What is a [classical] Composer?

Paul Morley (above) and Goldie (below) in photographs associated with the How To Be A Composer and Classic Goldie documentaries respectively.
It’s been an embarrassingly long time since The Impostume suggested that my motivation for footnoting a certain frustration with Woebot’s FACT review of One Foot Ahead of the Other was paranoia over one of Woebot’s blogposts having been about me, that the contempt of classical music, notational scores and roles for musicology in music journalism he’d expressed had been something to do with my own critical approach (having transcribed and done a detailed commentary of Zomby’s Kaliko, likened it to Ligeti etc.). Well firstly, it clearly wasn’t, and secondly it hadn’t crossed my mind as I’d hoped that ‘Loving Wonky’ wasn’t seen as erroneously peering through the lens of a stuffy, classically-minded musicology at the nobly savage sounds of da kids – after all, that’s a dichotomy I think has had its day and an objection I’d anticipated. Classically-minded or not, I can understand why people consider this blog to be musicological work, but I don’t see it that way. Does a discussion of music somehow surpass criticism and start being ‘musicology’ or ‘analysis’, terms most people associate with studious academic exercises in objective interpretation, if crotchets, quavers, tonics and dominants start coming into it? I think that’d be a shame. On this blog it’s always been my intention to aestheticise, to write aesthetic propaganda, rather than to analyse, explain or interpret with an academic objectivity, but I’ll grudgingly accept that since what I argue draws on detailed musical description it resembles musicology relative to most criticism in magazines or online. Anyway, many of The Impostume’s occasionally presumptuous but appealingly cynical observations were not undeserved.

To say the least, Woebot had expressed unease with contemporary classical music and its discourse (represented in part by the influence of critic Alex Ross), and particularly the idea of any of that contaminating (popular) music journalism. A similar antipathy regularly crops up in general discussion of music both historical and contemporary. Woebot’s thoughts were prompted by music critic Paul Morley evaluating his experiences of learning composition at the Royal Academy of Music, which were edited down for How To Be a Composer (click the link to watch it on Youtube), one of two remarkably similar recent BBC documentaries (the other being the more family-friendly Classic Goldie) that saw proficient but notation-illiterate figures known for their relationship with popular music ‘faced with the challenge’ of having to ‘compose classical music’, resulting in, it’s supposed, a struggle notable enough for two hours of TV. To a certain extent, these two programmes demonstrated that even though the words ‘composer’ and ‘composition’ are actually very broad, basic and flexible terms, they do nonetheless conjure up very narrowly specific sorts of musical practice in the popular imagination – typically involving stories of long dead white male geniuses in eighteenth- or nineteenth-century getup scratching away with quills, up to their powdered wigs in the complex deliberation apparently involved in designing a masterpiece. The musical style such words evoke is just as limited – the word ‘composer’, though it could and perhaps should refer to anyone who creates music of any sort, invariably implies the restricting prefix ‘classical’ and all the cultural baggage that goes with it. Like many others, Woebot seems to agree with Morley’s defining characteristics of classical music, that it’s essentially ‘of the past’ and predicated upon the notated score. This pairing is what causes Woebot to exclaim, ‘And the whole thing about scoring music is this anachronism writ in 20 foot tall neon writing. Who the hell would attempt to do something as inane as scoring music? In the 21st Century it’s an utterly nonsensical exercise.’

Goldie handles his score during the filming of Classic Goldie.
Illustrative listening scores aside, it’s easy to sympathise with this reaction, what with concrete music (I use this as a broader term than ‘musique concrète’, referring to all music whose sole or primary intended mode of existence and consumption is as a completed recording) and its superior levels of sonic-textual possibility and control now being the dominant musical format of the developed world – and that’s no longer an optimistic, progressivist appeal to ‘relevancy’, it’s a statement of fact. But it’d be a shame to relegate notated music to anachronism, and not just for the sake of the re-performance of historical music or the currently receded ‘contemporary classical’ arena where Morley and Goldie’s challenges took place. Music performed from a pre-established, possibly aging text is just as much a lasting aesthetic possibility as live theatre is, for example, and though film (which could be thought of as a kind of ‘concrete theatre’) is the more powerful format, a smaller but important theatre-going audience still appreciates the unique experience of seeing plays (re-)performed. Part of the appeal of text-based formats is, or should be, in the obligatory reconstruction and reinterpretation of works posing an alternative to the degree of prescribed inflexibility in concrete forms. They allow the act of reading the text to occur at the level of performance as well as listening, so that the two activities begin to merge.

This is a rich and currently pretty esoteric area of aesthetic possibility, with few listeners appreciating music in this way. Deliberately collecting multiple recordings of the same work so as to chart their different interpretations, for example, is seen by the majority of listeners as a bit on the fussy side. It’s also disappointing that this re-interpretive performance of scores is rarely very liberal or adventurous today (as it can be in contemporary theatre), and on a broader level it’s disappointing that alternative musical text-based formats are so uncommon, their detailed possibilities as manifested in a handful twentieth-century experimental musics remaining marginal (Cornelius Cardew’s elaborate graphic score Treatise is a great example of an alternative text-based format, being a fascinating meditation on the assorted aesthetic (im)possibilities of scores, suggesting among other things a music whose final aesthetic existence lies in its visualised potentiality, its ultimate inability to become singularly realised: a tragically quiet, imaginary music – it’s pretty stunning and you can go and have a look at it in the Barbican Music Library). Such formats could offer radical new ways of consuming art and ‘musicking’ beyond the limited, unchanging contours of concrete forms. Such radical new consumptions could come to enact metaphors for new social relationships, for more interactive, participatory social activity and organisation, providing politically resonant alternatives to art-forms in which freedom is limited to the subject position of the mute reader-listener or the ontologically distinct ‘cover versions’ of other creators (more on this over the coming months, hopefully).

One must be Educated in the Proper Ways

But of course, the setback inherent in any kind of musical notation is that it has to be read, and sadly the general perception is that if you want to be involved in ‘proper’ music, you’d better learn how to obey the strict rules governing musical reading and performance. This sense of obligation is the basis of Morley and Goldie’s TV challenges and the source of much anxiety over the perceived elitism and hermeticism of classical music past and present. Along with its often unnecessary political and historical connotations, this knowledge gap has led both to an unfortunate distrust of classical music (‘we’ve been getting along just fine without your elitist, aristocratic/bourgeois crotchets and quavers, thank you very much’) and an equally unfortunate submissive, humbled deference of the uninitiated toward the assuredly glorious, please-do-not-touch Classical Tradition, with Morley and, gratifyingly to a much lesser extent, Goldie falling very much for the latter, constantly surrounded by the High Priests of the Classical Church as they were. Given the latent social and cultural divisions between the classical establishment and its guests in the programmes, it was dispiriting to see the two independently accomplished musickers apparently capitulating to what is ultimately only the aesthetic power of those classical priests (i.e. the composers, teachers, musicians and conductors).

Fear of classical music, whether it manifests as distrust or humility, is often the fear of doing things ‘improperly’ – unnecessary, you’d hope. Regrettably, Morley and Goldie accepted it when they were told that they were improperly educated in music, in fact their ‘uneducated’ state is precisely what their TV challenges were predicated upon. This scenario seemed to make them look and even act like children: note that Goldie (whose refreshingly unbuttoned demeanour shouldn’t, of course, be taken as infantilism) was described by others and later himself as a kid in a candy store. One of Morley’s teachers, Hannah Riddell, seemed to behave as if she were teaching a Dickensian street urchin about polite society when going over the notational basics with him – I’m not sure if it’s editing, but you can imagine that her mildly primary-school tone was the result of her inexperience with an adult who couldn’t read western classical notation. Elsewhere, seeing Goldie’s playful energy and the fondness of both composers-in-training for greeting and celebrating with great big hugs (again, not infantile traits) catching the classical types off guard was amusingly instructive. Good for them for retaining and acting out that aspect of their personalities in a situation that could have dampened it.


This PR photo for Classic Goldie, including Ivor Setterfield, does a pretty good job of infantilising Goldie.
However, in an especially crushing scene towards the end of Classic Goldie’s first episode, Goldie was practically forced by conductor Ivor Setterfield (his chaperone, who seemed to muscle in at every step of the creative process) to harmonise his melody, a task that was clearly very frustrating for Goldie and, one could argue, quite unnecessary. Why should harmonisation be an unquestionable compositional must for an orchestral main melody? Though the matter wasn’t ultimately resolved onscreen, Goldie did seem to give in, but we can be grateful that he didn’t finish out the show brainwashed, his spirits broken and a glazed look in his eyes, answering Setterfield’s sinister questions on the Rules of Harmony with exactly what the Party member had demanded to hear, while the orchestra rehearsed for Classic Goldie’s soulless Bach chorale pastiche in the background. I for one would have been right behind the drum and bass producer if he’d reacted with ‘who are you to say this has to be harmonised? D’you know who I am?’. Instead, he got agitated and threatened to ‘kick the piano in’. Actually an enraged Goldie violently and noisily destroying a concert grand out of frustration on stage at the Proms could have been a far more radical and meaningful gesture than the attractive and deserving but fairly predictable Mahler-Holst-Gorecki puppet tone-poem that was eventually performed (if unduly critical and defeatist perhaps, putting the nippers off ever approaching classical music were it seen as a gesture of finality).

