Ine Vanoeveren, Tomorrow’s music in practice today : a practical guide towards deciphering contemporary music [Book review]

Abstract

Ine Vanoeveren is probably best known as an interpreter of Brian Ferneyhough and, naturally enough, her associated repertoire is New Music that can broadly fit under the letterhead (highly contested, of course) of New Complexity/Second Modernity. However, her approach to this repertoire – a repertoire occasionally derided as obscurantist and masochistic – is disarmingly transparent, and for the past couple of years she has repeatedly taken the initiative to discuss precisely how and why – in vividly direct terms – she performs this sort of music. Tomorrow’s Music in Practice Today is the most overtly pedagogical output of this initiative. In her Introduction, Vanoeveren frames her new book on the performance of New Music as a sort of rudimentary instruction manual, a resource she wishes had been available for her own education as a flutist, noting that all the musicological scrutiny given to the ‘intensive parametric polyphony’ of Ferneyhough’s works ‘didn’t help me at all in deciphering that intensive parametric polyphony.’ [excerpt]