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

[Guest]

Poor Ivan Hewitt's rather desperate suggestion that the BCA prize day somehow publicised the existence of composers to people who might otherwise have thought all composers were dead!

But even if the puff is half-hearted, it's good to hear contemporary music that isn't making cosmic statements and doesn't need instructions.

Miss Ubiquity herself, Gillian Moore got on my tits with a sublime piece of inverted snobbery. " ... working with the homeless people is a real proper piece work ... " whereas " ... the Proms thing appeals to a certain kind of middle class audience who know what the Proms is and know where the Albert Hall is." Really woman? Working class Londoners don't know where the Albert Hall is? Patronising cow.

Music is more real because it involves " ... people who've had homelessness issues recently"?! Good Christ! And here she comes again, babbling away on the Skempton.

[Bryn]

From its title I thought this might be a thread worth bothering with.

Ah well, how sad, never mind.

[hackneyvi]

I'm afraid it's not a classic show and very much Hear and Now's equivalent of the MOBOs but there's some attractive music to be heard amongst the sunken commentaries. Don't write it off till you've tried it, Bryn.

[Bryn]

The programme was fine by me. It's the opening message that was addressed. I'm no particular fan of Ms. Moore, but ... .

Oh, and I too am very much in favour of free improvisation, but music which comes with instructions (and maybe even a score) is also fine by me.

Good to hear Mr. Brabbins conducting the BBCSSO in Lento, though I think Mr. Volkov made a somewhat better fist of it a couple of time last year with the same orchestra.

[jayne lee wilson]

For once, oooh, just for once, I've got to say it - Phil, whatever the merits of your opinions you could at least express them without such blatant misogyny. I mean, please darling, pur-lease...

Poor Ivan Hewitt's rather desperate suggestion that the BCA prize day somehow publicised the existence of composers to people who might otherwise have thought all composers were dead!

But even if the puff is half-hearted, it's good to hear contemporary music that isn't making cosmic statements and doesn't need instructions.

Miss Ubiquity herself, Gillian Moore got on my tits with a sublime piece of inverted snobbery. " ... working with the homeless people is a real proper piece work ... " whereas " ... the Proms thing appeals to a certain kind of middle class audience who know what the Proms is and know where the Albert Hall is." Really woman? Working class Londoners don't know where the Albert Hall is? Patronising cow.

Music is more real because it involves " ... people who've had homelessness issues recently"?! Good Christ! And here she comes again, babbling away on the Skempton.

[Serial_Apologist]

Am I alone in feeling Skempton's "Lento" to be one of the biggest scams ever perpetrated by a composer on his or her naive and unsuspecting public?

The first time I heard this piece (the broadcast of its premiere), recalled a comment by David Drew, in his chapter on modern French music from "European Music in the Twentieth Century" (Ed H. Hartog) Pelican, rev 1961 p. 288), to Jean Wiener's "Concerto Franco-Americaine": "... He turned to the opposite extreme; the *bourgeois* was now to be *epate* by a *right-note* style. Instead of adding meaningless harmonies to the injury of common melodic jargon, he presented that jargon in its crudest form".

I normally quite like Skempton's pieces, or rather the few of them I have heard, reminding me as they do of those rather dusty unaltered Victorian-furnished middle class interiors in places like St Johns Wood, usually with a quietly ticking mantelpiece clock and palm in the corner and lace antimacassars, where one sought bedsit accommodation back in the 1960s - or film music wistfully appropriate to such a scene, more likely. This piece was by contrast either some sort of ****take or something wallowing pretentiously in its own unctuousness, and I took it to be the latter. I'm glad I didn't listen to this programme.

S-A

[Bryn]

Am I alone in feeling Skempton's "Lento" to be one of the biggest scams ever perpetrated by a composer on his or her naive and unsuspecting public?

...

I'm glad I didn't listen to this programme.

S-A

Re. you first point, no, others have been just as pretentious in their expression of dislike for the work.

Re. the second, heaven forfend that you might learn from doing so.

I suspect that the real reason for you ire is frustration at the fact that you just don't 'get it', and that you resent the fact that so many others do.

[Serial_Apologist]

Re. you first point, no, others have been just as pretentious in their expression of dislike for the work.

Re. the second, heaven forfend that you might learn from doing so.

I suspect that the real reason for you ire is frustration at the fact that you just don't 'get it', and that you resent the fact that so many others do.

What is there "to get"? No, I don't "get" whatever it is I am supposed to - and that now includes your reply. But, if there is something for me to learn, please feel free to elaborate.

[hackneyvi]

For once, oooh, just for once, I've got to say it - Phil, whatever the merits of your opinions you could at least express them without such blatant misogyny. I mean, please darling, pur-lease...

I regret that you identify misogyny in my outlook. Alas, I'm not able to see it. But I am content to be shown the way forward, jayne lee. To be lead me out of the darkness. If you will highlight the hatred for women which comes through so clearly to you, I will seriously consider any point you make.

Above all though, sweetie, don't feel inhibition in speaking your truth.

Wasn't it Tolstoy who said: ""The whole truth can never be immoral, duckie"?

[hackneyvi]

Am I alone in feeling Skempton's "Lento" to be one of the biggest scams ever perpetrated by a composer on his or her naive and unsuspecting public?

The first time I heard this piece (the broadcast of its premiere), recalled a comment by David Drew, in his chapter on modern French music from "European Music in the Twentieth Century" (Ed H. Hartog) Pelican, rev 1961 p. 288), to Jean Wiener's "Concerto Franco-Americaine": "... He turned to the opposite extreme; the *bourgeois* was now to be *epate* by a *right-note* style. Instead of adding meaningless harmonies to the injury of common melodic jargon, he presented that jargon in its crudest form".

I normally quite like Skempton's pieces, or rather the few of them I have heard, reminding me as they do of those rather dusty unaltered Victorian-furnished middle class interiors in places like St Johns Wood, usually with a quietly ticking mantelpiece clock and palm in the corner and lace antimacassars, where one sought bedsit accommodation back in the 1960s - or film music wistfully appropriate to such a scene, more likely. This piece was by contrast either some sort of ****take or something wallowing pretentiously in its own unctuousness, and I took it to be the latter. I'm glad I didn't listen to this programme.

S-A

I find it quite anguished and hard to listen to, SA. A Yank on Amazon (dunno what class he is though - '97? '84? Upper working?; Gillian Moore might know; you could ask Gillian ), this Yank refers to "nuanced emotional anxiety" and that seems right to me. It's so hard to listen to because the emotions are so stretched aand entangled that they come close to tearing. I see parallels with the Barber adagio in intensity but the Barber's movements are consecutive where the Skempton seems to work its emotions simultaneously.

But even though I admire it (can't say I 'like' it any more than I 'like' "Strange Fruit" - neither are pieces I'd ever choose to play), I don't really know why this is a work of greatness? Perhaps it simply stands out as a piece from its time that can be intensely moving without being straightforward.

I don't think it's a scam any more than the Richard Barrett was a scam last week but, for my part, I found the Barrett a fruitless listen where the Skempton is charging. I like his chamber concerto, too. They're pieces that might move a general audience in a way that Barrett or Ferneyhough generally will speak only to musically-educated people like yourself. There's certainly no sin in requiring education to appreciate art but the more artless works can still be valid and the Lento seems, to me, to be skillful and honest.

[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.