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Form-Figure-Style: An Intermediate Assessment
Author(s): Brian Ferneyhough
Source: Perspectives of New Music, Vol. 31, No. 1 (Winter, 1993), pp. 32-40
Published by: Perspectives of New Music
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FORM-FIGURE-STYLE: 
AN INT'ERMEDIATE ASSESSMENT 
BRIAN FERNEYHOUGH 
En art, et en peinture comme en 
musique, il ne s'agit pas de 
reproduire ou d'inventer des 
formes mais de capter des forces. 
-Gilles Deleuze 
NE OF THE most unfruitful arenas of confrontation in recent com- 
positional aesthetics has been the question of style and its rationale. 
The more the general climate of opinion has tended towards embracing 
some version of panstylistic pluralism, the more mutual intolerance and 
virtuoso attitudinizing have come to obscure entire groups of central 
issues. The increasingly uncritical acceptance of any and all incidental 
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Form, Figure, Style 
stylistic usages has driven many composers into one or other of the cur- 
rently flourishing ideological camps in which serious application to spe- 
cific areas of difficulty has given way to the production of writings 
which are often little more than verbally articulated body gesture, trans- 
mitting approval or opprobrium as the case may be, irrespective of the 
works themselves. By these means a clear-headed reexamination of the 
implications inherent in particular stylistic norms is conveniently diver- 
ted into satisfyingly primitive expressions of clan spirit. Most disturbing, 
perhaps, has been the phenomenon of deliberate remystification of musi- 
cal expression: the following considerations will seek to underline the 
dangers of such a position at a time when the expressive potential of 
music is being eroded by continual resort to false forms of directness, 
since it is this same supposed immediacy of transmission which 
engenders the self-congratulatory point of view that there can be such a 
thing as a global solution to the chronic dissolution of musical substance. 
One conceivable approach to a provisional resolution of the dilemma 
might be a renewed concentration on, and redefinition of, the term style 
itself: in particular, it seems vital to focus attention more intensively on 
the diachronic features of stylistic formation, since this alone promises a 
salutary counterbalance to views of style which concentrate on the simul- 
taneity of diverse physiognomic features in some historically referential, 
but apparently extrahistorically utopian subjectivism. The unholy alliance 
of period reference and formal organization often little more than non- 
committal in nature, is founded, like many another flourishing aesthetic 
sectarianism, upon a falsified model of musical history. Being hypo- 
stasized into a massive totality (in however limited a real form), such 
model building rapidly leads to a devaluation of the internal coherence of 
the individual work and its own specific criteria of autohistorical 
signifying. 
It should scarcely be necessary to emphasize that the carefully staged 
(but nonetheless supremely artificial) opposition of two equally unten- 
able fictions-(1) a music distinguished and authenticated by either the 
rapidity and spontaneity of the associated creative act, or else by reason 
of some supposedly natural qualities innate to the gesturally discursive 
vocables employed, and (2) one-dimensional distillations of abstract, 
material-bound strategies of generation such as are often purported to 
characterize that all-purpose scapegoat, Serialism-does not survive 
much detailed examination. All structuring systems are, to some extent, 
arbitrary and spontaneous, just as most spontaneity is nothing but the 
final stage of a frequently lengthy and intense ritual of self-programming 
on the part of the composer. The ideology of the affective transparency 
of musical substance as an iconic trace of the creative volitional act is full 
of pitfalls. The increasing emphasis placed upon the direct expressive 
33 
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Perspectives of New Music 
power of the musical gesture attempts to convince us that the internal 
rhetorical energy which it is said to generate is sufficient to supplant any 
secondary formative function which the constituent qualities of a "for- 
mal continuum" might otherwise have been in a position to contribute. 
This is a highly perilous doctrine, if only because any attempt to 
underline still more clearly the immediate, holistic significance of a ges- 
tural unit leads, almost inevitably, to its assumption of effective self- 
sufficiency and formally passive encapsulation in a henceforth largely 
contingent context. Focusing on immediacy of expression-however that 
term may be defined-suggests that little else is required for the ade- 
quate appreciation of its specific vehicle than (a) its capacity to be cate- 
gorized as to denotational intent, and (b) the apperception of its direct 
material presence. That such experientially isolationist tendencies have 
gained access to the heartlands of current musical thinking at the same 
time as the adoption of vocables derived relatively unmediatedly from 
earlier historical epochs is surely significant, and points to the destabiliz- 
ing and disorientating factors which such seemingly unproblematic 
appeals to "expressivity" conceal beneath the surface. 
