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The "Bachsche Nachdichtungen" (Bach-ian post-poesis) forms the central episode of the eighth section of my "History of Photography in Sound" - a piece lasting, in all, five and a half hours. The music pays tribute to J.S. Bach through the intermediary "manner" of Busoni, whose contrapuntal fantasy is recalled in the texture and material (four different versions of the chorale "Allein Gott in der Höh sei Ehr' " BWV 662, 667, 716 and 717). Although imitative of Baroque keyboard style the actual tonality of the music is chromatic and "slippery". The piece was composed at the suggestion of Carlo Grante (the dedicatee of the first section of the "History") and lasts roughly twenty minutes. [Program note by Michael Finnissy]
Photographs have generally been most valued, or perhaps de-valued, as documentation. They are treated as memoranda, relics, anecdotes, supposedly objective evidence, emblematic of singular arrested moments in time. In most photography, unlike painting or drawing, the view is disconcertingly blinkered, directly ahead. Everything is completely still. The camera and its lens (its eye) do not move. This fixed-perspective immobility is haunting and unnatural. In writing music, both my ears, and their accompanying brain and hand, have to remain mobile, alive. [...]
My title uses the word "photography", and its plethora of associations, to convey a certain kind of musical material: documentary - snipped out from different periods in the past, and different locations across the world - a collection of exterior facts. These refugee facts are then situated, more or less provocatively, in the eventual composition. They are exchanged for, disrupted, and transformed by composing (imagining, transcribing, analytically mis-reading) into other facts. [...]
"History" in the title conveys "remembered or invented past and present;" or "a chronological continuum"; or "the appearance and stylistic attributes of previous and current eras". "Sound" is the raw magma of music, before what Baudrillard calls "obscene formulae" intrude.
The musical "documents" ("photographs") or materials used in this piece are: (i) A "motivo fondamentale" - the plainsong Te Deum laudamus, or the Lutheran version harmonised by J.S. Bach, "Herr Gott, dich loben wir" (BWV 328). This is, in effect, a pitch reservoir, a "grundgestalt" (alternate minor thirds and whole tones). It functions as the "Aristotelian unifying factor, subsuming the following "variations"... (ii) A reference to Wagner's "Gotterdämmerung" 2.i. Hagen's question "Der ewige Macht, wer erbte sie?" - a rhythmic and harmonic leitmotif including rhetorical silence. Offset by... (iii) A reference to Berlioz's "Romeo et Juliette" Scene d'amour, a melodic and textural idée fixe. And then, more localised... (iv) Short quotations from, or allusions to, canonical musical personalities: most prominently Beethoven and Busoni, also Alkan, Mozart, Paganini, Grieg, and... (v) Short quotations from, or allusions to, musical genres: fugal (diatonic/harmonically directional or functional) counterpoint, minuets, 18th and 19th century hymnody, ragtime, "exotic" or "primitive" folkmusics (African and Black American, Sicilian, Inuit, Norwegian hardanger-fiddle, etc.), popular dance-band music of the 1930s and 1940s. [Michael Finnissy]
The eighth and longest section of Finnissy's "History" (the first 75 minutes of its last 100 minutes) is "Kapitalistische Realisme (mit Sizilianische Männerakte und Bachsche Nachdichtungen)", based on
(i) Beethoven ("grundgestalt" thirds in Op. 67, Op. 18 No. 5, Op. 10 No. 1). (ii) Bach ("Allein Gott in der Höh' sei Ehr' "). (iii) Busoni (retrograde of the Pezzo serioso from Op. XXIX with an overlay of Sicilian folktunes collected by Meyerbeer).
Music about music, as ApIvor would say, but also "an epicenter of tenderness", in Ian Pace's words, and often systematically etiolated - like a packet of sun-blanched photographs.
The materials matter less than their relations, which include equivalents of fades and dissolves and cuts and pans, organized into independent strata of cross-reference on multiple time-scales (including time-scales peculiar to "Bachsche Nachdichtungen", "Kapitalistische Realisme", and the "History of Photography" as a whole).
No one working in England has written more or more interesting piano music than Michael Finnissy (not even John White, with his 137 ostensibly modest piano sonatas); but the challenges of the "History" and its sections are moral, not pianistic. Performers must resist the temptation to shape and project the music (in the face of admonitions to play pppppp or "without any sense of phrasing or continuity"), knowing all the while that they are apt to be dismissed or disliked by audiences equipped with conventional ideas about how pianists should sound. According to Finnissy, it takes considerable courage to "tell the truth rather than don the mask"; more courage, one suspects, than it takes to confront the epileptic gestures of the first of his concertos for solo piano or "Verdi 6". [Program note by Kenneth Derus]
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