"Ambitious, questing and pointedly European in outlook, the music of Peter Seabourne avoids easy answers. Clearly Seabourne is a composer with whom to reckon, his music combining a demonstarbly Romantic rhetoric with an audible and yet never facile approach to tonality." [Richard Whitehouse - Musical Opinion]

...How difficult, indeed futile, to describe musical ideas in words - beware composers who talk too much!...

SOAPBOX

I have long held a feeling of alienation from much of the mid-late 20th century's avant garde. Unfortunately, I feel equally depressed by the banality of much of the counter-swing - often so "politically correct" yet crass and shallow beyond belief - the musical equivalent of the superficial "installations" that seem to dominate art galleries. Unfortunately both of these dead ends appear to frame the mindsets of promoters and broadcasters.

Perhaps the "Great Spasm" was necessary in its own terms - and do not misunderstand me: I am most certainly not in favour of trite populism or stagnant ultra-conservativism - but the legacy has been terrible for present day composers, indeed serious music as a whole. A generation of performers and audiences has been totally disengaged from the art-music of its own age because of it; perhaps the first time in history that this has been so. I worry that alongside this very few people even find the act of sustained listening possible without a video display or a rapid change of camera angle. And we composers carry the Mark of Cain...

The very architect of the one-way street, Schönberg said, "The only road that does not lead to Rome is the middle one", but to my mind there are plently of interesting fields beyond the verge if one can only turn one's head. And, much as I love it, there are other cities...

I embrace my musical heritage, even bits that I am not supposed to like (...including Poulenc and Rachmaninoff). Machines, super-complexity, mindnumbing repetition, empty experimentalism, static expressionistic wallpaper, and concertos for turntables or ping pong players hold no attraction. For me warmth, communication, character and reference are not signs of "cowardice in the face of the enemy" but enduring elements that can still breathe and stimulate. We must acknowledge the "trauma" that has been and yet find personal ways to sidestep it - as one might say composers such as Janacek, Ravel, Britten, Rautavaara did in their time.

Ultimately, if any serious music is to survive we are in the hands of future performers who will want to play it, and future audience members who will pay to hear it. Without intended conceit, I say that I want my music to be loved by at least some of them.

Partly through now running a small CD label, and from my travels for performances, I have met other like-minded composers whom I am pleased to call friends. This gives me hope... (turning on the radio, I must confess, too often does not).

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