Unfortunately though, if there’s another defining characteristic of classical music other than its historicity and its use of a score, it’s that classical music is a studiously harmonised music. The Story of Classical Music usually begins with the earliest forms of sacred polyphony, associated with the Notre Dame school once upon a time in the twelfth century, and continues through the various subsequent codifications of harmonic theory and practice by the likes of Zarlino (le Istitutioni Harmoniche, 1558), Rameau (Treatise on Harmony, 1722) and Schoenberg (Harmonielehre, 1910). Without having to observe the most basic conventions of textural harmonisation central to classical music, Classic Goldie would have been ‘Orchestral Goldie’, and How To Be a Composer would have been ‘How To Get Groups of Twentieth-Century Western Instruments to Produce Ordered Sound’. Neither of these would have given the documentary-makers or their mainstream audience the black-cop-meets-white-cop, culture-clashing, we-all-learned-something-today journey of discovery they were probably hoping for.
This TV-friendly culture clash fed off a popularly imagined construction in which a certain set of particular instruments, design conventions and rituals are bundled together into a socially and aesthetically delineated and constrained ‘classical music’, such that fresh, new avenues of musical exploration making use of the multifarious resources contained therein are foreclosed, unimagined. We can see this bundling-together at work in the interview with Goldie about the whole affair conducted by Morley: Goldie himself claims that orchestral composition is ‘by default’ classical composition (again, why should it be?), which is one more example of the many normative aesthetic conventions imposed implicitly on this sort of music today that deserve to be illuminated and have their dominance challenged because of the role they play in closing off areas of the aesthetic imagination for both composers and listeners (and of course this is a debate separate from the simpler issue of whether classical music past or present ‘is good’ or ‘is bad’). In fact, contemporary classical music seems more aesthetically specified today compared with the history of classical music taken as a whole, despite the overtures of compositional emancipation made by twentieth-century musical theorists now having supposedly reached a point of naturalisation.

Fixed Canon

I was sorry to see the postulant Morley lapping up the religious mythology that often surrounds the Holy, Mystical and Profound Secrets of Classical Music in its most intense, innovation-strangling forms, even though he seemed to acknowledge such an atmosphere. Perhaps this is the combination of his veneration of canonical pop heroes with the apparent (and widespread) belief that classical music is a nobler, more sophisticated art than pop music: we see him describing classical music’s shadowy, ancient hermeticism, calling it ‘proper’ and ‘serious’. It’s almost as if Morley has become a monk – having entered the monastery and been purged of his natural sinfully unclean and ignorant state he wanders the cloisters with his head bowed, genuflecting before icons of the musical saints, wishing he were a fraction as wonderful as they were (icons are tendentiously limited symbolic representations, remember, not real people). Though it’s an interesting and touching article, his hymn of praise to canonical Genius Composers for the Observer demonstrates a classical music completely drenched in Romantic aesthetics. The music that comes out of Morley’s faithful worship might be inspired and accomplished – and fair play to that, his string quartet is a fantastic achievement and will hopefully turn people on to classical music – but he’ll find it difficult to produce anything particularly groundbreaking until he can balance such canonical figures within a broader and more flexible musical-aesthetic perspective, and that goes for any novice musicker, really. It’s the continuing persistence of a particularly canon-entrenched aesthetics of Classical Music that catalysed that tradition’s becoming eclipsed as the West’s leading musical form by more popular (as in both origin and destination) alternatives in the twentieth century.

Early Medieval composer, German Benedictine Abbess and all-rounder Hildegard of Bingen has difficulty getting included in Western classical music canons, both because she lived in a time when music was (as some still have it) crude or undeveloped and because she was a woman. This icon-like drawing shows her receiving divine inspiration in the form of sinister tentacles descending from the ceiling to grip her brain.
As it happens though, this inspiring but ultimately limited way of looking at classical music actually didn’t seem entirely reflected by composers, teachers, musicians and conductors surrounding Morley and Goldie (not the open-minded, John Williams-loving Christopher Austin, not the down-to-earth Anna Meredith), but a headlock of this reverent romanticism, an austere and hackneyed ‘modernism’ (hm) and its only visible alternative, cheesy postmodernism, is definitely a major feature of what I hesitate to have to call ‘contemporary classical’ music (i.e. orchestral music distinct from the re-performance of historical classics), a term which you’d hope would be paradoxical.

Dressing music up

Not that clothing is necessarily an outward manifestation of inner attitudes (or anything to berate someone about, at the end of the day), but I do feel drawn to the idea that the way contemporary classical composers present themselves or are presented visually tells us a lot about what people think classical music is, as if something outside of the supposedly absolute, pure, abstract, non-visual Music they seem to believe in is anarchically, ironically leaking in to the experience, demanding to be heard. Despite the fact that awkward press photographs of contemporary classical composers (in which they’re invariably alone) can always be found, their appearance almost always seems to speak of a deeply serious person and his deeply serious music, a person with little care for the frivolities of outward appearance – the idea, being, you see, that we note in their dishevelled or minimalist appearance their unswerving dedication to profound abstraction, in the mould of the Great Beethoven’s darkly expressive, not-of-this-world disrepair. The undergraduates and the general public are supposed to whisper at the back of the hall, ‘I can see why he looks like that, what with his brilliant mind constantly striving towards Higher Things and maths and that’.

Philip Glass. To decorate this piece from this point on I'm using photographs of a relatively wide range contemporary classical composers (pop classical, academic classical, para-classical) I recently collected through a quick Google Images search. There were lots of images on offer but I only picked out examples of the particular stereotype I describe here, which, as you'll see, turned out to be remarkably well represented. My indictment of these photographs is not of course an indictment of the music (which in many cases is very worthwhile), the person or the personality associated with the picture - I assume the composers have little control over the aesthetic whims of the photographers. But if not proof, these images are certainly a glaring metaphor for the narrow aesthetics and weirdly specific degree of conformity in contemporary classical music.
I’m being cynical and presumptuous, but the rules for a contemporary classical composer’s clothing do seem oddly specific: a little too smart, almost certainly largely black in colour, either shabby or a subtle, minimalist chic (more usually a mix of the two) but none of this in an everyday way – the suits, roll-necks and weird collars could almost come from a specialist shop with a clothing line intended for the contemporary classical composer. In photographs they very rarely smile or when they do it’s not particularly warm, their hands frequently grasp their cheeks or chins in contemplation (I really dislike the term, but in many cases they’re literally ‘chin-stroking’) and the time-honoured cliché of symbolising the occupation and dedication of the great composer by picturing him (cos it’s still a lot more likely to be a him isn’t it) next to a score or a classical instrument is alive and shockingly well. Like the composers they must obey the typical contemporary classical music ensemble also performs in black or smart minimalism – like kabuki stage hands, we’re not supposed to see the workers, everything magically happens. Such images tell us a lot about the sort of tiredly purist, exclusive, austere (ascetic – monks again) aesthetic and socio-cultural goals contemporary classical music is supposed to have: the pictures scream out to us ‘this is what a composer is, this is what composing is’. Thankfully the number of exceptions seems to be on the increase, but Morley seemed to conform to these stereotypes with a hilarious precision (see photo at the top). He wore black almost exclusively, was often seen in a huge, shapeless duffel coat of the exact sort Harrison Birtwistle used to wear (its large hood making him seem even more like a monk), and facially, with his short hair and greying, all-over stubble he was the spitting image of Mark-Anthony Turnage as he appeared in Classic Goldie. Oh for a classical composer wearing jeans, a T-shirt, sportswear, colourful glad rags, an orchestra performing in non-uniform: music as inclusive, down to earth, multifarious, even fashionable… but ultimately, accessible.

Here I put two completely seperate composer photographs (of Michael Nyman and James MacMillan) side by side to illustrate the alarming prevalence of lower-face-clutching among contemporary classical composers.

