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‘STRUGGLING BUT FAILING TO MASK’: THE MUSIC OF MARK R. TAYLOR
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 July 2013
Abstract
The music of Mark R. Taylor (b. 1961) is as yet little known. In part, this derives from his unusual profile in the current musical scene. The initial characterization of his work given in this article takes his own remarks from a note inscribed at the end of a piano fragment from the mid-1990s as a framework. From his earliest compositions onwards, the handling of musical materials has depended on strictly controlled processes that are conveyed through a notable ‘simplicity of presentation’. This gives the work a semblance of postmodernism; but Taylor distances himself from the allusiveness, playfulness and irony of this movement, preferring to recognize a ‘personal expressivity’ characteristic of ‘the better kind of postmodernism’. These opposing tendencies to objectivity on the one hand and to expressivity on the other are components of a dialectical musical expression in which the music is ‘struggling but failing to mask profound inner turmoil’.
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References
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3 In addition to Patterns 1 there are Patterns 2 (1974–6), for 6 trumpets (or other melody instruments), and Patterns 3 (1978–80), for piano.
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7 Metronome markings, where given, seldom specify a pulse faster than 60; and in the memorable case of ‘…d'un désastre obscur…’, of 2009–10, an initial pulse of 16 is indicated.
8 Programme note for the performance by the author in a concert at Pembroke College, Oxford (27 February 2008).
9 There being no fixed order to the movements, they cannot be referred to other than by their headings.
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13 ‘Renaîtront-ils d'un gouffre interdit à nos sondes…?’ (will they ever live once more in a fathomless underworld?). Scarfe, Baudelaire, vol.1, 101