Although the relevant connotations of the term "expression" have 
scarcely been defined except by reading between the lines of otherwise 
vacuous ex cathedra pronouncements, the essence of the matter would 
seem to be this: that the musical sign or sign-constellation be, to a sig- 
nificant degree, transparent to emotive intentionality. According to this 
view, the sign would, in some respects, be analogous to a glass pane with 
variable degrees of translucency, through which the emotive object-the 
spiritual state, one assumes, of the composer in the act of composing (as 
transubstantiation of the act of self-observation) -is rendered palpable. 
The necessity and desirability of mediational artifice are either ignored or 
denied. But that is not all: such a doctrine suggests that there are catego- 
ries of musical gesture which are somehow naturally permeable to partic- 
ular emotional images, while offering corresponding resistance to others. 
Though it is clear that the human ear tends to react to various types of 
sound stimulus according to relatively constant somatic considerations, 
this would not, prima facie, be a sufficiently powerful interpretation of 
what such a doctrine must needs involve. Much recent music relies heav- 
ily on variants of a rather limited repertoire of gesturaltypes calculated 
to energize the receptive and interpretational faculties of the listener in a 
culturally quite specific fashion. 
It is especially disturbing that this species of "Pavlovian" semanticism 
has succeeded in gaining so much ground at the expense of subtler and 
vastly more flexible views of expressive strategy-particularly when, in so 
doing, a number of larger-scale aspects of compositional organization 
grow thereby still more rigid, mechanically unaccommodating, and 
34 
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Form, Figure, Style 
divorced from the fundamental, vitalist energies which one assumes to 
be both their ultimate raison d'etre and generator. In particular, it is this 
tendency's espousal of a form of "expressive atomism" which vitiates 
most gravely the life force of its own devoutly proclaimed program: the 
more efficiently the individual emotively denotational complex succeeds 
in transmitting its one-to-one correspondence with its triggering emotive 
state, the less it needs-or can allow itself to be compromised by-any 
form of functional interaction with its immediate surroundings in the 
work. Even if it were to be argued that this view be overly inflexible (in 
that, in practice, the various gestural/affective units merge into one 
another) the principle remains clear: expressive denotational monads 
negate their own potential internal power by evoking it in the act of sig- 
nification itself. 
At the very moment at which the gesture aspires to rise above its mate- 
rial presence it falls back into the mere historically conditioned material 
state, since its aspiration to uniqueness empties it of the possibility of 
entering the community of signifying acts as a subcategory in its own 
right. The energy required to create the gesture is consumed by the time 
its boundaries have been established, so that its ability to exercise an 
influence on the category pertinent to it is insignificant. Such gestures 
remain, like strangely visible black holes, at the still center of their own 
burnt-out identity. They exist solely on condition that they relinquish any 
claim to enter into more complexly fruitful formal associations except in 
the form of primitive chains or by a despairing reliance on the shaky 
mechanisms of the "Contrast Principle." By proclaiming their tenden- 
tially absolutist iconic pretensions they become, paradoxically, inter- 
changeable, depersonalized tokens of generally (but only generally) 
recognizable categories of communicational activity, since it is principally 
by means of some degree of porousness that a gestural unit attains access 
to any viable framework of articulative possibilities. The sense of the 
arbitrariness of a gesture increases in direct proportion to its fundamen- 
tal isolation. The barriers erected against large-scale argument by this 
body of principles can be only partially surmounted by the acting-out of 
a state of affirmative monolithicity by the composing individual; even 
then, the degree of strained self-awareness demanded by such a role 
bears eloquent witness to the extent to which the creed of spontaneity 
remains distinctly fragile, reflecting the insistently subversive contradic- 
tions at its very core. The last available counter to this formal dislocation 
and inconsequentiality seems to be a version of programmatic 
revanchism-the imposition of arbitrary, external formal principles upon 
a repertoire of sign categories incapable of developing its own grammar 
of continuity. 
