Form-Figure-Style: An Intermediate Assessment

Author(s): Brian Ferneyhough

Source: Perspectives of New Music, Vol. 31, No. 1 (Winter, 1993), pp. 32-40
Published by: Perspectives of New Music
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FORM-FIGURE-STYLE:
AN INT'ERMEDIATE
ASSESSMENT

BRIANFERNEYHOUGH
En art,et en peinturecommeen
musique,il ne s'agitpasde
ou d'inventerdes
reproduire
formesmaisde capterdesforces.
-Gilles Deleuze

most unfruitful arenas of confrontation in recent compositional aesthetics has been the question of style and its rationale.
The more the general climate of opinion has tended towards embracing
some version of panstylistic pluralism, the more mutual intolerance and
virtuoso attitudinizing have come to obscure entire groups of central
issues. The increasingly uncritical acceptance of any and all incidental
NE OF THE

Form,Figure,Style

33

stylistic usages has driven many composers into one or other of the currently flourishing ideological camps in which serious application to specific areas of difficulty has given way to the production of writings
which are often little more than verbally articulated body gesture, transmitting approval or opprobrium as the case may be, irrespective of the
works themselves. By these means a clear-headed reexamination of the
implications inherent in particular stylistic norms is conveniently diverted into satisfyingly primitive expressions of clan spirit. Most disturbing,
perhaps, has been the phenomenon of deliberate remystification of musical expression: the following considerations will seek to underline the
dangers of such a position at a time when the expressive potential of
music is being eroded by continual resort to false forms of directness,
since it is this same supposed immediacy of transmission which
engenders the self-congratulatory point of view that there can be such a
thing as a global solution to the chronic dissolution of musical substance.
One conceivable approach to a provisional resolution of the dilemma
might be a renewed concentration on, and redefinition of, the term style
itself: in particular, it seems vital to focus attention more intensively on
the diachronic features of stylistic formation, since this alone promises a
salutary counterbalance to views of style which concentrate on the simultaneity of diverse physiognomic features in some historically referential,
but apparentlyextrahistoricallyutopian subjectivism. The unholy alliance
of period reference and formal organization often little more than noncommittal in nature, is founded, like many another flourishing aesthetic
sectarianism, upon a falsified model of musical history. Being hypostasized into a massive totality (in however limited a real form), such
model building rapidly leads to a devaluation of the internal coherence of
the individual work and its own specific criteria of autohistorical
signifying.
It should scarcely be necessary to emphasize that the carefully staged
(but nonetheless supremely artificial) opposition of two equally untenable fictions-(1) a music distinguished and authenticated by either the
rapidity and spontaneity of the associated creative act, or else by reason
of some supposedly natural qualities innate to the gesturally discursive
vocables employed, and (2) one-dimensional distillations of abstract,
material-bound strategies of generation such as are often purported to
characterize that all-purpose scapegoat, Serialism-does not survive
much detailed examination. All structuring systems are, to some extent,
arbitrary and spontaneous, just as most spontaneity is nothing but the
final stage of a frequently lengthy and intense ritual of self-programming
on the part of the composer. The ideology of the affective transparency
of musical substance as an iconic trace of the creative volitional act is full
of pitfalls. The increasing emphasis placed upon the direct expressive

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power of the musical gesture attempts to convince us that the internal

