16 - Power, Potential: Robert Simpson, Mark Simpson

Summary

In 2013 Donald Macauley self-published The Power of Robert Simpson: A Biography. ‘Power’ is an unusual word to find in the title of a book about a creative artist; although ‘powerful’ is critical small change in descriptions of works and performances which make some kind of impact on the critic in question, imputing ‘power’ to the creator somehow lifts the notion from conventional to exceptional. ‘Power’ is political – what legislators and rulers have, and it seems anachronistic in the twenty-first century to propose that composers outside the spheres of commercial or popular music should be thought of as equivalent to legislators, and actually possessing the kind of unacknowledged legislative powers attributed to artists by Shelley in his essay ‘A Defence of Poetry’ in 1821.

Macauley clearly understood the romantic and potentially revolutionary connotations of his word-choice, using lines from Wordsworth's ‘To Toussaint L’Ouverture’ – beginning ‘Thou has left behind / Powers that will work for thee’ – as his epigraph, and ending his text in political vein with the declaration that ‘until we have a government which accepts that proper support for the arts is an essential ingredient of any civilised society, and a clear indicator of the country's spiritual health, it seems likely that the neglect of Robert Simpson’s, and of other worthwhile music, seems set to continue’. The two ‘seems’ in the last sentence hint that Macauley might not have been Simpson's most eloquent advocate, and the virtually simultaneous appearance in 2013 of a comprehensive symposium provided a more conventionally musicological commentary on Simpson's compositional character. This ends with a summarising stylistic survey by Simon Phillippo claiming that – despite such apparently ‘conservative’ aspects as the retention of tonal centres, distinctions between consonance and dissonance, and textures as well as formal outlines well-established in earlier music – Simpson's music ‘reflected a profoundly modernist outlook’.

Not all Simpson adepts will give as much emphasis as Phillippo to ‘bleakness … bitterness, violence, and seldom relenting harshness’ (p. 514): Simpson's own paradoxical notion of ‘ferocious anti-pessimism’ (p. 518) is a better encapsulation of his music's ‘energetic physicality’ and ‘pronounced masculinity’ (p. 517; see Simpson's 1971 essay ‘Against Lipsius’, Macauley pp. 342–6).