Richard Emsley: A View of his Music

Extract

Richarid Emsley's relatively small but vital body of work has perhaps not received its just deserts, either in terms of frequency of performances or attention from the world of commissioning and publishing organizations. The primary reason for this, I believe, is an all-too-common one: his work is not as readily categorizable as that of many other young composers active in this country at present. Keith Potter implies as much in the only other article published to date on Emsley's work. Potter is much concerned with a supposed division between ‘modernism’ and ‘postmodernism’ in contemporary music. I believe that to be something of a red herring in this context—functioning in many cases as no more than a way of efficiently marketing, under the ‘designer label’ of postmodernism, much that lies in the uncertain territory between ‘music about music’ (which after all goes back at least to Stravinsky) and lack of imagination manifested as pastiche (which goes back much further). In any case it seems more fruitful, in the context of an introduction to Richard Emsley's music, to see each composition as part of a gradually unfolding process within his oeuvre—an oeuvre which in fact has many features in common with the processes exemplified in the individual works themselves.