Roger Marsh (born 10 December 1949) is a British composer and retired academic. [1]
Born in Bournemouth, he studied in London with composer Ian Kellam at the London College of Music, and then at the University of York with Bernard Rands and Wilfrid Mellers. [2] After two years of further study at the University of California, San Diego, Marsh was appointed lecturer at the University of Keele in 1978, becoming head of department in 1985. He returned to York University in 1988, where he became Professor of Music the following year. [3] He was visiting composer at Harvard in 1993. In 1994 Marsh and his wife, the singer Anna Myatt, co-founded and directed the music theatre ensemble Black Hair. [4] Marsh retired from York in 2019, retaining the title emeritus Professor of Music. [5]
His students include John Abram, [6] Tom Armstrong, [7] Richard Causton, [8] David Power, [9] Andrew Hugill, [10] Shu-Yu Lin, [11] Aaron Moorehouse, [12] Akiko Ogawa, [13] Felipe Otondo, [14] Andy Quin [15] and Paul Whitty. [16]
He is best known for his ensemble and vocal music, often including elements of performance art and music theatre, influenced by Stravinsky and (through Bernard Rands) by Berio. [17] He has worked with many contemporary music vocal groups, such as Electric Phoenix (an offshoot of Swingle 2), Singcircle and Vocem. One of his first pieces to gain wider attention was Not a soul but ourselves (1977) for amplified vocals, setting a passage from Finnegans Wake . It was recorded by Electric Phoenix in 1982, and more recently by Paul Hillier’s Theatre of Voices in 2011.
Stepping Out, for piano and orchestra, was commissioned for the BBC Proms in 1990, where it was performed by the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Martin Roscoe, piano. As with the later orchestral work Espace (1993), Stepping Out explores unconventional spatial possibilities in music. [3]
Between 2002 and 2006 Marsh composed vocal settings of all fifty of the Pierrot lunaire: rondels bergamasques cycle of poems by Albert Giraud. As with his many close readings of texts by James Joyce, Marsh is interested in bringing out the meaning of the dense, symbolist texts. [18] He has expressed dislike for modern settings of texts in which the words are inaudible. [19]
His music is published by Chester Novello and Peters Edition, London. [20]
His music theatre activities began in the 1970s at York, where a group of like-minded composers - Marsh, Richard Orton, Steve Stanton and Trevor Wishart - were working with music students and staff (rather than trained actors) to stage performance works. Marsh's contributions included the solo piece Dum, performed inside a cage or at a lectern with many metal objects by (among others) Alan Belk of Vocem and the composer himself. [2] With his wife Anna Myatt he was associated with Midland Music Theatre in Birmingham as a director and performer. [3]
Humour and irony are important elements, as shown in a series of works derived from Old Testament stories and themes presented in contemporary terms, such as the dramatic oratorio Samson (1984 - closer in style to Japanese Noh drama than the European oratorio), the melodrama The Song of Abigail (1985) and the extended drama The Big Bang (1989) - subtitled "Tales of love and intrigue; a kaleidoscope of sex and violence". [17]
For the Naxos record label Marsh has produced dramatically performed audiobooks of Joyce's Ulysses (1994 abridged, 2004 unabridged), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1995) and Finnegans Wake (2021, unabridged), as well as three books of Dante's Divine Comedy. [21]
Recordings
Pierrot is a stock character of pantomime and commedia dell'arte, whose origins are in the late seventeenth-century Italian troupe of players performing in Paris and known as the Comédie-Italienne. The name is a diminutive of Pierre (Peter), via the suffix -ot. His character in contemporary popular culture—in poetry, fiction, and the visual arts, as well as works for the stage, screen, and concert hall—is that of the sad clown, often pining for love of Columbine, who usually breaks his heart and leaves him for Harlequin. Performing unmasked, with a whitened face, he wears a loose white blouse with large buttons and wide white pantaloons. Sometimes he appears with a frilled collaret and a hat, usually with a close-fitting crown and wide round brim and, more rarely, with a conical shape like a dunce's cap.
Albert Giraud was a Belgian poet who wrote in French.
Sprechgesang and Sprechstimme, more commonly known as speak-singing in English, are expressionist musical vocal techniques between singing and speaking. Though sometimes used interchangeably, Sprechgesang is directly related to the operatic recitative manner of singing, whereas Sprechstimme is closer to speech itself.