Speaking through the score

I’ve already touched on one area in which musical possibility is foreclosed – the uses and meanings of the score. One of Morley’s younger colleagues at the Academy discussed this as the ‘fetishisation’ of the score in classical music. Both Morley and Goldie seemed on the whole to proceed with the assumption that the score was a direct, transparent window onto the music that was intended to arise out of it, as if it were like a CD to be inserted into a machine rather than the starting point of a process of inevitable change and difference mediated by performers and their interpretations (Morley speaks of scores ‘transmitting’ meaning), and this is an assumption that does persist in contemporary classical music. It often seems as if composers are trying to write concrete music in a non-concrete medium, not only failing to achieve that task but missing out on the many possibilities of non-concrete music. This is typical of an atmosphere in which the performance of classical music is generally ruled by The Composer’s Intention, whether s/he’s alive or dead. Especially if s/he’s alive and on the same continent, though, all agency is turned over to her/him if possible, a constant dialogue is maintained and the absurd reifications of ‘what s/he was trying to do or say’, or the ‘sounds in her/his head’ have to be fully ‘realised’, especially concerning a premiere, and this was an assumption that Goldie very clearly took on. Undergraduate composers are constantly nagged to saturate their scores with the dynamics and slurring ‘that they intend’, to leave no room for ambiguity or the musician-machine’s disastrous programme-error doubt in what seems like an orgy of positivistic notation-worship. Even historical classical music wasn’t always like this. Besides, a single composer imposing concrete-music-style totalitarian control over a submissive musical workforce seems a bit like a grossly unequal society, don’t you think?

Oliver Knussen goes for the Birtwistle look.
One way out of the constraints imposed on performers is the use of improvisatory techniques, but in so many cases this too is an act ruled over by the composer, something that is permitted rather than a performer’s natural right. Living contemporary classical composers are constantly required to explain and, preferably, lecture about their ‘intentions’, and many of them accept this ritual eagerly. One evening I was listening to the unsmiling, hush-please self-contemplations of one composer (I forget his name, but he was dressed completely in black) whose style was characterised by controlled improvisatory techniques and whose regularly invoked patron saint was Derek Bailey. Outside of the lecture hall, some younger students had gathered who were laughing and joking around quite audibly but not very intrusively. After a while the Master of Sounds stopped, and, eyes downcast, addressed the subservient convener of the event, artfully intoning, ‘can you make them stop that… it’s really… quite… annoying.’ I’m not saying someone having their say ought to suffer all disturbances, but it was a fitting metaphor for the irony of much contemporary music – the adventurer in spontaneous sonics proved remarkably unsympathetic to sounds that were beyond his general control.

Michael Nyman
John Cage, a leading figure in non-jazz improvisation, chance procedures and compositional philosophy, said ‘everything we do is music’, and his career represented that. Also liberating would be the related notion that anything we do is music, but many contemporary classical composers don’t yet seem ready to embrace such an emancipation – for them music, and by that they specifically mean Composition, remains an activity constrained by a number of naturalised aesthetic assumptions.

Michael Torke. Presumably the photographer went for colour so as not to be clichéd.

The Rational Science of Abstract Music

In the Middle Ages, music based in academies and universities was considered a science, but as time wore on, music as a whole was seen far more as a humanist art. Today’s contemporary classical music, a large proportion of which is based in and reliant on academies, often seems to turn back to the medieval view of music as a science. This is might be because academic surroundings imply that study should be rational, complex, objective, a scientific endeavour distinct from everyday thought and existence – rather than messily human, the sort of thing that you’d find on the other end of a anthropo-musicological study. You’ll notice that some of Morley’s comments have this flavour, indeed, like his new mentor Peter Maxwell Davies he was drawn to the math-like procedures of medieval isorhythm, and Goldie notes the famous phrase ‘music is math’. The idea of composition as high science does result in interesting music, for sure, but it’s usually a heavily controlled music that requiring detailed explanation far beyond the scope of the average listening guide, often necessitating an instructive lecture with annotated examples and a full copy of the score to listen with (so if you don’t have at least an A level in music, forget about it).

Gavin Bryars. The horror, the horror.
When I first listened to Peter Maxwell Davies’s series of Naxos Quartets I didn’t notice that passages in one of the quartets were constructed using to mathematical magic squares, but then again I wasn’t constructed by IBM and I couldn’t touch Garry Kasparov at chess. After reading the liner notes and reading with interest about the magic squares and how they worked I listened again, and didn’t quite hear it. At that point I could have gotten hold of the score (very difficult and costly, probably), and attempted to analyse those complex compositional computations myself in order to appreciate them (most probably I would have failed despite my above average musical education), or I could have written to a musical analyst or the composer himself. Needless to say, I left these celebrated magic squares be, a little disappointed that they didn’t offer a less remote aesthetic experience, even if the sounds the quartets made as a whole were, relatively superficially, appealing enough to my ears.

Thomas Adès. Cheer up, you’ve got so much to live for.
I’m not going to suggest that music appreciated in these most complex, scientific sorts of ways is ‘wrong’ and deserves extinction, of course it doesn’t (though the issue of its funding could become part of a debate) – if you like that sort of thing and you’ve got the mind and patience for it or you enjoy composing it, good luck to you. But of course music can be so many, many things other than math, ‘rationality’, formalism and the arguably impossible dream of pure abstraction. I’ve seen undergraduate composers assume this prevalent poetics of composition unknowingly and unquestioningly, only to find their passion for music in a cul-de-sac. I’ve seen parties of schoolchildren at concerts, probably brought there by a teacher eager to feed them a bit of a different (hopefully it wasn’t ‘high’) culture, fidgeting and sulking through performances of this sort of music, even though the composer had treated them to a highly technical twenty-minute lecture on the structural procedures involved (what more could you ask for?).

I thoroughly recommend Howard Skempton’s delicately beguiling piano pieces, but this photo kind of creeps me out.
Another widespread notion that results from the musical-composition-as-high-science paradigm has it that composition is problem-solving, again something that Morley and Goldie seem to go along with. That’s a weird one if you think about it – surely there are a dizzying number of criteria by which musical ‘problems’ can be invented and solved? And who says problems need to be solved? Some of my favourite music can be seen as creating irresolvable problems. Problem music is fascinating. Morley talks of having to solve the ‘conundrum’ of a small ensemble featuring a tuba and a harp – couldn’t the disjunction between the two instruments be just as interesting as one particular solution? And why put such an obscure problem on the table in the first place?

Classic FM loves minimalist-with-a-heart Karl Jenkins, but after performing the oboe part in his The Armed Man it was months before I could talk or taste food again.

That classical sound

This brings me to another largely unchallenged status quo in contemporary classical music: its instruments and timbres. In an age in which practically any sound can be generated through electronic synthesis, it seems absurd to me that contemporary classical composers habitually remain with the classical orchestra, regularly achieving their ostensible goal of finding interesting new ways of doing things by manipulating those same old instruments in different ways. The innovation quota (a now-meaningless vestige of modernism which corresponds to the marking criteria of composition portfolios in many degrees) is apparently fulfilled by writing for unusual combinations of instruments and getting musicians to bang on the lids of pianos, knock on the sides of violins, turn bows upside down, hold down unconventional but mildly fortuitous combinations of keys, blow soundlessly and so on, and we saw Setterfield showing this sort of thing to Goldie. Now of course, any sound is valid in music, and in the pre-electronic world of Henry Cowell and John Cage, the playing of instruments in new and unintended ways was a sonic and symbolic revolution. Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes for Piano call for various objects to be inserted into the piano strings to alter the instrument’s timbre, and in this instance the piano was elegantly and very carefully re-engineered. But now that a whole universe of sound is at composers’ feet, why turn, if the goals are to be modernist, to the sounds that instruments simply happen to make when manipulated in ways and combinations that were unintended when their design was finalised a century ago? Imagine how amazing intended sounds could be if such composers were inclined to work at finding and using them with the same loyalty, patience and dedication they show to wood, brass and vibrating wire. Like its canon and the attitude towards its score, the traditional instruments of classical music have become a fetishised permanence, a fossilised faith, and a limitation.

Ludovico Einaudi is very much a pop classical composer. His imprisonment within this claustrophobic interior and his longing for the light demonstrates that it’s not just the more ‘serious’ composers that appear this Romantic way. Pop classical composers such as Einaudi tend to go for emotional sensitivity rather than formal rationality in their music, but the Composer myth remains the same.
Admittedly it’s not as easy to invent new sounds as it is to write for existing instruments, but it’s nevertheless a shame that the invention of new instruments has slowed and stopped (though Messiaen put them in the orchestra, the theremin and ondes martenot never got a foothold). Perhaps this is down to a belief that the orchestra cannot be improved, but it’s also likely to have a lot to do the professional specialisation of musicians today. It would be a problem for professional musicians who played a single instrument (not to mention costly and demanding for composers) if new musical compositions came complete with entirely new instruments, but only if you believe that the only acceptable musical performances come from musicians who have dedicated their lives to perfecting the performance of a single instrument. Would it be so heretical for musicians to perform new music on a new instrument they’d only been using for a few months (which does happen occasionally)? In previous centuries it was thought that the more instruments you could play, the better you were at music in general. In fact because modern-day percussionists already play a range of instruments, that area of the traditional orchestra has actually seen a certain amount of new equipment. Composer Harry Partch invented an entirely new ensemble that offered not just new timbres but a new division of the octave, taught musicians to play the instruments, and did all that before technology could have given him a major shortcut. Relative to that ear-opening achievement and the even greater prospects on offer today, where’s the inventive musical richness in patting a cello on its backside?

