John Buller
John Buller, composer,
born London, 7 February 1927; married
(1955) Shirley Claridge, 3 sons, 1 daughter;
died Sherbourne, 12 September 2004.
Photo
Credit Clive Barda
John Buller was a late
starter as a composer – he came to prominence
only in the 1970s, when he was approaching
50 – but the power and originality of
his voice made sure that the musical
world sat up and took notice. His music
was unashamedly intellectual, both in
construction and in the texts he chose
to set, but its powerful dramatic charge
communicated directly to his audiences
and earned deep respect from longer-established
colleagues.
Although Buller
was a chorister at St Matthews, Great
Peter Street, Westminster, and was writing
music in his teens, his musical ambitions
were heavily discouraged by his parents
and pressure brought to bear that he
should join the family firm of surveyors.
In 1946, when he was 19 and serving
in the Royal Navy, he had a work accepted
for performance by the BBC but, with
the death of his mother from cancer,
he did not feel that he could turn against
his grieving father and opt out. And
so he dutifully qualified instead as
an architectural surveyor, eventually
becoming a partner in the firm and resigning
only in 1974.
All the while he
had been composing on the side – bits
of music he said sounded too much like
Vaughan Williams. In June 1955 his father’s
death, also from cancer, brought a liberation
from the bonds of filial piety: before
the year was out he was a married man
and a student at Morley College, taking
harmony and counterpoint with Antony
Milner and orchestration with Iain Hamilton.
A B. Mus. at the University of London
followed in 1959–64. But there was no
sudden rush of music: Buller was always
a slow and methodical worker.
An important stage
in his development came in 1965, when
he attended the Wardour Castle summer
school, run in a Wiltshire girls’ school
by its music-teacher, the composer Harrison
Birtwistle, aided by his fellow-modernists
Alexander Goehr and Peter Maxwell Davies
Buller had a piece performed there,
took a lesson with ‘Max’ and founded
a friendship with Birtwistle which lasted
for the rest of his life.
He was already respected
enough in new-music circles to join
the MacNaghten Concerts Committee in
1965, serving as its chairman from 1971
to 1976. The composer Anthony Payne,
who got to know Buller during this period,
was struck by the courage of Buller’s
change of career:
I’ve often held him
up to young composers and students of
the more materialistic cast. Here was
a man who – in middle years, and with
a wife and four children to support
– was earning well but threw it all
overboard and took an alarming cut in
income in order to be a composer. Staggering,
really, perhaps even a little bit foolhardy
– and an indication of what a supportive
wife and family he had.
It was also during
the McNaghten days, in 1970, that Buller
wrote his first score to attract serious
attention: The Cave, an eight-minute
piece for flute, clarinet, trombone,
cello and tape (his taste for unusual
sonorities was already apparent) which
The Nash Ensemble premiered on the South
Bank in 1972. Another milestone came
in 1974 with the performance of the
22-minute Le Terrazze (for a
15-strong ensemble of woodwinds, brass,
strings and tape) in a BBC Invitation
Concert. Then Buller was named composer-in-residence
at Edinburgh University for the academic
year 1975–76 and his life as a professional
creative artist had at last taken off.
It was not to be an easy one.
James Joyce was an
early influence, beginning in 1971 with
Two Night Pieces from Finnegans Wake
for soprano, flute, clarinet and piano;
a year later he produced Finnegan’s
Floras for 14 voices, percussion
and piano. Buller’s most ambitious Joyce
piece came in 1976 with The Mime
of Mick, Nick and the Maggies, for
soprano, baritone, chorus and ensemble,
a full 70 minutes in length. Staged
at The Round House by the BBC, it earned
him the admiration of the new-music
community but a wider audience still
eluded him.
That came in 1977 with
the 37-minute Proença,
for contralto, mezzo soprano and orchestra,
a Proms commission for that year’s Jubilee
season; it was conducted by Mark Elder
– the only conductor consistently to
support Buller with performances. I
was a Prommer in the audience that evening;
I may not have understood everything
that was going on – the music is too
complex for instant comprehension –
but I can still recall its sheer physical
thrill.
