Exploring the British Music Collection
Whether you're a music-maker, researcher or just curious about music history, the British Music Collection is a state-of-the-art resource offering a world of discovery. Our writer delves into the archives and encounters everything from music made with frogs to the work of pioneering composer Richard Orton.
The instructions are bold and baffling: “Play no note intentionally.” Then the composer, perhaps a little anxious that his attempt to follow in John Cage’s footsteps might fall flat among musicians used to the British tradition of awkward silences, offers some extra advice: “One solution is to place oneself in a situation where sounds are inevitable.”
I’m looking at No 2 from Concert Music 1-7, a set of text scores written by Richard Orton, who most likely didn’t picture that work he composed as a young man for the heady, anything-goes setting of Birmingham Arts Lab would be receiving careful handling in a pristine West Yorkshire archive nearly 50 years later.
I have no idea whether performances of No 2 were a success or not – I can’t find footage online, nor any accounts from people who were there. To that extent, it’s lost to history. But thanks to the British Music Collection, I can sit and puzzle over the score, wondering how today’s musicians would interpret Orton’s wishes.
"A mind-boggling quantity and range of works"
Founded in 1967 – look out for the celebratory 50th anniversary events throughout 2017 – the British Music Collection has around 40,000 scores and 21,000 recordings from the 20th and 21st centuries, all by composers either born or living in the UK. Now cared for by custodians Sound and Music, the national charity for new music in the UK, over the decades the Collection has grown to include a mind-boggling quantity and range of works.
Whatever you’re searching for, the British Music Collection has two faces. One is its online portal, where you can browse its catalogue, read blogs, listen to playlists and discover the composer chosen as this year’s New Voice as well as ones to watch. (And if you're a composer yourself, you can submit details of your own work to help grow the online collection.)
The second is the physical archive, which after a nomadic few years in storage has settled comfortably into a new home at Heritage Quay, a purpose-built archive facility at the University of Huddersfield that also houses records for everything from Rugby League history and local brass bands, to more one-off collections such as the personal library of one Arthur Gardiner: textile worker, WWI conscientious objector and later Mayor of Huddersfield.
With exhibitions changing throughout the year, it’s open to the public and free to visit. But where to start? If, like me, you’re struck by option paralysis just looking at a takeaway menu, the giant curved interactive video wall that greets visitors inside the exhibition space is waiting for you to give it a wave.
Floating serenely across its seven-metre width is a collage of selectable photos, images of scores and links to music snippets. Feeling a little like a flamboyant conductor commanding an orchestra, I gesture into the air and find myself listening to Ultramarine by Jane Wells, a 1991 piece for alto sax and electronics that I’ve never heard before.
To see actual scores, as well as composer files that provide extra information, biographies and reviews, you’ll need to visit the search room. It’s open three times a week but ideally you should book in advance so that the archivists have the chance to retrieve your request from the vaults.
Making discoveries in the search room
While most of the British Music Collection’s scores are categorised by the types of performers who might have wanted to make use of the music – solo voice, string orchestra, chamber woodwind and so on – I’m drawn to the corner of the catalogue that’s merely labelled ‘Experimental’.
When the boxes emerge from the archive, I’m slightly disappointed that they’re not emitting an unearthly glow or humming at a mysterious frequency. Lifting their unassuming cardboard lids, however, uncovers a host of previously unknown treasures.
There’s Janet Beat’s dancing on moonbeams, a solo synth piece from 1980 whose gracefully curving, symbol-strewn hand-drawn score looks as though it could double up as a rare kosmische LP cover. Meanwhile, a set of pamphlets from the 1960s and 70s titled Music for Young Players reveals that composers such as David Bedford and Brian Dennis used scores posing as board games, Tube maps and dangling mobiles to sneak Steve Reich-style minimalism and Cagean indeterminacy into the classroom.
[dancing on moonbeams by Janet Beat, courtesy Heritage Quay]
I’m amused by the description of Andrew Hugill’s Catalogue de Grenouilles as a “miniature amphibian opera” for instrumentalists and recordings of frog calls, although it seems Hugill didn’t see it that way: “There is no avoiding the fact that people find frogs funny,” he writes, “but, despite this, the aesthetic of the piece is delicate and perhaps somewhat melancholic.”
And it’s in a brown envelope marked ‘Birmingham Arts Lab’ that I first encounter Orton’s Concert Music 1-7, each piece printed on a square of coloured card. No 3 is a 12-hour marathon: “Each performer writes his own score, involving the following categories: sounds activities (including bodily functions), degree of attention, action/reaction with other performers.” Then there’s No 5, in which musicians all contribute their own sound recordings, to be spliced together into one long tape loop.
The seventh piece, titled rope event, consists of introducing into the audience a piece of rope made from many other types of rope tied together, to “encourage a gentle communal tactility.” As the saying goes, if you can remember a performance of rope event, you probably weren’t there.
[Concert Music 1-7 by Richard Orton, courtesy Heritage Quay]
Investigating Richard Orton
You may not find his music on Spotify, but Orton isn’t an unknown. In the years before his death in 2013 he was a highly respected figure in music education; having set up the University of York’s electronic music studio in 1968, he later established its pioneering music technology course, as well as co-founding the Composers’ Desktop Project software network and authoring the über-hauntological Electronic Music for Schools.
His own compositions are relatively obscure these days, however, and I’m intrigued as to what he got up to in the period between the late 60s, when he played in the experimental group Gentle Fire with the more widely celebrated Hugh Davies, and his later life as an academic.
A list of works within Orton’s composer file reveals that, long after rope event, he continued creating pieces with a strong performance element and a hint of the absurd: 1974’s Brass Phase, for 12 brass players all seated on revolving chairs; Mug Grunt from 1972, featuring three actors who drink from mugs; and 1982’s Mythos, in which a solo saxophonist moves around a labyrinthine floor plan, re-enacting Perseus’s pursuit of the Minotaur.
His text experiments also became more innovative, culminating in 1972’s choral work Sawlo Seed, where a jumble of typewritten characters – words from James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake and Edgar Allan Poe’s Morella, ‘modulated’ through a Telegraph news story – are chanted in a ritualistic performance ripe with pagan and magical symbolism.
And in the listening room, I hear his 1978 piece Icarus, in which a soaring, swooping violin mimics the path of the ill-fated skyfarer against a tape accompaniment of pulsing, elemental synth textures, and feel sadness that, although not quite in the realms of neglected genius, Orton isn’t better known.
Playing your part
Music and information are so much easier to access than at the time of the British Music Collection’s birth, making the question of who gets commemorated and shared with new audiences and who stays forgotten more important than ever.
A resource such as the Heritage Quay archive is an open invitation to anyone to dive in and bring lesser-known composers and their music back to the surface. Or you can join in or host an event such as Sound and Music’s Herstories: Rewriting British Music History, a series of edit-a-thons designed to make the women composers of the British Music Collection more visible by filling in the gaps in their stories.
The online portal is open for you to discover new sounds, write new narratives, be inspired in your own music-making and curate content. On that note, maybe I’ll drop a few people a line, see if we can recreate a ‘happening’. All donations of rope gratefully received.
Visit the British Music Collection at Heritage Quay, University of Huddersfield and online at britishmusiccollection.org.uk
Find out more about Sound and Music at soundandmusic.org
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