‘James MacMillan takes us on another spooky tour of magic, illusion, ancient rites and the psychic zone in “Guess what’s upstairs”, tonight at 8 - on Five’.

‘Orchestral music’

However, if we’re to retain the orchestra as a musical tool, it’s because of the generally compulsory association of that certain group of instruments with the social and aesthetic parameters I’ve described above that I feel we should replace the loaded term ‘contemporary classical music’ with the broader ‘orchestral music’ (in the same way that you sometimes hear the term ‘guitar music’ instead of the more limited and culturally loaded ‘rock’), which would describe not only music involving an entire orchestra but also any music written to be performed on instruments associated with the twentieth-century Western orchestra. Such a re-branding would allow contemporary music-makers to use the twentieth-century Western orchestra (a highly-developed musical tool that may deserve to be stepping aside but doesn’t deserve the dustbin of history) without feeling yoked together with the prescriptive canons, conventions and expectations of the Western Classical Music Tradition. Of course there would be a tradition of orchestral music that included classical music as a sub-category alongside other sub-categories like film music, jazz and some instrumental folk musics for composers to draw inspiration from, but ‘classical music’ and its parameters would amount to a specific meta-style of music associated with a certain tradition that needn’t necessarily be privileged when it comes to the production of new music. There are already many examples of ‘orchestral music’ that could not easily be called ‘classical’ music (or even ‘jazz’ or ‘film music’ either), and there are more examples every year. The music of bands like Rachel’s, for instance, uses orchestral instruments without also taking on any strictly classical stylistic conventions along with them. Classical Music, ‘Orchestral Music’ and sometimes even notated music too are often thought of as being more or less the same thing, but classical music and its constituent genres can be thought of as just smaller categories contained within much broader and mostly unexplored categories of musical possibility.

That hint of a smile on Nigel Hess’s face is what reminds you he wrote the theme tune for Hetty Wainthropp Investigates.
What is a composer? I hope it’s becoming clear that according to its most prevalent definition, a ‘composer’ – and remember that invariably implies a ‘classical’ composer – is limited by the creative and aesthetic constraints imposed on classical music. Why should they be? Nowadays there are many terms for the people who make music either by themselves or as the figurehead of a collective enterprise: composer, artist, producer, singer-songwriter, sound artist, music-maker, recording artist, front man, instrumentalist, and so on. There seems to be an assumption that these are all distinct occupations, and they needn’t be – they’re all composers of sonic events, they can all be thought of as composers. Allowing the word ‘composer’ to mean something broader and more inclusive than its classicalised definition would even out the cultural playing field, bringing the canonical composers of the past down from their dusty pedestals and out of their tiny icons (so we can get a better look at them) and bring musical artists who are considered culturally second-class to enjoy a chance at the levels of respect and prestige previously reserved only for their ancient counterparts. ‘Composer’ should be the name given to anyone heading up a musical project, and in this all composers are equal, all subject to an aesthetic, social and cultural playing field that ought to be as large as the human imagination will allow.

Classical composers, general composers and composers in between

Whatever name they’re called by, many different sorts of composers work in and around this meta-style everyone calls ‘classical’. In Morley’s opinion, it seems, and in that of many others, the king of British contemporary classical music (and possibly all contemporary classical music) is Peter Maxwell Davies. Known as ‘Max’ to the courtiers, Maxwell Davies is the Master of the Queen’s Music and represents an aging generation of post-war British composers that succeeded Britten, Walton and Tippett. Much of Maxwell Davies’s music is highly worthwhile – in the sixties, along with Harrison Birtwistle and Alexander Goehr, he brought fire and imagination to a classical music scene that had been running on sentimental nationalism and comparatively conservative harmonic idioms for a number of decades. Like the generation they succeeded, however, the aesthetic outlook of Maxwell Davies’s generation can now also seem limited and conservative, and Morley’s interview with the Master Composer inadvertently brought this into the glaring light.

Peter Maxwell Davies’s mildly unnatural hands-on-hips pose makes him look a bit like a medieval jester in the midst of some jaunty dance for the entertainment of the king. Which is exactly what, as Master of the Queen’s music, his eight-hundred-year-old counterpart in the age that so interests him would have been doing.
When asked about his opinions of pop music, Maxwell Davies makes the typical hollow concession to musical relativism by noting the abilities of pop musicians ‘from Gershwin, to John Lennon, to McCartney’. Wow, all that way? I’ve seen composition teachers use Lennon and McCartney in this way, always presented as little other than skilled scientists of musical structure – not cultural iconoclasts, not stylistic pioneers, not figureheads of a youth movement and certainly not pop stars. And it’s never The Beatles, either, but Lennon and McCartney: canonical, surname-basis composing individuals. The other thing of course is that if you’ve heard of pop music you’ve heard of The Beatles. They’re by far the most visible pop band in history and it would have been astonishing to live through the sixties in the developed world and not have heard of them. Composers of Maxwell Davies’s type rarely mention slightly more recent or less well-known pop acts, not even Bowie or Eno let alone your Scritti Polittis, your Aphex Twins, your Burials or anything from black non-jazz pop traditions.

The saddest aspect of Maxwell Davies’s attitude to popular music is one that is typical of veteran musickers of his generation – that contemporary pop music is distastefully loud. Firstly, Maxwell Davies believes that he should listen to pop music at its supposed original ‘loud’ volume (like many of his generation he sees live performance as the only true musical format) so as to appreciate it As The Composer Intended, except he doesn’t because he fears for his delicate, finely-tuned composer’s ears. Secondly, what he refers to as the loudness of the music, to the extent that it even actually applies, is a surface characteristic so basic and superficial as to be practically absent to fans – Maxwell Davies’s complaint is in the same bigoted mode in which many people resist music they say ‘sounds classical’, ‘sounds weird’, ‘sounds council estate’ (as someone actually told me once) or ‘sounds ethnic’ because of basic surface features. Maxwell Davies then sneers at ‘all the hype’ that surrounds some of these newfangled pop stars. He himself owes an awful lot to hype, both back in the day and in his music currently being fed to students as part of their education. And again, this sneer at hype reveals the assumption that music should be abstract, pure, ‘only about the sounds’ rather than what it is: something that is appreciated in a human socio-cultural context, anchored in real life. To a greater or lesser extent the hype, the image, the mythology, the context, the extra-musical socio-cultural meaning, whatever it is – the human ritual – is always a part of the overall aesthetic package of musicking. There is no music without it, only sounds.

Max’s co-star Harry, or Harrison Birtwistle.
So these, I’m sorry to say, are the attitudes of the Master of the Queen’s Music. Not the Master of the Queen’s Classical Music, not the Master of the Queen’s Orchestral Music, not the Master of the Queen’s (horrible words) Serious or Art Music (whatever that would mean, note too that the epithet ‘Queen’s’ is going to narrow the field considerably) – again we encounter the assumption that music, and here the most valuable, nationally sanctioned music, is always already classical music. It makes you wonder whether a load of ravers should crash a concert at Windsor Castle. Well, relative to the diverse aesthetic achievements and possibilities of music as a whole, Maxwell Davies’s patch is very, very tiny.

Happily, a much younger generation of composers is beginning to inch away from the stagnant aesthetic prescriptions that dominate the upper echelons of contemporary classical music. Among them is Anna Meredith, the stereotype-smashing orchestral composer who appeared on camera helping Goldie with his composition. I first heard her work at a South Bank concert a few years ago that ended with her flak, a gripping torrent of sound incorporating electric guitars and an array of tom-toms performed amid strings of orange flashing fairy lights. Meredith’s sound isn’t always startlingly new, it often recalls the pointillist-minimalist textures of seventies/eighties John Adams and the violent, irregular modernity of some inter-war European classical music, but there’s a lot more of her career to come. Overall, Meredith’s work offers an earthier, more visceral experience of the senses rather than a specialist science of composition, and that’s a very timely breath of fresh air. One listener tellingly ***commented, ‘Meredith’s music sounds like bang smash crunch – but she doesn’t demand you treat it as the pronouncements of a guru. It’s only sounds – enjoy it!’, an opinion reflecting the more liberated aesthetics of John Cage, and about time too.

