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