Michael Finnissy at 80

Michael Finnissy is one of Britain’s most important living composers and teachers, with cause for celebration in this, his eightieth birthday year. As the milestone approaches, he discusses with Presto a number of important recording projects on the table - all in the company of a loyal dog who occasionally intervenes, satisfied that the questions are not too threatening!

Finnissy is in good health, with a demeanour and sharp intellect suggesting the qualities of someone a good deal younger. He is in fact about to move house, and, judging by the wall of recorded music behind him, will need reliable transport. “The last time we moved house, from Steyning to Sheringham, there were 500 crates of music books and CDs”, he says. “We’ve added to that in the twelve years we’ve been here!” He and his partner are moving to Wales. “As one gets older, one feels the need to have relatives close at hand.”

It is gratifying to report that Finnissy's birthday has a number of fitting tributes in recorded form, with collections of his works for piano (Ian Pace), organ (Forrest Eimold), and guitar (Sam Cave) separately released. He is quick to credit the artists, with whom he has worked closely. “I must say that the people who have been doing this are very close colleagues, and it was really their initiative. The plan to record complete sets seemed too good an opportunity to miss.”

Before looking at those collections in more detail, we retreat to the beginnings of a career in music, where Finnissy studied at the Royal College of Music under the tuition of Bernard Stevens and Humphrey Searle. “I learned a tremendous amount from Bernard”, he says, “not only about musical composition, but how to teach it. He was absolutely exemplary in that respect, and while he was a hard task master, he was wonderful at explaining things. If I didn't understand one way, he would try another way. I knew more about Humphrey as a composer, but if I’m going to be brutally honest, he was not in the best of health. We had one or two very interesting sessions where I was able to talk to him about his studies with Webern. His book on Liszt is fantastic, but he couldn't match Bernard's breadth of experience and generosity of spirit. If I went along with quarter tones, as a topic to discuss, Stevens was absolutely on the ball. He had been at the premiere of Alois Hába’s opera The Mother – and had contact with the most surprising corners of Europe. His model of international music making has remained key to what my own attitudes have been.”

Michael’s mention of Liszt is interesting, as the composer came to mind when listening to Ian Pace’s extensive collection of the piano music. Quite apart from some extraordinary transcriptions of the music of Verdi – of which more later – Finnissy packs a lot of very interesting and expressive music into a short space of time. “That’s very nice to hear”, he says. “I do my best! I am known to a lot of people as somebody who crowds their pages with notes, but believe me each note and rhythm is meticulously worked on until it's right. I think that can easily escape people's attention.”

Before studying with Stevens, Finnissy took a great deal from Sunday afternoon radio, listening to Talking About Music with Anthony Hopkins. “He was a wonderful teacher, and the breadth of his interests is what I also admired. One Sunday afternoon, when I was between eleven and twelve years old, he decided to talk about Ives's Concord Sonata. It was like releasing a bomb! The odd thing is, my dad was a photographer, and he knew a lot about film and film editing. I knew about that area, much more than I did about how you put a piece of music together. Yet here was Charles Ives, putting a piece of music together in the same way as you might edit a film: cinematic montage."

"I thought “Yes, this is possible, to do something which is not bound by the same conventions, even if it comes from the same spirit or psychology. The craft of composing could have been interpreted, I think, at that time in the mid-1960s, as being torn between a long-evolved and very tightly bound practice of acceptable harmonic functionality, and the newer type of ‘Darmstadt’ serialism. These two methods were not supposed to be compatible. I thought I would make it my mission to bring them together and say, “It’s not the rules, it's the usage that counts”.

Finnissy remained open to other art forms. “I was very glad to have chosen the RCM because of its proximity to the Victoria and Albert Museum, which was a wonderful place to learn about composing and how art is put together.” His pointing towards the V&A rather than the Royal Albert Hall is telling. “But I did spend quite a lot of time at the Proms. ‘Promming’ was inexpensive and full of goodies. Mahler and Bruckner were making almost their first regular appearances in this country, and also Webern, Schoenberg and Boulez. There was a lot of new music, so I could stand there and function like a sponge!”

