''Études transcendantales'' is a

song cycle A song cycle () is a group, or cycle (music), cycle, of individually complete Art song, songs designed to be performed in sequence, as a unit.Susan Youens, ''Grove online'' The songs are either for solo voice or an ensemble, or rarely a combinat ...

in 9

movements Movement may refer to: Generic uses * Movement (clockwork), the internal mechanism of a timepiece * Movement (sign language), a hand movement when signing * Motion, commonly referred to as movement * Movement (music), a division of a larger c ...

for

mezzo-soprano A mezzo-soprano (, ), or mezzo ( ), is a type of classical music, classical female singing human voice, voice whose vocal range lies between the soprano and the contralto voice types. The mezzo-soprano's vocal range usually extends from the A bel ...

and

chamber ensemble Chamber music is a form of classical music that is composed for a small group of Musical instrument, instruments—traditionally a group that could fit in a Great chamber, palace chamber or a large room. Most broadly, it includes any art music ...

composed by

Brian Ferneyhough Brian John Peter Ferneyhough (; born 16 January 1943) is an English composer. Ferneyhough is typically considered the central figure of the New Complexity movement. Ferneyhough has taught composition at the Hochschule für Musik Freiburg and ...

between 1982 and 1985.

Background

The creative basis for the ''Études transcendantales'' is Ferneyhough's mild mid-life crisis. He thought about death and what makes music more than just music of the moment, and thus the songs deal with such themes. As part of this, he wanted the ensemble to sound rather harsh. Starting from the standard modernist

Pierrot ensemble A Pierrot ensemble is a musical ensemble comprising flute, clarinet, violin, cello and piano. This ensemble is named after 20th-century composer Arnold Schoenberg’s seminal work '' Pierrot lunaire'', which includes the quintet of instruments a ...

, he replaced the

clarinet The clarinet is a Single-reed instrument, single-reed musical instrument in the woodwind family, with a nearly cylindrical bore (wind instruments), bore and a flared bell. Clarinets comprise a Family (musical instruments), family of instrume ...

exchanged for an

oboe The oboe ( ) is a type of double-reed woodwind instrument. Oboes are usually made of wood, but may also be made of synthetic materials, such as plastic, resin, or hybrid composites. The most common type of oboe, the soprano oboe pitched in C, ...

, the

piano A piano is a keyboard instrument that produces sound when its keys are depressed, activating an Action (music), action mechanism where hammers strike String (music), strings. Modern pianos have a row of 88 black and white keys, tuned to a c ...

for a

harpsichord A harpsichord is a musical instrument played by means of a musical keyboard, keyboard. Depressing a key raises its back end within the instrument, which in turn raises a mechanism with a small plectrum made from quill or plastic that plucks one ...

, and removed the

violin The violin, sometimes referred to as a fiddle, is a wooden chordophone, and is the smallest, and thus highest-pitched instrument (soprano) in regular use in the violin family. Smaller violin-type instruments exist, including the violino picc ...

altogether. Including the voice, now all the parts are very different from each other and have strongly contrasting timbres, e.g., the pointillistic harpsichord with the smoother mezzo-soprano. Originally, Ferneyhough intended all the songs to be set to poems by the German poet Ernst Meister. However, he could not find enough suitable poems on death and permanence, and instead commissioned a poet friend, Alrun Moll, to write texts for the remaining songs.

Music

Like many other works by Ferneyhough and other

New Complexity New Complexity is a composition school in 20th-century classical music where composers seek a "complex, multi-layered interplay of evolutionary processes occurring simultaneously within every dimension of the musical material". Origins Though o ...

composers, ''Études transcendantales'' is infamously difficult to perform and is extremely complicated. Pitch-wise, the notes are freely sampled from all 12 tones and the

quarter tone A quarter tone is a pitch halfway between the usual notes of a chromatic scale or an interval about half as wide (orally, or logarithmically) as a semitone, which itself is half a whole tone. Quarter tones divide the octave by 50 cents each, a ...

s in between. Rhythmically, Ferneyhough is known for his nested irregular

tuplet In music, a tuplet (also irrational rhythm or groupings, artificial division or groupings, abnormal divisions, irregular rhythm, gruppetto, extra-metric groupings, or, rarely, contrametric rhythm) is "any rhythm that involves dividing the beat ...

s, and there is no exception here. Almost each individual note also has its own unique dynamics and articulation, including extended techniques such as

multiphonic A multiphonic is an extended technique on a monophonic musical instrument (one that generally produces only one note at a time) in which several notes are produced at once. This includes wind, reed, and brass instruments, as well as the human ...

s on the oboe, glottal stops for the voice, and key-clicking for the

flute The flute is a member of a family of musical instruments in the woodwind group. Like all woodwinds, flutes are aerophones, producing sound with a vibrating column of air. Flutes produce sound when the player's air flows across an opening. In th ...

. Throughout the nine songs, the process of composition transitions from a serialist-type systematic approach in the first song to an intuitive and free approach by the last song. While Ferneyhough thought this system is important, the practical effects are not discernible to the listener, as his intuitive composition produces music like that produced by his automation methods For example, for the oboe part in the first song, the rhythm is almost totally determined by a strict system, with five stages of complexity, each determined by another cycle of numbers: # dividing each measure into a number of notes # subdividing chunks of those notes into another layer # adding dots so that 4 notes fit where 3 did previously # tie some notes with each other and replace others with rests # replace two consecutive notes with a triplet in which one beat is a rest Each subsequent song has its own unique system (or intuitive development) for the creation of all aspects of the composition. Alternatively, if only to prove that the score is self-consistent, the rhythm can be deconstructed. The very first measure can be broken down in increasing complexity (note that the actual

meter The metre (or meter in US spelling; symbol: m) is the base unit of length in the International System of Units (SI). Since 2019, the metre has been defined as the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time interval of of ...

is in 2/10, but is really equivalent to a 2/8 measure at 5/4 the speed):

References

Toop, Richard Richard Toop (1 August 1945 – 19 June 2017) was a British-Australian musicologist. Toop was born in Chichester, England, in 1945. He studied at Hull University, where his teachers included Denis Arnold. In 1973 he became Karlheinz Stockhause ...

(1991). "Brian Ferneyhough's ''Études transcendantales'': A Composer's Diary (Part 1)". ''Eonta'' 1 (1), 55–89.

Background

Music

References

Further reading