Ferneyhough-Bone Alphabet-P - Product Information
Bone Alphabet by Brian Ferneyhough for solo percussion. Duration: 11'30"
Bone Alphabet came about as the result of a request by Steven Schick for a solo work for a group of
instruments small enough to be transportable as part of the performer's personal luggage when traveling by air. I responded by leaving the precise instruments to be utilised unspecified, other than by requiring each of the seven sound sources selected to be capable of supporting an extremely wide range of dynamics and of having closely similar attack and decay characteristics to the other instruments. An additional constraint was that no two adjacent instruments making up the gamut of possibilities were to be constructed of the same material (so that, for instance, a chinese gong could not be located next to a cow bell).
The work was composed as a succession of thirteen distinct types of musical comportment, each made up of a different number of subsections. A second stage of the compositional process involved detaching these subsections from their original context and redistributing them in a kaleidoscopic and relatively unpredictable manner, so that the rhetorical language of Bone Alphabet reveals itself as a non-linear succession of unprepared contrasts and unexpected conjunctions.
In spite of its radically limited instrumentation, the work is conceived polyphonically throughout, the individual voices being distinguished primarily by sharply etched articulational characters, given the same group of seven sounds is shared by all voices. It is the principal task of the interpreter to discover ways of surmounting the initial timbral constraints by recourse to a compensatingly capacious reservoir of stamina and physical dexterity.
Bone Alphabet was given its first performance by Steven Schick, its dedicatee, in San Diego, February
1992.
- Brian Ferneyhough
Bone Alphabet came about as the result of a request by Steven Schick for a solo work for a group of
instruments small enough to be transportable as part of the performer's personal luggage when traveling by air. I responded by leaving the precise instruments to be utilised unspecified, other than by requiring each of the seven sound sources selected to be capable of supporting an extremely wide range of dynamics and of having closely similar attack and decay characteristics to the other instruments. An additional constraint was that no two adjacent instruments making up the gamut of possibilities were to be constructed of the same material (so that, for instance, a chinese gong could not be located next to a cow bell).
The work was composed as a succession of thirteen distinct types of musical comportment, each made up of a different number of subsections. A second stage of the compositional process involved detaching these subsections from their original context and redistributing them in a kaleidoscopic and relatively unpredictable manner, so that the rhetorical language of Bone Alphabet reveals itself as a non-linear succession of unprepared contrasts and unexpected conjunctions.
In spite of its radically limited instrumentation, the work is conceived polyphonically throughout, the individual voices being distinguished primarily by sharply etched articulational characters, given the same group of seven sounds is shared by all voices. It is the principal task of the interpreter to discover ways of surmounting the initial timbral constraints by recourse to a compensatingly capacious reservoir of stamina and physical dexterity.
Bone Alphabet was given its first performance by Steven Schick, its dedicatee, in San Diego, February
1992.
- Brian Ferneyhough
