Brian Ferneyhough - String Quartet No. 6 (2010) (with score)
The Sixth String Quartet in particular explores different ‘characters’, for example violin I’s lively solos, and the cello’s expansive opening gestures contrast with violin II’s ostinato as well as the viola’s emphasis on regular pulses. Thanks to the combination of surprisingly basic defining characteristics of material at the local level and the furtherance of the principle initiated with the Second String Quartet (which creates a sense of distance between the musical surface and complex deep structures) there emerges an expressive immediacy that becomes the hallmark of the later quartet style. Any apparent directness in the gestural language is nevertheless contextualised by formal concerns. In this sense, his quartets aspire to preserve a classical balance.
Ferneyhough revisits techniques and ideas first explored in earlier works. He acknowledges that the fragmentary expression of the Sixth String Quartet recalls the 20 sections of the early Sonatas for String Quartet, implying that his quartet enterprise observes a self-tradition.
Although there is no quartet longer than the Sonatas for String Quartet, the only other to be cast in a ‘fragment form’ of sorts—the latest, the Sixth String Quartet— is more substantial, paradoxically, than any of the intervening ones. The Sixth String Quartet intensifies and modifies the concept of the fragment considerably in relation to the Sonatas for String Quartet, exploring time perception from numerous perspectives. Whereas connective materials enhance reflection on already-heard gestures and textures in the Sonatas for String Quartet, lending a sense of continuity and expansiveness to the work, the Sixth String Quartet is propelled by the juxtaposition of miniature expressive-frames, which pass by the listener too quickly to be assimilated into a continuity of their own. There are five times as many fragments than in the Sonatas for String Quartet (at least 100), but the concern for long-term architectural process remains (albeit subverted) behind the work’s extreme discontinuity of surface. The Sixth String Quartet is one of three works from the 2000s (the others are Plötzlichkeit and Chronos-Aion, also comprising over 100 small sections each) that employ what the composer calls a ‘sausage-slicer technique’. This simply means that the length of each section is predetermined—for example, the rhythmic structure, bar-lengths, number and regularity of impulses—but local detail (including texture-types) is not. Section-to-section, the composer must reconcile the predetermined length or capacity of a ‘slice’ with the local demands of the material and his intuition. Despite these concentrated formal ‘slices’, the material feels freer in the Sixth String Quartet, an impression undoubtedly supported by its tonal language (built around a microtonally adjusted augmented triad on B♭) and Ferneyhough’s deliberate evocation of a Sehnsucht [longing] character of the Romantic style.
A general impression of freedom is noted by Irvine Arditti, who remarks that ‘most of the time in the Sixth Quartet it feels like a very free piece. One is playing in the spaces and things happen’ (Archbold, 2011, p. 62). Although Ferneyhough’s rhythmic complexity is no less precise than ever, Arditti’s comment implies that a performer might interpret the ‘slices’ or fragments as though they were a kind of higher-level chronometric notation; spaces, in other words, within which performers might relay the material by interpreting its disposition in that space. He corroborates this impression with the comment that in the Sixth String Quartet, ‘things are not happening quite so rigidly as in some of the other quartets’ (Archbold, 2011, p. 62). This is conveyed in gestures such as those between bb.167–171, where violin I plays the same material as the other instruments (they are in unison) but at a faster rate (a process that Ferneyhough calls ‘prolation’). In the video documentary, Ferneyhough explains this process, and Arditti immediately begins to think of his material in terms of its proportional relationship to the other three instruments, and thus this short section as though it were a chronometric ‘space’ within which this relationship is explored. When realised, the passage creates a constantly changing harmonic field, enhanced by the composer’s focus around this time on microtonal ‘hypertonality’.
The Sixth String Quartet pushes the search for such a middle ground to the limit. Ferneyhough’s comment on Exordium might equally apply to the Sixth String Quartet: the piece ‘elevates the non-sequitur to a formal principle’, without establishing a cause-and-effect pattern between abutting fragments, thus forcing the listener to engage with the time implicit in each tiny fragment: at times, any perceptible ‘middle ground’ is elusive. (Lois Fitch)