Proença
sets mediaeval Provençal texts
– an arcane choice, it might first appear,
but Buller chose them for the immediacy
of the emotions they convey: eroticism
and brutality, the brutality of the
Albigensian ethnic cleansing of the
early 13th century. He explained that
"song is, in a way, what this piece
is ‘about’ – verbal, instrumental and
vocal; the joy it can represent; and
the violence it can meet". And
his music met its composer’s brief,
combining lyricism with a savage energy,
kaleidoscopic colour with long-term
structural coherence. In her article
on Buller in The New Grove Dictionary
of Music and Musicians, Susan Bradshaw
explained how it was done: Proença
is
centred on a slowly
evolving melody that is shaped and propelled
by means of its own reflections; … its
reflected melodic layers give Proença
a three-dimensional harmonic background
that can readily absorb Buller's unbarred
rhythmic patterns.
Official recognition
came with an Arts Council bursary in
1978; another residency as composer
was spent at Queen’s University, Belfast,
in 1985–86. Meantime, the next popular
success came in 1981, with another Proms
commission, The Theatre of Memory,
again conducted by Mark Elder. Taking
its inspiration from a mnemonic structure
designed by the 16th-century Giuliu
Camillo (reported in Frances Yates’
book The Art of Memory) which
was to influence the design of Shakespeare’s
Globe, Buller’s score divides the orchestra
into seven wedges, each with a concertante
soloist at its tip, and finds musical
parallels for the conventions of Greek
tragedy to animate the structure.
Buller’s next major
composition was an even tougher nut,
requiring six years of concentrated
effort: an opera setting Euripides’
The Bacchae – Buller preferred
Bakxai, which suggests the original
Greek – premiered at the English National
Opera in 1992, again with Elder on the
podium. Though the production didn’t
show the music to best effect, Guy Rickards,
writing in Tempo, didn’t mince
his words:
I believe John Buller’s
Bakxai (The Bacchae) to be the
finest British opera since Britten’s
Curlew River. … Buller has made
Bakxai intelligible to a modern
audience, intensely dramatic and utterly
compelling.
Anthony Payne was likewise
"tremendously impressed",
finding that Buller had
had done something
quite special: he hadn’t in any way
soft-pedalled – he had written a modernist
opera, in John’s style – and yet he
had somehow managed to make it appear
as if there were tunes being sung, as
if the chorus was singing melodic, almost
catchy, material which nevertheless
was modernistically done.
Buller’s modest
output and methodical approach to composition
kept his income low, necessitating numerous
moves to premises the family could still
afford: from Leatherhead to Suffolk,
even to France, before eventually returning
to rented accommodation in Dorset, where
Birtwistle was a near-neighbour. Buller’s
wife, the painter Shirley Claridge,
not only stood by him during each uprooting
and economic retrenchment; she also
acted as his copyist, producing immaculately
neat scores.
Proença
and The Theatre of Memory were
released by Unicorn-Kanchana in the
mid-1980s and had long disappeared from
the catalogues when they were reissued
by NMC last year, provoking a fresh
round of excited reviews – the critic
Andres Clements described Proença
as ‘by any standards one of the great
achievements of recent British music’.
Sadly, the theatre
of Buller’s own memory was by then in
its final act. Signs of Alzheimer’s
had revealed themselves in a degree
of absent-mindedness perhaps as early
as seven years ago, on his return from
France, and with time the illness began
to interfere with his ability to concentrate
– an enormous frustration to this most
rigorous of intellects, and an especial
tragedy for a composer who had so much
time to make up. His last major work,
the 12-minute, orchestral Illusions,
was written for the Cheltenham Festival
in 1997.
Buller’s craggy
face looks out from the front of that
NMC CD, his imperious stare lightened
by a quizzical twinkle, the whole topped
with a swirl of white hair. Anthony
Payne remembered the personality behind
the severe image:
The first impression
you got was that here was an inherently
decent man. He was very warm and friendly,
modest, very cultured, very well read,
and a thinker – a mature human being
and a rather splendid person.
Martin Anderson
A slightly
shorter version of this obituary was
published in The Independent
on 24 November 2004
John
BULLER (b.1927)
Proença
(1977)a - The Theatre of
Memory (1981) - Sarah Walker (mezzo-soprano)a;
Timothy Walker (electric guitar)a;
BBC Symphony Orchestra/Mark Elder -
Recorded: BBC Studio 1, Maida Vale,
London, November 1979 (Proença)
and January 1985 (The Theatre of
Memory)
NMC ANCORA D 081 [70:58] [HC]
Two
major works by a distinguished composer
who still has not been given his due
… well served by exceptional performances.
… see Full
Review