Thus, recent years have witnessed the reemergence of textbook forms 
35 
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Perspectives of New Music 
such as variations, passacaglia, rondo, and the like: whilst there is noth- 
ing implausible per se in the employment of such molds it nevertheless 
seems likely that the current drive away from forms which are intimately 
interwoven with the expressive strategies of which they are composed 
represents a symptom of the abyss yawning between the immediate 
ideals and "image" of neoromantic aesthetic arguments, and the forced 
unnaturalness of their reification through abstract forms which are, 
themselves, the most persuasive witnesses to the lacunae in the naturalist 
position. If semantically loaded elements are to be called upon to guar- 
antee directness of communication, the dilution of these same elements 
as a result of their integration in organic formal patterns leads to them 
being called into question as functioning iconic signals: if, on the other 
hand, more arbitrary formal models be imposed, the gestural elements 
retain their monadic innocence only at the considerable cost of appearing 
in a condition of radically schizophrenic disassociation from their cir- 
cumambient context, which latter itself pretends to a more conventional 
interlocking of levels than is, in fact, present. On a larger scale, then, the 
arguments of this school of thought against so-called "Serial" music 
rebound upon its members with a vengeance. Forced inconsequentiality 
and a species of Neoconservatism are the logical endpoints of this trend. 
Material which exhausts itself in the violent flare of its own emergence 
into the world can scarcely serve as the basis for a revised concept of styl- 
istic integrity, be this pluralistically orientated or not. Perhaps, for some, 
a period of polemic reductionism has been a necessary prelude to the re- 
consideration of stylistic means. If so, it would be pleasant to be able to 
foresee a renewed concentration, not upon still further vistas of ready- 
made, found objects, but, by means of an intense investigation of the 
energy sources which invest gestural complexes with their propulsive 
drive towards the future, upon these lines of force themselves as 
expression in waiting. 
The situation outlined above has not been selected as a convenient 
weapon with which to attack particular individuals. It is intended far 
more to serve as one of several possible illustrations through which the 
need for new perspectives on the question of style might usefully be 
demonstrated. Of equal pertinence would also have been a consideration 
of that approach to pluralism which attempts to integrate elements 
extracted from various disparate cultural sources into a single "meta- 
style," since many of the arguments already offered would apply here in 
equal measure. It is not necessary to examine in very close detail the 
many works offering vast and fractured vistas of "quantum leaps" from 
one prefabricated stylistic habitat to another. Where there is no conceiv- 
able answer to a problem, it appears likely that there is no problem. This 
would seem to be especially true in respect of stylistic plurality at the 
36 
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Form, Figure, Style 
present time. In any case, it is at least very questionable if any single styl- 
istic tendency could, by reason of creativeforce majeure, provide that sub- 
stitute "common language" whose present lack is loudly, if sometimes 
perfunctorily, lamented on all sides. Far more wide-reaching conse- 
quences would be achieved, not by praying for rain, but through a conse- 
quent and painstaking attempt to reconstruct the authenticity of a 
musical dialect-be it that of one or several composers-from the inter- 
stices out. 
Faced with that interpretation of style which concentrates largely on 
the surface characteristics of given materials, it would appear necessary 
to affirm the importance of the cumulative, developmental aspects of the 
endeavor. Elements do not simply appear, theyemerge imbued with 
history-not only that ubiquitous but vague shadow of the past, but 
also, more significantly, their very own "autobiography," the scars of 
their own growth. Theories which depend on the exclusivity of the 
spontaneity/precalculation axis for their validation unwittingly depreciate 
the means in their own hands, since both postulated extremes presup- 
pose channels of signification which remain imprisoned in the one- 
dimensional suddenness of surface which a more deeply, more differ- 
entiatedly oblique species of discourse would avoid. The reintegration of 
some form of depth perspective depends on reestablishing contact 
between the surface features of a work and its inner, subcutaneous 
drives. Like the beautiful illusion of perfection offered by many virtuoso 
performers, the compositional style which aspires implicitly to the status 
of natural object denies us entry into the crossplay of forces by which 
that very illusion is sustained. It is thus imperative that the ideology of 
the holistic gesture be dethroned in favor of a type of patterning which 
takes greater account of the transformative and energic potential of the 
subcomponents of which the gesture is composed. It is a question, in the 
first instance, of the conscious employment of perceptual categories in 
respect of the "afterlife" of a gesture, since it is here, at the moment of 
dissolution, that the constrictive preforming of gestural material is able 
to be released as formal energy. A gesture whose component defining 
features-timbre, pitch contour, dynamic level, and so on-display a ten- 
dency towards escaping from that specific context in order to become 
independently signifying radicals, free to recombine, to "solidify" into 
further gestural forms may, for want of other nomenclature, be termed a 
figure. The deliberate enhancement of the separatist potential of specific 
parametric aspects of the figure produces a unit at one and the same 
time material presence, semantic sign, and temporary focus of the lines 
of organizational force until the moment of their often violent release. 
