Lemma-Icon-Epigram

Brian FERNEYHOUGH
Born 1943, Coventry, England

Lemma-Icon-Epigram (1981)

piano solo

Over the years, the detritus of images associated with my alchemical and metaphysical studies, or Renaissance studies, began to accumulate round a core, and this core was, as I said, the idea of Denkbilder: pictures to help you think or ?thinking pictures?. So the first part of the piece is the whirlwind of the not-yet-become: the idea of processes, not material, forming the thematic content of the work.

So this is the Lemma, the superscription. The second part, the Icon, is the description of the possible picture put into actual pictorial form. I'm dealing here with the expansion and contraction of rhythmic and chordal cycles. There are only seven chordal identities, and this middle part is the same thing seen from many perspectival standpoints. I have what I call a ?time-sun?. That is, I imagine a framework within which these chords are then disposed on several levels, like objects. Then there is a sun passing over them: the shadows thrown by the sun are of different lengths, different intensities, impinging in different ways upon different objects, themselves also moving upon the space defined by this frame. The third part is the Epigram. This is the attempt to unite these two elements that have appeared previously.

Brian FERNEYHOUGH in comments drawn from an interview with Richard Toop published in Collected Writings, Editors James Boros and Richard Toop, Harwood Academic Publishers 1995.