David Matthews at 60: Visions of reality

Musical Times, Spring 2003 by Hyde, Thomas

THOMAS HYDE surveys the symphonic oeuvre of the distinguished British composer, sixty in March

PROFILING the composer David Matthews in 1990, Calum MacDonald described him as `hardly an unsuccessful composer, or one ripe for revaluation. Valuation might be nearer the mark.'1 A regular stream of commissions and a high-profile publisher ensured that he was hardly unsuccessful; nevertheless, at the time of the article's publication, only one of his works had been recorded, and MacDonald went on to state that `he has attracted less attention and critical celebrity than many of his near contemporaries and juniors.' One can only touch here on the possible reasons for this. Certainly Matthews's preference for upholding musical traditions rather than seeking out novelties for their own sake ensured he was less likely to make headlines. `My concerns are with what music has always been about, rather than with substitutes',2 he has said. Accordingly, he has remained committed to traditional forms, notably the symphony and the string quartet, and his works tend to be scored for conventional instrumental lineups. His harmonic and orchestral style is broadly tonal and Romantic - a label he feels no urge to shun - but his music displays none of the ironic detachment that `neo-Romantics' such as Holloway or Del Tredici use to keep their more heightened emotional vein in check. Nor does one find with Matthews the stylistic confrontations of a composer like Rochberg. He has found inspiration in the English tradition, its landscape and the homegrown gods of Britten and Tippett, who remain vital influences. With his composer-- brother, Colin, he worked for Benjamin Britten in the 1960s and he has written a book on Tippett. In recent years some critics have detected a certain mildness of manner in his music, provoking some into viewing him as a lightweight. Further doubts can arise from the fact that his output as a whole shows few signs of major stylistic crisis or redirection since his mature works started appearing in the mid-1970s. A composer who develops by sticking to one path appears, on the surface at least, less interesting.

But while Matthews has confessed to being `certainly no iconoclast'3 his musical language should not be dismissed as merely conservative or reactionary. If listeners detect a distinctly English flavour in his music, he defines this by stating that `English composers have always been eclectics, taking from the continent what interested them most.'4 His commitment to the symphony ensures that he views himself as part of a mainstream that goes back, via Mahler and Sibelius, to Beethoven, and in his search for a vernacular contemporary idiom one can hear as many hints of Janacek and central European music as of any English source. If he is suspicious of cosmopolitanism on the ground that it `creates a danger of dislocation in art', his music nevertheless shows a composer whose ears have lead him to draw on such influences as the blues pianist Montana Taylor and the tango (as a replacement for the classical minuet), not to mention the Grateful Dead and the Beach Boys. And if Matthews is, as the critic Paul Driver put it, among `the most plausible of neo-Romantic composers', it is because his music is in essence free from nostalgia; it is about the renewal of traditions rather than taking refuge in them. We should not be surprised therefore that his love of the English landscape, which has been such an important source of inspiration for him, is not motivated by an attempt to drag music back to a previous era. His pastoral vein is always forwardlooking, and not merely as a cow over a gate. He may have described the recent chamber orchestral piece Burnham Wick (1997) as a `modern pastora', but he has been eager to point out that `if that pastoral tradition can no longer be sustained in its innocence, perhaps another might replace it, which reconciles our Romanticised sense of a picturesque past with the brutal facts of history.'5

ORCHESTRAL music has always been central to David Matthews's output. Indeed, it was the sound of hearing a live orchestra in his teens that first encouraged him to begin composing. His orchestral output to date comprises some thirty-five acknowledged works and, although including numerous attractive chamber and string orchestra pieces not to mention concertos, is dominated by five symphonies and four large-scale symphonic poems. If one wants to pinpoint the essentials of his harmonic and melodic style, however, a good starting point is a short early work entitled September music (1979).6 Though somewhat French in character (Matthews himself describes it as a kind of recreation of L'apres-midi d'un faune), the piece also touches base with Tippett. The opening horn theme takes the listener straight into the world of The midsummer marriage, and the way that this theme's four-note motif generates much of the melodic material in the piece (including ex.1) is characteristic of Matthews's subsequent methods.