Brian Ferneyhough was born in Coventry on 16 January 1943. Robin Holloway was born in Leamington Spa on 19 October of the same year. These facts are the pretext for an exercise in comparing and contrasting which underlines the exercise's arbitrariness, while also inviting a response to the pleasures of allusion which it facilitates. Is it a striking coincidence that the English Midlands should have given birth to two such different composers within the same calendar year, or is it a conjunction with no wider cultural significance? An analysis which attempted in-depth intrusion into the early environments of each might begin to indicate if such questions should be taken seriously. My analysis here has a very different orientation: certain compositions by Ferneyhough and Holloway are placed in perspectives which glancingly allude to Bildung – the emergence and evolution of creative character and quality.

A career like Holloway’s, centred entirely on Cambridge (though taking in Oxford at the postgraduate stage), is certainly different from one that soon exchanged London for Amsterdam, Freiburg, San Diego and Stanford (California). Rooted conservatism appears to contrast with rootless radicalism – except that consciousness of traditions and models, established theories and practices, proves as essential to one as to the other. In both cases, awareness of and possible dependency on an academic environment indicates that talking and writing about music need not be shunned by composers, and it is one of the many ironies thrown up by this enquiry that it was the ‘hard-line avant-garde’ Ferneyhough who had his Collected Writings published first. On the other hand, Holloway was earlier with book publication as such, with Debussy and Wagner, arising from his doctoral dissertation. A study of the pair in terms of their writings alone could be illuminating, fuelling many tendentious as well as eminently reasonable assertions about the possible relevance of such words to the music. But I forgo more than a hint of such a study here.

Taking to the Stage

It is clear that few composers, even from the ‘hard-line avant-garde’, can resist the lure of the stage. .