on music and beauty

Tag: Julian Anderson

British music in Toronto

On the last day of February I was in Toronto, to take part in the performance of Julian Anderson’s Book of Hours with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. Together with Andrew Staniland, currently composer in residence with the orchestra, we looked after the electronics of the piece. Everything went really well, and the work was enthusiastically received.

The conductor was Oliver Knussen, and the programme also included works by Mark-Anthony Turnage, Gary Kulesha and Simon Bainbridge, all present at the concert, and at the dinner afterwards, in a fancy Italian restaurant by the telling nome of Grano (wheat). Grano is much more than just a restaurant, it is a stage for the Toronto artistic and cultural scene, under the amiable supervision of the owner Roberto.

The concert programme was quite peculiar: apart from Gary Kulesha, who is Canadian, the conductor and the other three composers were British. They also had in common the same composition teacher, John Lambert. When Olly described the qualities of his teacher I was immediately reminded of my own composition teacher, Azio Corghi. Both Corghi and Lambert’s students have vastly different musical styles, and they have all been able to develop their own original voice. Far from promoting a school or a house style, Lambert and Corghi seem to have been more keen on perfecting their own type of musical maieutics. They help (or helped, in the case of Lambert, who died in 1995) the students to find their own voice, without trying to impose any aesthetic or artistic rule. It is not an easy way of teaching, because, in true Socratic spirit, it forces the teacher to look at things from the pupil’s perspective.

Gifted artists like them have devoted a great part of their life to teach the younger, limiting their own creative output in order to pass on their knowledge to the next generation. From them we learn a profound moral lesson, not just an artistic one.

Julian Anderson

In 2004 I collaborated with Julian Anderson and BCMG – the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group – on the realisation and performance of the electronics of a large-scale ensemble work by the composer, Book of Hours, commissioned by BCMG. I worked with Julian in the Conservatoire’s studios and performed the electronics – together with Jonathan Green, at the Birmingham premiere on 28 January 2005 and at the second performance in Manchester the following day. Both concerts were conducted by Oliver Knussen. BEAST, the Birmingham Electroacoustic Sound Theatre at the University of Birmingham also took part in the project, with Scott Wilson as sound engineer.

Commissioned through the Sound Investment scheme, Book of Hours takes its name from the elaborately illuminated medieval manuscripts that divided the day into eight segments, or ‘hours’. The work does not literally portray or depict either of the medieval artefacts but it aims to explore – and somehow unite – the relationships between these very old objects and the very latest technology.

Book of Hours, published by Faber Music, won the Royal Philharmonic Society award for large-scale composition in 2006. The Manchester performance was recorded by the BBC and has been released on CD by NMC Recordings.

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