Wattamolla Red

Martin Wesley-Smith's composer colleagues, myself included, secretly hate him. It's not a personal thing. He's a generous fellow, affable to a fault, and there are few people with whom I'd rather have dinner. But he seems to have misunderstood the whole point about being a contemporary composer. He writes music that audiences like. I don't mean they just respect it, or admire it, or find it powerful or deeply affecting; no, they really like it.… Wesley-Smith's music spans all the usual genres from chamber music to opera, and his work with electronics and computers seems to call for the adjective 'pioneering', But the fact that audiences even like his electronic music (which surely can't be right) attests to the nature of his output. Even when he is being deadly serious, as in the chamber opera Quito (TP111) … Wesley-Smith continually undercuts the paths with black humour. I should stress that it's usually not applied humour, but rather a rich seam of irony, capable of descending into slapstick, but more generally insinuating itself with some subtlety. It's the musical equivalent of a raised eyebrow, from beneath which Wesley-Smith views the world and all its absurdities.

Much of this music was originally devised to accompany images, but it's surprising how well it works without them. I know of no other body of electronic music so humane in its concerns or its sounds, and the booklet essay by the composer is one of the best pieces of CD documentation I've read in quite a while.