rhetorical energy which it is said to generate is sufficient to supplant any
secondary formative function which the constituent qualities of a "formal continuum" might otherwise have been in a position to contribute.
This is a highly perilous doctrine, if only because any attempt to
underline still more clearly the immediate, holistic significance of a gestural unit leads, almost inevitably, to its assumption of effective selfsufficiency and formally passive encapsulation in a henceforth largely
contingent context. Focusing on immediacy of expression-however that
term may be defined-suggests that little else is required for the adequate appreciation of its specific vehicle than (a) its capacity to be categorized as to denotational intent, and (b) the apperception of its direct
material presence. That such experientially isolationist tendencies have
gained access to the heartlands of current musical thinking at the same
time as the adoption of vocables derived relatively unmediatedly from
earlier historical epochs is surely significant, and points to the destabilizing and disorientating factors which such seemingly unproblematic
appeals to "expressivity"conceal beneath the surface.
Although the relevant connotations of the term "expression" have
scarcely been defined except by reading between the lines of otherwise
vacuous ex cathedra pronouncements, the essence of the matter would
seem to be this: that the musical sign or sign-constellation be, to a significant degree, transparent to emotive intentionality. According to this
view, the sign would, in some respects, be analogous to a glass pane with
variable degrees of translucency, through which the emotive object-the
spiritual state, one assumes, of the composer in the act of composing (as
transubstantiation of the act of self-observation) -is rendered palpable.
The necessity and desirability of mediational artifice are either ignored or
denied. But that is not all: such a doctrine suggests that there are categories of musical gesture which are somehow naturally permeable to particular emotional images, while offering corresponding resistance to others.
Though it is clear that the human ear tends to react to various types of
sound stimulus according to relatively constant somatic considerations,
this would not, prima facie, be a sufficiently powerful interpretation of
what such a doctrine must needs involve. Much recent music relies heavily on variants of a rather limited repertoire of gestural types calculated
to energize the receptive and interpretational faculties of the listener in a
culturally quite specific fashion.
It is especially disturbing that this species of "Pavlovian"semanticism
has succeeded in gaining so much ground at the expense of subtler and
vastly more flexible views of expressive strategy-particularly when, in so
doing, a number of larger-scale aspects of compositional organization
grow thereby still more rigid, mechanically unaccommodating, and

Form,Figure,Style

35

divorced from the fundamental, vitalist energies which one assumes to

be both their ultimate raison d'etre and generator. In particular, it is this
tendency's espousal of a form of "expressive atomism" which vitiates
most gravely the life force of its own devoutly proclaimed program: the
more efficiently the individual emotively denotational complex succeeds
in transmitting its one-to-one correspondence with its triggering emotive
state, the less it needs-or can allow itself to be compromised by-any
form of functional interaction with its immediate surroundings in the
work. Even if it were to be argued that this view be overly inflexible (in
that, in practice, the various gestural/affective units merge into one
another) the principle remains clear: expressive denotational monads
negate their own potential internal power by evoking it in the act of signification itself.
At the very moment at which the gesture aspires to rise above its material presence it falls back into the mere historically conditioned material
state, since its aspiration to uniqueness empties it of the possibility of
entering the community of signifying acts as a subcategory in its own
right. The energy required to create the gesture is consumed by the time
its boundaries have been established, so that its ability to exercise an
influence on the category pertinent to it is insignificant. Such gestures
remain, like strangely visible black holes, at the still center of their own
burnt-out identity. They exist solely on condition that they relinquish any
claim to enter into more complexly fruitful formal associations except in
the form of primitive chains or by a despairing reliance on the shaky
mechanisms of the "Contrast Principle." By proclaiming their tendentially absolutist iconic pretensions they become, paradoxically, interchangeable, depersonalized tokens of generally (but only generally)
recognizable categories of communicational activity, since it is principally
by means of some degree of porousness that a gestural unit attains access
to any viable framework of articulative possibilities. The sense of the
arbitrarinessof a gesture increases in direct proportion to its fundamental isolation. The barriers erected against large-scale argument by this
body of principles can be only partially surmounted by the acting-out of
a state of affirmative monolithicity by the composing individual; even
then, the degree of strained self-awareness demanded by such a role
bears eloquent witness to the extent to which the creed of spontaneity
remains distinctly fragile, reflecting the insistently subversive contradictions at its very core. The last available counter to this formal dislocation
and inconsequentiality
seems to be a version of programmatic
revanchism-the imposition of arbitrary,external formal principles upon
a repertoire of sign categories incapable of developing its own grammar
of continuity.
Thus, recent years have witnessed the reemergence of textbook forms

