Biography
Michael Finnissy can be counted among the leading, and most prolific, composers of his generation. He is also a first-rate pianist, playing his own works and commissioning and performing the works of his contemporaries (particularly fellow British composers), as well as his own transcriptions of Gershwin and folk music. He displayed prodigious talent by his teens. He attended the Royal College of Music, where he studied composition with Bernard Stephens and Humphrey Searle, later working with Roman Vlad in Italy. He studied piano with Edwin Benbow and Ian Lake. In 1968 he began teaching at the London School of Contemporary Dance, and in 1971 at the Chelsea College of Art. He has also taught at the Dartington International Summer School, the Royal Academy of Music, and was appointed Chair of Composition at the University of Southampton. In the 1990s he was twice elected president of the International Society of Contemporary Music.
Influences on Finnissy's own music include the range of modernists one generation older, such as Boulez and Stockhausen, as well as Renaissance composers such as Byrd and Obrecht, and especially folk music of all kinds, particularly English. Also, with respect to Finnissy's approach to the piano and the central (philosophical, at least) role his own instrument has played in the formation of his compositional style, the great Romantic masters -- Alkan, Liszt, Busoni, and the like -- hold a place in Finnissy's canon. Gershwin figures prominently, as well. In Finnissy's concern with the fault lines between the playable and the notated in music, Gershwin seems to exemplify to Finnissy a composer for whom the written product was a somewhat direct representation of the intended result of a piece. The ultra-complex layering of Finnissy's own piano music, such as English Country Tunes (1977), approaches a printed extension of the performable, rather than bowing to the constraints and inaccuracies of traditional notational practice. Another concern, placing him among those (mostly British) composers such as James Dillon and Brian Ferneyhough writing music dubbed "The New Complexity," is the incorporation of numerous contrapuntal layers, sometimes weaving into an already dense texture quotation or allusion from historical sources such as medieval music, Romantic opera, or Balkan folk music. Chance processes are another element of many of his pieces, for example, the arbitrary superimposition of a string quartet's four parts in Nobody's Jig. The influence of theater is also present in the "stage directions" of some abstract works.
Finnissy's earliest acknowledged work is ostensibly Le Dormeur du Val (1963 - 1968) for the Boulez-like ensemble of mezzo-soprano, celesta, harpsichord, piano, and string quartet, on texts of Rimbaud. Earlier pieces -- the piano Vieux Nöel from 1958 - 1959, for example -- have seen the light of day on recordings. A group of Songs, 1-18, was begun in about 1963 and completed (or ceased) in 1978. Large-scale pieces for mixed forces include the 25-minute Jeanne d'Arc for two voices, solo cello, and 11 instruments (1967 - 1971); the 20-minute World for six voices and 19 instruments (1968 - 1974); the theatrical Mysteries 1-8 based on ancient mystery plays (1972 - 1979); seven Piano Concertos for various forces; a half-hour String Trio (1986), and the operatic Undivine Comedy (1988), Thérèse Raquin (after Zola, 1993), and Shameful Vice (1994), to name only a few of the works in Finnissy's already vast catalog. He has also transcribed or written glosses (mostly for piano solo) on sources as diverse as Obrecht, Handel, Billings, Rossini, Verdi, Gershwin, Australian sea-shanties, and Scottish, English, Balkan, and other folk music. ~ Robert Kirzinger, All Music Guide