Beat Furrer (1954-Present)

Introduction
Beat Furrer is a swiss composer who was born in 1954 in Schaffhausen, Switzerland. He first studied piano as a child, but then soon took an interest in conducting. She studied music at Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst. And after composing many works including operas, he began to teach composition in Frankfurt and in Graz. In his music, he likes to explore the human voice and how that can interact with instrumentation.

Work Analysis
The piece i wanted to look at for Furrer's music is "Invocation VI". It is a piece that uses a soprano voice and a bass flute. This combination is not a common one you would see so the interest for the piece is already there. The piece has sections of repetition where the breath of the flautist and the notes played create not only the underlying melody but also the percussions like in a sense. The voice is being used in a very odd way where some of the music seems to be singing, but most of it is in a pitched whisper that is very interesting to listen to. Most fo the syllables that are being said are very staccato, these are then contrasted by held out fully sung notes. At times it can even seem like the vocalist is reacting to what the flautist is doing, a percussive sound will result in a sung note in distress, in some cases. This way of playing the flute gives the piece an overall unnerving feeling where a main part of the piece is just listening to how the flute player is breathing. Both the flute and the voice start out with lines that have notated pitches, but as the piece goes on the piece becomes more about just about the percussive sounds of certain syllables and breathing and less about playing the instruments.

Comparisons
This piece to me holds a lot of the qualities of John Cage's music, where there prepared piano is being used for precisely the opposite of the instrument is used for. Both the flute and the voice, which are traditionally instruments that make pitched noises are then being used to make these sounds that are odd and percussive in nature. It also seems to draw a lot of influence from the experimental vocal music of Meredith Monk, both of these composer are taking the human voice and pushing the boundaries of what it can do. Furrer is then taking this concept and applying it not only to the human voice, but also to instruments and what an instrument can do outside the traditional box of what we know it to be able to do.

Observations
I am very intrigued to Furrer's music in the same way I was interested in Monk's music. This piece made me think a little more into instrumentation. It makes sense to begin to think of instrumentation as more than just what the instrument is mainly intended to do. Playing around with that concept of timbre manipulation allows for a new flute experience that is overall a extremely compelling look into a broader spectrum of what is classified as music.