Richard McGregor

‘A METAPHOR FOR THE DEEPER WINTRINESS’: EXPLORING JAMES MACMILLAN'S MUSICAL IDENTITY

This article explores aspects of identity which underlie compositional processes in James MacMillans music. This is not intended as a critical discourse on identity as such, since this highly contested area is subject to ‘extensive and intensive controversy about how identity should be conceptualised in the wake of various anti-foundational critiques to which it has been subject’. Since in the course of this article I will use the essential concepts of ‘Scottish identity’ and ‘Catholic identity’ in particular as points of reference, it is necessary to show on what basis these terms have been conceived in relation to MacMillan.

‘The Blast Has Arrived at the Body’: Wolfgang Rihm’s Creative Explosion of 1981

The period from 1979 to 1982 was a key developmental time for Rihm. Starting from his time in Rome as recipient of the German Art Academy Fellowship, he commenced a series of works some of which were not completed until a year or more after his return from Italy. At this point, he began to articulate for himself a relationship with graphic arts and sculpture on the one hand, and poetical texts, often by schizophrenics, on the other. By the beginning of 1981, he was ready to express himself in written words on the relationship between music and painting, or more precisely, his relationship with the other art forms. His continuing association with the painter Kocherscheidt and his ‘discovery’ of Arnulf Rainer and Antonin Artaud gave him an impetus which propelled compositional developments in that year. Some works which had been started, such as the fourth string quartet, were completed but, ultimately dismissed as, in effect, belonging to his compositional past, rather than looking to the future. The works which followed the string quartet, and especially Tutuguri (and Tutuguri VI in particular), were pivotal in his developing compositional processes and aesthetic, but, the path forward was not always straightforward.

Wolfgang Rihm: Aspects of Unity and Diversity in His Compositional Processes

The fecundity of Wolfgang Rihm’s compositional invention allied to the broad sweep and depth of the intellectual engagement that underpins his work means that any attempt to encapsulate the totality of his ‘style and idea’ is bound to fail. The many facets which interact at all levels in both individual works, and through works that are united within some conceptual framework, are such that analytical exploration will be, at best, partial. Since Rihm’s reputation in Germany is now undeniable it is perhaps surprising then that there has been comparatively little English-language analysis of his compositional aesthetic and processes. Whereas in the 1970s it might have been convenient, and easier, to compartmentalise Rihm within the New Simplicity movement, his subsequent development has defied categorisation, despite attempts to label his compositional processes based on a perception that they are automatic and unplanned, the result of a ‘stream of consciousness’. Following on from this perception such analysis as has taken place has, as I have observed elsewhere, largely avoided structural or parameter investigation focussing rather more on the affective, often drawing on the composer’s own words as a starting point. The four authors represented in this special edition have variously attempted to get ‘under the skin’ of the music itself, while recognising and exploring the broader influences, or as Yves Knockaert puts it, allusions, the compositional imperatives, and the praxis that Rihm brings to each project. This collection begins appropriately enough with what might be termed a ‘hidden’ aspect of Rihm’s work—his relationship with the music of Franz Schubert. Appropriate, because Schubert was one of the first composers to be referenced in a work, indeed within the title itself, when Rihm wrote Erscheinung: Skizze über Schubert in 1978 (and by implication in Ländler the following year). Rihm’s interactions with the music and ideas of earlier composers, particularly those of the Romantic period have continued to baffle some commentators who might want to dismiss such an idea as somehow vaguely postmodern. Yet as Alastair Williams’ article shows, in passing, such allusions to composers of the past—not just Schubert, but Strauss, Mahler, Brahms and Contemporary Music Review, 2017 Vol. 36, No. 4, 203–206, https://doi.org/10.1080/07494467.2017.1399667

Walking the Line: Deconstructing Identity,Suicide and Betrayal in Peter Maxwell Davies’Mr Emmet Takes a Walk

This article explores how Peter Maxwell Davies uses thematic and structural devices to chart the means by which the title character in Mr Emmet Takes a Walk is led towards suicide. Discussion centres on how Davies integrates use of quotation and trademark musical gestures into the development of characterisation in order to explore different states of ‘reality, dream and waking fantasy’ by which he seeks to explain the reasons for Emmet’s suicide.

Stepping Out: Maxwell Davies’s ‘Salome’ as a Transitional Work

There have always been elements of ambivalence in Peter Maxwell Davies’s music. It is possible to perceive a tension between freedom and order in works as early as Alma Redemptoris Mater of 1957, though there the ‘freedom’ was heavily circumscribed within the musical texture. In that work the melismas, deriving from medieval models, decorate the controlling cantus line. Indeed melismatic lines which appear in various works of this early period are strictly controlled by the pitch organization despite being temporally free. An extension of this organizational idea can even be seen in the early children’s works, where freedom versus order is key to the musical argument, allied to the concern not to compromise the compositional technique despite writing for less accomplished players.