Tom Coult

Summary

‘There's much less music in your head than you think there is when you start to write it down.’

It seemed important to include in this book interviews with young, upand- coming composers who appeared to be going places, who were beginning to establish their careers and who might be at the peak of them when or if a project like this is repeated a few decades in the future. But choosing composers to represent the future of British music – an impossible and unfair burden, in any case – wasn't easy.

One reason was the increasing difficulty in identifying a central musical orthodoxy that young composers are required to react to or against. In the absence of a leading ‘disciple’ who's helping music to evolve from such a perspective, I assumed that the most I could hope for was a spokesperson for one of the directions in which it's evolving. Another reason was the difficulty in predicting who’ll be a big name of the future, since so many factors other than musical talent are involved. Not the least of these is a temperament that can survive the demands of an insecure and increasingly competitive profession. There are more composers today than ever before, and the harsh realities of the musical market place mean that even exceptional early promise can't guarantee long-term success. (Re-reading Paul Griffiths's book thirty years after it was published is to be reminded of a number of then prominent composers whose music is rarely heard today.)

For me, there was the additional problem that my chosen representatives of the emerging generation had to be both young and sufficiently articulate to discuss their music with a stranger who was unlikely to know any of it. But Tom Coult appeared to tick all the boxes. He’d recently been awarded a composition grant that I was indirectly involved with, and he’d impressed me with his eloquence in a radio interview about his work. I was struck by the range of influences from the wider artistic world that he admitted to and by his confidence in expressing the view that composition, for him, is in part an act of hedonism. And when George Benjamin, with whom he was then studying at King's College London, vouched for his talent and promise, I knew that I’d made a good choice.