The Music of Nicholas Maw

Extract

Ten years ago when Europe had already experienced thirty years of experiment and achievement in the field of serial composition, there was emerging in Britain the first generation of young composers to have shown awareness of the revolution from the start. This time-lag, combined with a characteristically wary view of the latest continental developments, and naturally eclectic gifts, has borne fruit in a sensible but vital series of new styles and techniques—less liable, perhaps, in their innate conservatism, to achieve a visionary leap in the dark, but at the same time not prone to the excesses of some avant-garde experiments. Several of the young composers involved, Nicholas Maw among them, have shown facility in free atonal as well as twelve-note idioms and have tended recently towards a less rigorous application of serial methods. In fact in Britain at least the stage may well be set for a fulfilment of Krenek's prophecy—that the future development of atonal music will not depend on strict twelve-note regulation so much as on an instinctive preservation of the essence of the method.