Hear and Now - 26th November 2011 - British Composer Awards, Skempton's Lento

[Serial_Apologist]

Barber's Adagio is another piece I do not particularly like; I acknowledge it in the same way I would acknowledge an early work by any composer who is destined for greater things: Debussy's "Clair de lune" for example. Samuel Barber was working his way through various influences, including that of Sibelius, at the time he wrote the Adagio in 1936 (as part of a string quartet originally). The piece was much used as an emblem of America's grief in the wake of 9/11; a Canadian friend of mine, who does not appreciate Barber's later music at all, told me that she found it the most moving piece of music ever written.

The difference I see between that work and "Lento" is one of two composers moving in opposite directions: Barber in the direction of a modernism that, as in the case of Elliott Carter though obviously less radically so, was more authentically reflective of its time than the late romantic aesthetic he had shared with one or two other American composers, eg Paul Creston, Howard Hanson.

I take on the chin Bryn's admonishment of my "ire" with regards to the Skempton piece; some few weeks ago we shared wistful reminiscences on the Scratch Orchestra and "alternative" London in the late 60s on this board; I'm sure we share similar views on many aspects of politics today, but in matters where I suspect aesthetics loyalties outlive their political sources in the case of the "Cardew School", and what became of it, it's like we're speaking in different languages. All this will puzzle those without the backgrounds; but what I want to say boils down to: whenever I hear what apparently purports to be a serious contemporary piece of music in an idiom more appropriate to 1750 than 1990, what is the point of adopting wholesale (sic) the musical language of pop music (with or without beats), when pop music is just everywhere and signifies the reduction of everything to what some people making huge profits deem the masses capable of absorbing? It's the mirror image thing of what happened to composers in the Soviet Union in the 1930s and 1940s and in Nazi Germany - the extinguishment that starts in the creative imagination and ends in artistic exile.

[heliocentric]

I regret that you identify misogyny in my outlook. Alas, I'm not able to see it.

You don't think the phrase "patronising cow" is misogynistic? You sound like you're in a 1960s sitcom.

Back on topic, I don't really see how Lento could be construed as a "scam". No more so than are the Tallis Fantasia or the music of Satie anyway. I can't imagine that very many composers, and Howard Skempton possibly least of all, really conceive of their music in terms of hoodwinking their public. Surely it's better to begin by assuming the opposite, unless one's opinion of one's fellow human beings really is so low as to prevent that.

[Serial_Apologist]

Back on topic, I don't really see how Lento could be construed as a "scam". No more so than are the Tallis Fantasia or the music of Satie anyway. I can't imagine that very many composers, and Howard Skempton possibly least of all, really conceive of their music in terms of hoodwinking their public. Surely it's better to begin by assuming the opposite, unless one's opinion of one's fellow human beings really is so low as to prevent that.

I would deny those parallels, heliocentric.

For one thing, nobody could have composed Vaughan Williams's Tallis Fantasia in, let's say, 1590. A whole new way of treating modal harmony had to have taken place in the meantime in the hands of composers ranging from Borodin and Mussorgsky to Debussy, Ravel and, yes, Satie - the imprint of whose time and not just personality I would argue as being instantly recogniseable in any one piece.

As to instances of "hoodwinking" we have the example from the early 1960s of two serious music critics (not composers, true, but in the case of one a renowned author and broadcaster on contemporary composition) messing about in a BBC studio with percussion and electronics, and the resulting piece being passed off as by one Piotr Zotik, iirc, and judged as a serious piece of experimental music by the reviewers.

Unless someone can come back and convince me to the contrary that Skempton did not compose "Lento" with the intention of exposing the pretentions of critics in their eagerness to accept anything new at face value, then my opinion about the piece will remain unchanged.

[hackneyvi]

You don't think the phrase "patronising cow" is misogynistic? You sound like you're in a 1960s sitcom.

I don't think I've ever seen a 60s sitcom to know what it sounds like to you. I think it may be a cultural reference which resonates differently to you than it does me.

If it worries you less, how about:

patronising Galloway kite

?

That's a Scottish bird, by the way, which it's an offence to disturb or harass and is nicely non-gender specific.

[jayne lee wilson]

It was Piotr Zak, S-A, a scam conceived by Susan Bradshaw and the great Hans Keller...

But Lento doesn't actually sound like pop music does it? When I first got to know it I was moved and impressed by it, I took it as emotionally authentic, a sharply-defined evocation of a single mood of poignancy and regret... on later reflection I think I heard it as "minimalism in a late-romantic harmonic and emotional context".

