Howard Skempton

Howard While Skempton (born 31 October 1947) is an English composer, pianist, and accordionist.

Since the late 1960s, when he helped to organise the Scratch Orchestra, he has been associated with the English school of experimental music.

Skempton's work is characterised by stripped-down, essentials-only choice of materials, absence of formal development and a strong emphasis on melody.

The musicologist Hermann-Christoph Müller has described Skempton's music as "the emancipation of the consonance".

Skempton was born in Chester and studied at Birkenhead School and Ealing Technical College.

He started composing before 1967, but that year he moved to London and began taking private lessons in composition from Cornelius Cardew.

For example, A Humming Song (1967), an early piano piece composed before Skempton started lessons with Cardew, is a miniature with static, gentle sound.

The harmonic structure consists of eight symmetrically arranged pitches, out of which six are selected for use in the piece.

Chance procedures are then used to determine the order and number of occurrences of individual pitches.

The pianist is asked to sustain certain pitches by humming.

In 1968 Skempton joined Cardew's experimental music class at Morley College, where in spring 1969 Cardew, Skempton and Michael Parsons organised the Scratch Orchestra.

This ensemble, which had open membership, was dedicated to performing experimental contemporary music by composers such as La Monte Young, John Cage and Terry Riley, as well as by members of the orchestra itself.

One of Skempton's early works, Drum No. 1 (1969), became one of the "most useful and satisfying" pieces in the repertory of the Scratch Orchestra.

Through the Scratch Orchestra Skempton met numerous composers and performers, including Christopher Hobbs, John White and various Systems artists, and the pianist John Tilbury.

Another early piece, Drum No. 1 (1969), composed for the Scratch Orchestra, consists of just a few written instructions to the performers and is clearly inspired by similarly realised works by La Monte Young, whose music Cardew was enthusiastically propagating in the late 1960s.

Other early works include two pieces for tape, a medium Skempton rarely used later: Indian Summer (1969) and Drum No. 3 (1971).

However, tensions arose during the politicising of the Scratch Orchestra in the early 1970s, when Cardew and a number of other important members pushed the ensemble in a Maoist direction.

Skempton, Hobbs, Parsons, White and many others refused to be associated with this political line, and the break-up of the Orchestra was accompanied by (in Parsons's words) "a split between its 'political' and 'experimental' factions".

The early 1970s saw a slow shift from static, abstract pieces to pieces with more clearly defined rhythmic and harmonic structures, although the methods and forms Skempton used remained unorthodox.

Since 1971 Skempton has been working as a music editor, performer (of his own compositions, on piano and accordion), and teacher.

He now teaches composition at the Birmingham Conservatoire.

The score of May Pole (1971), a piece for orchestra, consists of a chance-determined sequence of chords.

Each performer chooses a note from a chord, and chooses the moment when to play that note.

The later the choice, the softer the dynamics.

Skempton later called such pieces "landscapes" that "simply project the material as sound, without momentum."

For instance, in the series of Quavers piano pieces (1973–75) the music consists solely of repeated chords with no pauses between them.

In addition to "landscapes" two other categories appeared, dubbed "melodies" and "chorales" by the composer.

In 1974 Skempton and Michael Parsons formed a duo to perform their own works.

Some of his earlier piano works, such as Saltaire Melody (1977) and Trace (1980), have become favourites with the public.

Formative influences on Skempton's music included the works of Erik Satie, John Cage and Morton Feldman.

The "melodies" are single melodic lines either with simple accompaniment (Saltaire Melody, for piano (1977)) or suspended in space (later works such as Trace for piano (1980) and Bagatelle for flute (1985)).

"Chorales" are works where material is presented primarily (or solely) using chords.

An example is Postlude (1978), for piano, in contradistinction to Eirenicon 3 (1978), also for piano, which is a "landscape".

The 1980s saw an increase of interest in Skempton's music, which led to more commissions and permitted him to compose more for larger forces.

In the 1990s important recordings of his works started appearing, such as a disc of piano music recorded by his old friend and former Scratch Orchestra colleague John Tilbury, released on Sony Classical in 1996, and Surface Tension, a recording of miscellaneous works released on Mode Records.

Lento, an orchestral work composed in late 1991, became one of Skempton's most widely recognised pieces.

Skempton was the winner in the Chamber Scale Composition category at the Royal Philharmonic Society Music Awards in 2005 for his string quartet Tendrils (2004).

Skempton's style is characterised by a concentration on quality of sound and economy of means, absence of development in the conventional sense, and concentration on sonority.

Many of his pieces are quite short, lasting no longer than one or two minutes.

Although the compositional methods are clearly experimental, involving, for example, aleatory methods, there is a marked emphasis on the melody in many pieces.