Keith Burstein

Keith Burstein born 1957 as Keith Burston (the anglicised form adopted by his father of the surname, which Burstein later dropped) is an English composer, conductor and music theorist with Russian family origins.

He is noted for his fervent championing of tonal music as a valid contemporary composing style.

Keith Burstein's early musical approach was informed by the culture of atonalism in which he was educated at the Royal College of Music, and his early compositions were written in the atonal style.

Originally tutored in piano by Hove-based music teacher Christine Pembridge, Keith Burstein attended the Royal College of Music from 1977 (where he held two scholarships).

While attending the college, he studied composition with Bernard Stevens and John Lambert.

During this time he was exposed for the first time to the contemporary classical music of Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez, and became a committed enthusiast for atonal and experimental music.

After graduation, he studied with Jonathan Harvey on a Ralph Vaughan Williams Trust bursary.

Burstein has commented that at the time of his studies there was widespread talk of a "malaise", or "vacuum" in contemporary classical music, but that there were no simultaneous ideas regarding how this problem might be solved.

Keith Burstein initially made his name as a conductor and commissioner of contemporary music – primarily as founder of chamber ensemble The Grosvenor Group (not to be confused with the property company of the same name).

Burstein made a dramatic shift towards composing tonally during the late 1980s.

Keith Burstein reassumed his original family name in the late 1980s, at the same time that he was discovering his own voice as a composer.

He has commented that this was part of a process of self-discovery at the time, and not related to religious beliefs.

This ensemble existed between 1983 and 1993 and performed works by Schoenberg, Webern, Stockhausen, Harrison Birtwistle, Edward Elgar, Brian Ferneyhough, Oliver Knussen, Mark-Anthony Turnage and Luciano Berio among others.

Burstein has subsequently described the ensemble as "an attempt to explore the landscape and to find a pathway forward".

The group received considerable critical acclaim during its existence.

In a 1986 review of one of their concerts, The Times newspaper commented that "they played as though their very lives depended upon it."

However, Burstein's priorities were beginning to alter due to his growing interest as a composer in reassessing and reincorporating tonality into contemporary music.

Although the Grosvenor Group performed three of Burstein's compositions during its lifetime, these were atonal works inspired by his education at the Royal College of Music.

Burstein would eventually sideline his conducting work (and end his commissioning work) in favour of full-time composing.

This is expressed in the subject matter of several of his works, including The Year's Midnight – A Meditation on the Holocaust (2000) and the opera Manifest Destiny (2004, revised as Manifest Destiny 2011 in 2011), in which would-be suicide bombers reject violence in favour of a desire for peace.

He is associated with the Stop The War Coalition, giving press conferences with Bianca Jagger and Walter Wolfgang and performing benefits alongside Julie Christie and Michael Nyman.

Keith Burstein was born in the English coastal town of Brighton: his birth name was "Keith Burston", and he was one of the two sons of Samuel and Barbara Burston.

The family surname was an Anglicised version of Burstein, the original Russian-Jewish family name of Samuel Burston's ancestors (who emigrated to the UK in the late nineteenth century).

The family was musical – Keith's parents, uncles and aunts were all orchestral musicians, and one of his cousins is the composer Paul Lewis.

Both Samuel and Barbara Burston were orchestral violinists and had played in the orchestras for the Royal Opera House and Sadler's Wells Theatre as well as the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and the BBC Ulster Orchestra.

They also played in the Hallé Orchestra, Manchester (during which time Samuel Burston had enjoyed a close rapport with the conductor Sir John Barbirolli.)

However, he has also noted that his Jewish ancestry perhaps formed a "subliminal linkage" to his decision to compose the Holocaust-themed choral work The Year’s Midnight in 2000.

In a 2002 interview with The Independent newspaper, he reflected "What had happened to me was a sort of Damascene conversion, I suppose. I suddenly saw that atonalism was a dead end. Once you accept that melody is everywhere, and always has been, in folk music and pop and rock, you see that it's not reactionary to write a tune.".

He began pursuing tonal composition and reinvestigating more traditional forms such as requiems, church chorales and brass band music.

Although both Burstein (and various critics) have sometimes dubbed his style as "neo-romantic", he has stated that his education in atonalism has informed his musical approach.

He has been described by the Hampstead & Highgate Express (in a review of his Symphony No. 1) as "a contemporary master of tonality" and by The Daily Telegraph as "an ardent new romantic post-modernist."

Burstein has developed his approach into a theory he initially dubbed "Romantic Futurism", realigned as "New Tonalism" and now calls "Super Tonality".

He views this approach as a fusion (or reintegration) of atonal and tonal composition – in which tonality is used to release the expressive power of dissonance – and considers it to represent "(a) wider horizon… that carries atonalism and all the other -isms with it, and creates a forward-looking fusion."

Super Tonality acknowledges the philosophy and reasoning behind the original atonal experiments of Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern and others, but strongly questions the dominance of these and related forms in contemporary classical music and in modern music critical theory.

Burstein has also suggested that this style of music can be composed by musicians (such as himself) "who were fired in the white heat of the atonal avant-garde and who dedicated themselves to that depth of knowledge and practise within the most highly-charged furnaces of experiment".

He has cited Arvo Pärt as one of the other composers whom he believes is working in this area.

Burstein's outspoken stance has sometimes led to friction between himself and others in the contemporary classical music establishment.

He has accused "moribund atonalist dogma" of having stifled musical debate in the world of contemporary classical music.

He has also challenged the idea that "the intrinsic worth of a musical piece is defined solely by its 'intellectual' content; and that the degree of intellectuality is signified entirely by the degree of atonalism involved in its construction."

Burstein is also known for a strong commitment to humanism and to issues of social concern.