5 - Shock Waves: The Musical Elements of James Dillon

Summary

James Dillon was born in 1950 and educated – partly – in Scotland; early commentators duly accorded him ‘outsider’ status, noting the element of ‘sheer aggression’ as well as ‘a sense of struggle, of wrestling with intractable material’ which suggested Varèse and even Beethoven as ‘obvious’ ancestors. In his penetrating discussion Richard Toop does not pursue the modernist/classical dialectic implied by this comparison, but hints instead at a distinction between Northern intransigence and the ‘unusually Mediterranean opulence’ of the orchestral Helle Nacht (1986–7); Toop's dialogue with Dillon also underlines the absence of ‘mediation’ and the ‘abruption’ he admires in Xenakis (pp. 38–9). This idea then transmutes into ‘this kind of moment when things are between order and disorder’ (p. 41), another elementally modernist perception ultimately deriving from ‘this whole problem, that we grapple with in music, between difference and invariance’ (p. 42). The tension between tendencies to promote synthesis while at the same time rejecting it might therefore be one of the defining factors of the way in which Dillon's Überschreiten (1986) reflects its Rilkeinspired preoccupation with ‘fusion of the organic and the transcendental’ alongside that ‘dissident … excess, rebellion and transgression in the face of order’ (p. 48) which are no less salient. Since the 1980s Dillon has continued to generate musical rituals in these terms which can be relatively austere or relatively opulent in character: the contrast is nowhere more powerfully displayed than in three of his large-scale compositions from the middle of the twenty-first century's second decade – Stabat Mater Dolorosa for 12 voices, 11 musicians and electronics (2014), The Gates for string quartet and orchestra (2016) and Tanz/haus: Triptych 2017.

The kind of parallels and oppositions described by Richard Toop are the common currency of critical attempts to place a composer who struggles with ‘this notion of cohesion’, and who acknowledges essential aspects of tradition only to challenge them. In his first string quartet (1983) Dillon ‘wanted to create a kind of notion of directionality in terms of discontinuities. … I was maintaining the notion of a traditional narrative, but … through disruption rather than through continuity’.