Podcast #6: Final Survey of Late Style

Composers and performers may get so caught up in being consistent…being able to do what they want to do correctly—to follow the rules you might say. But over time that begins to be much less.  Later in one’s career, there is perhaps a purity that may not have been there before because the essential artistic makeup is still there, but there is greater efficiency and greater compulsion to follow the rules so that what happens later might be more succinct, more powerful than what happened before. 

—Elem Eley

The late output of a composer is so interesting because it reflects on who the composer was at that time.  If you look at the best known composers, you have a myriad of places where they wound up at the end of their lives.  Whether they lived to a ripe old age or whether their life was cut short, as we would deem it, their musical output is always a reflection of their own searching.

—Mark Laycock