"Iconoclast" Des Oliver, (Composer); Mingyuan Ruan, (Accordionist)

Accordionist Mingyuan Ruan
Producer: Mingyuan Ruan
Sound Engineer: Zheng Sun
Videographer: Chenxin Wang, Xi Chen
Des Oliver: desoliver.com/
Mingyuan Ruan www.mingyuanru...
About the music:
This piece was commissioned by the Royal Academy of Music in 2020
as part of the ‘200 Anniversary Commissions’ to celebrate two centuries
of music-making and education at the Academy, and is in memory of my former teacher, British Composer Steve Martland (1954-2013). The work's title is taken from The Guardian obituary (Steve’s favourite paper) penned by the journalist Guy Rickards. The headline
describes Martland as an ‘Iconoclastic composer who crossed musical
boundaries to create a distinctive, edgy sound’.
Many thanks to Mingyuan Ruan, who premiered the piece in a digital performance filmed and recorded in Beijing, presented at the Angela Burgess Recital Hall, Royal Academy of Music on 23rd June 2022. Thanks also to Philip Cashian and Owen Murray.
The piece is more than a simple commemoration. It's my attempt at a kind of musical séance, bringing old memories to life, and begins as a distant dream, a faint but colourful recollection of a single moment. This one moment opens up a reservoir of feelings, thoughts and memories buried in that hidden place somewhere between the conscious and unconscious mind.
It's like when you remember the sound of a familiar voice; its texture and peculiar characteristic inflexions, but are unable to decipher the words..., a burst of laughter perhaps, distant yet distinctive.
As the music progresses, the memories become increasingly more specific-a memory of a lesson with Martland listening to and discussing Debussy's La cathédrale engloutie, then later on (from bs. 105), influences of J. S. Bach, and Henry Purcell, two composers whom Martland greatly admired.
Then emerge other qualities: his wit, dry humour, and the way his piercing eyes would light up in the face of gossip, failing miserably to conceal his glee. His energy, fierceness, his strong moral/political compass, kindness, impishness, and larger-than-life presence. These all become ever more apparent as the piece unfolds and by Letter I (bar 169), it's as if he is standing in the room next to me.
During the last third of the piece, there appears a cycle of relentless quintuplets, which has a dual meaning; they represent liberation from convention and antagonism towards the status quo. The rhythm of the piece is made up of mainly 'equal' subdivisions of the beat: quarter notes, eighth notes, sixteenth notes etc. So, the quintuplets are distinct/independent from this, lying outside the scope of the duple-'system', constantly creating friction against the duple metre pulse ('groove'). They symbolise liberation from convention, and Martland's antagonistic personality, which is ironic since he typically avoided using irrational rhythms in his music.
I wanted to choose an instrument that stands apart from the 'conventional' setup found in an orchestra, to signify Steve's unique personality and his position within/outside British contemporary music. But, by happy accident, I discovered the instrument is eerily reminiscent of the sound of The Steve Martland Band, which was more like a high-energy rock group than a classical ensemble, consisting of very loud amplified brass, ‘sleazy’ bass guitar, heavy drums, and ‘dirty’ saxophones, marimba, guitar, piano and amplified violin.
-Des Oliver