Finding a uniquely personal style is harder now for a composer than it has ever been. Gloria Coates, an American-born, for some time German-resident composer now in her fifties, has achieved this quite remarkably: if I were to switch on the radio in the middle of another of her pieces I feel sure that I would be able to identify it as hers within seconds. I expect that on paper her music looks extremely complex – she uses dense webs (or “swarms”, as the accompanying note puts it) of interweaving contrapuntal lines – but it is often at the same time audibly simple, with a firm rhythmic tread and a strong sense of tonal or modal centre. Beneath or in the midst of her almost matted textures a slow, chorale-like element is often perceptible; where it is not, one gradually focuses on single events detaching themselves from the clustering lines and begins to suspect that they are made up of very simple elements.
The second movement of the Seventh Symphony would perhaps be a good starting point, since here her ‘cluster’ textures and her chorale-like writing for the most part simply alternate, eventually generating a three-note brass motif that grows impressively, for a moment distinctly recalling the awesome apparition of a great iceberg in Vaughan Williams’s Sinfonia Antartica. Or try the first movement of the Fourth Symphony, where the underlying chorale, its basic tonality constantly called into question by the slow microtonal glissandos that surround it, is ultimately revealed to be Purcell’s “When I am laid in earth” – and in a sonorously simple harmonization, what’s more.
But perhaps after all her First Symphony is the one to begin with, since it so clearly demonstrates her generation of complexity (but a complexity that you feel is always explicable) from simplicity. At the beginning a plain pentatonic melody is played on open strings (the instruments ‘mistuned’ to make this possible). Varieties of attack (pizzicato, striking the instrument, Coates’s beloved glissandos) and rhythmic dislocation are then introduced: the music becomes simple and complex at once. The added elements themselves are the subject of a brief scherzo, while in the third movement the orchestra retunes, returning not only from ‘abnormal’ to normal tuning, but from modal to tonal, and a series of rich chords confirms the move between sound worlds. In the finale Coates finds a technique that we gradually recognize as central to all the later music here: close canonic working, so dense and so filled with microtonal slides (but slides to and from held notes: hence the feeling that somehow or another this music is tonal) that a mere 14 parts sound as ramified as Ligeti.
I am impressed with Coates’s work, in short, and although I’m aware that it’s very easy to be over-impressed by an arrestingly personal idiom, by sheer originality, the looming eloquence of some of this music suggests that its immediate impact will not soon wear off. She is a composer with her own voice and something to say with it. The performances (all live) are accomplished (listening to this music isn’t hard; playing it must sometimes be rather like finding your way around a maze blindfolded), and the recordings are excellent.'