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The story of a mythical woman's journey into mad despair is embodied in the choices-and madness-invoking struggles-pressed onto the performer by the complex, variable structures of Ferneyhough's work. The author explores one possible map through the journey.
"Cassandra: the most unfortunate of the daughters of Priam and Hecuba. Apollo loved her and promised that if she would give him her love in return, he would teach her to see the future. Cassandra consented but did not keep her word once the god had granted her the gift In return, he took away people's belief in her utterances and made her a laughingstock. Now Cassandra was regarded as mad, and because she prophesied nothing but misfortune, people soon grew fed up with her disruption of all their enjoyments and confined her in a dungeon." (Wolf 1984, 277)
Cassandra's Dream Song, composed in 1970, was Brian Ferneyhough's response to what he perceived as a deluge of flute literature emphasizing the characteristics of the flute that he believed trivial. In Cassandra's Dream Song, his focus is "on the instrument's ability to offer a high density of information on a certain number of levels simultaneously, while filtering through the highest degree of unity imaginable that of a single, monodie instrument." (Ferneyhough, 1995, 99) This piece sought a different kind of virtuosity, employed and experimented with forms of freedom and restraint, and required performer involvement in its structuring.
Ferneyhough had always been intrigued by complexity in music. During this period, he discovered ". . .that there was an entire dimension of potential expression buried in the attitude of the performer to the music text. I thus determined to see how far this. . .could be systematically exploited. . .how far the results could be incorporated into the very fabric of the composition...." (Ferneyhough, 1995, 318) Ferneyhough's compositions not only consist of technically difficult writing and complex rhythmic structures but also overlay a dense series of instructions for the execution of passages. The juggling of these levels creates energy that emerges from the struggle to keep all the balls in the air; the result is a charged atmosphere of risk.
Ferneyhough was also interested in the concept of freedom and restraint in music. Cassandra's Dream Song presents a framework...