The rise of cringe

Spectator

16 hours ago

No one wrote programme notes quite like the English experimentalist John White. 'This music is top-quality trash,' proclaims his 1993 album Fashion Music. 'We kindly ask the users of this CD to play it at the volume of a suburban Paris soundmachine or a London underground discman earphone as used by the kid next door.' Track titles included 'Epaulette' and 'Latin Flutes'. From what I remember – my copy vanished a long time ago – the music was cheap and very funny: tinny and dumb.
I was reminded of White recently because trash is back. Everywhere I go, I find composers producing shamefully terrible music. Some deliberately, some inadvertently. What flavour of terrible? Not ugly or discordant. Not camp. More tonal and naff: works woven from the worn-out and iffy.
No bad thing necessarily. The history of classical music is a history of the absorption of trash – the reclamation of forms and sounds once considered stale, embarrassing or wrong. Junk is fuel. And the greatest advances in the artform are often its most bathetic. Take the entry of the dinky, farty Turkish band in Beethoven's Ninth. It should still stop you: this ludicrous sound gatecrashing a world-historical event just as it edges towards transcendence. An outrageous compositional decision – and a clear sign of genius.
So we should rein in our instinct to dismiss compositions that have us holding our nose. But the crucial thing with bad music – whether you're the composer, an audience member, performer or critic – is to be in on the joke. Otherwise, you probably are the joke. I'm not sure that composers Tom Coult or Mark Simpson realise their new commissions for the Proms sounded like a joke. They certainly affect a certain seriousness. A certain honesty and sincerity. Qualities that can be a fast-track to cringe.
Simpson's Zebra also had a third crucial ingredient: a total lack of inhibition. The work is a prog-adjacent concerto for electric guitar so it comes with the territory. It's also an attempt to paint a drug-induced hallucination, one that Philip K. Dick had in real life in 1974, in which he received 'messages from the Roman empire' and 'visitations from three-eyed invaders'. And as we all know there's little more embarrassing than being high.
That the piece came across as one big overexcited overshare, an exercise in premature ejaculation, splooshing and splurging uncontrollably, was perhaps not inappropriate. But the sounds were the musical equivalent not so much of being on a trip but something far worse: someone describing their trip. Then, in the final seconds, a genuinely hallucinatory moment: the sound of a disembodied woman's voice intoning something incomprehensible but sinister over the Tannoy. Incomprehensible by accident. On Radio 3 the words are clear – and the worse off for it.
Trips are tricky. But the perils of evoking a bygone age and going full Werther's Original are even more acute. Tom Coult's Monologues for the Curious lay somewhere between Alan Bennett and the John Lewis Christmas ads on the Richter scale of twee. Melodicas, harmonicas, the ghost of a brass band, the slink of a slow dance: all that was missing was a ukulele. The men of a certain age depicted in these four portraits for tenor and orchestra amble around, dewy-eyed with nostalgia, kindly and cloying. Nothing wrong in wanting to conjure up the insufferable – but you ought to do it without being insufferable yourself. Allan Clayton channels Purcell's stuttering Cold Genius in the second movement and the quirky mood briefly lifts but the tenor – looking, as usual, like a homeless Brian Blessed – was soon singing of his fondness for owls and I wanted to run.
Award for real wrong-'un behaviour, however, goes to young composer Max Syedtollan. His Prynhawn Da! – which opened at Cafe Oto with some magnificent mummering from a man with a doily covering his face – verges on the evil: a criminal collision of Bavarian oompah, house hits recomposed contrapuntally, a reggae version of the Willliam Tell overture, bagpipes, klezmer, Balkan brass, carols, 1980s TV theme tunes, all sped up then slowed down 'so as not to cause a stitch'. Arranged and performed in a ripely revolting way by the Listening Project, the half-hour work is calculated to cause maximum offence. It had me pained, confused, frequently bursting into laughter, feeling that maybe I would never truly understand the world. Feeling also that Syedtollan – who knew exactly what he was doing – is a force to be reckoned with.
Syedtollan is perfectly capable of writing actual good music. Horo povera – stomped out at the start of the night with infectious energy by Search Engine Quartet – is a memorable slice of aggro-minimalism. To risk it all by tipping out a barrel of muck in the second half, however, was a sign of a true artist. The MIDI recording of Prynhawn Da!, by the way, is even better. By which, of course, I mean much worse.