Roger Smalley
Avant-garde composer and pianist who championed the electronic techniques of Stockhausen
ROGER SMALLEY, who has died aged 72, was a Britishborn composer and pianist who made his name in avantgarde music, notably as a fervent champion of the electronic techniques of Stockhausen; for the past 40 years he lived in Australia, where his compositions successfully blended European modernism with the traditional music of the outback.
Smalley had been a co-founder in 1969, with Tim Souster, of Intermodulation, the contemporary music ensemble. Critics spoke of him in the same breath as Peter Maxwell Davies and Harrison Birtwistle, and he composed several high-profile works such as Gloria tibi Trinitas, an orchestral piece that won a Royal Philharmonic Society prize in 1966.
He was no mean pianist either, giving thoughtful – and thoughtprovoking – recitals that would start with great works by Busoni and Beethoven before exposing the audience to the latest developments in contemporary music.
Although feted by modernists, Smalley’s music confounded others. One Gramophone review in 1967 discussed how his Five Piano Pieces “seem to consist of alternating bangs in the two extreme registers of the piano”, adding that in the fifth piece the bangs stop and “the music … stands in some danger of actually getting going; but the composer recovers himself ”.
Roger Smalley was born in Swinton, near Manchester, on July 26 1943. As a child he operated the hand pump on the church organ. His earliest piano lessons were with a neighbour, but “by the time I was 14 or 15 I think I’d outstripped her”, he recalled. By his mid-teens he was attending performances at the Manchester Institute of Contemporary Arts by musicians such as John Ogdon.
Smalley attended Leigh Grammar School and won a scholarship to the Royal College of Music, where he studied piano with Antony Hopkins and composition with Peter Racine Fricker and John White, whose 100plus piano sonatas he recorded in 1996. He also went to Alexander Goehr’s classes at Morley College.
Smalley’s earliest works were influenced by Maxwell Davies, but in 1964 he worked with Stockhausen in Cologne and on his return began writing extensively about the German composer’s works; his first compositional step into Stockhausen’s musical world came with The Song of
the Highest Tower, for the 1968 City of London Festival. From time to time he could be heard performing at Bethnal Green recital hall, a 78-seat venue in east London that shared its entrance with the municipal launderette.
In 1968 Smalley was appointed artist in residence at King’s College, Cambridge, from where grew Intermodulation, an ensemble that used both electronic techniques and improvisation, something more commonly heard in jazz. Beat Music, which they performed at the Proms in 1971, not only contained an electronic pulse but was also a pun on the beat style of popular music. Smalley’s written music was now increasingly appearing as sets of instructions to the players rather than conventional notation.
Life changed in 1974 when he took part in a three-month composer residency at the University of Western Australia in Perth and quickly felt liberated from the avant-garde pigeonhole. “I felt that as long as I remained in Europe it would be very difficult to escape the spectre of Stockhausen,” he told the journalist Andrew Ford. Now he felt free to give performances of music by composers such Rachmaninov and Schumann, while developing his modernism with works such as Accord, a monumental piece for two pianos.
It was a combination that was also realised in his recordings. On one disc, from 2004, Smalley juxtaposes Brahms and Chopin with his own chamber music, some of which takes themes from the romantic composers to create a situation where, as
Gramophone noted, “positive compromise between retrenchment and progress is evident at every turn”.
If being so far away meant that he dropped off the European radar for a time, in the 1980s Smalley was attracting attention in Britain once more. There was a Symphony for the BBC Philharmonic in 1982 and a Piano Concerto for the BBC National Orchestra of Wales in 1985, both of which were premiered at the Proms, with the latter winning the top award of the Paris International Rostrum of Composers in 1987.
Back in Australia he contributed to the country’s bicentenary in 1988 with
The Southland, a 50-minute oratorio for chorus, didgeridoo, gamelan ensemble, folk group and orchestra that uses different texts to explain aspects of the Australian story. He took citizenship in 1990 and was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia in 2011.
Smalley retired to Sydney in 2007 and was the subject of a book, Roger Smalley – a Case Study of Late 20th Century Composition (2012), by the musicologist Christopher Mark. He is survived by his partner Pattie Benjamin; he had two children from an earlier marriage. Roger Smalley, born July 26 1943, died August 18 2015