In the first of a four-part series, Peter Reynolds looks at different strands in contemporary music with a focus on composers in the immediate here and now. This week he writes about five composers now in their 30s and 40s, all writing very different kinds of music.
Alex Ross’ influential history of 20th-century music The Rest is Noise opened many listeners’ ears to a world often fenced around with barbed wire and “Keep Away” signs: contemporary classical music (you see – we don’t even have a proper name for it). In a world where gratification is increasingly instantaneous, contemporary music can ask the listener to take a leap into the unknown. These days, though, the range of different styles is enormous: from the mind-bending complexities of Brian Ferneyhough to the soft-focus choral style of Eric Whitacre.
30 years ago, musical genres were strictly demarcated, but now it’s difficult to know where “contemporary classical” ends and, say, the world of Björk begins – something that’s reflected in BBC Radio 3’s Late Junction slot on weekday nights. This ethos can be found in the work of many younger composers, maturing in an internet-dominated, pluralistic age, taking their influences and inspirations from whatever music comes to hand.
Anna Meredith shot to public fame when she was commissioned for the Last Night of the BBC Proms 2008. With typical flamboyance she composed a work for five orchestras, linked up through simultaneous broadcasts from around the United Kingdom. With an estimated listening audience of 40 million worldwide, it was a high-risk strategy, but also typical of her boldness. Recent commissions have included her Concerto for Beatboxer and Orchestra (2010), an opera for Aldeburgh, Tarantula in Petrol Blue (2009) and HandsFree (2012): a work for body percussion for the National Youth Orchestra.
Watch an interview with Anna Meredith Read our Composers Project interview with Anna Meredith
On the other side of the Atlantic, Vermont-born Nico Muhly has been dubbed the “planet’s hottest composer”. He casts his stylistic net wide, having worked with Antony and the Johnsons, Bonnie Prince Billy, as an editor and keyboard player for Philip Glass, and composing the music for the film adaptation of Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader. Yet he’s also on record as saying, “for me William Byrd’s music is the most fascinating thing ever, maybe because it’s so severe and restrained”. Muhly has a large portfolio of choral and orchestral works, including his violin concerto Seeing is Believing, and his first opera, Two Boys, seen at ENO in 2011 and coming to the Metropolitan Opera in New York very soon. It deals, says Muhly, “with the romance and the violence that come with living a life online”.