Stelae for Failed Time.pmd

Brian Ferneyhough
Stelae for Failed Time
Stela: a standing stone slab used in the ancient world primarily as a grave marker but also for dedication,
commemoration and demarcation.
Encyclopaedia Britannica
The cultural philosopher Walter Benjamin proposed an understanding of History as a series of timeless,
epiphanic insights. This composition for 12 solo voices and electronics seeks to erect around that
image a double understanding of Time; on the one hand as something tending towards experiential
congealment or self-commemoration, on the other, as a dimension susceptible to ‘failure’ - either by
reason of failing to live up to the implicit demands made on it by human society in extremis or else
because it cannot withstand remainderless appropriation by the events through which it is manifest.
Time, in musical terms, is most fully, successfully and subversively itself when it ruptures the unspoken
compact of solidarity with musical materials in order to offer itself up as a sudden presence of ‘ironic
energy.’ Seen in this light Benjamin’s last day on earth was a double failure of Time, that is, of a final,
catastrophic allegory of unmitigatedly atemporal presence and the literal, unyielding facticity of Time,
for him as an individual, having run its course.
Stelae for Failed Time is the concluding section of a music theatre work loosely based on Walter
Benjamin’s theoretical writings reflected through his final hours on earth (and thereafter). The text,
written by the American poet Charles Bernstein, is itself multi-layered, moving between artless children’s
rhymes and extended considerations of Benjamin’s theory of Allegory. The tragic sense of Time it
embodies is one of pure potentiality perpetually eviscerated by its imbrication in the real, rather as the
illusion of the continued presence of an amputated limb sensibilises us to para-dimensions of the
actual.
For now time is lost
now time is gained
now time is empty
now time is full
now time is lived
now time is hollow
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Brian Ferneyhough
Stelae for Failed Time cont.
now time is made
now time is stone.
Just as the stelae of antiquity tend to depict those commemorated as living individuals engaged in for
them typical activities, so the present composition seeks to contain a fluidly mutable musical discourse
in a series of five discrete panels or blocks. By assigning all five blocks an identical number of
measures I sought to underline the conventional or arbitrary nature of their overall shape in order to
permit the events out of which they are assembled to emerge the more forcefully in their emblematic
or commemorative capacity. The accompanying electroacoustic materials are constructed in large
part from sampled speech whose textual basis, in order the more adequately to reflect the
problematically mimetic relationship between speech and external reality, is translated into a constructed
‘negative vector language’ of my own devising.
The composer would like to thank Gilbert Nouno for his invaluable advice and assistance in the
preparation of the electroacoustic component of this work.
Brian Ferneyhough
Peters Edition Limited
Hinrichsen House
10-12 Baches Street London N1 6DN
Tel: 020 7553 4030 Fax: 020 7490 4921
e-mail: newmusic@uk.edition-peters.com
internet: www.edition-peters.com