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Before studying composition, John Woolrich studied English at Manchester University. The composer will be 50 next year and there are few more widely admired and liked figures in the world of 'new music'. His contacts are oceanic. He has founded ensembles- the Composers Ensemble - and commissioned new works for them assiduously; he is a generous and respected educator; he organises distinguished and original concert series- the Hoxton New Music days, now Almeida Opera Concerts. But as an artist he maintains the outsider's distance, cultivates a critical mind, and always looks for new perspectives.
What kind of music does he write? Surprisingly perhaps, for someone with his love of the modernist tradition, it is not hard. There are acerbities and abrasions - flatulent trombones, sawn-off oxygen cylinders, flutes that aggress as readily as seduce - but the attitude is benevolent. We find our way around. Musical sections and paragraphs are punctuated for our benefit. Other composers may not hold themselves responsible for the 'concentration problems' of their audiences but Woolrich does.
Woolrich's music is always intensely cultured. A work needn't descend, he says- and his never does- 'to soap opera to gain access to universal emotions'. From Monteverdi to Mozart, Corelli to Tippett, Berio and Birtwistle, the Great Tradition imposes itself.
Is he then a post-modernist, playing games with his allusions and re-creations? Ulysses Awakes, a wonderfully elegiac string piece from the late 1980s based on the music of Monteverdi, was copper-bottomed neo-classical re-creation, and a continuing success. The Viola Concerto, with its references to Wagner, Schumann and Mozart and its stories of love and parting, was sublimely traditional- and original- myth-making. And Woolrich's most recent anniversary tribute- Arcangelo, to commemorate Arcangelo Corelli, born 350 years ago- shows Woolrich removing himself further still from the post-modern aesthetic, revelling not in Corelli's glorious sonorous surface but his structural depths. It was the shape of the concerto grosso- 'a shaggy-dog story without the Beethoven punch-line'- that interested Woolrich, not its effects.
If Woolrich's musical personality is shy, maybe we should look for its essence in the fleeting statements of the Pianobooks, or the intense and private chamber works. But in the end those pictures tell only half the story. The full picture- of an artist grappling with private imperatives and public responsibilities- was provided by the Oboe Concerto, premiered at the Proms in 1996. The questions raised by that piece- how to be convincingly personal in public, how to find and project a voice- are at the heart of Woolrich's music, and they are ones to which Woolrich finds answers as cogent as any composer working today.
c.Dermot Clinch, 2003
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