March 2025: up to York Late Music to celebrate Roger Marsh‘s 75th birthday with Trifarious including pianist Alex Wilson.
Roger was my supervisor for the DPhil I undertook at the University of York in the early 90s but he arrived at York around 1988 when I was a second year undergraduate and, under his tuition, I took modules (or ‘projects’ as they were known at York then) in composition and music theatre (the latter based around Roger’s large-scale Old Testament drama The Big Bang). Roger was an excellent lecturer – entertaining, committed, someone who wore his knowledge lightly and who, although he laid his aesthetic cards on the table for his students, allowed us to respond to the various compositional stimuli he placed before us in our own ways. As a doctoral supervisor Roger was challenging and inspiring. The process of supervision was very different in the early 90s from the regular, hands-on, closely monitored process it is today (at least in the UK); I don’t remember very regular sessions with Roger but for each piece I worked on with him he made at least one comment that really made me think – sometimes it annoyed me as well (as when my piece for Icebreaker, Blag, was deemed to have ‘not many colours’) but was generally proved to be correct once I’d calmed down!
Trifarious performed two pieces by Roger: Easy Steps for piano (1987) and Ferry Music for clarinet, cello (arranged by me for viola) and piano (1988). Alex Wilson delivered a blistering performance of Easy Steps and Ferry Music‘s contrasting panels of colour and action came across vividly. Context was provided by Berio’s set of encores for piano, Takemitsu’s The Bird Came Down the Walk for viola and piano and then two pieces by Roger’s pupils – myself (represented by The Chief Inspector of Holes) and David Power (Six De Chirico Miniatures for solo piano). The Chief Inspector had not been heard for some time prior to this concert, in fact I worked out (in preparing some text for Roger) that it has a performance rate of one every ten years! This time I took the narrated part myself and enjoyed bringing the piece back to life; I just about managed to project over the more raucous passages of trio writing.
I composed The Chief Inspector in 1994 just after finishing with Roger and after returning from the 1993 Contemporary Performance and Composition course at the Britten Pears School, Snape – a rather different experience and a difficult one at that; the piece has Marshy elements mixed into music of a neoclassical strain, an approach that served me for quite some time and that I occasionally resurrect although it can lead me down rather dry, somewhat academic avenues if I don’t introduce some indiscipline now and again.
