Ross Lorraine introduces the music of a
"new complexity" original, Roger Redgate
The first piece of Roger’s that I heard was the gripping
oboe solo Ausgangspunkte, written for his brother Chris. Although
composed twenty years ago, it has all the hallmarks of his mature
style, and still sounds as striking today, featured in the recent
Bmic Cutting Edge series. It is a classic of the ‘new complexity’
genre that Redgate helped to forge, along with such composers as
Michael Finnissy and Richard Barrett, his co-director of the groundbreaking
Ensemble Exposé. Like the music of Brian Ferneyhough, with
whom he studied in Germany, the piece makes huge demands on the
skill and endurance of the performer, but the element of sheer display
is tempered by a strong sense of direction and control – and
even, paradoxically, of restraint. It opens up a line in his career
towards such exhilarating solos as +R for clarinet, written ten
years later.
En route came Pas au-delà for piano which, despite its undoubted
rigour of construction and its purely modernist aesthetic, has something
of the natural, exuberant virtuosity of the best improvisation (reflecting
perhaps his interest in the music of Anthony Braxton and Ornette
Coleman) – even unleashing the unashamed ‘big climax’
of register and dynamics that such music often seems to call for.
Incorporating this flowing, intense and personal language into
ensemble music seems to have taken a little longer. Although his
String Quartet No 1 (1983) has a subtle and elusive quality that
is characteristic of him, the initial impression is of a very Webern-like
use of the angular yet lyrical phrases, carefully spaced and with
persistent fluctuations of tempo. Only towards the end, a long accelerando
leads to a climax which looks and sounds more like Ferneyhough,
the piece’s dedicatee; there then follows an even longer slowing
and disintegration into complex, sparse and novel string textures
that are completely his own. The journey of the piece seems to parallel
the distillation of a new, refined personal language from more generalised
historical antecedents.
Vers-Glas for 14 amplified voices (1990) seems more assured, consisting
of very beautiful, hovering harmonies that alternately coalesce
and disperse in an almost exhaustive array of vocal sounds, sometimes
gelling into a unity of line, only to burst away in fragmented groupings.
It is music that is meditative in the true sense: never sloppily
dreamy, but intense, taut and rich in detail.
Pierrot on the Stage of Desire (1998) for chamber ensemble has
a dramatic energy that shows another side of the composer. The instruments
speak as individual, often conflicting characters in a Commedia
dell’Arte play – the almost diabolical perversity of
spirit seems to pay tribute to Pierrot Lunaire by way of Le Marteau.
It has the intricate energy of a long piece condensed down in some
alchemical reduction in which the elements dance and spin together.
Roger Redgate’s music may be highly refined and ‘musicianly’,
but it is far from abstract or detached, engaging as it does with
the art, writing and philosophy of today and the recent past in
a manner more commonly associated with composers in continental
Europe. His range extends to music for film and television, collaborations
with experimental rock and performance art, and he is in demand
as a conductor as well as teaching composition and writing about
music. Although not yet exactly high profile or at least highly
fashionable in Britain, his pieces are already quietly establishing
themselves internationally as a group of works that repay many hearings.
When the dust settles, it is composers such as this who will emerge
as having something lasting to say.
Ross Lorraine 2000
Roger Redgate: Ausgangspunkte for solo oboe
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Roger Redgate
other contemporaries
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