Why I no longer compose concert works professionally

I’ve come to recognise that the contemporary music world is not where my work belongs. Its ideological stranglehold on what ‘authentic’ music should do — and its tendency to prioritise cleverness, theory, and cultural signalling over human contact — ultimately made me realise that I was a fish out of water there. Over time, I also began to feel that there was little room for someone of my background and profile within the current climate. That feeling, though difficult to face, clarified my thinking.

My musical instinct has always been towards movement, towards affect, towards the audience — and that was never quite understood or valued in that scene. Rather than continuing to fight for a place in a system whose values contradict my own, I’ve chosen to move on. My past technique isn’t lost. It now informs a new direction: writing music that exists for people, not institutions.

While I’m no longer composing concert works professionally, I have not renounced the medium. If such music emerges in the future, it will do so quietly and on my own terms — without expectation, justification, or the need for it to belong to any particular world.

Birtwistle and the vanishing space for seriousness

When I look at Harrison Birtwistle’s career, I see a composer who managed to inhabit the arts world without being consumed by it. He didn’t ingratiate, didn’t brand himself, didn’t tweet manifestos. He simply built a language of his own and kept working until institutions had to come to him. It’s a model that feels almost impossible now.

Birtwistle emerged in an era that, for all its bureaucracy, still valued difficulty. The BBC could justify supporting a “challenging” composer because seriousness itself was a cultural currency. There was room for the awkward, the uncompromising, the mysterious. Today’s institutions have inverted that logic: their currency is accessibility, alignment, and the visible performance of virtue. The former was human; the latter bureaucratic.

In the 1950s, William Glock asked Stravinsky what he thought of a young Harrison Birtwistle. Stravinsky’s reply was favourable, and that was enough: Glock decided Birtwistle was worth supporting. It’s hard to imagine such an act today, when curators must justify every decision with policy language and demographic balance sheets. Once, a single pair of trusted ears could change a career; now, belief has been replaced by consensus. The idea that a work might be championed purely on aesthetic conviction feels almost quaint — a relic of an era when institutions still believed in art as a domain of taste rather than compliance.

Later, Pierre Boulez’s advocacy would perform a similar function on the international stage. When Boulez took up Birtwistle’s music, it wasn’t merely a gesture of collegial respect — it was an act of consecration. In a landscape where reputations were still built on the trust between great ears, Boulez’s endorsement gave Birtwistle the legitimacy that no panel or policy statement could confer. It was a transmission of belief across borders, from one uncompromising mind to another — a form of artistic kinship that today’s professionalised networks no longer seem to allow.

It is also impossible to overlook that Birtwistle came from a working-class background — a path into the arts that seems harder to bring off today, despite the rhetoric of inclusion and diversity. The postwar generation benefitted from a cultural infrastructure that believed talent should be nurtured wherever it appeared: grammar schools with orchestras, local authority grants, a BBC willing to take chances. Those structures have largely vanished. In their place, we have committees that speak the language of access while quietly reproducing class and cultural gatekeeping through professional networks. Birtwistle’s ascent reminds us that real inclusion begins not with ideology but with opportunity — the chance to work seriously, without apology, and be heard on one’s own terms.

Birtwistle thrived because he was given permission to carve out a space of independence. In the present climate, that strategy is harder to replicate. The infrastructures that once insulated creative autonomy — small ensembles, dedicated commissioning programmes, publicly funded rehearsal time — have thinned. A composer today is expected not only to write music but to embody an institution’s talking points, as though artistic vision were a form of social branding.

Today, by contrast, the composers most visible on the international stage tend to produce work that is smooth, legible, and tonally polite — music that flatters institutions rather than challenges them. Publishers now seek alignment over individuality; they sign composers who fit the prevailing aesthetic mood rather than those who unsettle it. It is no coincidence that so much recent music sounds competent yet curiously drained of substance. The system rewards what might be called decorative seriousness — art that gestures toward difficulty while remaining narratively and harmonically safe. In Birtwistle’s time, risk itself carried prestige; now, it is treated as a liability. When the marketplace dictates taste, the result is music that is everywhere acceptable and nowhere indispensable.

Perhaps it’s my generation that feels this loss most keenly. Those of us who came of age in the late twentieth century straddle two worlds: the fading postwar belief in seriousness for its own sake, and the new managerial culture that treats art as a form of social service or personal branding. We were trained to pursue integrity, but we emerged into an environment that prizes visibility. That tension — between inward purpose and outward performance — defines the unease of many Generation X composers. We remember what it felt like when difficulty was a virtue, and we can see, with painful clarity, how quickly that world has evaporated.

