Terrain

Brian FERNEYHOUGH
Born 1943, Coventry, England

Terrain (1992)

violin solo, oboe/cor anglais, flute/piccolo, clarinet in Bb, bassoon, trumpet, trombone, horn, contrabass
Commissioned by Gulbenkian Foundation/Ars Musica Brussels
Published by Edition Peters, catalogue EP7364

One of the first pieces of significant contemporary music that I have ever heard, at the age of fifteen or sixteen, was Octandre by Edgar VARÈSE. I was excited and stimulated by the crystalline sonic images and the refreshingly unsentimental and vigorous language in which they were couched. In some ways, Terrain is the repayment, via a circuitous detour, of a long-standing debt, since the eight instruments chosen are precisely those employed in Octandre, albeit with a number of subsidiary doublings.

When given the opportunity to compose a concertante piece for Irvine ARDITTI, I wanted to offset his particular brilliance with an incisive and timbrally heterogeneous ensemble. As a onetime wind-player myself, I saw the Octandre combination as a rich reservoir of textural, dynamic and articulational potential. Also attractive to me was the fact that, although the instrumentation of an extremely well-known piece, it has never succeeded in establishing itself as a `standard´ grouping, so that, in formal terms, a significant level of innovation was conceivable.

Lick a rugged landscape, Terrain may be imagined as a provisional and volatile balance established between forces operating on different, but simultaneously unfolding levels. The initial multifaceted violin solo becomes gradually amplified, distorted and obscured by various strata of activity, some consisting of diverse duos (the first is for piccolo and double bass), others marked by florid solo passages or larger tutti blocks. The dense middle of the work is composed of a chain of progressively more chaotic `re-readings´ in which the violin succeeds more and more in re-establishing some of its initial assertive pre-eminence. Towards the end, obsessively-iterated grey fragments of previous return to lie like irregularly shaped boulders in a bleak tundra of post-glacial devastation.

The title itself is taken from the homonymous poem by A. R. AMMONS. I would also like to acknowledge the influence of the aesthetic writings of the late Robert SMITHSON.

Programme note © Brian FERNEYHOUGH