Finnissy’s three-point plans : political agendas and musical enunciations

Abstract

That the personal is political is now less an axiom than a cliché in the humanities. Nevertheless, the interactions between these two categories of personal/political, despite this purported 1:1 relationship, are fraught, vague, and frequently contradictory. In an effort to provide some grounding, however modest, to this interaction, I will examine three explicitly – to a self-parodical degree – political works of Michael Finnissy as particular instances of a constellation of personal (local) and political (global, although frequently national) material.

The following chapter aims to place Finnissy’s three Political Agendas in dialogue with both Finnissy’s own working methods and the critical apparatus of Anglophone scholarship on political music in a (broadly, contested) ‘experimental’ tradition. In the first instance, I analyse the pieces themselves, with special attention to the cross- and self-references made and their significance in Finnissy’s artistic practice. In the second, I position this practice within particular readings of two composers – John Cage and Cornelius Cardew, both to whom Finnissy has dedicated pieces – and their concomitant understanding of political music. Within this context, Finnissy’s music presents an alternative methodology of compositional mediation in the presentation of a political message.