Forrest Eimold’s collection of Finnissy’s organ music for Métier contains the four Organ Symphonies. These are very different in practice to the term employed by the likes of Vierne or Widor. “My partner is an organist”, Michael says, “and he plays some of that French repertoire. I was engaged by the freedom and shaping of the French organ symphony. There were discussions in ‘Tempo’ magazine, when the Maxwell Davies symphonies had started to appear, about the value of writing symphonies at the end of the twentieth century, and it seemed to me that the French organist brigade had got there a lot earlier, and it wasn't such a silly or effortful thing to do. Nobody was asking me – and still isn’t – to write symphonies for orchestra, so it was a choice between the piano, following Alkan, or the organ. I chose the organ because it had that tradition.”

Within the collection of organ works is the evocative ‘Blackburn’, a piece alluding to the machinery of the English Industrial Revolution. “The library in Blackburn”, says Finnissy, “houses a Spinning Jenny, and the story behind it goes that this man's daughter was too slow at her spinning, so he decided to invent a machine that could work faster in order to increase productivity. and financial profit. It seems to me to exemplify the tensions within human beings, between greed, imagination and technological progress, all in one machine. I liked Blackburn Cathedral very much, and John Robinson at the cathedral was incredibly hospitable and very generous. It was an interesting place to be, and the organ is something else!”

Finnissy has a very different approach to his contemporaries in the English Country Tunes for piano, bringing out the elemental, outdoors aspects of folksong. His rapport with nature is very different to that of Vaughan Williams or Holst but is borne of a similar admiration. “If I'm asked to explain my attitude to complexity, I say “Just look at a country hedgerow!” It is a complex mass of habitation and productivity, never static. Again it is a compositional model, and my main spur here was that I discovered, through Bernard, Percy Grainger's arrangements of folk song, that had been denigrated by Cecil Sharp. Grainger pioneered wax cylinder recording of folk singers, because you could analyse every detail of what they were singing, and his transcriptions are amazingly detailed and thoughtful."

"Sadly, at that time ethnomusicology was not on the agenda at the Royal College of Music, but it was something I felt obliged to learn and join with. How do you draw what you hear? Do you compromise or censor or try to ‘improve according to notions of good taste? More than once I've been moved to declare myself as a folk musician, because once you detach the human being and the life of a human being from their craft and skill, you’ve committed some kind of weird crime. Composers are not megastars and heroes – they’re just people. Good people, bad people, or somewhere in between. Folk music is very important to me: as a reminder of what I am actually trying to do."

Finnissy’s approach brings to mind the approach of how Ives or Bartók might approach the communication of those melodies. “Bartók and Grainger were in communication with each other about methodology and how to go about transcribing”, he says, “and because of the disaster with Cecil Sharp, Bartók has that continuity, whereas with Grainger’s move to America there was less continuity within his collecting. Goodness only knows what would have happened if he had been allowed or encouraged to publish his collection. I used my opportunity when I was involved with the International Society for Contemporary Music, and travelling every month to somewhere different in the world, to build up a large collection of writings about and collections of notations of folk music. All of that had a big impact. Something happens with folk music that doesn't happen with art music.”

Ian Pace’s collection of Finnissy’s piano works is dominated by the collection of Verdi transcriptions, published in four books and heard across the albums. “When I first heard Verdi, I could not believe the energy and the passion in it”, he says. “One could use words like ‘rawness’ or ‘immediacy’, and I found that engagement with the situation that the music is partner to. I do find it in Wagner now, but I didn’t as a teenager. Verdi has that immediacy and authenticity of spirit which I strive for. It was like meeting a man who has a good handshake. At that stage it was very difficult to get to grips with Verdi's oeuvre, because most of it was out of print, so I was chasing around good second-hand bookshops, the British Library, and a wonderful bookshop in Paris very near the Boulevard St. Michel. I was able to build up quite a lot of my collection from there. I’m still amazed by Verdi!”

