Critical Perspectives on Michael Finnissy: Bright Futures, Dark Pasts

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Section A: Finnissy's Aesthetics and Styles
1. Michael Finnissy: Modernism with an English Accent Christopher Fox
2. Post-Experimental Survivor: Finnissy the Experimentalist Philip Thomas
3. Negotiating Borrowing, Genre and Mediation in the Piano Music of Finnissy: Strategies and Aesthetics Ian Pace
4. Ontological implications in the work of Finnissy Nigel McBride Section B: Finnissy's Identities
5. Marginality and Finnissian Performance in the 1980s Roddy Hawkins
6. 'My "personal themes"?!' Finnissy's Seventeen Homosexual Poets and the Material World Gregory Woods
7. Finnissy's Voices James Weeks
8. 'Listening to the instrument(s)': a performer's response to Finnissy's music for String Quartet and the Chi Mei Ricercari for cello and piano Neil Heyde Section C: Compositional Considerations
9. Notational and Non-notational paradigms in Finnissy's music Nigel McBride
10. Finnissy and Pantonality: Surface and Inner Necessity Arnold Whittall
11. The Medium is now the Material: The 'Folklore' of Chris Newman and Michael Finnissy Lauren Redhead
12. Finnissy's Hand James Weeks Section D: Contexts and Case Studies
13. Questioning the foreign and familiar: Interpreting Finnissy's use of traditional and non-Western musical sources Maarten Beirens
14. Finnissy's Three-Point Plans: Political Agendas and musical enunciations Max Erwin
15. Finnissy's alongside - Richard Barrett
16. From Jean-Luc Godard to Dennis Potter: Finnissy's Cinematic and Televisual Inspirations Ian Pace

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The composer and pianist Michael Finnissy (b. 1946) is an unmistakeable presence in the British and international new music scene, both for his immeasurable generosity as prolific composer for many different types of musicians, major advocate for the works of others, and performer and conductor who has also been a driving force behind ensembles; he was also President of the International Society for Contemporary Music from 1990 to 1996. His vast and enormously varied output confounds those who seek easy categorisations: once associated strongly with the ‘new complexity’, Finnissy is equally known as composer regularly engaged with many different folk musics, for working with amateur and community musicians, for a long-term engagement with sacred music, or as an advocate of Anglo-American ‘experimental’ music. Twenty years ago, a large-scale volume entitled Uncommon Ground: The Music of Michael Finnissy gave the first major overview of the output of any ‘complex’ composer. This new volume brings a greater plurality of perspectives and critical sensibility to bear upon an output which is almost twice as large as it was when the earlier book was published. A range of leading contributors – musicologists, composers, performers and others – each grapple with particular questions relating to Finnissy’s music, often in ways which raise questions relating more widely to new music, and provide theoretical foundations for further of study both of Finnissy and other composers.

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