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such as variations, passacaglia, rondo, and the like: whilst there is nothing implausible per se in the employment of such molds it nevertheless
seems likely that the current drive away from forms which are intimately
interwoven with the expressive strategies of which they are composed
represents a symptom of the abyss yawning between the immediate
ideals and "image" of neoromantic aesthetic arguments, and the forced
unnaturalness of their reification through abstract forms which are,
themselves, the most persuasive witnesses to the lacunae in the naturalist
position. If semantically loaded elements are to be called upon to guarantee directness of communication, the dilution of these same elements
as a result of their integration in organic formal patterns leads to them
being called into question as functioning iconic signals: if, on the other
hand, more arbitrary formal models be imposed, the gestural elements
retain their monadic innocence only at the considerable cost of appearing
in a condition of radically schizophrenic disassociation from their circumambient context, which latter itself pretends to a more conventional
interlocking of levels than is, in fact, present. On a larger scale, then, the
arguments of this school of thought against so-called "Serial" music
rebound upon its members with a vengeance. Forced inconsequentiality
and a species of Neoconservatism are the logical endpoints of this trend.
Material which exhausts itself in the violent flare of its own emergence
into the world can scarcely serve as the basis for a revised concept of stylistic integrity, be this pluralisticallyorientated or not. Perhaps, for some,
a period of polemic reductionism has been a necessary prelude to the reconsideration of stylistic means. If so, it would be pleasant to be able to
foresee a renewed concentration, not upon still further vistas of readymade, found objects, but, by means of an intense investigation of the
energy sources which invest gestural complexes with their propulsive
drive towards the future, upon these lines of force themselves as
expressionin waiting.
The situation outlined above has not been selected as a convenient
weapon with which to attack particular individuals. It is intended far
more to serve as one of several possible illustrations through which the
need for new perspectives on the question of style might usefully be
demonstrated. Of equal pertinence would also have been a consideration
of that approach to pluralism which attempts to integrate elements
extracted from various disparate cultural sources into a single "metastyle," since many of the arguments already offered would apply here in
equal measure. It is not necessary to examine in very close detail the
many works offering vast and fractured vistas of "quantum leaps" from
one prefabricatedstylistic habitat to another. Where there is no conceivable answer to a problem, it appears likely that there is no problem. This
would seem to be especially true in respect of stylistic plurality at the

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37

present time. In any case, it is at least very questionable if any single stylistic tendency could, by reason of creativeforcemajeure, provide that substitute "common language" whose present lack is loudly, if sometimes
perfunctorily, lamented on all sides. Far more wide-reaching consequences would be achieved, not by praying for rain, but through a consequent and painstaking attempt to reconstruct the authenticity of a
musical dialect-be it that of one or several composers-from the interstices out.
Faced with that interpretation of style which concentrates largely on
the surface characteristics of given materials, it would appear necessary
to affirm the importance of the cumulative, developmental aspects of the
endeavor. Elements do not simply appear, they emerge imbued with
history-not only that ubiquitous but vague shadow of the past, but
also, more significantly, their very own "autobiography," the scars of
their own growth. Theories which depend on the exclusivity of the
spontaneity/precalculation axis for their validation unwittingly depreciate
the means in their own hands, since both postulated extremes presuppose channels of signification which remain imprisoned in the onedimensional suddenness of surface which a more deeply, more differentiatedly oblique species of discourse would avoid. The reintegration of
some form of depth perspective depends on reestablishing contact
between the surface features of a work and its inner, subcutaneous
drives. Like the beautiful illusion of perfection offered by many virtuoso
performers, the compositional style which aspires implicitly to the status
of natural object denies us entry into the crossplay of forces by which
that very illusion is sustained. It is thus imperative that the ideology of
the holistic gesture be dethroned in favor of a type of patterning which
takes greater account of the transformative and energic potential of the
subcomponents of which the gesture is composed. It is a question, in the
first instance, of the conscious employment of perceptual categories in
respect of the "afterlife"of a gesture, since it is here, at the moment of
dissolution, that the constrictive preforming of gestural material is able
to be released as formal energy. A gesture whose component defining
features-timbre, pitch contour, dynamic level, and so on-display a tendency towards escaping from that specific context in order to become
independently signifying radicals, free to recombine, to "solidify" into
further gestural forms may, for want of other nomenclature, be termed a
figure. The deliberate enhancement of the separatist potential of specific
parametric aspects of the figure produces a unit at one and the same
time material presence, semantic sign, and temporary focus of the lines
of organizational force until the moment of their often violent release.
The concept of the parameter has become part of our communal creative experience. Whatever the pros and cons of aesthetic maneuvering as

