Howard Skempton celebrated his 70th birthday on 31 October, 2017. The occasion was marked with a celebratory concert at Kings Place curated by the choral director David Wordsworth. The event featured music by Skempton in an appropriately wide range of genres – his authorized worklist includes almost 600 pieces (depending how one counts collections of independent pieces) for many instrumental and vocal combinations. Accordingly, solos for piano and clarinet, chamber and choral music were performed by a broad spectrum of British new-music specialists: composer–pianists Michael Finnissy and Morgan Hayes; leading lights of contemporary music Thalia Myers and John Tilbury; pianists Esther Cavett and Jonathan Powell; the Gildas String Quartet; clarinettist Jack McNeill and the Addison Chamber Choir. Images of this gala event are included here, as Plates 5.1 and 5.2.

After politely observing this canonizing homage from a seat near the end of a row, Skempton slipped out for an after-show jam with the jazz ensemble Notes Inégales, performing, among other favourites, his comic patter song In Cuba they play with maracas (1988). No single concert could pay tribute to the breadth of Skempton's on-going composing and performing, and the entire evening passed without mention of his most famous work, the orchestral elegy Lento (1990), and his signature pieces for solo accordion, the latter distinguished by pathos, abstraction and folksy allusion. As a composer, but also as an accordionist, publisher, singer, teacher, and broadcaster, Skempton occupies a unique and central place in British new music, even as he complicates those simplistic categories (“centrality,” “British music,” and “new music”).

Skempton's musical style is lucid yet sophisticated, appealing to both lay and specialist listeners in equal measure. His voice is as fresh and immediate in the increasingly ambitious and varied compositions of recent decades, as in the piano and accordion miniatures written in his early days as an experimentalist. As such, his contribution to contemporary music stands apart from that of the new complexity school, yet it is also distinct from the minimalist composers with whom he has been associated. The bittersweet quality of some of his pieces, the austerity of others, and above all their uncompromising focus on sonority, project a seriousness of purpose combined with tenderness and charm.