The concept of the parameter has become part of our communal cre- 
ative experience. Whatever the pros and cons of aesthetic maneuvering as 
37 
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Perspectives of New Music 
far as its original function is concerned, the term is surely indispensable 
if we wish to come to practical grips with the above-outlined notions. 
Regardless of the extent to which many composers might seek to per- 
suade us that the analytical mobility of parametric inflection has been 
superseded by a return to the integral and indivisible nature of the emo- 
tive gesture, we should not permit ourselves to become confused: the 
power of such rhetorical assertions lies mainly in their undifferentiated 
substance, while the character of even minimally complex musical dis- 
course is of quite another order. One of the most farreaching conse- 
quences of the sometimes over-literal manipulations typical of the 
"classical" serial period has been, not so much the flawless establishment 
of some materially egalitarian utopia of authorless creation, but, rather, 
the almost incidental demonstration that any form of sonic unit is the 
potential focus of many lines of directional energy. 
The acausally immobile quality of the parametric complexes in such 
compositions was not, in the first instance, a necessary consequence of 
parametric thinking as such but, rather, follows directly from the specific 
aesthetic positions adopted. The deepest doubts concerning serial think- 
ing are related to the perception that total mobility of parametric deploy- 
ment tended to generate a series of contextless monads, whose aural logic 
by no means obviously followed from the abstract rules of play to which 
they owed their existence. It was thus the overall decontextualization of 
parametric structuring which led inevitably to the decay of composi- 
tional credibility, not any particular inadequacy inhering in the view of 
sonic event as being a momentary fixing of a number of independently 
moving streams of information. On the contrary, the resultant 
"dematerialization" of the event, its radiation into, and illumination of its 
defining context, is an essential prerequisite for the establishment of 
those taut chains of mutually embedded perspectives without which the 
event must needs remain largely incommunicado in respect of larger for- 
mal concerns. In this fashion, the event experiences a return to itself as 
affective substance at the very moment at which the illusion of stable 
identity is processually transcended. 
A realistic reintegration of parametrically defined perspectives sug- 
gests the need for a stylistic ambience in which an uninterrupted move- 
ment from level to level, from largest to smallest element of form, is an 
ever-present possibility. A mode of composition which enhances the 
affective gesture with the energy to productively dissolve itself in a quasi- 
analytical fashion suggests itself since, by adopting such a standpoint, the 
gesture is brought to function in several ways simultaneously, thus 
throwing its shadow beyond the limits set by its physical borders, while 
the strands of parametric information of which it is composed take on 
lives of their own-without, however, divorcing themselves from the 
38 
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Form, Figure, Style 
concrete point of their common manifestation to such a degree that their 
independence on the processual level could ever pose a serious threat to 
to the credibility or integrity of the gesture itself. The enhanced figure, 
being primarily a subclass of the gesture, partakes of the general "speech 
resemblance" character of the latter, without at any point renouncing its 
essentially synthetic emphasis. Its very dependence on the material imme- 
diacy of the gestural manifestation guarantees that a return to the static 
inconsequentiality of neoserial hierarchies will be rendered improbable. 
The present state of value-free pluralism demands resolution, not in 
the continued search for some Holy Grail of "common language" (since 
this would also imply common purpose), but rather through the 
rigorous definition, both in the single work and in the work series, of a 
continuity of context in and through which particular vocables- 
whatever their incidental origins-may assume audible responsibility for 
the embodiment of a stylistic tradition in the making. The major prereq- 
uisite for such an undertaking, far from being the punctual selection of 
general types of surface feature, is the creation of a continuously evolving 
state of stylistic homogeneity. The current defeatist denunciation of 
"progress" need not inhibit this quest, since there is always room for a 
language which offers the listener a rich panorama of life-forms in 
motion. Progress in this sense is surely attainable. 
Only the conscious and systematic deconstruction of the gesture into 
semantically mobile figural constellations promises to overcome the for- 
mer's inherent limitations, since it is the synthetic nature of the figure 
which permits the definition of the category through which it wishes to be 
heard, rather than vice-versa. Expressive energy derives, in large measure, 
from the impacting power of restriction; arrested motion has a peculiar 
force all its own, and it is precisely this impetus which informs the dissolu- 
tion of the gesture into a cloud of liberated, form-building atoms. A musi- 
cal element possesses radically different qualities, depending on whether it 
is presented as the evidential trace of a completed process, or as a concrete 
"given,"the result and goal of unmediated invention. Analogously, we can 
imagine a species of form in which all contributory sonic events would be 
so formulated as to permit the differentiated radiation of their particles 
into a governing corona of classificatory hierarchies: it is this articulatedly 
febrile world of forces which remains for us to secure. 
