Gardner: love or hate?

There are many composers that I love and many that I hate, but in John Gardner I have a composer that I both love and hate simultaneously. Every work I’ve heard, without exception, has generated one of only two reactions in me: “ooh, lovely!”, or, “blimey, I’ve accidentally walked into a hoedown.” It’s love or hate, nothing in between. He’s the Marmite of Music.

In fact they should put that on his website, which doesn’t seem to go in for too much hyperbole. It kicks off by describing him, not as England’s most interesting living composer, most unusual living composer, or even most under-rated living composer. No, he is simply “England’s oldest living composer” (and even then only “almost certainly”). Wow what an accolade! Maybe they’re scared Tavener will sue.

We’ve done quite a few Gardner pieces since I joined the choir, and he does seem to be one of the most divisive of composers when it comes to general opinion. A Burns Sequence, for example, is mostly on the “ooh lovely” side of the Great Marmite Divide, but some people find the unstable rhythms and keys quite frustrating and unnecessarily difficult to follow. Gardner freewheels through cross-rhythms and unrelated chords with gay abandon, and it often feels like we’re trundling along somewhere behind, as though we were scared of speeding in a built-up harmony. But personally I rather enjoy the challenge of the quick changes. I especially love the hymn-like first and last pieces where the metric form means we have to be absolutely together. Conversely, my least favourite piece in the sequence is the simplest one, the utterly twee and vile (or fresh and engaging, depending on your viewpoint) “Whistle an’ I’ll come to ye”. OOOOOOOOH I hate it! My fingers are involuntary curling even as I type. It’s a folk song about young love (bleurgh) where the ladies have to sing coquettishly (double triple bleurgh) while the men whistle humorously in accompaniment (actually I do quite like that bit). We struggled with the style a bit at rehearsal on Wednesday. “Convince me that you fancy this lad” entreated David-the-conductor, on what felt like our hundredth attempt. I tried, but I may not have been utterly convincing. It’s hard to be coquettish when you’re wishing you were running the lad through with a pitchfork. I don’t think I was the only one struggling either, as David declared us all lesbians at one point. I think we got there in the end, but my greatest fear is that we’ll give it our all on Saturday, and it will go down so well that our loyal audience will begin insisting we do it as an encore at every single concert. I would actually rather bath in Marmite.