Claire Jackson
Music journalist
‘Mark-anthony Turnage’s colourful music fascinates for its cultural richness and original voice. I thrilled at the chance to explore his achievements and career byways for Composer of the Month.’
‘They all know far more than I do about writing music. I’m an amateur. I’ve been found out.’ Such was Mark-anthony Turnage’s wry response as critics gaggled together on Twitter to condemn his opera Coraline after its recent premiere at the Royal Opera House , with one or two reviewers appearing unusually keen to express their disapproval by the means of social media. ‘Don’t worry,’ added Turnage in a later Tweet. ‘There will be no further operas by me that you will ever have to sit through again. I’m done with the genre. Going to leave it to my more talented contemporaries and younger colleagues.’
This strong response is typical Turnage, a composer who is a perfectionist and infamous for withdrawing works. He has revealed that there are several pieces in between Night Dances, his first major orchestral work written in 1981, and Lament for a Hanging Man (1983) that have been taken out of circulation, and a piece for viola and ensemble that was once performed at Tanglewood has also been taken off the shelf. ‘It’s a strange piece; I quite like it but it just doesn’t work, it’s a mess,’ he said. ‘It sounds like bad Walton, sort of jazzy in a way, but very English.’
For Turnage fans, that might sound like an intriguing proposition, but it’s unlikely anyone who wasn’t at that Tanglewood performance will ever hear the piece. Turnage is prone to a scorched earth policy: anything that isn’t on par with his exacting standards may well be destroyed, never to see the light of day again. In the late 1980s, he was working on an opera based on the life of jazz musician Charles Mingus. He’d got as far as writing a whole act – 45 minutes of music – and, after reworking some of the ideas for an ensemble piece (Kai), he ‘literally destroyed the rest of it… I wouldn’t want anybody to get hold of what I’d done’.
Turnage’s unwavering self-criticism is directed at a very talented and versatile composer, with a particular knack for opera. His first, Greek, is a modern retelling of the Oedipus myth set in the East End of London, based on the 1980 play by Steven Berkoff. Greek was premiered at the first Munich Biennale in 1988 and the Jonathan Moore production transferred to the Edinburgh Festival that summer, to critical acclaim. A film version was made for television, which won the RPS/ Charles Heidsieck Music Award in 1990. Later that year, the original production moved to English National Opera; those performances were shortlisted for the Laurence Olivier Awards. Greek has since been performed widely.
Turnage went on to write The Silver Tassie (1997-99), based on Seán O’casey’s 1920s play, and then, in 2011, Anna
Nicole. The latter premiered at the Royal Opera House and was revived in 2014 – each time the critics appeared, pencils sharpened. Anna Nicole tells the real-life cautionary tale of an American dreamcum-nightmare. The title’s protagonist, an impoverished Texas stripper turned
‘There will be no further operas by me that you will ever have to sit through again’
glamour model, marries an octogenarian oil tycoon. She becomes addicted to plastic surgery and, because of the pain it causes, drugs. Her empty celebrity is the focus of reality TV show and, exploited by those around her, she ultimately dies in tragic circumstances. Turnage’s scoring is masterful: while the staging cleverly creates an edifice to mindless populism, the music is intelligent and propulsive, conveying the disconnection between the grotesque and the fragile.
Anna Nicole, like Coraline, which is a family opera based on a novel by Neil Gaiman, appeals to audiences who might not traditionally be drawn to opera. This is down to Turnage’s skill at creating cultural collages, cross-referencing ideas from so-called high and low art. In Greek he uses football chants (the ‘Olé, olé, olé’ that was popular at the time) and the ITV World of Sport theme tune. It is regrettable that Turnage has decided not to write for the genre again. In Tweets that have since been deleted, the composer went on to state that the decision was not in response to the reaction to Coraline, but something that he had decided ‘some time ago’.
Perhaps we should not be surprised. Opera is a form that Turnage has long had mixed feelings about. He has said in the past that he sympathised with composer Pierre Boulez’s notorious call to burn down the opera houses. (Boulez’s radical suggestion was based on the idea that it is impossible to present contemporary opera in theatres made for historic works, and that to explore new formats we need a new infrastructure.) The antipathy also stems from Turnage’s upbringing: he was not exposed to vocal music until he was a
Turnage began to incorporate ideas from drug culture in his music
music student, and only decided to tackle Greek with the active encouragement – and financial support – of German composer Hans Werner Henze. Instrumental music is where Turnage feels most at home.
Fractured Lines, a selection of premiere orchestral recordings by the BBC Symphony Orchestra under conductor Leonard Slatkin (2002), is an excellent place to begin. The title track is a double percussion concerto that was premiered at the BBC Proms in 2000. The composer reworked it and the later iteration appears on this disc, with soloists Evelyn Glennie and Peter Erskine. Many pieces receive the post-performance Turnage tinker; in this instance, the composer has said that he wanted to lighten some of the dissonance. The tightened structure and recast melodies create a blaze of colour that remains true to Turnage’s initial abstract ideas. Four-horned Fandango – available on the same disc – is another work that was extensively edited after its premiere (at EMI’S 100th birthday party, performed by the CBSO under Simon Rattle). The allusions to Spanish dance are conceptual, and it is in this piece we hear more overlapping melodies that are reminiscent of New Music Manchester, the group of composers that centred on Harrison Birtwistle, Peter Maxwell Davies and Alexander Goehr in the 1950s. But although Birtwistle’s influence can be heard in some of Turnage’s output, it is Oliver Knussen who has had a lasting impact on the composer’s style.
Turnage took piano lessons from the age of six – his mother played the instrument, in addition to playing the cornet in a brass band, and his father sang (as a tenor). At
14, Turnage was accepted by the Junior Department of the Royal College of Music to study composition, piano and flute. He started working with Knussen soon after, and credits his fellow composer with instilling confidence and encouraging him to write as an individual, as well as
the importance of pristine orchestration, which Knussen is often praised for. The young Turnage followed his mentor’s route, studying with John Lambert and then with Gunther Schuller at Tanglewood.
At the same time, Turnage was developing a life-long passion for jazz, particularly Herbie Hancock and Miles Davis. These influences can be heard in his writing, particularly in his melodies for brass and woodwind. He often collaborates with jazz musicians – the on-stage trio featured in Anna Nicole included major jazz luminaries Peter Erskine, John Parricelli and John Paul Jones – and his very first published score, Night Dances, includes a muted solo trumpet in tribute to Davis.
As his orchestral and stage works became better known in the 1990s, Turnage’s style stood out against his
British contemporaries. (Turnage has mentioned that he feels better accepted by the European new music scene.) Having lost his brother to drug addiction, he began incorporating ideas from drug culture in his music, which chimed with the Britpop era – Junior Addict and Blood on the Floor (featuring sections with titles such as ‘Needles’, ‘Cut Up’ and ‘Crackdown’) are challenging on many levels.
Despite being presented as something of an outsider – a ‘working class Wunderkind’, as the Guardian put it – Turnage is highly respected within the establishment. In 1997 he produced Twice Through the Heart (‘a dramatic scena for mezzo-soprano and 16 players’) and The Country of the Blind (‘a chamber opera in six scenes’) for Aldeburgh Festival. He has been composer-in-residence for the London Philharmonic Orchestra, and a co-composer-in-residence of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. In 2005, he was appointed Research Fellow in Composition at the Royal College of Music.
That recognition was consolidated in 2015 when Turnage was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for his services to music.
And although those services may now not include further dalliances with opera, given a collaborative and nurturing environment, we can look forward to his individualistic flair continuing to excite the orchestral world.