Duration: 320 minutes
Difficulty: Difficult
Excerpt from programme Notes
The piece, lasting around five and a half hours, is divided into eleven sections. The fifth and ninth are quite short in duration (between 10 and 15 minutes), the eighth is long (between 75 and 80 minutes) the others average half an hour. The composition was begun in 1995 and completed in 2001.
Ian Pace gave the first complete (recital) performance at the Royal Academy of Music in London, on 28th January 2001. The eleventh section of the cycle (first performed by Nicolas Hodges with slide projections by Ken Scott and Steyning Camera Club) was commissioned by Steyning Music Society.
The Academic Board of the Royal Academy of Music generously supported the writing of the later stages of the composition (the Bachsche Nachdichtungen suggested by Carlo Grante, sections 9, 2 and finally 1).
The History of Photography in Sound was designed to be performed, in whole or part, either as a solo piano 'recital' or as an 'installation' with video, slides and film.
1. Le démon de l'analogie (for Carlo Grante)
2. Le réveil de l'intraitable réalité (for Marc Couroux)
(1) Analogy (Copy) Homology. "No sooner is a form seen than it must resemble something."(2) Reality (Image) Illusion. "We translateas if the universalised image were producing a world that is without difference."
3. North American Spirituals (for Marilyn Nonken)
Billings Ives Cowell Nancarrow. Confronting Afro-American spiritual responses to slavery: Nobody knows the trouble I see; By and by; Go down, Moses; Steal away. Appropriated by Michael Tippett in A Child of our Time to signify the voices of defiance and hope everywhere and at any period of history.
4. My parents' generation thought War meant something (for my mother April 1922-October 2000)
Six verses, each introduced by increasingly brief fragments of the opening bars of Debussy's Berceuse Héroïque, drawing on vernacular sources between Arthur Sullivan (his hymn-tune Gertrude - Onward Christian Soldiers - , also more pervasively Whatever you are from the operetta Utopia Limited) and the Soviet song (by Blanter) Sacred War.
5. Alkan Paganini (for, and commissioned by, Nicolas Hodges)
Virtuosic pan-demonium (another set of analogues to No.1). Jean qui rit Alkan re-composes Mozart, Paganini's Capriccio Op.1 No.12, copied by Schumann (Op.10 No.1).
6. Seventeen Immortal Homosexual Poets (for Ian Pace)
The central axis of the cycle and the first section to be completed and performed. The title recalls various albums of Japanese classical writing wakashu assembled between the tenth and nineteenth centuries. The poets appear in reverse chronological order: Gregory Woods (born in 1953), then Mutsuo Takahashi, Thom Gunn, Allen Ginsberg, Frank O'Hara, Harold Norse, Pier Paolo Pasolini, James Kirkup, Jean Genet, Stephen Spender, Federico Garcia Lorca, Ralph Chubb, Jean Cocteau, Konstantinos Kavafis, Oscar Wilde, Edward Carpenter, and John Addington Symonds (born in 1840).
7. Eadweard Muybridge Edvard Munch (for James Clapperton)
Balances and contradicts No.5. Abstract structuralism (scientific rationality) Metaphysical expressionism (emotive irrationality).
8. Kapitalistisch Realisme (met Sizilianische Männerakte en Bachsche Nachdichtungen) (for Colin Symes)
Three Bs. (i) Beethoven (grundgestalt thirds in Op.67, Op.18 No.5, Op.10 No.1). (ii) Bach (Allein Gott in der Hoh' sei Ehr' BWV 717, 716, 662, 667). (iii) Busoni (retrograde of the Pezzo serioso from Op.39 with an overlay of Sicilian folktunes collected by Meyerbeer). Counterpart to No.4.
9. Wachtend op de volgende uitbarsting van repressie en censuur (for Andrew Infanti)
Opening almost identical to No.1. Thereafter the first half is loosely modelled on the Sarabande from Busoni's Doktor Faust (linked to material from No.8). The second half is a disordered atomising (censoring) of the first.
10. Unsere Afrikareise (for Dr. Franz Eckert)
Title from Peter Kubelka's film. Meditating on occidentalised 'African' materials (also finally from No.3). Most obviously Victor Masse's operatic version of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's Paul et Virginie, and Felicien David's Le Desert. Sectionalised montage including 'ritornelli' (as No.2 but mostly less hectic).
11. Etched bright with sunlight (for Dr. Mark Signy)
Title from Derek Jarman's unfilmed project Sod 'em. Reiterations of previous material, bringing chaos into order (Adorno's 'minima moralia'). Opening with Bach (BWV 328), then Wagner, North African folk music (related to No.10) and an excerpt from Kavafis (in No.6), Berlioz, eventually 'disappearing' in 'mid-sentence'.
© Michael Finnissy
Reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press