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far as its original function is concerned, the term is surely indispensable

if we wish to come to practical grips with the above-outlined notions.
Regardless of the extent to which many composers might seek to persuade us that the analytical mobility of parametric inflection has been
superseded by a return to the integral and indivisible nature of the emotive gesture, we should not permit ourselves to become confused: the
power of such rhetorical assertions lies mainly in their undifferentiated
substance, while the character of even minimally complex musical discourse is of quite another order. One of the most farreaching consequences of the sometimes over-literal manipulations typical of the
"classical"serial period has been, not so much the flawless establishment
of some materially egalitarian utopia of authorless creation, but, rather,
the almost incidental demonstration that any form of sonic unit is the
potential focus of many lines of directional energy.
The acausally immobile quality of the parametric complexes in such
compositions was not, in the first instance, a necessary consequence of
parametric thinking as such but, rather, follows directly from the specific
aesthetic positions adopted. The deepest doubts concerning serial thinking are related to the perception that total mobility of parametric deployment tended to generate a series of contextless monads, whose aural logic
by no means obviously followed from the abstract rules of play to which
they owed their existence. It was thus the overall decontextualization of
parametric structuring which led inevitably to the decay of compositional credibility, not any particular inadequacy inhering in the view of
sonic event as being a momentary fixing of a number of independently
moving streams of information. On the contrary, the resultant
"dematerialization"of the event, its radiation into, and illumination of its
defining context, is an essential prerequisite for the establishment of
those taut chains of mutually embedded perspectives without which the
event must needs remain largely incommunicado in respect of larger formal concerns. In this fashion, the event experiences a return to itself as
affective substance at the very moment at which the illusion of stable
identity is processually transcended.
A realistic reintegration of parametrically defined perspectives suggests the need for a stylistic ambience in which an uninterrupted movement from level to level, from largest to smallest element of form, is an
ever-present possibility. A mode of composition which enhances the
affective gesture with the energy to productively dissolve itself in a quasianalytical fashion suggests itself since, by adopting such a standpoint, the
gesture is brought to function in several ways simultaneously, thus
throwing its shadow beyond the limits set by its physical borders, while
the strands of parametric information of which it is composed take on
lives of their own-without, however, divorcing themselves from the

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39

concrete point of their common manifestation to such a degree that their

independence on the processual level could ever pose a serious threat to
to the credibility or integrity of the gesture itself. The enhanced figure,
being primarily a subclass of the gesture, partakes of the general "speech
resemblance" character of the latter, without at any point renouncing its
essentially syntheticemphasis. Its very dependence on the material immediacy of the gestural manifestation guarantees that a return to the static
inconsequentiality of neoserial hierarchies will be rendered improbable.
The present state of value-free pluralism demands resolution, not in
the continued search for some Holy Grail of "common language" (since
this would also imply common purpose), but rather through the
rigorous definition, both in the single work and in the work series, of a
continuity of context in and through which particular vocableswhatever their incidental origins-may assume audible responsibility for
the embodiment of a stylistic tradition in the making. The major prerequisite for such an undertaking, far from being the punctual selection of
general types of surface feature, is the creation of a continuously evolving
state of stylistic homogeneity. The current defeatist denunciation of
"progress" need not inhibit this quest, since there is always room for a
language which offers the listener a rich panorama of life-forms in
motion. Progress in this sense is surely attainable.
Only the conscious and systematic deconstruction of the gesture into
semantically mobile figural constellations promises to overcome the former's inherent limitations, since it is the synthetic nature of the figure
which permits the definition of the category through which it wishes to be
heard, rather than vice-versa. Expressive energy derives, in large measure,
from the impacting power of restriction; arrested motion has a peculiar
force all its own, and it is precisely this impetus which informs the dissolution of the gesture into a cloud of liberated, form-building atoms. A musical element possesses radicallydifferent qualities, depending on whether it
is presented as the evidential trace of a completed process, or as a concrete
"given," the result and goal of unmediated invention. Analogously, we can
imagine a species of form in which all contributory sonic events would be
so formulated as to permit the differentiated radiation of their particles
into a governing corona of classificatory hierarchies: it is this articulatedly
febrile world of forces which remains for us to secure.
Style is important as the vehicle for, and governing instance of, the
expansion, diversification and combination of independently steered
streams of formal potential. The progressive accretion, from work to
work, of that form of aura which only long-term evolution can provide
will be the most effective guarantee for the proper exploitation of such
possibilities, no matter what surface characteristics an individual composer's style may display. More than ever, it is likely to be the consistency

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of whatever stylistic means are adopted that, simultaneously resisting and

encouraging invention, will prove most capable of validating a species of
expressive vitality which, like the architectural fantasies of Piranesi, does
not content itself with remaining industriously imprisoned within the
limits of the individual work.

Firstpublishedin Englishin theDarmstaidter

Beitragezur neuenMusik19 (1982).