Style is important as the vehicle for, and governing instance of, the 
expansion, diversification and combination of independently steered 
streams of formal potential. The progressive accretion, from work to 
work, of that form of aura which only long-term evolution can provide 
will be the most effective guarantee for the proper exploitation of such 
possibilities, no matter what surface characteristics an individual com- 
poser's style may display. More than ever, it is likely to be the consistency 
39 
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40 Perspectives of New Music 
of whatever stylistic means are adopted that, simultaneously resisting and 
encouraging invention, will prove most capable of validating a species of 
expressive vitality which, like the architectural fantasies of Piranesi, does 
not content itself with remaining industriously imprisoned within the 
limits of the individual work. 
First published in English in the Darmstaidter Beitrage zur neuen Musik 19 (1982). 
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	Article Contents
	p.[32]
	p.33
	p.34
	p.35
	p.36
	p.37
	p.38
	p.39
	p.40
	Issue Table of Contents
	Perspectives of New Music, Vol. 31, No. 1 (Winter, 1993), pp. 1-338
	Front Matter [pp.1-328]
	[Illustration]: S. A. Jones: Detail from Pu'u O'o, 1992, Acrylic on Canvas, 37 by 44 Inches [p.5]
	Complexity Forum
	Why Complexity? (Part One) (Guest Editor's Introduction) [pp.6-9]
	Il Tempo della Figura [pp.10-19]
	The Tactility of Time (Darmstadt Lecture 1988) [pp.20-30]
	[Illustration]: S. A. Jones: Porphyry, 1990, Acrylic on Canvas, 47 by 41 Inches [p.31]
	Complexity Forum
	Form-Figure-Style: An Intermediate Assessment [pp.32-40]
	[Illustration]: S. A. Jones: Space Sign, 1971, Acrylic on Canvas, 48 by 48 Inches, Collection of Dr. Martin Sarnes [p.41]
	Complexity Forum
	On Complexity [pp.42-57]
	Mere Complexities [pp.58-62]
	[Illustration]: S. A. Jones: Haleakala, 1991, Acrylic on Canvas, 37 by 43 Inches [p.63]
	Complexity Forum
	The Complexity of Experience [pp.64-77]
	Flourish for Solo Flute [p.78]
	[Illustration]: S. A. Jones: Dalradian, 1992, Acrylic on Canvas, 32 by 40 Inches [p.79]
	Complexity Forum
	New Perspectives on Old Complexity [pp.80-85]
	Minimalism Forum
	The Minimalist Aesthetic in the Plastic Arts and in Music [pp.86-132]
	[Illustration]: S. A. Jones: Beryl, 1989, Acrylic on Canvas, 36 by 38 Inches, Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Stephen Zetterberg [p.133]
	Minimalism Forum
	La Monte Young's The Well-Tuned Piano [pp.134-162]
	[Illustration]: S. A. Jones: Fernandina, 1992, Acrylic on Canvas, 37 by 40 Inches [p.163]
	Ligeti Forum
	States, Events, Transformations [pp.164-171]
	Interval and Form in Ligeti's Continuum and Coulée [pp.172-190]
	[Illustration]: S. A. Jones: Paricutin, 1993, Acrylic on Canvas, 42 by 46 Inches [p.191]
	Ligeti Forum
	The Pattern-Meccanico Compositions of György Ligeti [pp.192-234]
	[Illustration]: S. A. Jones: Chuquicamata, 1991, Acrylic on Canvas, 36 by 46 Inches [p.235]
	Computer Music Forum
	Stochastic Composition and Stochastic Timbre: GENDY3 by Iannis Xenakis [pp.236-257]
	The UPIC System: Origins and Innovations [pp.258-269]
	Supplementary Sets and Regular Complementary Unending Canons (Part Four) [pp.270-305]
	Colloquy and Review
	The "Endless Round" [pp.306-314]
	[Illustration]: S. A. Jones: Topaz, 1990, Acrylic on Canvas, 44 by 46 Inches [p.315]
	Colloquy and Review
	1992 Warsaw ISCM [pp.316-322]
	[Illustration]: S. A. Jones: Clinochcore, 1990, Acrylic on Canvas, 34 by 38 Inches [p.323]
	Editorial Notes [pp.324-327]
	Correspondence [pp.329-331]
	Erratum [pp.332-333]
	Back Matter [pp.334-338]