ABSTRACT
This chapter illuminates these familiar attributes of Finnissy’s work by exploring the role played by the hand in his practice of making. It suggests that the special features, or peculiarities, of Finnissy-as-maker might be fruitfully understood with reference to a phenomenological discourse of embodiment, in which the hand, and its inherent physicality and mobility, plays as fundamental a role in the act of making as more traditional notions of eyes, ears and imagination. The route-finding hand might also be discerned in Finnissy’s non-jazz-based piano music. In Barrie Gavin’s documentary film Dust in the Road Finnissy is seen discussing his pre-compositional materials: a reservoir of non-systematic pitch and rhythm permutations of a found melody. For Finnissy’s music arises, as we have seen, from multiple modes of ‘touching’ – visual, aural, haptic – all of which could be said to be in play at any one point and any of which might momentarily seem to take the lead.