With the milestone of turning eighty, and a possible time for reflection on his musical achievements thus far, would Michael be able to direct new listeners towards one or two particular pieces in his output – or should prospective listeners dive in at the deep end? “It is very personal”, he responds, “because some people don't like diving in at the deep end. I have been very lucky and I have quite a lot of pieces recorded and available on CD, with Métier/Divine Art/First Inversion  and NMC and other labels. There’s stuff on YouTube. I’d jump first and ask questions later. Dip your toe in the water!"

A recent guitar piece, Outcast, made a strong impact on its premiere in 2022. “If there is a story behind the piece, or events which make a narrative with the music, it’s perhaps a more friendly place to start. I have written a lot of songs, and there is a recording of a few of them, alongside a piece I called ‘Wisdom', which was written during the pandemic as a request to write about loneliness and isolation. The piece finishes with part of the final chapter from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, where Frankenstein’s Monster, who is unloved, lonely and dangerous, is all alone and about to go out on the ice of the Arctic. It's a very powerful piece of writing about rejection, fear, dependency, and human relations… why we are the way we are. The shorter songs are responses to different texts about Salomé, three settings of a wonderful poem by Goethe, stuff I wrote when I was eighteen and my school friends all went to Oxford. There are some fun things on that CD, Alternative Readings.”

Now he is eighty rather than eighteen, Finnissy is pleased to confirm he continues to write fluently. “I'm working on a piece for Exaudi, to perform on their workshop days at the Guildhall School in London in May. It's one of a quartet of pieces, with two partial psalm settings and collects. I find the texts challenging in a way that appeals to me. You have to think a bit about what they say! I find myself more responsive to that kind of text.”

Clearly well-read, Finnissy has explored a great deal of text in his composing. “I was a very bookish child. Being born into a household just after the war, where there were a lot of adults talking to each other about things that children wouldn't understand, I was given books to read. I grew up loving books and still do. I feel it's part of my declaration of who I am and where I am. You either lead a rich life, or you lead something else, and literature enriches my life in the same way as good filmmaking or going to an art gallery. I think there are so many people that don't bother. The technology might be wonderful, but if you're only going to use it in a trivial and haphazard kind of way, what's the point?”

Does location play a part in his composition? “I actually leave locations to take care of themselves. I had spent childhood holidays here in Norfolk, as my dad was still doing radio and radar research. The notion that some people have, that if you live by the sea you're going to write music about the sea, is a bit naff. Yes, I did check out the sound of the waves the other day as it happens, but not because I was aiming to write a sequel to La Mer! I was interested in the sound for its own sake. Composing is not really like painting, I think it deals with internal realities: emotion, feelings, sensations, fantasy, irrationality…"

This approach shows Finnissy as complementary to many other composers, where the location - real or imagined - is in the title and places the listener in the location before pressing play. “I believe”, he continues, “that my music has its storms, its sunny moments, even its moments of drought. I just try to be authentic, truthful and accurate about how and what I perceive.”

Switching to the present, is there music he has been particularly drawn to from living composers? “I have a lot of composer friends, and it would be rather invidious of me to single anybody out. I don’t play much now, but I have always tried to support a broad spectrum of composers and particularly encourage young composers whose work does not have the performances that it deserves. Yet it’s not just young composers, but older ones too, who remain challenging, and whose music makes the kinds of sounds that I like. It’s quite factionist, the British musical scene – you’re either a serialist, or a minimalist, an experimentalist. People seem to hang on to labels."

"I really struggled hard – and succeeded, I think – to bring all those factions together in one programme. It’s very difficult if you have managers or agents who want to promote a particular idea. It was easy to do one of those concerts in which I could mix my own work, and sometimes not even my own work, with composers like Laurence Crane, Chris Newman, Dave Smith, Judith Weir, Xenakis, Ives, Satie, Kurt Weill, Elisabeth Lutyens, Mossolov, Andrew Toovey, and many other composers whose work I gave performances of, and continued to until recently. You have to allow art to live, not shut it away because it’s not Beethoven! I love Beethoven, incidentally, but there are already a lot of people playing him, and not so many the other composers that I just mentioned.”