A COMPOSER who goes to Aeschylus, Euripides and Thucydides; to Shakespeare, Dryden and Dante; and to James Joyce for his inspiration is likely to be a man of broad culture and of gravitas. But John Buller, though described by one commentator as “austerely perverse”, was by no means a cerebral composer. Indeed, William Mann of The Times deemed one of his Joyce pieces “sympathetic music, witty and lyrical and brightly coloured”.
Buller’s career was unusual. Born in London in 1927 to parents who recognised and encouraged his musicality, he was a chorister at St Matthew’s, Westminster, and began to compose in his teens, having work accepted by the BBC before he was 20, while serving in the Royal Navy. But he then decided against a career in music and took up work as an architectural surveyor. In due course, however, his first love beckoned irresistibly and in his early thirties he turned back to it, studying with Anthony Milner and taking a London University BMus.
Progress was nevertheless slow. The Nash Ensemble accepted Buller’s The Cave and performed it on the South Bank in 1970. This eight-minute piece for five musicians employed a taped element — a tool which was to recur in a much larger work, Le Terrazze, first heard at a BBC Invitation concert in 1974. By this time his obvious capability and good sense had earned him the chairmanship of the Macnaghten Concerts Committee, a position he held for five years until 1975, when he was appointed composer-in-residence at Edinburgh University.
There, his Familiar, for string quartet, was heard in May the following year. Already, though, he had dipped into Thucydides with The Melian Debate (1972) and into Joyce with Two Night Pieces from Finnegans Wake (1971), Finnegans Floras (1972) and — on a large scale — The Mime of Mick, Nick and the Maggies (1976). The pianist and writer Peter Stadlen reckoned that Joyce and Buller “turn out to have been made for one another”. The BBC had broadcast the second and third of these Joyce pieces, and they had caught the ear of Stephen Plaistow, head of the corporation’s commissioning unit.
As a consequence, two major works emerged, both premiered at the Proms and both conducted by Mark Elder with the BBC Symphony Orchestra (in 2003 they were issued together on a single CD). They were Proença (1977) and The Theatre of Memory (1981). The former, which uses Provençal verse of the 12th and 13th centuries, is concerned with the age and ethos of the troubadours, the flowering of their songs and the ultimate suppression of their liberal attitudes.
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The “singing” protagonists are a mezzo-soprano (at the first performance the splendid Sarah Walker) and an electric guitar, which perhaps represents masculinity; certainly there are passages which are strongly erotic. The work was warmly received by the Proms audience; its composer — hitherto unfamiliar to them — was a diminutive figure apparently unfazed by his reception.
Buller perhaps was a little “austerely perverse” in choosing as the subject of his next orchestral work the memory theatre, itself deriving from the Greek theatre, which Giulio Camillo built for Francis I of France in the 16th century. He described it as “a vast memory bank or Renaissance computer”; but “it was this Greekness that became the other source of the piece”.
The orchestra is thus laid out, as in a Greek theatre, in seven radial wedges, each led by a soloist. The public reacted with intrigued puzzlement (the conductor enters after the work has begun) but David Cairns described it as “a vast and glittering orchestral score of riveting power”.
Buller’s last major work, his only opera, again looked to classical Greece for its inspiration. The Bacchae, or BAKXAI (which the composer preferred, since most of the text is in the original Greek), was an ENO commission first performed, in a less than ideal production, on May 5, 1992.
Its success was nevertheless such that a revival was planned, but it did not materialise — which grieved the composer of a work which had been described, in the periodical Tempo, as “the finest British opera since Britten’s Curlew River”. There was, however, a by-product — Bacchae Metres, heard at the Proms in 1993.
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John Buller was married to the painter Shirley Claridge, who was his immaculate copyist and who, in the late 1980s, designed a Christmas card for the Musicians’ Benevolent Fund. There were four children.
The family’s life was not always easy; Buller’s output was small and rarefied. For a while they lived in France, eventually returning to rented accommodation in Dorset. In 2003 signs of Alzheimer’s manifested themselves; a bitter conclusion for a composer with a muscular mind. His voice was fresh, colourful and energetic, and his music now richly deserves revival.
He is survived by his wife, three sons and one daughter
John Buller, composer, was born on February 7, 1927. He died on September 12, 2004, aged 77.