Anna Meredith in a much more encouraging composer photograph.
It’s nice to see that Meredith has a myspace page you’d imagine she maintains herself: top friends include Björk and The Postal Service, and some examples of a dabbling in electronic music can be heard there. It’s difficult to get as enthusiastic about these pieces as with her orchestral music, especially if you’re acquainted with the kinds of complex, inventive energy more popular electronic music styles have offered, leading one to wonder if a reciprocation of Classic Goldie is in order, seeing Meredith ‘faced with the challenge’ of producing material she’d have to mix into an hour-long DJ set, with a little help from Goldie along the way. Actually you feel it wouldn’t be all that tough for her, but if Goldie’s ‘mentor’ Ivor Setterfield were put in that position, well, that would be an interesting turning of the tables (BBC, if you’re reading…).

In 2003 Meredith and a few like-minded colleagues also born in the late seventies / early eighties, Emily Hall, Charlie Piper, Mark Bowden and Chris Mayo (who was also helping Classic Goldie out), founded the Camberwell Composers Collective, which, in a departure from the usual structures of classical performance, ran a night at the Crypt jazz club in Camberwell. Recalling the New Music Manchester group that included Maxwell Davies and Harrison Birtwistle, the move does have a fresh sense of camaraderie in a context where composers only ever seem to come one at a time. Like Meredith’s website, the collective’s myspace page and camberwellcomposerscollective dot com is decorated by Anna’s sister Eleanor Meredith, and makes a U-turn away from the slick, funereal austerity and tediously predictable use of notational iconography that invariably forms the visual language of New [Classical] Music flyers and websites (as if music, as Stravinsky and Eduard Hanslick blinkeredly argued, connotes nothing but itself, its own textual specifics), even if the collective’s musical style itself doesn’t make such a U-turn, or not nearly as a dramatically.

The Camberwell Composers Collective: something to smile about?
Meredith and the Camberwell Composers Collective ought to discourage the growing sense among young composers that anyone who wants to get somewhere interesting should jump the apparently sinking ship of the British contemporary classical music establishment and put their hopes into jazz or record labels and their networks (John Zorn’s Tzadik label is a great place to find alternative composers, for example). One could argue that the change they represent within the establishment doesn’t go far enough, that it’s too subtle compared to the radical rethinking that’s necessary, but hopefully a new generations of composers will be inspired by their work enough to bring its relatively broader outlook with them to the academic study of composition.

If we discard the notion that Classic Goldie cynically tested the drum and bass producer against the artistic legitimation of ‘high culture’ (and tentatively I think that in the end we can), then one of the most provocative ideas to have come out of the documentary was that orchestral music was just another tool in Goldie’s – or anyone’s – musical cabinet. It’s clear that Goldie himself likes to see it that way, but when Morley mentions Goldie’s conducting and asks him whether he’d like to be seen as ‘a classical musician’, he responded that he’d like to be remembered as ‘a man of our times… a renaissance man’. Though he was probably looking for a word that would encompass his painting as well as his music, he wouldn’t say ‘composer’, because that word customarily excludes ‘drum and bass producer’ – like most people he probably doesn’t truly see ‘producers’ as part of a connecting, unifying continuum (however broad) with the composers of traditional orchestral music, which was what Setterfield was constantly suggesting in his mildly patronising but well-meaning manner.

Hands down my favourite composer photograph. Composers (plural, at last) playfully participating in real life (they’re at a bus stop and there ’s even, gasp, a member of the public involved). Steve ‘Kode9’ Goodman and The Spaceape are multi-talented musickers. The former’s recently released book ‘Sonic Warfare’ further underlines his status as a modern-day musical Renaissance man. He lives in Camberwell I believe, but the Camberwell Composers Collective doesn’t (yet) seem broad enough in its definition of the word ‘composer’ to accomodate his abilities.
Goldie was a composer before Classic Goldie. What’s developed is that he now works with a broader range of music. By exploring both orchestral music and drum and bass, Goldie begins to demonstrate the intriguing potential in the broadest, most inclusive definition of the word ‘composer’, and despite his first orchestral outing regurgitating certain well-established classical formulae (the epic narrative, the orchestra-as-universe, Latin language) I have a lot of time and respect for Goldie the composer. Even more inspiring are the ideas he describes to Morley about bringing classical music to a wider audience, about relaxing the rules of appreciation and consumption that have grown up around classical music: ‘have a few beers, have a listen to that, see what you think about that’, ‘if we’re gonna do it now, we need to change it now… I wanna hear those new composers’, and holding concerts with several different conductors performing different works. Goldie recognises that some of those aesthetic and performative regulations are fossilising (i.e. slowly replacing organic tissue with stone) the works of the past, putting them on ‘such a fucking pedestal’. As a composer and as an all-round musicker, he represents an exciting step towards a broader musical freedom.

Segue Finale

To pick up from my foamy review of Fear of Music and come to terms with this blog’s habit of trolling: musical composition, listening and appreciation shouldn’t be regulated and constrained with implicit prescriptions, assumptions, prejudices, reductions, but rather should be expanded and emancipated toward the inner and outer limits of possibility and beyond. This detrimental fantasy of a state of what is sometimes called ‘ignorance’ or ‘incorrectness’ regarding any music shouldn’t push listeners into either hate-filled antipathy or cap-doffing humility (as with many, Stubbs’s Manichean project was paranoia over the former fuelled by seeing things through the lens of the latter, thus he enforced the marginalising musical-aesthetic dichotomy whose very injustice he sought to portray). Such one-dimensional, fear-motivated religious faith-acts of unconditional disrespect or unconditional respect stand in the way of flexible, imaginative engagement with music new or old, in any and all of its forms.

How can it be shown that music is a rich and diverse but accessible mystery?

I wrote this back in September, but a recent post by Simon Reynolds anticipated the issues in my opening paragraph. I agree with him on the place of close musical commentary in writing on music not necessarily holding any more weight as proof than other critical approaches, and I never mean them to. Blow by blow musical commentaries can make for horrible prose, but they do form one possible avenue of evidence-based argument in any discourse on music. Postgrad music students I know confess to skimming such passages and taking the concluding sentence on faith unless it's absolutely necessary.

This is the third part in a four-part series of essays on musical pasts, presents and futures. The other parts are:

1. ‘Hauntology: The Past Inside the Present’.
2. ‘The Premature Burial: Burial the Pallbearer vs Burial the Innovator’.
4. ‘The Twenty-First-Centry Modern Composer’.

The Premature Burial: Burial the Pallbearer vs Burial the Innovator

Cover art for Burial’s second album Untrue by Burial.
Rouge's Foam - The Premature Burial: Burial the Pallbearer vs Burial the Innovator. Here you can listen to this blogpost as spoken word and together with the musical examples. Download this as a high-quality mp3 and listen elsewhere by clicking the arrow on the right of the player.

What is Burial’s music ‘about’? What does it ‘do’? Come to think of it, what is his music? What does it mean? Of course, all of this is up to the listener’s imagination, but for a while now there’s been a certain degree of consensus on the answers to these questions: Burial ‘mourns the death of rave’, his music is (to paraphrase a handful of commentators) a ‘plaintive echo from a bygone era of collective energy’, ‘a melancholy, ghostly memory of the faded promise of rave, drenched in weathering and mired in urban decay’.

It’s difficult, not to mention pointless, to argue that this reading of Burial, derived from ‘hauntology’, is invalid. Its validity seems confirmed by interviews with the guy, even if the interviewers sometimes do come across as a bit leading. To dispute this reading would be intolerant, even mean-spirited – it’s as a pallbearer for rave that Burial takes on a powerful meaning for many of his fans, and why argue with that? Of course to see Burial in this way you’d first have to agree that rave is in some sense dead, and that’s a hotly disputed point. It’s a question I won’t try and answer here, largely because at the time rave was in its generally accepted heyday I was just getting into solid foods, but being reluctant to sit down and accept that I’ve arrived at a time when musical culture has declined almost to worthlessness, the ‘death of rave’ angle on Burial doesn’t really have any definitive meaning for me per se.

It’s a reading that’s solidifying into a naturalised collective interpretation of Burial though – his image within culture and history is being covered in six feet of earth. But this fresh, living and newborn voice still has a lot more to offer than the corpse of rave. There’s Burial the Pallbearer, but there are other Burials too.

Antoine Wiertz, The Premature Burial, 1854. Also the name of an Edgar Allan Poe short story.

