The first opportunity to study music seriously came at Bishop Otter College in Chichester, West Sussex, an institution dedicated to turning out teachers well-equipped to look after a challenging subject on any school’s curriculum. Every artist needs a mentor, and in Michael Waite, a caring and highly intuitive composition teacher at the college, he found just that person. Guided gently towards better ways of musical expression, Graham Lack was soon composing for small ensembles, guitar, recorder, organ, piano and especially solo wind instruments. These studies formed, naturally enough, part of a music teacher’s armoury, but inculcated a deep understanding of how a musical instrument functions and how best it can be encouraged to ‘speak’. During that time, 1972-1975, the composer was fortunate to hear several works performed, including a number of motets by the Choir of Chichester Cathedral and pieces for chamber orchestra. He was the recipient of the Sussex Area Award for further studies.

 Between 1976-1980 Graham Lack studied at Goldsmiths’ College at the University of London, graduating B.Mus. (Hons.Lond.) and studying composition with Anthony Milner, a pupil of Mátyás Seiber, himself a former prodigy of Zoltán Kodály. Milner was also responsible for exercising a telling influence on a still inexperienced composer, providing more than a dash of necessary rigour to a fortunately easily malleable compositional technique. His exacting methods and constant questioning directed to finding just the best way to achieve the desired sound left their mark. A discretionary stipend awarded by the Idlewild Trust enabled the composer to take up a place at King’s College, again within the University of London, and he successfully completed a master’s degree – an M.Mus. in historical musicology – with Brian Trowell, Reinhard Strohm and Pierluigi Petrobelli. These studies in early music, mediaeval and renaissance notation, aesthetics, stemmatics and musicography were by no means a flight from composition itself. It was more a cathartic experience during which these disciplines were understood as a kind of composition in reverse. Here, too, came the decisive impulse – and impulse it was – to leave England and explore a musical tradition that the English label as ‘continental’ and which in German belongs to the ‘Abendland’. It was Reinhard Strohm who kindly provided the necessary letters of introduction. Back in 1981, Germany was still divided, and the American presence was strong within the Bundesrepublik Deutschland. The composer thus took up a lectureship in music at the University of Maryland, on the Munich campus, and had the uncanny experience of commuting each day as a British ‘third country national’ between Germany and the United States of America. The university closed its programmes in 1992, but by then the composer was active as a freelance composer, and providing essays and articles for a number of journals including BBC Music Magazine and Tempo. For the 2000 Salzburg Festival he contributed an essay to the programme of music by George Benjamin.   

The quest further to absorb musicological knowledge and place original findings at the disposal of others continues apace, and Graham Lack is currently completing at the Technische Universität in Berlin a doctoral dissertation that devises a morphology of spectral music and traces the influences of this method on contemporary Finnish composers. He has spoken at the following symposia: KlangForschung (Munich 1999); International Symposium of Composer Institutes (Munich 2000), and has been invited by the University of Oxford (2001) and the Institute of Finno-Ugric Studies at the Ludwig Maximilians Universität in Munich (2001) to give papers on contemporary Finnish music. At present, the composer still lives and works in Munich.

  It is the field of chamber music to which Graham Lack feels most drawn. The soundworld produced by a small number of instruments is irresistible to him, and he believes there is still much to be explored in this genre. Recent works include the Quintet for Violin, Viola, Cello, Horn and Piano, the Trio for Clarinet, Cello and Piano, and, at the time of writing, a concerto for viola and chamber orchestra for Hariolf Schlichtig. A few remarks on the Quintet have much to bear on the composer’s attitudes and ideas. Composed for Wolfgang Gaag, the former solo horn with the Munich Philharmonic under Sergiu Celibidache, the piece takes as its point of departure a work written for the same forces by Felix Draeseke, a contemporary of Brahms. But this earlier quintet by an avowedly romantic composer does not provide any specific musical material for Lack’s own work: it is the soundworld of the Draeseke piece that interested the composer, plus the fact that an original composition using this unusual but highly justifiable instrumentation enables players to put together a homogeneous programme containing both new music and old. The Clarinet Trio was written for Eduard Brunner. Other artists for whom Graham Lack has composed include: The King’s Singers (Images, Book I) and SingerPur (Images, Book II). His choral music is published by Hayo-Verlag in the series ‘Chor 2000’.  

November 2000 sees the premiere in Munich of Nine Moons Dark, a series of dramatic scenes for soprano, ensemble and speaking chorus. Well on the way to becoming a stage-work in its own right, this secular cantata is to a libretto in German by Sabine Frank freely based on legends and ideas explored in the Finnish Kalevala.

  November 2000  

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