British composers question
Jeff Gower
Can any of you comment on what the following British composers' music is
like? I saw an ad for them by the EMI British Composer Series - I have
heard of them by name, but am not aware of their styles, etc.. Thanks.
Dominic Muldowney
Geoffrey Burgon
Robert Saxton
Paul Patterson
John Robicheau
Hi Jeff,
Sorry no info on these guys... (I saw this ad as well) but...
I know you are a big Delius buff, so why don't you pose this question &
join the
fledgeling British Music Mailing List?
this is a URL with info
http://www.netaxs.com/~jgreshes/lists/bmusic-l.html
or try the RVW site for subscribing info....see you there!
this month's "work of the month " is Moeran's Symphony in G minor
--
John T. Robicheau email: <JTR...@Pitt.edu>
University of Pittsburgh School of Pharmacy
"Music is the cry of the soul." Frederick Delius
Rob Kerr
> Jeff Gower wrote:
> >
> > Can any of you comment on what the following British composers' music is
> > like? I saw an ad for them by the EMI British Composer Series - I have
> > heard of them by name, but am not aware of their styles, etc.. Thanks.
> >
> > Dominic Muldowney
> > Geoffrey Burgon
> > Robert Saxton
> > Paul Patterson
>
BBC Composer of the Week this week has been Paul Patterson, and I have
had a chance to listen to a lot of his music. Love the violin concerto
- more accessible than someone like Peter Maxwell-Davies, for example.
He combines modern idiom with _something_ which makes the result more
pleasant on the ear (IMO), yet retains its quintessentially modern
outlook.
I was also impressed by his sonatas. The one for oboe is extremely
beautiful (oboe and piano - it's not called a sonata, but the format is
right). His ambition, as stated in the Musical Encounters programme,
was to write a sonata for each of the instruments of the orchestra.
So far he's only done two (oboe and violin I think). Can't wait for
the clarinet!!
HTH
--
Rob Kerr
(Please remove "no_spam." from my e-mail address if replying.)
"It's got three keyboards and a hundred extra knobs, including
twelve with '?' on them."
-- The Unseen University Organ, as designed by B. S. Johnson
(Terry Pratchett, Men At Arms)
Eric Schissel
Saxton is described in a review in an oldish Fanfare as, I think, modern
but letting the light in (review of a CD of his "In the Beginning" and
Violin Concerto on, I believe, Collins Classics; I'll look for the review
sometime. His opera Caritas is also on Collins.(His chamber symphony
is/was on EMI; a volume of Starobin's New Music with Guitar series has
some of his music; and his chacony is on one of Fleischer's Sony
CDs of music for the left hand. Two works of his are on a Cala CD called
"Red Leaves." and are for chamber orchestra and for string orchestra.The
Chacony is also on a Metier CD with Tippett's 2nd piano sonata. His piano
sonata is also on Metier, coupled with Tippett's 4th sonata. Other works
of his have been recorded on other labels.) -Eric Schissel
Tim Brooke
For info on Muldowney, the attached article may be of interest. For a
list of works published by Faber Music Ltd check out our website:
Muldowney has a whole page with a biography, discography and list of
works with instruementation, commission and first performance
details. Other works are published by Universal Edition and Novello &
Co.
Best wishes,
Tim Brooke
"Dominic Muldowney's search for self-expression has taken him into
distinctly different territory from that explored by most of his
contemporaries; into a range of musics, in fact, in which most of the
territorial imperatives so beloved of art in the 20th century break
down irretrievably, yet he began his career fixed securely in the
European modernist tradition: born in 1952, he studied at Southampton
University with Jonathan Harvey and at York with Bernard Rands and
David Blake, and his earliest works show how he had assimilated all
the lessons of the post-war avant garde. What went wrong, from the
viewpoint of strait-laced orthodoxy, was his appointment to the
National Theatre in 1975. He had studied privately with Harrison
Birtwistle, and when Birtwistle was appointed the NT's first Musical
Director he invited Muldowney to be his assistant. He's been there
ever since, succeeding Birtwistle as Director in 1981.
The RNT experience has broadened and shaped Muldowney's creative
palette in so many more ways than the cloistered existence of a
"serious" composer could ever have done. It has embued him first of
all with an overriding sense of the practicalities of music-making,
and of the obligation on a composer to write music that fulfils the
functions required of it, whether that is to be dramatically
effective, or instantly accessible. And in political and intellectual
terms working at the RNT has intensified his love for Brecht: his
settings of Brecht's poetry, certainly the most substantial and
important since Eisler and Dessau, have provided a bridge between his
work in the theatre and that for the concert hall.
It was inevitable also that the severely practical side of
Muldowney's work would overflow into his music for the concert hall,
less predictable but no less welcome that the broadening of style
would go with it, so that his most celebrated works of the early
1980s, the Concertos for piano and saxophone, written in 1983 and
1984, could disclaim all labels like "neo-romantic", "post-modernist"
or "traditionalist" with impunity.
Even the apparently cerebral rhythmic explorations of Muldowney's
recent concert pieces began as practical explorations of the ways in
which complex rhythms could be most easily managed by
instrumentalists. They first surfaced in the song-cycle Lonely
Hearts, and were refined and elaborated in the Violin Concerto and
the Three Pieces for Orchestra. Those works show how he has been able
to reconcile his fondness for vernacular gestures with a structural
rigour that has been part of the very essence of modernism: the
polyrhythms he creates are by no means arcane or irrational. Neither
has there been anything exclusive or excluding about his experiments:
while the Trumpet Concerto of 1993 developed his methods with a new
virtuosity and naturalness, the Oboe Concerto, written just before
it, could forsake all such technical elaboration in favour of a
direct, intrinsically lyrical impulse.
Where his music goes in the longer term is a teasing question. The
way in which a text-setting like Out of the East can be transformed
into something far richer and stranger suggests that sooner or later
Muldowney will have to confront music theatre head on, and in doing
so call into question many of our cherished notions of what belongs
in the opera house and what belongs to the "straight" theatre. That
may be the point at which all the strands in his development will
come together: "With all the madness that there is," he's said, "one
must harness everything one can summon up to present a case for
sense."
Andrew Clements, Winter 1994
Jeff Gower
Just a note to thank everyone for your great replies to my inquiry! I
knew I could depend on you folks for info. thanks again.
Jeff
Jackie Reynolds
In article <Pine.OSF.3.91.97062...@mhc.mtholyoke.edu>,
Jeff Gower <jgo...@mtholyoke.edu> writes
>Can any of you comment on what the following British composers' music is
>like?
Burgon (b 1941) first came to prominence in GB in the early 1980s with
his TV scores for the John Le Carre spy thriller Tinker Tailor Soldier
Spy and the Evelyn Waugh novel Brideshead Revisited, both of which you
might have seen in the US. These show he can write melodies which linger
in the mind. His music has been described as haunting, eclectic and
having a sense of the theatrical, with jazz and Balinese music cited as
influences. His Requiem of 1976, which I have on record, is accessible,
melodic but with a contemporary edge.
Simon
--
Simon Reynolds
jac...@subs-desk.demon.co.uk