Burial the Painter: Representations of London

I’m not necessarily saying that Pallbearer-inclined listeners are unaware of or ignoring these other Burials, but other ways into listening to the music can get somewhat neglected. One way of listening that has been described to a small extent in music criticism and by some listeners outside of the more underground urban music scenes however is Burial the Painter, who seems to portray the physical and emotional environments of his native Zone 2 London with startling familiarity. One of the common unconscious preconceptions of our time, particularly among those who might describe themselves as being ‘serious’ about music, is that music (as opposed to lyrics) is ‘autonomous’, ‘abstract’, largely meaningless, that music is ‘about music’ primarily, and ‘about’ anything else only secondarily and weakly, that it exists wholly or partly in a vacuum, separate from and above any external worlds – that it’s pure sound and not sound with worldly meaning. Burial the Painter challenges these preconceptions by revealing a music that can be in constant, detailed and illustrative dialogue with a worldly reality that listeners can recognise and relate to, not just enriching the world but reflecting and embodying it too.

How does Burial paint London so effectively? Part of the appeal is that it’s so difficult to pin this down: he does nothing so simple as recording the sounds of the streets, the voices and traffic, and even were he to do this, it would only amount to only one dimension of the city, that of the sonic. The only non-musical samples he uses come from a small number of films and contemporary computer games. Burial’s representational skill works through subtle association rather than strict reproduction. As images, his tracks reveal all kinds of recognisable detail, but he’s not a photographer so much as an impressionist painter.

James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Nocturne in Grey and Gold: Snow in Chelsea, 1876. Whistler painted London in the late nineteenth century and gave many of his paintings musical names like ‘Harmony’, ‘Symphony’ and ‘Variations’. A nocturne is a piece of music aiming to invoke the night, and Whistler’s nocturnes are night scenes. Burial’s music can be seen as a contemporary take on the nocturne genre.

Burial the Painter is an ally of Burial the Pallbearer because his tracks have a loose but appreciable resonance with dance music styles like rave, jungle, 2-step garage and dubstep, which contribute many of the associations that specify the Zone 2 London of the early twenty-first century. The light, nimble beats may remind you of 2-step, the shadowy bass sounds a bit like a junglist hoover sound, the vocals are a fractured reflection of RnB and rave’s soul divas – these are all musical symbols of Zone 2 London because they’re aspects of musics that come from there and that are listened to by many Londoners.

Burial references other musical styles that can seem to address more historical aspects of the London environment, though, and sometimes he seems to look back to the 1890s just as much as the 1990s. ‘Archangel’, from Untrue, is a fan favourite largely because of its excellent melodic vocal science (see below), but the sample of Romantic orchestral music that it’s built around is also a major part of its appeal. It samples the intro video to the Playstation 2 game Metal Gear Solid 2 at a point when the game’s protagonist, having technologically rendered himself invisible, jumps off a suspension bridge in torrential rain with his arms spread out angelically. The sample exemplifies contemporary orchestral music written for epic films and computer games (dominated by strings, untexted mixed choir etc.), which itself is derived from the classical music of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. More specifically, the sample’s pseudo-baroque harmony and grandiose, orchestrated melancholy could point to the late Victorian and Edwardian urban Gothic grandeur that still forms an important part of the Zone 2 London cityscape. This Gothicism is particularly characteristic of areas that didn’t usually lie underneath the flight-paths of the Luftwaffe and/or were historically well-off areas, such as the south-west (Burial went to school in Putney and the Wandsworth area is depicted on the cover of his self-titled debut LP).

Extract from ‘Archangel’, featuring the orchestral sample.
The sample could be a choral snippet from a lavishly orchestrated Romantic performance of Bach’s St Matthew Passion, held in the Royal Albert Hall on a rainy November evening in the late nineteenth century as the Bach revival was in full swing – the Victorian RAH isn’t a gothic building but it is a venue where you can hear rain drumming on the rooftop. I’m also reminded of composers like Brahms (German but popular in the homes of the Victorian middle classes), Hubert Parry and particularly the Elgar of the theme to his Enigma Variations, which shares many musical similarities with the Metal Gear Solid 2 sample, such as the speed, orchestration, stepwise harmonic motion, minor mode and their related keys (Enigma’s opening is in G minor, ‘Archangel’ is in the harmonically next door C minor, and both put emphasis on the subdominant chord/key during the course of the melody).

Opening of the theme from Elgar’s Enigma Variations.
‘Forgive’ loops a sample thought to be from Brian Eno’s ‘An Ending (Ascent)’ which is a synthesiser piece, but Burial’s reverb makes it sound nonetheless grandly orchestral. I know they’re not there, but I swear I can hear symphonic French horns and trombones in the mix. Burial’s London is a place where distantly-heard echoes of contemporary urban music reverberate against a backdrop of rain-eroded Victorian schools, stations, churches, cemeteries and prisons.


The connection of Burial’s music with London goes beyond the simple association of certain musical styles with the places where they’re produced or celebrated, however. Sound effects, again taken from films and video games, also play an important part. In the context of this music the metallic noises of falling gun cartridges, drawn jungle knives and rifles being reloaded in the music are not so much threatening indicators of urban warfare as the non-specific background sound of an inhabited industrialised environment. The ubiquitous hiss and crackle of vinyl records that overlaps with recordings of rain on empty streets has been seen as a metaphor for (musical, cultural) decay, which it can be, but in a less complicated sense it describes the dirty, weathered and rainy streets of London with amazing efficiency.

The subject matter in these paintings of London isn’t usually very specific, even with the descriptive track titles, and nor should it be – again, Burial’s depictions are emotional reflections and impressionistic atmospheres rather than literal reproductions. Perhaps this is an obvious point, but it’s worth a second thought. ‘Night Bus’ manages to convey what it’s like to wait for or ride one of London’s night buses home at 2am, but there’s no glazed robotic voice reminding us ‘One seven one. To. Bellingham, Catford Bus Garage’, no constantly shifting crowd of tightly-squeezed passengers and no rumble of giant diesel engines. Instead, there’s the intermittent sound of rain in the middle distance and a slow, simple, pulseless minor-feel melody in the treble with an echoing, heavily processed vocal phrase nestled gracefully at its core: semi-conscious rumination around a couple of ideas in a beautifully basic mood, largely isolated from the surroundings. ‘Night Bus’ perfectly reflects the vaguely melancholy, half-asleep state of mind you’re in at the end of an exhausting night out, still a rainy hour’s travelling and walking away from home and a warm but lonely bed. Burial’s London has the emotion painted in too.

Burial the Storyteller: Text and Narrative

Instrumental music generally gives rise to meaning by association or connotation, unlike pictures or words, which have relatively specific (or denotive) meanings, but a piece of music can still tell a story by manipulating its connotative elements over time. Burial’s music has the best of both worlds because it incorporates recorded sound effects (sonic photographs, really) alongside sampled speech. By combining these specifically meaningful sound-objects with the more ethereal language of musical connotation, Burial acquires a unique and strangely gripping ability to tell mysterious and open-ended stories.

Whistler, Nocturne in Grey and Silver, 1873-5.

This dimension of Burial’s music comes out a lot more clearly on his beatless tracks because they’re generally a lot less closely repetitious, allowing narratives to develop more broadly and richly. A simple example of Burial the Storyteller is the short untitled track at the very start of Untrue. It begins with a sample from David Lynch’s recent film Inland Empire, an African American woman saying ‘I saw your light. It burns forever’ (as ever with Burial the inability to clearly hear what’s being said adds to the mystery, for a long time I heard the second part as ‘It binds the ether’). Then three different types of vinyl hiss and crackle enter, some loosely pitched reverby tones fade in and suddenly a deep, menacing note passes through a quick filter envelope and recedes. It’s as if we see a fleeting glimpse of something horrifying – like slowly opening a decomposing book, finding a horrible picture inside and then closing it quickly, unable to look, or like rolling away clothes, seeing a terrible wound and covering it up again. The unease lingers on the metallic, chromatically-rising tones like a bad memory or a sense of panic, but then the more sedate ‘Archangel’ begins shortly afterwards.

The untitled opening track of Untrue.
In forty-six seconds, Burial has told a compelling – and frightening – story. Who says these opening words, and why? Why the tone of spirituality? More pressingly, what’s the relationship between the opening voice and whatever it was that happened next? Did she show something, do something? Was something done to her? It’s fitting that Burial sampled a Lynch film, as his musical storytelling method has a lot in common with the director’s cinematic storytelling method. Both rely on connotation and mood to create effective stories when the conventions of specified meanings break down, raising questions rather than answering them, and it’s this disorientation that makes Lynch’s films so much more terrifying that conventional horror films. In fact, Lynch’s films contain many instances of carefully constructed atmospheres of anticipation climaxing into a moment of shock just like the untitled opening of Untrue – the monster that suddenly walks out from behind the wall at the back of the Wendy’s restaurant in Mulholland Drive, for example, and the moments in Inland Empire when Laura Dern’s face suddenly becomes grossly distorted.