Dreimal sieben Gedichte aus Albert Girauds "Pierrot lunaire", commonly known simply as Pierrot lunaire, Op. 21, is a melodrama by Arnold Schoenberg. It is a setting of 21 selected poems from Albert Giraud's cycle of the same name as translated into German by Otto Erich Hartleben. The work is written for reciter who delivers the poems in the Sprechstimme style accompanied by a small instrumental ensemble. Schoenberg had previously used a combination of spoken text with instrumental accompaniment, called "melodrama", in the summer-wind narrative of the Gurre-Lieder, which was a fashionable musical style popular at the end of the nineteenth century. Though the music is atonal, it does not employ Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique, which he did not use until 1921.
Jan (Janice) DeGaetani was an American mezzo-soprano known for her performances of contemporary classical vocal compositions.
Corey Dargel is a composer, lyricist, and singer who makes a mix of contemporary classical and electronic pop music.
Hilliard Ensemble was a British male vocal quartet originally devoted to the performance of early music. The group was named after the Elizabethan miniaturist painter Nicholas Hilliard. Founded in 1974, the group disbanded in 2014.
Qu Xiao-Song is a Chinese composer of contemporary classical music.
A Pierrot ensemble is a musical ensemble comprising flute, clarinet, violin, cello and piano. This ensemble is named after 20th-century composer Arnold Schoenberg’s seminal work Pierrot Lunaire, which includes the quintet of instruments above with a narrator.
Richard Causton is an English composer and teacher.
Andrew Hugill is a British composer, writer and academic. He is both a professor of music and a professor of creative computing. He directs the Creative Computing programme at University of Leicester.
Jane Marian Manning OBE was an English concert and opera soprano, writer on music, and visiting professor at the Royal College of Music. A specialist in contemporary classical music, she was described by one critic as "the irrepressible, incomparable, unstoppable Ms. Manning – life and soul of British contemporary music".
Lunatics at Large is a New Music chamber ensemble based in New York City. It was formed in 2007 to explore the repertoire for mixed chamber combinations beginning with Arnold Schoenberg's Pierrot lunaire, op. 21. Lunatics at Large is a Pierrot ensemble augmented with soprano and viola.
Isidora Žebeljan was a Serbian composer and conductor. She was a professor of composition at the Belgrade Music Academy and a Fellow of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts.
Pierrot lunaire: rondels bergamasques is a cycle of fifty poems published in 1884 by the Belgian poet Albert Giraud, who is usually associated with the Symbolist Movement. The protagonist of the cycle is Pierrot, the comic servant of the Italian Commedia dell'Arte and, later, of Parisian boulevard pantomime. The early 19th-century Romantics, Théophile Gautier most notably, had been drawn to the figure by his Chaplinesque pluckiness and pathos, and by the end of the century, especially in the hands of the Symbolists and Decadents, Pierrot had evolved into an alter-ego of the artist, particularly of the so-called poète maudit. He became the subject of numerous compositions, theatrical, literary, musical, and graphic.
Françoise Renilde Irma Vanhecke is a Belgian soprano, an artist, a pianist, a music researcher, music lecturer and a vocal coach. She is known for her role of Ida Heiger in Tristesses. She is a music composer under the pseudonym of Irma Bilbao.
Graham Waterhouse, cellist and composer especially of chamber music, has written a number of song cycles. As a cellist, he has used string instruments or a Pierrot ensemble instead of the typical piano to accompany a singer. In 2003 he composed a first cycle of songs based on late poems by Friedrich Hölderlin. In 2016, he set nursery rhymes, excerpts from James Joyce, and texts by Shakespeare. In 2017, he wrote settings of poems by Irish female writers, and in 2022 a cycle of Buddhist texts for mezzo-soprano, cello and piano.
Pietro Scarpini was an Italian classical pianist, harpsichordist, composer and conductor, who had an international performing career as a pianist from the late 1930s to the late 1960s. He was particularly known for interpreting 20th-century repertoire, including Schoenberg's Pierrot lunaire and Busoni's "vast and fiendishly difficult" Piano Concerto.
Cultural references to Pierrot have been made since the inception of the character in the 17th century. His character in contemporary popular culture — in poetry, fiction, and the visual arts, as well as works for the stage, screen, and concert hall — is that of the sad clown, often pining for love of Columbine, who usually breaks his heart and leaves him for Harlequin. Many cultural movements found him amenable to their respective causes: Decadents turned him into a disillusioned foe of idealism; Symbolists saw him as a lonely fellow-sufferer; Modernists converted him into a Whistlerian subject for canvases devoted to form and color and line.
Stephen Lawrence Pruslin was an American pianist and librettist who relocated to London in the 1970s to work with Peter Maxwell Davies and Harrison Birtwistle.