A collection of pieces employing quotation, pastiche, arrangement and original music to explore questions of music history and personal identity as a composer
One of the many themes of Marcel Proust’s novel A la Recherche du Temps Perdu is a theory of art history, influence and individuality that has music at its heart. As part of that, Proust describes two pieces by the imaginary composer Vinteuil – a violin sonata and a septet. This project began not from an attempt to ‘write’ those pieces, but to use them to imagine what a speculative, non-linear music history, taking Proust into the present day, might sound like.
Researcher: Alex Hills
So far, this project consists of six pieces, written for a range of occasions. They all propose a version of music that incorporates elements from more than one historical moment, drawing from Proust’s notion of art bending time to contain past, present and future simultaneously. This is done by balancing pastiche and quotation with original music, often using shared basic materials and gestures to create links between historically disparate styles.
The two pieces directly based on Proust – Misremembrances and Septet for 11 Instruments – were written as part of a project with UCL philosopher Tom Stern on Music and Proust, supported by UCL Music Futures, and premiered at UCL and the Royal Academy of Music in June 2022 and October 2023 respectively. Misremembrances takes fragments of, amongst other bits of late 19th-century French music, Debussy’s Violin Sonata to imagine a fictious past for the piece (what would it have sounded like written in 1870, or 1895?) but also to project them into the future. What can I, writing in 2022, do with that language and those materials? The Septet for 11 Instruments (Proust miscounted the number of instruments he was describing in the book!) spreads outward from the first performance of La Mer – which is clearly invoked in Proust’s description of the work’s first movement – in 1905. It travels both backwards through Wagner to Beethoven, Proust’s key musical influences in the book, and forwards via Stravinsky and Messiaen to the present day.
A smaller piece written at the same time as the Proust project is A History of Descent for solo double bass, commissioned as part of the Academy’s 200 Pieces series (first performed at the Academy in 2022 and subsequently recorded). This explores many historical forms of a very generic bass gesture: descent. These move from baroque (the chromatic descent of lamentation) to, again, the present day.
Another small piece is closer to arrangement, Andante No Longer for Strings, in response to Ruth Crawford Seeger’s Andante for Strings (which is also the third movement of her String Quartet). This takes the underlying structure of long notes and hairpin dynamics that make up the movement in what Crawford Seeger described as ‘a sort of counterpoint of crescendi and diminuendi’ and adds a triad to nearly every note, finding tonal connections that are the opposite of the dissonant counterpoint she intended. This was a co-commission by Ensemble Plus Minus and the BBC, for performance on the Radio 3 New Music Show on March 29 2025. An arrangement of the fourth movement of the quartet is also projected as part of a future Ensemble Plus Minus project on cross-genre transcription and arrangement.
Finally, in 2024 I wrote two substantial solo piano pieces exploring these ideas. Faure and Me has three movements – Me, Faure and Faure and Me. The first of these is in my ‘own’ language, although one consequence of this project is to make me constantly ask what this is. The second is an attempt to pastiche late Faure, and the third a hybrid of the two, as if Faure and I were writing a piece together, while all sharing some of the same gestural and melodic materials. The second solo piano piece, Kaleidoscope, takes as basic material the descending chromatic bassline from tonic to dominant often called the ‘Passus Duriusculus’ (‘difficult passage’ – closely related to the Lamentatio bass referenced in A History of Descent), which is given an extraordinary range of harmonic treatments from Purcell and Bach onwards. Here it is again treated in a historically fluid way, ranging from simple tonal treatments to contemporary ones. These pieces will both be recorded by pianist Joseph Havlat for future release and public performance.
This is very much a project in progress, and I anticipate counterfactual music history being an important part of my compositional practice in the future. It has proved both provocative and liberating, allowing me to engage with musical languages which I would not have previously been comfortable finding in my own work, and changing my sense of who ‘I’ am as a composer.
Image credit: Marcel Proust’s bed and screen in the Musée Carnavalet, Paris. Public Domain.