NICHOLAS MAW AND THE MUSIC OF MEMORY

Extract

Back in the early 1960s, followers of new music in Britain soon became aware that the future would not be entirely dictated by the innovative radicalism of Princeton or Darmstadt – or even by such iconoclastic Brits as Peter Maxwell Davies and Harrison Birtwistle. And anyone inclined to dismiss Nicholas Maw's Scenes and Arias, on its first version's Proms première in August 1962, as a nostalgic pseudo-Delian wallow, was put right by Anthony Payne's enthusiastic contextualization of Maw in this journal a couple of years later. In Payne's analysis, Scenes and Arias triumphantly avoided rambling romanticism, demonstrating a ‘post-expressionist language’ at ‘a new pitch of intensity’, as well as ‘the composer's exceptional feeling for the movement inherent in atonal harmony’.