NEW RELEASE!!!
For the many who've written wondering where and how Mr. Crane's music can be purchased, we are pleased to announce we have an answer for you more informative than "damned if we know."
And so, thanks to the good folks at Metier Sound & Vision, we are happy to announce the release of...
Laurence Crane: 20th Century Music
Solo Piano Pieces 1985-1999
Michael Finnissy, Piano
Metier Sound & Vision / MSV28506
Track Listing:
20th Century Music
Three Preludes
Blue Blue Blue
Kierkegaard: his prelude
Kierkegaard: his walk around Copenhagen
Birthday Piece for Michael Finnissy
Jacques Derrida goes to a nightclub
Jacques Derrida goes to a massage parlour
Jacques Derrida goes to the supermarket
Jacques Derrida goes to the beach
Gorm Busk
James Duke son of John Duke
Looking for Michael Bracewell
Andrew Renton becomes an international art critic
Chorale for Howard Skempton
Three Pieces for James Clapperton
Available at finer music outlets all around the UK and online.
Download available in the US and the rest of the world from iTunes or eMusic .
Buy Buy Buy!!! Don't look for it on P2P!!! Support independant music!!!
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We now return you to our regularly scheduled biography:
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Just to be clear, now: you won't get Mr. Crane by emailing here. We are as officially unofficial as can be.
It has come to our attention, however, that he occasionally looks in on proceedings. So leave a comment below if you'd like to tell him something. Keep it clean, please.
For now we are being slightly secretive. We don't mean to create a mystery, it's just we've heard that coy is this year's cute. And to those who know, know this: snitches get stitches. In the cutest way, of course.
So who is this Laurence Crane we love so dearly? Let the critics have their say:
"As minimal as you can get, and irresistibly droll." - Gramophone, December 1995
"…every piece had soft, magical qualities that kept you riveted." - The Independent, November 2001
Contemporary music in the 1990’s has developed a parallel stream to the "new complexity" style of Ferneyhough, Barrett, Dillon et al, which has seen composers using a simple, pared down language. Laurence Crane presents a return to figuration after abstraction, a return to clarity after excess, and a return to singularity after multiplicity.
The material chosen is familiar; mostly consonant, often tonal, triads, elementary chords, old well-used intervals rescued from a previous unjust ignorant redundancy.
The familiar sound or image is abstracted by being placed in a new clean and often isolated context, like a museum glass case. Its innate value is respected by it remaining alone, unornamented and unaffected during the course of the piece by any development or transformation, the image staying as and where it is by being gently reiterated or prolonged so that it holds our full attention. The clear structure is held in functions so that we can observe the original material only from one or two other angles. Consequently any tonality inferred is abstracted and becomes non-functional and non-subservient to any dialectic.
His pieces sit in varying degrees between two poles: There are outwardly humorous pieces, such as the set of songs entitled Weirdi, using material that mocks itself and its genre, a wry ironic awareness of a music and music community that occasionally takes itself too seriously. On the other hand there are the more objective abstract pieces entirely without programme, the intention being to present music objects that articulate structures of purity, with no extra-musical concerns.
The detachment and restraint is an aspect that makes this music very English in its manner, also reflected in its understatement and self-mockery or self-apology. It also has a down-to-earth quality, the familiarity of the material connecting more with the every day than the imagined, and an honesty which suggests more an awareness of knowing exactly how to say exactly what it has to say, without boring anyone with irrelevant display or ostentation – just clear presentation.
Laurence Crane was born in Oxford in 1961 and studied composition with Peter Nelson and Nigel Osborne at Nottingham University, graduating in 1983. He lives and works in London.
