The Music of Simon Holt ed. by David Charlton (review)

British composer Simon Holt (b. 1958) has enjoyed a successful and varied international career, primarily in the United Kingdom and Europe. The Music of Simon Holt provides a welcome introduction to this important but under-discussed figure in contemporary concert music. Holt's atonal music communicates more via texture and timbre than by melody, and the essays in this collection offer an overdue investigation of his style, methods, and artistic viewpoint. They form a useful resource for those concerned with Holt's music as well as those interested in British art music at the turn of the millennium, or in composers of texture, timbre, and gesture.

The variety of perspectives represented by the authors form this volume's greatest strength. Editor David Charlton combines analytical essays with interviews and memoirs, making this book applicable to a wide readership. Music theorists and musicologists will benefit from the scholarly contributions, including Richard E. McGregor's investigation of timbre as characterization in Holt's opera The Nightingale's to Blame, Philip Rupprecht's discussion of how tempo and timbre animate the images raised by Holt's evocative titles, and David Beard's application of stance theory to Holt's concertos. Readers interested in art history will appreciate Charlton's overview of concept art and politics in Holt's music. More focused analyses appear in Edward Venn's narratological discussion of the Three for Icarus cycle, which draws on Pieter Bruegel the Elder's painting Fall of Icarus (Musées royaux des beaux-arts de Belgique) as well as Rebecca Thumpston's analysis of agency in Holt's cello solo Feet of Clay, partially inspired by a photograph by Bruce Nauman. Scholars of music and literature will similarly appreciate Steph Power's two essays outlining Holt's settings of texts by Emily Dickinson and Charlotte Perkins Gilman as well as Anthony Gilbert's examination of Holt's use of Spanish poems by Federico García Lorca. Composers may be interested in Simon Speare's discussion of Holt's creative process as preserved in his sketch scores; Speare explains that—unfortunately for future musicologists—Holt now works on his computer and regularly purges his draft files. Performers and general readers will likely gravitate toward the interviews and memoirs. Pianist Stephen Gutman and oboist Melinda Maxwell examine Holt's music from the player's perspective, while conductor Thierry Fischer describes preparing this music for ensemble performance. Julia Bardsley, a video artist, interviews Holt about their collaborations for the stage works Who Put Bella in the Wych Elm? and Sueños. Finally, the catalog of Holt's output, including commissions, premieres, and recordings—through 2016, the most recent date of composition—will be useful to many.

Collectively, the authors do good work situating Holt and his music among his British colleagues (Peter Maxwell Davies, Harrison Birtwistle, et al.) as well as other twentieth- and twenty-first-century composers, including Olivier Messiaen (an early influence on Holt), Alban Berg, György Ligeti, and Iannis Xenakis. Such contextualizations are particularly helpful for readers who may be less familiar with Holt's work but will recognize aspects of his timbral-textural idiom from comparisons with these composers. Rupprecht's chapter, moreover, provides a summary of contemporary music ensembles in London circa 1980, a helpful guide for understanding the British new-music scene at that period.

While the chapters are not arranged in an obvious order, points of connection and conversation do arise across them. For example, as Charlton notes, "There is evidence that the music which [Holt] hears and writes exists as a kind of object which is not wholly made of music" (p. 284). As mentioned in the summaries above, many of the contributors approach Holt's work through the composer's extramusical inspirations—notably poetry, the visual arts, and mythology—in order to explain how Holt "tease[s] out possibilities" in these source materials...