Howard Skempton - Works

Works

See also: List of compositions by Howard Skempton

Skempton's style is characterized by a concentration on the quality of sound and an economy of means, absence of development in the conventional sense, and concentration on sonority. Many pieces are also quite short, lasting no longer than one or two minutes. Although the compositional methods are clearly experimental (involving, for example, aleatory), there is a marked emphasis on the melody in many pieces, and already some of the earlier piano works (Saltaire Melody (1977), Trace (1980)) quickly became favorites of the public.

Formative influences on Skempton's music included Erik Satie, John Cage and Morton Feldman. For example, A Humming Song (1967), an early piano piece composed before Skempton started lessons with Cardew, is a miniature with static, gentle sound. The harmonic structure consists of eight symmetrically arranged pitches, out of which six are selected for use in the piece. Chance procedures are then used to determine the order and number of occurrences of individual pitches. The pianist is asked to sustain certain pitches by humming. Another early piece, Drum No. 1 (1969), composed for the Scratch Orchestra, consists of just a few written instructions to the performers and is clearly inspired by similarly realized works by La Monte Young, whose music Cardew was enthusiastically propagating in the late 1960s. The score of May Pole (1971), a piece for orchestra, consists of a chance determined sequence of chords. Each performer chooses a note from a chord, and chooses the moment when to play that note; the later, the softer the dynamics. Skempton later called such pieces "landscapes" that "simply project the material as sound, without momentum." Other early works include two pieces for tape, a medium Skempton rarely used later: Indian Summer (1969) and Drum No. 3 (1971).

The early 1970s saw a slow shift from static, abstract pieces to ones with a more clearly defined rhythmic and harmonic structure, although the methods and forms Skempton used remained unorthodox. For instance, in a series of Quavers piano pieces (1973–75) the music consists solely of repeated chords with no pauses between them. In addition to "landscapes", two other categories appeared, dubbed "melodies" and "chorales" by the composer. The "melodies" are single melodic lines either with simple accompaniment (Saltaire Melody, for piano (1977)) or suspended in space (later works such as Trace for piano (1980) and Bagatelle for flute (1985)). "Chorales" are works where material is presented primarily (or solely) using chords. An example is Postlude (1978), for piano, in contradistinction to Eirenicon 3 (1978), also for piano, which is a "landscape". The earlier "melodies" were apparently composed at the instrument, intuitively, whereas the later ones evolve from a series of written pitches.

It was also in the 1970s that Skempton started composing chamber works, although these were almost always for two performers, since they were written to be performed by the duo of Skempton himself and Michael Parsons. These pieces included a number of horn duos, pieces for two drums, and a duet for piano and woodblocks. Finally, in 1970s Skempton started playing accordion and composing for this instrument.

In 1980 Skempton composed Chorales, his first major work for orchestra. It was commissioned by the Merseyside Youth Orchestra. The composer described it as "essentially the same as what I was doing before, but on an orchestral scale". Although the work is clearly a "chorale" in the sense Postlude and similar pieces are, during the 1980s Skempton's range expanded greatly, leading to works such as The Durham Strike (1985), which is a set of piano variations that is longer than any of the previous piano pieces, Images (1989), a large cycle of piano works for a TV documentary, and chamber works scored for larger forces than those used previously.

Skempton's first major success came in 1991 after the premiere of Lento (1990), an orchestral piece that gained a larger audience for the composer. During the 1990s and the 2000s Skempton started composing longer works for larger forces. These include several concertos, among which are those for instruments rarely used in the Western tradition: the hurdy-gurdy (Concerto for hurdy-gurdy and percussion (1994)) and the accordion (Concerto for oboe, accordion and strings (1997)). Some of the later works explore non-standard instrumentation: Alveston (2007) is scored for four trumpets, Horizons (2001) is scored for oboe and harp, Ballade (1997) is a pieces for saxophone quartet and string orchestra.