AGITPROP STILL CASTS ITS SPELL ON THE BBC

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Being an avant-garde Classical composer these days means having to get noticed (given how many there are of them and how 'select' the audiences are for that kind of highly dissonant music). The best way of getting noticed is to tie your piece of music, however gratuitously, to a right-on political cause. This has been going on for a long time now, but it still occasionally does the trick. Richard Barrett, a 'New Complexity' composer, got five minutes of Friday's PM to talk about his latest work, which is being premiered at the Huddersfield Festival of Contemporary Music (and which was broadcast on Radio 3 last night.) Result!
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The reason for the programme's extremely unusual demonstration of interest in the toughest kind of brand-new Modernist music? Well, the piece was called 'Mesopotamia', and it was part of a self-proclaimed protest against the Iraq War.
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Nigel Wrench went to rehearsals & chatted to Barrett about what he was protesting about. Amusingly, Barrett waffled on about the 'destruction of time' as if auditioning for Pseud's Corner, which leads me to suspect that his 'political anger' is largely a marketing ploy - especially as you would never guess from just hearing the piece itself (which you can listen to - if you so choose - on Hear and Now via the BBC i-Player) that it was 'about' any such thing.
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Left-wing protest art, though, still gets the BBC's juices flowing.
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