Jonathan Cole by Richard Whitehouse
Far from being a lost or even forgotten cause, Modernism in music has continued to evolve in hitherto unexpected ways. A quarter-century ago, the likelihood of a progressively-minded composer even admitting to a liking for, letting aloine drawing inspiration from Sibelius in a way that he might from Webern or Boulez was unlikely. And if the rules of engagement have changed, so have the means of realizing them - yet such greater inclusiveness does not preclude the need to integrate and absorb stylistic influences so as to arrive at an individual musical idiom.
This is perhaps the most relevant perspective from which to approach the music of Jonathan Cole - who over the past decade, has steadily been building a reputation as a forward-looking composer with a broad cultural outlook placed at the service of a personal creative vision.
Cole’s composing instincts followed an eventful path: piano lessons and choral singing were formative influences, but it was not until he had informal tuition with Malcolm Williamson - prior to embarking on his degree - that “I was confronted with what composition really entails, and how focused you must be to get it right”. His studies at King’s College London with David Lumsdaine proved equally demanding, but gave him “a technical grounding so that I could have confidence in my ideas” - a process furthered by postgraduate studies with Robert Saxton and Simon Bainbridge, “where it became liberating to know I could realize my ideas at this level”. Courses at Dartington Summer School with Louis Andriessen and Lou Harrison added to this rounding-out of his musical outlook.
Cole’s breakthrough as a composer came in 1999, when he won the Royal Philharmonic Society Composition prize for Ouroboros I (1998), soon to be followed by the London Sinfonietta- commissioned Ouroboros II (1999 - 2000). Although fully separate works, they share similarities in the way that the end of each piece is made manifest in its beginning - hence the common title, which alludes to the circular image of the serpent’s head touching its tail: an outwardly simple process, yet one shot through with many subtle and intriguing possibilities for its continuation. Ouroboros II - its two, imaginatively-scored movements between them effecting an elusive but satisfying sense of coherence - is among the pick of chamber orchestra works to emerge from the UK in the last decade.
Allied to this unpredictable continuity is the way that an assumed goal can be diverted or transformed unexpectedly - as in the piano pieces Trapdoor (1999) and Go Tango (2002), where such a procedure is made the point of the music and which, for that reason, requires an easily assimilated harmonic structure.
“Nearly all of my music is based harmonically on simple intervallic relations. I think that harmony is the most important resource that contemporary composers have, and there has always to be at least a pitch hierarchy working, however elusive or ambiguous it might seem in its realization. It’s far more effective to me in such a context than in music which is constantly trying to affirm - however sincerely or ingeniously - an explicitly tonal perspective”.
Film remains a rich form of expression for Cole. “Tarkovsky talked a great deal about the association of images in out minds, about how that is the most natural form of connection between ideas, and this is something which has influenced me deeply. As has Hitchcock’s use of tension graphs, so that he could plot exactly the emotional shape of the film. So it is with composition: there are specific points in the piece where the tension is at its height, and you have to know indene where they’ll be.”
Such thinking is directly embodied in the song-cycle Assassin Hair (2002), to poems by the French surrealist Georges Bataille, where an intelligible but never schematic form hold all the freely associated imagery firmly in check, and where the overall pacing ensures that the dramatic meaning of the texts is perceived directly against the fastidious timbres and dynamics of the music. Nor does any other composition of Cole’s so embody his conviction that the working of memory is inseparable from the actual musical content.
More recently, the bracingly astringent ensemble writing of Penumbra (2003-2004), commissioned by the London Symphony Orchestra, has found its natural intensification in Temporale Distante (2003), written for the RAI National Symphony Orchestra in Turin.
Without constituting a self-consciously ‘grand statement’, this latter piece fairly sums up the attributes and strengths of Cole’s music to date - in its lucid and precise feeling for instrumental sonority, its imaginative finessing of the boundary between musical time and real time; above all, its unprejudiced drawing on the past in the search for new means of securing formal and expressive conviction.
Testament (2005), conceived as an ‘in memoriam’ to the late Sue Knussen, comes as relative contrast: a short but atmospheric piece that traces its steadily unfolding melodic line across a sombre though eventful background, and which takes its poignant allusions to Stravinsky as the music reaches its powerfully understated climax. In its sheers clarity and refinement - neither to be taken for granted in much new music of whatever stylistic persuasion - this a further instance of the sheer diversity of means that Cole is able to invest in his now recognizable and personal idiom.
Qualities, indeed, which are only to be expected from a composer who, by his own admission, finds “originality as such pretty meaningless, whereas individuality is paramount - you have a duty to yourself to write ‘your’ music. Directly related to this is the creative summit you have to strive towards, and you have to face the fact that you’ll never get to it - however hard you climb”.
Cole’s music - in its technical expertise, aural imagination, and sense of being constantly and intriguingly in progress - renders a Modernist conception in terms that are never less than relevant to the creative concerns of today.
Copyright Richard Whitehouse (2006)