The Music of Benjamin Lees

Extract

One of the most disquieting features of the contemporary musical scene is that more composers than ever before are being ‘born out of their time’. There have been occasional examples before—Mendelssohn and Brahms, one feels, would have been more at home in the eighteenth century; but today the temporal exile is becoming a familiar figure, owing to the unprecedentedly swift development of musical language. From Debussy onwards, the characteristic twentieth-century composer has sensibly insisted that each new work shall break new ground, but by now this entirely healthy, forward-looking tendency has developed into an obsession with the new for its own sake. The restless technical curiosity of certain outstanding composers of high integrity, together with the pure snobbism of others, is bringing us perilously near the stage where each new work will amount to a complete stylistic revolution in itself.