Even Birtwistle and his contemporaries seemed blind to this shift. He once referred to the younger generation of composers as “amoebas,” while Alexander Goehr liked to say, pompously, “We were a radical generation.” Both remarks miss the point. The change was not in temperament but in terrain. By the 1990s the very structures that had sustained their radicalism — broadcasters, ensembles, and festivals willing to take long-term risks — were being repurposed by bureaucratic logic. The younger composers were navigating a different ecosystem, one where radicalism itself had become a managed brand. What they inherited was not a tradition of rebellion, but its institutional afterimage.

What strikes me most is that Birtwistle’s authority came not from rhetoric but from sound. He didn’t argue for his seriousness; he was it. His music carried a moral weight that made explanation redundant. That kind of gravity is increasingly rare in a culture where meaning must be explained, softened, or apologised for in advance.

The question is not why Birtwistle succeeded, but whether the conditions that made such success possible still exist. In a world allergic to opacity, where even mystery is treated as poor communication, the idea of a composer who simply is — unyielding, unclassified, uninterested in optics — feels almost utopian.

Yet perhaps that’s precisely why his example endures. He reminds us that the most radical act in a self-advertising age is not to conform or explain, but to persist — steadily, silently, and without permission. And perhaps persistence itself can take different forms. For some, it means staying within the system until it yields; for others, it means stepping beyond it, continuing the work without applause or permission. To keep faith with one’s own ear — to go on creating when recognition no longer justifies creation — may be the only resistance left that still feels real. The silence, after all, is not defeat but refusal..

Applause and silence

My mother once asked me why my music is greeted with such enthusiasm in the concert hall and yet seems to lead nowhere afterwards. The question, innocent as it was, revealed the divide at the heart of contemporary music life. Audiences respond to sound, to shape, to meaning — to the thing itself. Institutions respond to alignment, visibility, and the optics of belonging. The former is human; the latter bureaucratic. When listeners applaud, they confirm that the work has spoken to them. When institutions fall silent, they confirm only that they are listening for something else. When music still moves hearts but not hierarchies, perhaps it’s the hierarchies that are out of tune.

The day I realised I would never be a ‘career composer’

Preface:
This reflection comes from an early stage in my artistic life, when I was still trying to find my footing in the world of contemporary music. I had been invited to attend Brian Ferneyhough’s composition course at Royaumont Abbey in France — an experience that, for all its prestige, taught me more about the culture of careerism than about music itself. It was there, amid a mix of brilliance, vanity, and quiet cruelty, that I began to understand what kind of artist I was not destined to become.

Royaumont Abbey (1994)

I remember walking one afternoon between lectures and concerts with Brian Ferneyhough and Olga Neuwirth on the grounds of Royaumont Abbey. Our conversation was in English, until at a certain point Neuwirth switched to German. Brian followed suit. They both knew perfectly well that I didn’t speak German, yet neither returned to English. I’ve often wondered why Brian didn’t insist on continuing in the language we all shared. Perhaps it was easier to let the moment pass. Still, I felt the small sting of exclusion — a reminder of how fragile courtesy can be when social positioning is at stake.

That week, I learned much about the culture I was supposedly entering. Brian told me, half-amused, that some of the composers on the course arranged to receive “important” phone calls during the lunch hour, simply to appear in demand. Another, when his piece was performed, delayed taking a bow so that the applause would last longer. These weren’t isolated incidents; they were symptoms of a world obsessed with appearances, where calculation stood in for integrity.

At one lunch, Marc Texier — the course’s director — remarked that I wrote “Irish music”. I had no idea what he meant. It later emerged that he was from Morocco and a composer of sorts; so I asked him, quite sincerely, whether he wrote Moroccan music. He didn’t seem to find the question amusing.

Experiences like these clarified something for me: to my mind, you cannot be a ‘career composer’ and an artist at the same time, because one demands conformism while the other demands authenticity.

