things together and got down and did it. Up until that point it had just been a package, a folder of different versions of it – none of them worked, really, and none of them were complete. So it’s a bit nerve-wracking, tomorrow’s going to be a bit nerve-wracking – to hear this finally come to fruition. And it’s rather a long time, if it doesn’t work. Because it won’t be over in three minutes…

And what am I doing now? Writing a second string quartet for the Kreutzer Quartet, which I’m loving doing. The thing I really like doing is writing for people that I know.

Will that just be called Second String Quartet… 

Yes, it will.

… or will it have a “real” name?

I’ve run out of “real” names for things. And I think that I’m a little bit disillusioned with giving titles, which cost an awful lot of effort to actually make them meaningful. And then people just don’t pay any attention to them, so I thought ‘well, OK then, I’m just gonna call this the Second String Quartet…’

Or the opposite – they spend the review talking about the title and not the piece…

And nothing else, yes they just talk about the title as if the title was the piece. The title isn’t. The title is simply a key to a door, or maybe something else entirely. It’s not the music. Really, music operates on a level… different from language, different from words. And so what you can tell somebody about a piece, of course, is never going to actually be the experience of listening to it. This is what’s so frustrating about talking about music. That you can describe away, and analyse away until your head blows off, but actually the experience of music is either going to be magical or it’s not, and that’s the end of it. 

And this new quartet is presumably going to be quite different from the first quartet, which had a very restricted registral palette for much of its duration.

Well, that would be giving the game away, wouldn’t it? [laughs] I don’t know, Jim, there’s not enough done of it yet! No, I can’t tell you anything about it, really. I’m just doing it. I’m enjoying doing it… it’s longer than the first quartet – it’s half an hour. [8]

It seems a shame to me that you haven’t done more [quartets] but perhaps there are good reasons for that…

Well, like I haven’t been asked.

…what is it about the medium that attracts you? I mean I know you’ve written lot of pieces that are for the four instruments in a string quartet, but not called a String Quartet as such [9].

Well, I slightly fought shy of the idea doing something called a String Quartet on a regular basis because so many other people do it. And the kind of games of getting into Quartet Cycles and all that stuff – I can’t get very worked up about that. But on the other hand if a quartet I like ask me to do a piece – and there didn’t seem any reason not to call it Second Quartet, because actually it is of a degree of compositional abstraction that wouldn’t easily be describable by a more picturesque kind of title… there we are.

I’m becoming more interested, I think, in… abstract? – I don’t like the word very much… in not glossing the music with other elements so much. I want to have a time of just looking at notes and rhythms and things…

Is that because in some of the recent pieces people have taken the titles too seriously and listened through that filter too much, rather than listening to what’s actually going on with the air molecules?

Or simply because inventing those titles is fun, and there can be a point where you invent the title and make the piece fit the title. I don’t really want to do that so much any more because… I just want to do something different, actually. I’ve done enough of that, so I want to turn another corner and do something different with my life now than Molly Houses and Post-Christian Survival Kits and Venice Vipers and all of that stuff. And people say ‘what does that title mean?’, well, you know –  String Quartet –that’s what it means.

Notes.

[1] Antony Hopkins (1921–2014) presented the BBC radio series Talking About Music from 1954 until 1992.

[2] Finnissy’s Song series consists of eighteen numbered pieces, originally written between 1966 and 1976.

[3] Despite his protestations, Finnissy has written at least two pieces for solo guitar: Song 17 (1976) and Nasiye (1982), and one for two guitars: Normal Deviates (2017).

[4] Finnissy’s ‘Australian’ pieces, originally composed in 1982–83, include Warara, Aijal, Banumbirr, Teangi, Marrngu, Ouraa, Ulpirra, Hikkai, Botany Bay, The Eureka Flag and the three sets of Australian Sea Shanties, plus Quabara (1988).

[5] This interview was intended to form part of a pair of Radio New Zealand Concert programmes on Finnissy and his music, but for reasons I can no longer recall, these were not made.

[6] For a monumental (291-page!) discussion and analysis of this piece by Ian Pace, see here.

[7] I’m referring to pieces such as Molly House (2005) and Post-Christian Survival Kit (2005)

[8] Finnissy’s Second and Third Quartets may be heard here and here.

[9] For example (at the time of this interview) Nobody’s Jig (1980–81), Plain Harmony (1993), Sehnsucht (1997), Multiple forms of constraint (1997),and Six Sexy Minuets Three Trios (2003). And since then: Civilisation (2004/13), Contrapunctus XIX (2013), and Mad Men in the Sand (2013).