ABSTRACT
On 10 October 1977 Michael Finnissy gave a piano recital in Freiburg consisting mainly of new work by young British composers. In any case the early performances of the ensembles Suoraan and, from 1987, Ixion support a commitment to such work, while the distance between the date of collection of interviews and the 1980s explored and suggests how formative those performances have been in Finnissy’s continued claims to marginality. Finnissy consistently refers to the Freiburg recital not only as the beginning of his activity as a concert pianist but as an accidental one, too. In Britain, and especially at the British Music Information Centre, the question of what constituted British music was more fluid and keenly felt, which is to say that the music which Finnissy performed there had a more explicit relationship with questions of margins and establishment. The Freiburg concert in 1977 was not strictly speaking Finnissy’s first public performance as a pianist.
