20 UK composers just got 25k richer
NewsThe Paul Hamlyn Foundation has rolled out 20 awards of £25,000 each to a list of composers, ranging from classical and experimental to jazz and folk. The lucky note-pickers are:
Yazz Ahmed
Auclair
Shirley Collins
Tom Coult
Jayne Dent
Tim Garland
Simon Holt
Soweto Kinch (pictured)
Cassie Kinoshi
Ryan Latimer
Cassandra Miller
Aidan O’Rourke
Sophya Polevaya
Rowan Rheingans
Abel Selaocoe
Joe Snape
James B Wilson
I never came across of any of these names, except Simon Holt:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IgN17uWIx2A
… who writes the usual modern music stuff.
Meanwhile the really meaningful talents are ignored by such reward giving bodies: David Matthews, James Francis Brown, Peter Fribbins, and a number of others working quietly on recapturing some of the musical values destroyed by modernism. But establishments want to support aesthetics of half a century ago, as if the world had been frozen in 1965. They are comparable with the forces who want to continue to destroy the planet in spite of the realities of climate change. They are hopelessly conservative and reactionary.
It strikes me as unsupported to extrapolate judgements based on knowing the work of 1 out of 20 awardees, several of whom create in different sub-fields (e.g., jazz).
Yes, but it would have been normal if, from all those 20, there were at least SOME serious composers included. Say, three or four. But no…..
There’s nothing ‘usual’ about Holt’s remarkable canvasses of sound. The performance you’ve linked to is Northern Sinfonia / Zehetmair. Click on ‘Show more’ and read the description of the mythological ‘Lileth’ and then listen to the music with mind and imagination open. Or listen to Brabbins directing the same piece on NMCD094 – there is also ‘Kites’ there, the first piece of Holt’s I ever heard, plus Rattle conducting ‘Feet of Clay’. Varied, imaginative, vivid depictions. Like or loath the aesthetics of 1965 that you deride (I remember, as I had just started listening to contemporary music then), that has nothing to do with Holt’s pieces from the 1980s onwards.
A mind sufficiently open will find anything beautiful – is motivated to find anything beautiful because, in the end it wants beauty to be a mere opinion, it doesn’t want the values of pleasure to have anything like the substantive claims that objective values have. Why? Because this would make pleasure difficult, serious, consequential. And the open mind doesn’t want such commitments. Having an open mind without having also a strong sense of aesthetic value is the limit of meaninglessness – however personal your aesthetic may be, yet it must be something, something you are committed to, something you are, rather than a merely open mind. A nothing.
Huh?
Soweto Kinch is excellent!
Hm. I just started listening to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z910RCOZ67k and I wonder if he can even play his instrument. Shouldn’t he go and practice before going on stage? Or is it supposed to sound that ugly?
I know British music, and I’ve never come across any of those names except Simon Holt’s.