Bone Alphabet – Brian Ferneyhough

Bone Alphabet by Brian Ferneyhough Performed by Morris Palter at the University of Kentucky Singletary Center for the Arts April 11, 2007 “Bone Alphabet” (1992) is generally considered one of the most difficult works in the solo percussion repertoire. “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. The precise instruments to be utilized are left unspecified, other than by requiring each of the seven sound sources selected to be capable of supporting a 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 cowbell). The gestures that we hear, then, might be considered the “letters” of Ferneyhough’s alphabet. Sometimes they coalesce into words or even poetic phrases. More often, they claim our attention in and of themselves for their distinctive articulation of musical time and space. Like much of Ferneyhough’s output, “Bone Alphabet” is a study in the unequal or “irrational” division of the rhythmic pulse. As important as these temporal relationships are to Ferneyhough’s aesthetic, the most potent ratio in “Bone Alphabet” is surely the 1:7 …
Video Rating: 4 / 5