Brian Ferneyhough (1943, England). Ferneyhough studied composition with Lennox Berkeley at the Royal Academy of Music in London and then in Am-sterdam with the composer Ton de Leeuw and Basel with Klaus Huber. In addi-tion to composing, Ferneyhough was also active in teaching. He taught com-position at the Musikhochschule in Freiburg im Breisgau, the Royal Conserva-toire at The Hague, and the University of California, summer courses in new music at Darmstadt, and lecture series at Abbaye Royaumont and IRCAM, as well as at a number of art institutions in Europe and the US. He is a laureate of the Gaudeamus competition award and a special prize of the Italian chapter of ISCM.

Mnemosyne for bass flute and tape (1986)
Mnemosyne forms the seventh and final stage in Ferneyhough’s Carceri d’invenzione cycle for chamber ensemble. In Greek mythology, Mnemosyne was the goddess of memories and mother of the muses. In the composer’s words, “the different chordal patterns varied in the preceding six pieces are again spread out here… as an omnipresent background which serves to bring into play or extend ‘harmonic spaces’, and also to make available a discreet but constantly present series of focal notes around which the soloist weaves a limited number of intervallic chains, themselves derived from eight initial chords and having strong internal relationships…”.