‘Standard Deviations’ at Dublin’s National Concert Hall

Ireland’s National Symphony Orchestra gave the first performance of ‘Standard Deviations’ on Tuesday 14th November, as part of Composer Lab 2023. It was a thrill to hear this piece come to life under the baton of Gavin Maloney. You can find the performance, broadcast by Lyric FM, on the ‘Works’ page. I introduced the piece by saying that the title is from statistics, denoting how far a particular value lies or deviates from the mean value; and that its applicability to music is that once you have a musical context you can deviate from it either by a little or by a lot. What I forgot to say is that I just like the title for the hell of it.

The Penhill Giant in Skipton

On Wednesday 11th October, 230 primary school children filed into Skipton Town Hall to hear ‘The Penhill Giant’. Writer Sally Edwards based her text on the legend of the Wensleydale giant, and narrator Claire-Marie Seddon brought that text vividly to life with the help of Skipton Camerata conducted by Ben Crick. This was a particularly pleasurable project for me as I was writing for children, with virtually the same forces as Prokofiev’s ‘Peter and the Wolf’. I felt great relief that the piece appealed to its young audience, given their rapt attention during the performance and their warm appreciation at the end of it. I am often struck by the perceptiveness of children’s listening (John Berger noticed the same thing with their appreciation of visual art) and a few times in my life I’ve been approached by them with intelligent, probing questions about what they have heard. That my music in general appeals to kids is a considerable source of pride for me. Below is the first performance, captured on a mobile phone and Zoom recorder!

Cross-Eyed Interview

On 29th April of this year, Frances Wilson interviewed me for her ‘Meet The Artist’online interview series. You can find the interview here

Song cycle released by Voces8 Records

On Friday 4th March Voces8 records released Within a Certain Time and Place to words by Chinwe D John. Chinwe, a GP in the United States, contacted me last year to commission a song using her lyrics, and the project grew from there. The songs explore themes of hope, fate and love, and they were recorded last June by Andy Staples and Alisdair Hogarth in the magnificent church of St Jude’s, Hampstead. You can audition/purchase the songs here

Taylor Taylor

In 2011 director Ben Galster approached me to write the music for a viral for Taylor Taylor, a well known hairdressing salon in London. We tried out many temp tracks to see what might work, and decided in the end to go with a notionally classically oriented score that would help tell a story in a short time. I had to write the same music for two contrasting virals, which was a challenge to make work at the level of synchronisation with the images! ‘Our Hands, Your Beauty’ has remained on the internet while ‘A Magical Place’ got lost at some point. Using the workprint, I re-uploaded the latter. You can watch the two virals below. The violinist is me.

Blush Furiously

It is a fact that a lot of film music written gets rejected for various reasons (think of Alex North’s score to ‘2001’). This was the case with ‘Blush Furiously’, a film I scored at the National Film and Television School. Sometimes the music can be re-used for other projects, but in this case the music was so specific to the mood and style of the film that I have not been able to find an alternative use for it. So here are the amalgamated cues below.

An anniversary—addendum

I found the score of my Variations I! I wrote it when I was fifteen, and am quite impressed by this piece of juvenilia. The London Sinfonietta recording has been lost after so many house moves, so I mocked up the score instead.

Pocket Universe revisited

Pocket Universe was first performed on 22nd March 2019 by EXAUDI conducted by James Weeks. This was a pre-pandemic performance, and none of us knew what horrors awaited us around the corner. The singers did splendidly, and their performance was the best I had heard my music performed in many a year. So far I’ve had interest in the piece from Chamber Choir Ireland and the Festino Choir of St Petersburg, but unfortunately the pandemic seems to have militated against further performances. So I decided to see what a four-piano version of the piece would sound like in the interim (listen below). The fleeting dissonances are more acutely felt in the piano version than in the original. Piano is ‘digital’, voices are ‘analogue’! I’ve done nothing at all to improve the piano sounds.

An anniversary

On Friday 6th May 1988, when I had just turned sixteen, I made my way to the Purcell Room at the South Bank Centre, London, for my first ever professional performance. The occasion was a workshop led by George Benjamin and David Bedford, and the players were the London Sinfonietta. My mentor Michael Finnissy was in the audience, as were family members. I also remember Gillian Moore looking distinctly gothic! Cellist Lionel Handy played a ferociously difficult passage for cello solo superlatively, and the experience overall was one of great joy. I intend to find the score to ‘Variations I’, which is in a box somewhere among my belongings, to see if it is any good. I remember it has Boulezian characteristics, despite a fake-minimalist beginning. I think that even then my musical personality was incipiently there: the jokes, the virtuosity, the energy…