Anthony Payne (1936-2021)

[ahinton]

https://slippedisc.com/2021/04/reports-uk-composer-dies-within-month-of-his-wife/

RIP Tony

[Serial_Apologist]

https://slippedisc.com/2021/04/repor...h-of-his-wife/

RIP Tony

Such sad news - Anthony Payne is someone whom I would have wished to know.

[ahinton]

Such sad news - Anthony Payne is someone whom I would have wished to know.

Indeed you would; I've known him for almost 45 years...

[Bryn]

https://slippedisc.com/2021/04/repor...h-of-his-wife/

RIP Tony

So soon after Jane, too. Sad news indeed.

[ahinton]

So soon after Jane, too. Sad news indeed.

Yes, indeed; a heart attack during the night, I believe...

[Petrushka]

Very sad news. I was fortunate to have met him after a pre-Prom talk he gave on his 'elaboration' of the Elgar 3 in 1998 and I suppose he will forever be associated with that work. I also occasionally saw him at the Barbican.

RIP.

[Lordgeous]

RIP Tony. Great bloke. A pleasure to have known you, those many years ago.

[Serial_Apologist]

Of those composers of the half-generation before me, which included "The Manchester School" composers; Hugh Wood, David Blake, Jonathan Harvey, Corenlius Cardew and David Bedford - all of whose music I am extremely fond of - Anthony was the one whose musical outlook chimed the most, for me. He seemed suspended, as I do, between aesthetic musical worlds that were put across by the congnoscenti of modernist music who drew attention back in the 60s as divided by ever-widening gulfs; yet I indentified (and still do) with the common threads he perceived and felt between them: the modally and more chromatically-inclined sides of the early 20th century "English renaissance" composers perhaps best summed up and shared out between Delius and Vaughan Williams, (I have the marvellous radio talk he gave as part of the "Fairest Isle" series, leading off with an analysis of the Vaughan Williams Fifth first movement); the expansion of harmonic, formal and expressive resources of Schoenberg and the Second Viennese School composers; (though unlike me, perhaps, I wouldn't presume that he would have embraced Eisler); and - both critically and in Tony's case self-critically - the advances of Darmstadt serialism. And I think I may have heard somewhere that he had a liking for jazz.

And so, to go, for a moment, from the sublime to the ridiculous, I woke up this morning, in the words of the apocryphal blues singer, and looked outside at the brilliant sunshine, and slipped my cassette of Britten conducting Frank Bridge's "Enter Spring" into the player, as it just happened - seriously! - to be the next item on my listening itinerary, and thinking how that coincidence of conjunctions, and the fact that Tony had written a fine little book on Bridge, might be an opportunity to make up for never having met Tony, or Jane Manning, it occurs to me to suggest something composed by Bridge for the funeral or whatever commemoration might be envisaged. For the past half hour I've been going through the Bridge oeuvre with this in mind. "Enter Spring" is perhaps more seasonally apposite than In Memoriam, and so I've ended up switching in my mind between the Trio (Rhapsody) and Piano Trio No 2, both of 1928, and the Fourth String Quartet, which Bridge completed nine years later. The choice between these three major works in the composer's output is very difficult to settle: the first two date from what might be argued to be the pinnacle years of Bridge's creativity, with "Enter Spring" and "There is a Willow..." already in the bag, and "Oration" on the horizon, while the Fourth Quartet marks a point of stylistic reconciliation and integration, corresponding with Bartok's work from the Violin Concerto No 2 on; while on the one hand its language and structural rigour in the first two movements are probably closer to Schoenberg than he or any other British composer had yet come, the last movement marks as glorious an invocation of inner reconciliation and closure as any work I can think of.

So, this last movement is the music I am sending through the ether, if anyone happens to be listening!

[antongould]

Of those composers of the half-generation before me, which included "The Manchester School" composers; Hugh Wood, David Blake, Jonathan Harvey, Corenlius Cardew and David Bedford - all of whose music I am extremely fond of - Anthony was the one whose musical outlook chimed the most, for me. He seemed suspended, as I do, between aesthetic musical worlds that were put across by the congnoscenti of modernist music who drew attention back in the 60s as divided by ever-widening gulfs; yet I indentified (and still do) with the common threads he perceived and felt between them: the modally and more chromatically-inclined sides of the early 20th century "English renaissance" composers perhaps best summed up and shared out between Delius and Vaughan Williams, (I have the marvellous radio talk he gave as part of the "Fairest Isle" series, leading off with an analysis of the Vaughan Williams Fifth first movement); the expansion of harmonic, formal and expressive resources of Schoenberg and the Second Viennese School composers; (though unlike me, perhaps, I wouldn't presume that he would have embraced Eisler); and - both critically and in Tony's case self-critically - the advances of Darmstadt serialism. And I think I may have heard somewhere that he had a liking for jazz.

And so, to go, for a moment, from the sublime to the ridiculous, I woke up this morning, in the words of the apocryphal blues singer, and looked outside at the brilliant sunshine, and slipped my cassette of Britten conducting Frank Bridge's "Enter Spring" into the player, as it just happened - seriously! - to be the next item on my listening itinerary, and thinking how that coincidence of conjunctions, and the fact that Tony had written a fine little book on Bridge, might be an opportunity to make up for never having met Tony, or Jane Manning, it occurs to me to suggest something composed by Bridge for the funeral or whatever commemoration might be envisaged. For the past half hour I've been going through the Bridge oeuvre with this in mind. "Enter Spring" is perhaps more seasonally apposite than In Memoriam, and so I've ended up switching in my mind between the Trio (Rhapsody) and Piano Trio No 2, both of 1928, and the Fourth String Quartet, which Bridge completed nine years later. The choice between these three major works in the composer's output is very difficult to settle: the first two date from what might be argued to be the pinnacle years of Bridge's creativity, with "Enter Spring" and "There is a Willow..." already in the bag, and "Oration" on the horizon, while the Fourth Quartet marks a point of stylistic reconciliation and integration, corresponding with Bartok's work from the Violin Concerto No 2 on; while on the one hand its language and structural rigour in the first two movements are probably closer to Schoenberg than he or any other British composer had yet come, the last movement marks as glorious an invocation of inner reconciliation and closure as any work I can think of.

So, this last movement is the music I am sending through the ether, if anyone happens to be listening!

Excellent stuff, if I may say so, S_A

[Serial_Apologist]

Excellent stuff, if I may say so, S_A

Thanks Anton!