If you want to get a sneak peek at Laurence Osborn’s Essential Relaxing Classical Hits, before we premiere it, then visit clothing emporium Lululemon.co.uk. I’m not getting paid to say this – though that would, in my opinion, be an incredible new angle to work on guerrilla marketing – but it will go a long way to explaining what he’s been up to. Osborn was browsing the website while writing his new piece, reading the copy. He was grabbed by the ostensible words that accompany the website’s plethora of yoga pants and short sleeve shirts. ‘Pulse mapped’. ‘Metal vent’. ‘Coin pockets’. To him, it recast the body as something optimizable – a product with new upgrades. It sent him, as ever, down a rabbit hole.
These kinds of things tend to take hold of Osborn. The composer’s ideas are sudden, even feverish. He reacts to the kind of nonsense so absurd it dares you not to react to it, suggesting you just be agreeable and learn to live with the simulation glitch. His work storms in on concert programmes, washing up the inconceivable. At hcmf// 2017, the Riot Ensemble premiered CTRL, his largest piece to date. Disturbing and explosive, it sounded like nothing else you will hear at a contemporary music festival. In composing the piece, Osborn was thinking about masculinity and ‘the role it plays in the reproduction of trauma’, with violence as its mechanism. The piece was treated with auto tune, a tool that signifies the illusion of invulnerability, while also betraying, through reference to what it’s correcting in the voice, a very human fragility.
For a concert piece, CTRL was as narrative as they come. Like something out of a 1970s prog rock storybook, Osborn juxtaposed symphony, dissonance and football anthem. Genres clashed; time accelerated, then collapsed. With a soprano performance as its centre-piece and fluid orchestral manoeuvres delivered all over the shop, the piece spoke to Osborn’s interest in bombast. ‘I like to write music that is loud and intense and uses all the resources at its disposal’, he said, describing the frenetic pace of CTRL, and the giddy malevolence with which the Riot Ensemble performed it. That used to sum him up perfectly. Talking to him now, he seems a little less burdened with intensity, and is seeking some distance from his former self. ‘CTRL is really just 27-year-old me going baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa’, he says, before describing his new piece as ‘relaxing’, at least in some places.
The Riot Ensemble perform CTRL at hcmf// in 2017
Osborn credits his approach to writing music to his parents. Both of them worked in the theater, and raised on a steady diet of drama, the composer grew increasingly attracted to narratives. It explains his penchant for opera. His avant-garde piece The Mother adapts a play by experimental writer Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, and has been compared to texts ‘by Ibsen and Chekov’. He now finds it almost impossible to separate concepts and music, and is always tempted to reach for that ‘extra-musical significance’. But where Osborn’s style may once have been bulldozing listeners, he now wants to create work from a subtler vantage point – to creep in his themes from the side.
It can be done. This is a composer who once described one of his own pieces as ‘a cheeky little chord on piano and vibes’, after all. Osborn can be casual, his approach to explaining his music demystifying; he’s keen to point out the characters in his pieces, to show us their very real experiences. Returning to hcmf// with a new commission written for Ensemble Klang, he’s now taking aim at late capitalism. But he’s scaling back the stakes, making them human-sized. Written with consumerism on the mind, Essential Relaxing Classical Hits is a meditation on us, and the ways we commodify ourselves. It’s about the insulated worlds we’ve sealed ourselves into, from within.
At first, the Ensemble Klang collaboration was an issue for Osborn. They were too perfect a match, going together with him far too well. He felt an inescapable natural link between his music and theirs: ‘their line-up fits garish music – it’s got these trombones, saxophones and electric guitars, instruments that squeal and provoke’. Sometimes when the stars align, they don’t: ‘I tried for a long time to write something in that vein, and every single time it felt so disingenuous’. Much like his piece for the Riot Ensemble in 2017, Osborn shot a different shot, using a wider range of tools than usual.
Osborn’s new piece is fighting back against the new expectations that have cropped up around him – including the descriptions that have gone into this very article. ‘If someone was to learn I was being commissioned by Ensemble Klang, they might have a specific idea as to what that piece would sound like – I don’t want to do that’. Instead, he wants to peel back the loudness. This doesn’t mean he’s getting rid of it, but that he sees something in its silhouette. He’s found a new version of himself in Essential Relaxing Classical Hits, changing Ensemble Klang in the process.
The name Essential Relaxing Classical Hits is a bit of a misnomer. The piece does refer to some big moments in music’s history – there are phrases from Pachebel’s Canon, Air on a G String and Au Clair de Lune – but it’s really quoting the factory line on which they’ve been packaged and branded, voided of all meaning, over a handful of decades. Osborn’s text, which is as disturbing as it is hilarious, also takes aim at the mindfulness industry, pithily reacting to its placeholder status as a DIY mental health solution. In moments, his music wades through the aesthetic of new age, and the renaissance it’s had in both overground and underground scenes. He tries to see if something beautiful can be salvaged, in spite of itself. It’s all very Osborn: the irony and sincerity, wrapped up with one another in hell.
Osborn isn’t trying to fake anyone out with the piece, or act like he’s above it all, looking down on us as we merge our DNA with capitalism. He spent the last year and a half in the space we did, and noticed that our current infrastructure is governed by fiction. ‘The system we have allows us to construct a world around us that’s fake. It runs by the principles that we personally hold, and it confirms biases we have. In some ways, the last year has really brought that to the surface – it’s in how people relate to the vaccine, or climate change.’ His piece suggests the phenomenal ease with which we can start to take anything, absolutely anything, as the norm, whether it’s yoga pants described with game theory or revered classical music that sells us things. If it sounds a little quieter than usual, and moves in less of a linear line, then it’s because Osborn is down here with us, scrolling with suspicion.
Ensemble Klang premiere Laurence Osborn’s new hcmf// commission at this year’s festival, running Thursday 18 – Monday 22 November 2021. Read more about the festival here ahead of our full programme announcement.