Where ‘Night Bus’ could be a relatively static painting of someone on or waiting for a bus at night, tracks like Untrue’s ‘Endorphin’ tell a much more complex and ambiguous story. A minute-long segment in C minor of soft tones, multi-layered crackle and looping rave synth sounds featuring the slowed-down and pitch-shifted words ‘…and you see all these flashing blue lights’ is repeated in its entirety. At the end of the second iteration there’s an abrupt ending of this material, leaving only dislocated reverb, then suddenly new material for the last thirty-five seconds fades in. In this coda it’s started raining and we quickly modulate to a strange new key (ultimately F sharp minor, which is harmonically the furthest you can get away from C). A final cadence falls into place, its oddly emphasised penultimate chord a caustic open fifth on E natural (E and B natural are both notes that are very dissonant and out of place in C minor), which really creates a burning sensation. Then the downward octave-leap at the end confirms the arrival in a new and slightly disturbing harmonic place. The story has an AAB structure, and there has been a major development: something dramatic has happened, harmonic ‘home’ is now far away and we’re not taken back there. The quoted speech and the title are clues whose significance is unclear, enhancing the mystery rather than clarifying anything.

The end of ‘Endorphin’.
Another beatless track on Untrue, ‘In McDonalds’, ends with the words ‘you look different’ just as the music has died to deep, reverberating hum. These words, spoken by the mother of the main character in the film Bullet Boy, have been slowed down and deepened, so ironically it’s whoever says these words that sounds different. We’re listening from the perspective of an implied first person whose transformed state (i.e. the change in appearance noted by the second person) is further demonstrated by their strangely altered hearing at the moment a friend or relative expresses concern, as if they're on the threshold of a bad drug trip or something more supernatural. What happened ‘in McDonalds’?

The end of ‘In McDonalds’.

Burial the Singer: Unquantised Melody and Vocal Science

The end of ‘In McDonalds’ is an elegantly simple instance of Burial using electronic manipulation of voice to powerful expressive effect, and he does it in more elaborate ways throughout his work, particularly on Untrue. The complex electronic alteration of rhythm and pitch in vocal samples to create new, cyborg melodies is referred to as ‘vocal science’. It’s a hallmark of recent underground dance music and Burial is an innovator and a master of it. The name ‘vocal science’ clearly comes from people who believe this kind of music to be a rational, painstaking and objective exercise (ugh), and it’s slightly misleading because although complex technical wizardry is often required, it’s still very much an art(form) and can be likened to older traditions of decorative improvised singing.

John Atkinson Grimshaw, Spirit of the Night.
Burial himself doesn’t sing on his tracks (as far as I know), but he does construct a personal singing voice for himself by reshaping vocal fragments selected from pre-existing music, positioning rhythm, pitch and EQ with precision just like any other vocal performance. His vocal science is an inventive and artful balance of melodic grace and rough rhythmic collage achieved through the re-engineering of found sound. The results are junkyard sculptures that point to new and undiscovered worlds of vocal-melodic expressivity.

Perhaps the most striking aspect of Burial’s voice is its inhuman, androgynous quality. By always shifting the pitch of the vocal samples up or down, male voices take on a feminine or childlike quality and female voices take on a masculine quality respectively, something Burial has described as ‘sexy as fuck’. In fact, this pitch-shifting is so complex and widespread among Burial’s tunes that categories like ‘male’, ‘female’, ‘child’, ‘adult’, ‘black’ and ‘white’ are entirely left behind. In this way Burial’s voice can be seen as a Utopian fantasy, poignantly representing an ideal Self or an ideal Other, as in the legend of Pygmalion, about a sculptor who creates the perfect woman out of ivory. I use the phrase ‘Burial’s voice’ in two senses, as in simply ‘the voice of Burial’ but also describing something created by Burial – as in, appropriately, ‘Frankenstein’s monster’.

A still from The Truman Show, a film written by Andrew Niccol, in which the eponymous hero re-assembles the face of his lost love from scraps found in magazines. Another Niccol film, S1m0ne, about a beautiful computer-generated actress, also parallels Pygmalion and Frankenstein.
On ‘Archangel’, as on other tracks, Burial’s voice is a transcendent post- (or pre-) human, an angel that professes its love (‘holding you, loving you, kissing you’) in a broken voice both soothing and gothically lachrymose, and promising from a supernatural plane that with all this ‘[you] wouldn’t be alone’.

Burial turns the possibilities of unquantised rhythms (i.e. rhythms that don’t line up to a metronomic pulse) to his expressive advantage, using a subtle, precision earliness or lateness to make the voice seem like it’s breaking with emotion. This can be heard noticeably in ‘Etched Headplate’, but the most powerful instance is in ‘Near Dark’. A sample of the words ‘I can’t take my eyes off you’ is repeated over an over, pitch-shifted into different variations to create a great eight-bar melody. Listen to how each phrase is rhythmically placed though: the first one, an initial proposition, is slightly early, anticipating the drop of the main material, so seems to be nervously rushing ahead. In the second phrase, which forms a response to or development of the first, we notice that the ‘I can take my…’ half of the phrase is too fast, but then it slows more to align with the beat, and the final note differs from that of the first phrase, implying a new harmonic direction. The third phrase is the one that really gets you – it’s a calculated fraction of a second late as if pained, reluctant to carry on. It also returns to the harmony of the first phrase like an insistent denial of the second phrase, and after this the fourth phrase is late too. Rhythmically, the sample moves like a fish in a stream, sometimes swimming against the current of the beat, sometimes propelled forward by it, all with an effortless shifting of fins. Emotionally, it’s like a subtle, perfectly timed acting performance that sends a shiver down the spine.

The main melody of ‘Near Dark’, with phrases labelled.
Occasionally people ask whether the effects of techniques like unquantisation are ‘accidental’, in accordance with the ancient, glorious and undying traditions of skepticism towards new art along with rhetoric about drugs, infantilism, mental illness, savagery, degeneracy, disrespect of tradition etc etc. It’s irrelevant really. Burial, whatever musical training he has or hasn’t had, clearly does possess a remarkable ear for inventive rhythm (as well as for melody, harmony, texture, structure, sampling) and ‘Near Dark’ has to be one of the finest uses of electronic unquantisation, this brand new musical technique, that I know of. You don’t write a tune like ‘Archangel’ and then fail in your intentions to line rhythms up ‘properly’.

Whistler, Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket, 1870s. About this painting art critic John Ruskin said: ‘The ill-educated conceit of the artist... approached the aspect of willful imposture... I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face.’

Burial the Poet: Words, Phrases and Sentences.

There are lots of ways to construct a melody, but a particularly effective method is to string together a series of sub-phrases that respond to and develop each other, often along the lines of the so-called ‘question and answer’ (also known as ‘call and response’, or more technically ‘antecedent and consequent’) pattern beloved of music teachers. There could be any number of equivalents to poetry in music, but to pick just one: the construction of melody mirrors the structural balancing acts of poetry that take place up and down the hierarchical levels of words, phrases, sentences and stanzas or paragraphs.

Whistler, Symphony in Green and Violet, 1868.
Burial the Poet operates in the area where close vocal science becomes large-scale storytelling, crafting musical phrases and sentences in an alien language with shifting, intangible meanings. Instead of nouns there are pitched tones, instead of verbs there are harmonic directions, instead of adjectives there are effects like filters, EQ and reverb, instead of rhyme, assonance and alliteration there are melodic logics like ‘call and response’, and instead of punctuation there is rhythm. This is a process most clearly exemplified in ‘Near Dark’ and ‘Archangel’. ‘Etched Headplate’ has a more irregular poetry, while ‘Ghost Hardware’ creates the line from a handful of disparate elements. In ‘Shutta’ an unusual phrase is constructed from four staccato chords that are harmonically embellished with vocals.

My favourite example of Burial the Poet is the main melody of the brand new track ‘Fostercare’ from the amazing 5 Years of Hyperdub compilation released recently. It’s an astonishing track, one of the strangest and most fascinating since ‘Shutta’. As poetry, the opening lines of the melody reach right inside you and hold a conversation with a part of you that you never knew existed.