S-A, do you dismiss some of John Adams' work for similar reasons? Tromba Lontana say, or the lengthier Common Tones in Simple Time? What these pieces do is create a single or narrow range of mood and atmosphere by varied or not-so-varied rhythmic/melodic repetition... so despite its greater richness of invention I don't think it's too far-fetched to see the Tallis Fantasia as part of the same tradition as Lento.

There are classical slow movements - Sibelius' 3rd and 5th symphonies, even Mozart's 40th - which often sound to me like minimalism avant-la-lettre; intensely repetitive, emotionally very concentrated.
If you object S-A, that Howard Skempton is writing this music too late, too retrospectively, surely music can't always develop via a series of freshly-conceived radical masterpieces, and the greatest music (at least, until WW2) always had a great deal of the past in it... if Lento seems too purely retrospective - and I have some sympathy with that view - then there is much other minimalist music you have to come to similar terms with. The problem for me then remains: the best of it - Adams as well as the more radically inventive Steve Reich - sounds remarkably fresh.

I would deny those parallels, heliocentric.

For one thing, nobody could have composed Vaughan Williams's Tallis Fantasia in, let's say, 1590. A whole new way of treating modal harmony had to have taken place in the meantime in the hands of composers ranging from Borodin and Mussorgsky to Debussy, Ravel and, yes, Satie - the imprint of whose time and not just personality I would argue as being instantly recogniseable in any one piece.

As to instances of "hoodwinking" we have the example from the early 1960s of two serious music critics (not composers, true, but in the case of one a renowned author and broadcaster on contemporary composition) messing about in a BBC studio with percussion and electronics, and the resulting piece being passed off as by one Piotr Zotik, iirc, and judged as a serious piece of experimental music by the reviewers.

Unless someone can come back and convince me to the contrary that Skempton did not compose "Lento" with the intention of exposing the pretentions of critics in their eagerness to accept anything new at face value, then my opinion about the piece will remain unchanged.

[ahinton]

As to instances of "hoodwinking" we have the example from the early 1960s of two serious music critics (not composers, true, but in the case of one a renowned author and broadcaster on contemporary composition) messing about in a BBC studio with percussion and electronics, and the resulting piece being passed off as by one Piotr Zotik, iirc, and judged as a serious piece of experimental music by the reviewers

Piotr Zak, it was (boy, how that dates me! No, I didn't write that. Not at all. Oh, no, siree. Dearie me, no!).

Sorry, I now see that Jayne Lee Wilson's already identified the identity of that particular perpatrator, but I might add that I suspect that you may have been confusing "him" with Petr Kotic (1942- ), the Czech-born composer who really does exist and has for years lived in NYC.

[french frank]

But the Piotr Zak case simply poses a question: if that work was a 'scam', why would it mean that another work, in some way apparently comparable, was also a 'scam'?

I was talking to someone last week about the paintings of Vermeer where you have an analogous situation, or a reverse situation. If a van Meegeren forgery could not be distinguished, even by experts, from a Vermeer, would it be of comparable artistic worth (I don't mean market value)?

You then have fact: the Zak was a hoax; the Skempton I think there is no reason to think was a hoax, scam or hoodwink (I'm astonished - I've never heard that suggested before). That said, I mentally put Lento and A Farewell to Stromness in the same category ...

[heliocentric]

The point in mentioning the Tallis Fantasia and Satie wasn't to give examples of persiflage but to give examples of stylistic antecedents to Howard Skempton's piece.

Unless someone can come back and convince me to the contrary that Skempton did not compose "Lento" with the intention of exposing the pretentions of critics in their eagerness to accept anything new at face value, then my opinion about the piece will remain unchanged.

How about: having been personally acquainted with Howard Skempton as well as his work for nearly thirty years I cannot believe for one second that he would conceive of such a thing. Any good?

[heliocentric]

I think it may be a cultural reference which resonates differently to you than it does me.

It resonates to me as the kind of casual sexism that would have passed without comment forty years ago. How does it resonate to you?

[Bryn]

How about: having been personally acquainted with Howard Skempton as well as his work for nearly thirty years I cannot believe for one second that he would conceive of such a thing. Any good?

Seconded. A more dedicated and conscientious composer I do not know, and I know a good many, (oh, and that's no sleight on any of them).