Kurze Schatten II: compositional procedures and aesthetic principles

The article proposes an analysis of the guitar piece Kurze Schatten II by Brian Ferneyhough. The analysis aims to understand the compositional procedures and aesthetic principles of the composer, revealing an approximation with concepts from the thought of Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari and T. Adorno. By understanding the elements that manage the internal logic of the work, it is evident that the composer's serialist heritage, developed in the light of the Adornian concept of informal music, is present in the structural components of Kurze Schatten II and in the processuality of the creative gesture. The rupture with the traditional concept of unity perceived in the analysis originates a music of transformations, passages, approximations and contrasts, realized in a rhizomatic space operated by differences and impermanences. The technical analysis of the work brings to the forefront issues that are better understood in the light of these considerations of aesthetic order.