Brian Cherney was born in 1942 in Peterborough, Ontario, in Canada. During the early 1960s, Brian Cherney studied composition with Samuel Dolin at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto and later with John Weinzweig at the University of Toronto, receiving graduate degrees in both composition (M.Mus.’67) and musicology (Ph.D.’74). During the late 1960s, he attended the Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik in Darmstadt, where he attended lectures given by Ligeti, Stockhausen and Kagel, among others, and lived for a year in Munich while doing research for his doctoral dissertation. Although Cherney has concentrated on composition since 1974, he has also written a major study of the music of Canadian composer Harry Somers (University of Toronto Press, 1975).
Influenced during the 1960s by Bartók and Weinzweig (among others), Cherney was later influenced by such composers as Ligeti, Crumb, Lutoslawski, Messiaen and Carter. In recent years he has developed a personal style based on a coherent harmonic language and careful attention to temporal proportions, in which certain kinds of music often recur either literally or in altered version from one piece to another.
Since 1972, Cherney has been on the staff of the Faculty of Music at McGill University in Montreal, where he teaches composition, twentieth-century analysis, and twentieth-century history and is currently Chair of the composition Area Committee. He and his wife live in Montreal and have two grown children. – Extract Cherney’s publisher, Dobberman-Yppan
On March 9, Seattle Modern Orchestra conducted by Robert Aitken will create the US Premiere of Cherney’s Die klingende Zeit. In the score, Cherney share this note about the piece:
In my piece, Die klingende Zeit, the twenty-four-hour day has been divided into four quarters, each representing a six-hour period reduced in real time (i.e. chronological time) to six-and-a-half minutes. The first section, representing one quarter, begins at 12:00 noon (imagined time) and is followed by a second section representing 18:00 hours to midnight, and a third section representing midnight to 06:00 hours (dawn). The fourth quarter – 06:00 hours to 12:00 noon – does not exist in the piece, only in the imagination. Thus the total length of the piece is nineteen-and-a-half minutes (3 x 6 1/2). At the appropriate places during these three sections (representing three of the four quarters of the twenty-four-hour cycle), the “canonical hours” are “chimed”, using various instrumental resources (usually involving percussion instruments) and at certain places, the current “time” in the twenty-four-hour cycle (proportioned in scale to the four cycles of the chronological time of the piece) is rung in the manner of a “minute repeater” watch (using percussion instruments and/or piano). As the music unfolds, allusions are made to existing music having to do in some way with time: e.g. Ravel’s piano piece La Vallée des cloches, the movement entitled “Nacht” from Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire and the song “Um Mitternacht” from Mahler’s Fünf Lieder nach Rückert. Thus, on one level, the piece is about time made “audible” but on another level it is about the way we experience music the passage of chronological time. The “chiming” of “time(s)” during the piece is thus intended to be a symbol of a deeper preoccupation with the experiential time of music. (For instance, at a deeper structural level, each six-and-a-half-minute section is based on a cycle o seven durations which I call “breathing rhythms”, ranging from six seconds [chronological time] to thirty seconds and the proportions of these seven durations govern the proportions of the seven structural units of the piece [which are superimposed on the three six-and-a-half minute units mentioned above]).
For further exploration in Cherney’s fascination for clocks and quotations, take a listen to this extract of the Canadian Composers Portraits.
Seattle Modern Orchestra is fiscally sponsored by Shunpike.