NOT TOO VIOLENT: THE FALL OF NOTATION IN MICHAEL FINNISSY’S AUTUMNALL FOR SOLO PIANO GEORGIOS THEOCHAROUS N THE LATTER PART of the twentieth century, compositional practice saw a renunciation of structure as an end. While American composers turned to minimalism, a number of Darmstadt composers who emerged in the 80s, including Roger Redgate, Chris Dench, James Dillon, Richard Barrett and Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf, turned to what might be called “non-identity music.”1 As opposed to the aesthetically limited direction of post-modernism, they looked for ways of expression that would do away with short-lived ironies. They looked to negate the simple and the memorable. They turned to the defiantly complex and serious inner workings of ideas that never materialize themselves but rather manifest themselves as attempts to express the ineffable, knowing that the more they fail in this endeavor, the more they succeed in their musical aims. I Not Too Violent 5 These composers made new demands on the performers, who found themselves having to read the unreadable and render the unrenderable. Notation was changed to include the most obscure rhythmic time divisions. Microtones abounded. Extended techniques became concrete material, not rebellious acts of innovation. Serial procedures were abandoned. It is understandable then that this school of composition came to be called (albeit by way of self proclamation) the Second Modernity.2 In the first part of this paper, I will attempt to present the problematic nature of this notation in the solo piano piece Autumnall (1969–72) by Michael Finnissy as seen from the point of view of the performer, while in the second part, I will attempt to substantiate the composer’s reasoning in choosing this enigmatic kind of notation by looking at the music as content. I will use the first part as a presentation of problems that I have had in trying to learn this piece as performer and possible solutions that I initially thought might be viable answers. In the second part, I will present my philosophical reading of the piece. PART 1 That the title of the piece Autumnall is spelled with a double “L” poses an enigma before we have even looked at the musical notation . A series of possible interpretations begins to uncoil. The first is that it may be a typographical error. However, it is not too difficult to dismiss this conjecture if we look at how meticulously prepared this manuscript is. A second possibility is that the “all” at the end is literally used as the word “all,” to announce to people that autumn has come. This we can dismiss out-of-hand. Yet another interpretation might be that the two “L”s should be read as the number “11,” which seems to be an attractive solution, since the manneristic nature of the notation makes excessive use of the rational tuplet. Moving on though, why is a tempo marking absent at the very beginning of the piece? Could this be an enigma to be solved with the little information that we get from the supposed reference to the number “11” in the title? If so, how? Looking further down on the first page, we notice that seconds are used to denote rhythmic value. It would therefore, perhaps, not be too unreasonable to hypothesize that the double “L” in the title may mean eleven seconds. But what are we to do with this number? 6 Perspectives of New Music We notice that the piece opens with nineteen quarter-note rests. (See Example 1.) We begin to think that if a ratio tuplet is another way of expressing a new tempo, then the rests could be nothing more than part of the conundrum that the composer has set up for us to establish the opening tempo. So in answering the question of what we are to do with the number eleven, we consider it to be the number of seconds it will take for these nineteen quarter-rests to be performed. In other words, we now have a tuplet of nineteen quarter-notes in the time of eleven quarter-notes under the tempo marking of q = 60 (i.e., 1.7 quarter-rests per second). In doing so, we...