There is something very Monty Pythonesque about the music of British composer Richard Ayres (born in 1965) in the outrageous level of its surreal non sequiturism; if Messrs. Gilliam, Idle, Cleese, et al., had been composers, this might well be what their music would have sounded like. The three manically disjunct works recorded here, written between 1997 and 2006, are characterized by a strict avoidance of traditional principles of logic or coherent musical development, except in the cases where those principles are ...
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There is something very Monty Pythonesque about the music of British composer Richard Ayres (born in 1965) in the outrageous level of its surreal non sequiturism; if Messrs. Gilliam, Idle, Cleese, et al., had been composers, this might well be what their music would have sounded like. The three manically disjunct works recorded here, written between 1997 and 2006, are characterized by a strict avoidance of traditional principles of logic or coherent musical development, except in the cases where those principles are employed only to be slyly subverted (for example, in the first movement of the NONcerto for horn, in which the soloist is required to run back and forth across the stage, mounting ramps that are supposed to simulate the Alps, to create the effect of horn calls echoing between distant peaks). Ayres cites Schnittke and Janácek as inspirations, and it's possible to hear the influence of Schnittke's polystylism, but executed with an acute sense of the ridiculous not usually associated with the...
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