As Beethoven is reputed to have said, What do I care for your stupid fiddle
when the spirit moves me?
joanna
----- Original Message -----
From: "Dominic Fox" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Tuesday, November 15, 2005 9:57 PM
Subject: Re: Blah
A note on Ferneyhough, not that I know all that much about him really:
his "Etudes transcendentales" are meant to be near-as-dammit
physically unplayable, although musicians still very gamely try to
play them - the performance is then almost guaranteed to be different
from what's in the score, to have ad hoc, "live", holes, elisions and
mis-keys "added" to the score by the technical limitations of human
players and their instruments.
But technique catches up. The fusion guitar prodigy Shawn Lane
recorded one piece with a passage that was assembled, note-by-note, by
digital means from recordings of other performances. It was assumed by
him to be unplayable; but the guitarist Buckethead painstakingly
worked sections of it out, and found ways to play them (using some
quite exotic techniques). Lane himself used to talk about
"transcendental technique" - this is a reference to Liszt, in the
first instance, whom Lane loved and studied very deeply - meaning the
kind of thing you can't figure out how to play slow, then practice up
until you can do it fast - you just have to throw yourself into it,
and see what comes out. But even Lane's fastest and wildest excursions
have been notated, are reproducible with effort; the next generation
makes a creole from the experimenter's alien pidgin.
I wrote a poem for Lane, who died young of suffocation due to lung
disease, which touches on this:
--
NOTES LIKE RAIN outpouring from overwhelmed
guttering during a deluge - "transcendental
technique", now taught in magazines.
Numberless books on lepidoptery
an evening's study. The mind's uncageable
papillon, fluttering through the fingers.
"Some kind of spirit" as convected warmth,
as sonic youth, as torrents remotely
seeded, propagating to the last breath.
--
One of the published obituaries for Lane includes an anecdote about
someone visiting and finding a stack of books on butterflies on his
desk. The visitor assumed they were for a school project for Lane's
daughter; they weren't; Lane had just taken an interest in butterflies
and in his usual intellectually voracious fashion set out to discover
as much as he could about them. So the idea that there are some things
you have to reach for without having a solid base of knowledge or
technique to help you get there is quite compatible with the greatest
love and respect for knowledge, for self-study: "each man is his own
academy" indeed.
Mr Bircumshaw, prodigious autodidact that he is, should appreciate
this especially...
Dominic
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