Multivalent Late-Modernist

Desire, gratification and the moment: a music analytical and psychological enquiry into the role of repetition in the music of Howard Skempton, with a response by the composer

“…Writing at that time principally from the perspective of music analysis and critical musicology, my questions were rhetorical, but more recently I started to see if psychology could help me understand why Howard's music, probably more than other music I enjoy, gives me such a pleasurable sense of 'understanding it' in the 'moment', as it were; of feeling I 'know' how the music is 'playing me'. I, therefore, sought a different kind of understanding from that which, to date, has informed the reception of Howard's music (for instance by Hill 1984;Parsons 1980Parsons , 1987Potter 1991;Pace 1997;Whittall 2017Whittall , 2018aWhittall , 2018b. Much of what has been written by these authors has been specifically about Howard's approximately 140 piano miniatures, and I continue this line of investigation here, rather than looking at his later, longer compositions which offer different interpretational challenges.…”