Alex Tay – britmod

Описание: This piece was written during the Composition and Performance course in September 2024 as part of the Britten Pears Young Artist Programme, premiered during the Aldeburgh Festival in June 2025.

“The U.K. scene’s filled with decisive brits who know what they think. I wanted to be like that when I was younger, but I found out later that I'm too weak as a composer, I don’t have so much to stand for. I found a text that frames my artistic impotence and wrote something stylistic derivative, copying the great and bold faces of British post/modernism – Knussen, Adès, Anderson (this piece's dedicatee, the sleigh bells are a nod), Matthews, Turnage; hence the piece’s contraction as moniker. I tried to convince myself that the derivation was a meta way of sending myself up but that kind of got confusing.

The title also refers to A.G. Cook’s album britpop. Just like everyone else I've felt Hyperpop’s sugary swell and was thinking about its relation to pop, how its sort of like pop squared. Was it possible to square the aesthetics of the above listed names if I vandalistically heaped them into a conglomerate and drove their musical characteristics to an extreme? But I ran out of time and the self-hating irony got lost and the squaring became more of a half-hearted circling – I think that's where the synth comes in? – so what’s a piece like that going to turn out like anyway.” Alex Tay

Film credit: Alexander Barnes