The main melody of ‘Fostercare’, with phrases labelled.
This melody is unusual among Burial tracks in that it’s constructed from much smaller fragments of vocal samples, so there are no words to make out. We’re in C sharp minor, and the first phrase (the call) starts with an anacrusis (also a poetic term) by entering before and anticipating the harmonic downbeat. The first phrase ends, via an unquantised downward slide, on the minor third. The second phrase (the response) partially lines up harmonically with the bass, which cycles two bars of tonic (C sharp, home), one bar of G sharp and then a bar of the foreboding submediant (A major - we actually hear A major’s third over G sharp, a bar before the bass comes in with A). Here it’s not just the beginnings of the notes that are unquantised to great effect, but the ends too: there’s an odd semi staccato feel as the notes cut out slightly early that makes the voice sound timid. As in ‘Near Dark’, the third phrase is another ‘call’ and so echoes the first phrase. Here, though, it’s actually exactly the same as the first, which is what makes melodic sense here, but again Burial is cleverer than trite reiteration, and muffles the phrase with a low-pass filter, making brilliant use of technology that wasn’t available to the writers of expressive melody in the nineteenth-century.

Then the fourth phrase, another ‘response’, mirrors the second phrase accordingly, again, switching the harmony to the submediant. Now Burial’s bassline, powerful as it is, is pretty simple, just a loop of three notes, so he’s running out of ways to keep his melody fresh by the time he gets to the fifth phrase, (which is a new ‘call’ and could be thought of as the beginning of a new sentence), so he changes his game. Instead of using anacrusis as he did before, he does the opposite, waiting until the downbeat has passed before the notes of the fifth phrase start, now quite close to where a sixth phrase should be. This phrase actually takes place halfway between where the fifth phrase and the sixth phrases should be were the phrases coming in at the same rate as before.

Whistler, Nocturne: The River at Battersea, 1878.
All the fifth phrase does after the first note is bounce back and forth between two more notes, the third and fourth scale degrees. With traditional notes, traditional paper and traditional conventions of melody, this seems a little weak, a rather flat gesture (though deliberate imperfection or naivety like this is something you often find in Schubert or Schumann). Played on an acoustic instrument it wouldn’t sound that great, but Burial’s unquantised rhythms and manipulative vocal science really bring the phrase to life with a judiciously controlled articulation that no acoustic composer could possibly hope to notate for a performer. That Burial manages to turn such a relatively dull phrase into something like this is yet another example of how he’s made advanced use, practically unprecedented in its sophistication, of the medium of electronic composition to multiply the possibilities of composition as a whole.

The fifth phrase was a ‘call’, but even though we’re left hanging and the bass implies that a response is due – there isn’t one. In fact, the melody stops right there, even as the background harmonic parts carry on as before. The melody was an irregular six bars long but the background harmony carries on to the regular eight bar mark, and then goes on for a further eight bars without any melody as if it were a dub version. After this, new material comes in that offers a new beat but now doesn’t even have any harmony. The track sounds ‘unfinished’: as it carries on it boldly puts a highly tense lack of melodic (and then harmonic) material in the foreground.

Whistler, Nocturne: Trafalgar Square, 1876.

Burial the Architect: Texture, Form and Cadence

‘Fostercare’ is the inverse of conventional expectations of structure, an ‘Archangel’ robbed of its melodic material just as it was getting going. This is another example of Burial’s storytelling ability (think of this structural outline in the context of the track’s title), but it’s also a notable outing for Burial the Architect.

Conventionally speaking, there are two dimensions in which music can be subject to structural or what could be called architectural design: the horizontal and the vertical. The horizontal axis is time, while the vertical axis spans the variety of sound produced in a single moment – usually this means pitch but timbre and frequency in general could also count. Construction across the horizontal time axis is often called ‘form’, while construction across the vertical axis could be called ‘texture’. In practice it’s ultimately quite difficult to notionally separate the two categories, just as a building is (to add on another dimension) a three-dimensional object and not a pair of two-dimensional objects at right angles, hence the analogy of ‘architecture’.

Whistler, Nocturne in Blue and Gold: Old Battersea Bridge, 1872.
A key two-dimensional structural point in many musical styles is the cadence, an event which can bring structural harmony both to a close and to a new beginning. Really well done cadences have been rare since the nineteenth century and they’re often barely more than vestigial in contemporary popular music. Burial, though, seems obsessed with them, creating layered and innovative cadences almost out of nowhere with startling creativity. New voices and sounds will suddenly enter to accentuate a cadence, heighten the anticipatory tension and then bring it home to release of that tension. This is particularly noticeable in ‘Distant Lights’ and ‘Etched Headplate’, where Burial uses a single cello tonic note to bring out the cadences while that surreptitious leaping bass approaches from beneath.


Burial’s approach to structure is usually pretty fiercely original, but ‘Ghost Hardware’ is one of Burial the Architect’s most inventive and accomplished edifices, showcasing his skill for form and texture at every level of structure, from the small to the larges scales. Burial has said that he’s not into long intros that slowly build everything up, but his alternative structures are not weakly abrupt, and here he manages to create a very short and detailed intro that works remarkably well. Satisfyingly paired down though it is, it nonetheless introduces many of the motifs that take on key structural roles as the track plays out before the anacrusis of the vocal phrase takes us elegantly to the drop. One of these is a quote from the film Girl With a Pearl Earring: Scarlett Johansson exclaiming ‘you looked inside me’ when she sees Vermeer’s portrait of her. Throughout the intro, Burial uses sound effects like he’s reinvented the medium of percussion and its structural logics (the break, the fill etc). The material for the intro is used in beatless secondary areas that periodically punctuate the track and contrast with the track’s main material, building in texture and heightening tension while the harmony remains rooted to the spot.


The primary texture of the track is dominated by a deep bass part that’s only used to present a bare minimum of load-bearing harmonic anchorage. It amounts to only two notes for the cadence at the end of the eight-bar ‘sentence’ and one more short note in the middle, irregularly positioned in bar four where bar five would have been the obvious, more even place for it. This is much like syncopation or unquantisation but on the much larger scale of bars rather than the pulse and its subdivisions. This economy of bass sets up a great interplay between areas of presence and areas of absence. Just as the difference between areas of low and high air pressure causes the wind to blow, so there’s an ebb and flow of anticipatory tension and release across the eight-bar ‘sentence’ – listen out for it, it’s something Burial’s very good at. Here, as in ‘Fostercare’, Burial is acutely and audaciously aware not just of exactly where to put notes, but where to leave them out.

Burial the 21st Century Composer

The Burials I’ve identified here are just some of angles from which to look at this multi-faceted composer. Of course, Burial is all of these things simultaneously – despite the necessarily sequential nature of this discussion, singing was never distinct from poetry, painting was never distinct from storytelling, poetry was never distinct from architecture. There are many more Burials too – others that I have or haven’t touched upon that could be recognised may include the Percussionist, the Audiophile, the Engineer, the Polyphonist, the Gamer, the Film-Watcher, the Music Fan, the Listener/Perceiver, the Orchestrator, the Gothic, the Socialist Realist, the Dancer, the Poststructuralist, the Bricoleur, the Romantic, the Diarist, the Raver, the Independent, the Victorian and the Myth. I feel that I’ve barely scratched the surface of what Burial offers here. Given all this it seems that effectively Burial is still anonymous, still to be discovered. It’d be a shame to prematurely make like we’ve got him sussed.

Whistler, Early Morning, 1878.
Many music critics compare contemporary music with the music of the past, sometimes favorably, often unfavorably. Taking the opposite approach, one could compare contemporary music to how music could be in the future. (Let’s not forget that the past is usually just as much of an unknown, just as subject to the clouding of ideology and bias, as the future can be). I’d like to think that rather than simply being a reminder of what we might’ve lost, Burial’s music is a foretaste of what’s to come.

Is Burial one of the first truly twenty-first century composers? Absolutely. His music has to be one of the most accomplished, sophisticated and personalised applications we have to date of the possibilities inherent in the technologies of twenty-first century electronic composition (and he pretty much used the bare minimum there) and the twenty-first century musical and sonic environment. But even Burial, astonishingly unique and innovative though his music is, keeps a loose grip on the stylistic conventions of Western music’s previous few centuries. Perhaps by making uniquely detailed inroads into post-experimental electronic musical style ahead of others, he’s paving the way for the detailed and articulate languages of newer, even bolder generations of composers.

So what does this word ‘composer’ mean, now that we’re in the twenty-first century?

Whistler, Nocturne in Grey and Gold: Westminster Bridge, 1871-2.
This essay is partly a response to this and partly inspired by Arnold Schoenberg’s essay ‘Brahms the Progressive’. Also want to mention that Burial the Ballardian was already on the list of Burials, and that Devil, Can You Hear Me, who writes a good blog, complained about the ‘codified aesthetic’ surrounding Joker while this post was still on the drawing board.

This is the second part in a four-part series of essays on musical pasts, presents and futures. The other parts are:

1. ‘Hauntology: The Past Inside the Present’.
3. ‘What is a [Classical] Composer?’.
4. ‘The Twenty-First-Centry Modern Composer’.