In the composer portrait album The Tyranny of Fun, Richard Baker is shown to be an adept and versatile sound collagist and sculptor. Spanning three decades, the survey of Baker's compositional life includes multiple pieces for chamber ensemble – miniatures and concerti – as well as for a percussion duo, unaccompanied choir and diatonic music box, the latter a charming two-minute solo called Crank. This inviting amuse bouche fittingly starts off the album, as it was written the earliest, in 1994, when Baker was not yet a quarter-century old and studying with Louis Andriessen at The Hague, but it was performed by Baker recently, in 2023, almost 30 years later, bookending all of the works on The Tyranny of Fun, which are about evenly distributed through time.
A composer and conductor, Baker is very skilled at crafting curious three-dimensional sound objects from Western classical musical instruments. When I listen to Motet II, my favourite piece of the album, I am suspended between an understanding of the extended sounds of known instruments and an incomprehension at the delicious togetherness that creates a meaning at once cohesive yet difficult to describe in specific terms. Each of the seven parts of Motet II, performed by the phenomenal CHROMA ensemble, hovers around a minute and a half, and are all delectable musical creations. The string and brass pairings forge unforgettable sound colours both bright and grounded. The timbral play is amazing, due to exceptional percussion writing. And the recording is so clear – by the experienced David Lefeber, who is an engineer and producer on many of NMC's recordings – allowing individual instruments to speak and be understood as themselves but also to fuse into fresh chimeras romping in their special soundworlds.
In the programme notes of Motet II, Baker writes that the piece was ‘composed against the backdrop of tumultuous world events: a global pandemic; the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis and the subsequent wave of international protests against structural racism; a contentious presidential election in the USA’. Musically, the material ‘comes from two sources: a television performance of a Welsh folksong by American actor and singer Eartha Kitt, Mae Nghariad yn Fenws (“My Lover is Venus”) and a BBC Cymru news item about the appearance of racist graffiti in the village of Penygroes in north Wales.’ Now, Baker doesn't expect us to glean this level of context from the music, and he even says that ‘the piece is not narrative or descriptive and the consequences of these various kinds of interference assume a musical life of their own’. But I find the specificity of Baker's inspiration wonderful. Though I suspect it's not unusual for composers to be influenced by current events and what is streaming or floating through airwaves at the moment of composition, their sources are simply not often revealed so plainly. Baker wants us to know his sources and maybe even seek them out to retrace his steps.
What is special about music and art for Baker, I think, is the human desire to make meaning out of everything in our lives, musical and not. For him, a composition is autobiographical, a moment in time: what he has seen, what he has thought about, what he has listened to. A notes app converted into musical creation. I can hear detractors already: what does this have to do with the music? Too Much Information. Let MUSIC speak for itself. But I love the notes, and not because I need them to understand the music. The music can be perfectly understood on musical terms: Baker mixes genres, rhythms and melodies; he hopscotches across registers and gestures; he is a masterful orchestrator (and the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group masterful interpreters). I love the notes because meaning is elusive, and we have in Baker someone who is actively making meaning of the world through writing music, and we can follow along. That is what the internet is best at: putting old and new, deep and shallow, popular and esoteric all on the same plate. Baker too. Dig in.
