Contemporary music in the 1990’s has developed
a parallel stream to the ‘new complexity’ style of Ferneyhough,
Barrett, Dillon et al, which has seen composers using a simple,
pared down language. Tim Parkinson writes on one of its more underrated
progenitors.
Laurence Crane’s miniatures present a return to figuration
after abstraction, a return to clarity after excess, and a return
to singularity after multiplicity.
The material chosen is familiar; mostly consonant, often tonal,
triads, elementary chords, old well-used intervals rescued from
a previous unjust ignorant redundancy.
The familiar sound or image is abstracted by being placed in a
new clean and often isolated context, like a museum glass case.
Its innate value is respected by it remaining alone, unornamented
and unaffected during the course of the piece by any development
or transformation, the image staying as and where it is by being
gently reiterated or prolonged so that it holds our full attention.
The clear structure is held in functions so that we can observe
the original material only from one or two other angles. Consequently
any tonality inferred is abstracted and becomes non-functional and
non-subservient to any dialectic.
His pieces sit in varying degrees between two poles:
On one hand there are the outwardly humorous pieces, such as the
set of songs entitled Weirdi, using material that mocks itself and
its genre, for example in the over-reiteration of a seemingly banal
gesture in the prelude. This combined with the texts of the songs
– New Music Weirdo, Fat Cat CC, The Hall is Good, Balanescu
and Get the Funny Police – present a wry ironic awareness
of a music and music community that occasionally takes itself too
seriously.
On the other hand there are the more objective abstract pieces
such as Riis, Sparling or Trio, entirely without programme, the
intention being to present music objects that articulate structures
of purity, with no extra-musical concerns.
The detachment and restraint is an aspect that makes this music
very English in its manner, also reflected in its understatement
and self-mockery or self-apology. It also has a down-to-earth quality,
the familiarity of the material connecting more with the every day
than the imagined, and an honesty which suggests more an awareness
of knowing exactly how to say exactly what it has to say, without
boring anyone with irrelevant display or ostentation – just
clear presentation.
Extract from Estonia © Laurence Crane 2001
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Laurence Crane
other contemporaries
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