Bill Hopkins -
a brief biographical note
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Bill Hopkins was born in Prestbury, England, on 5 June 1943. He composed only
nine mature works, few of which were performed during his lifetime. As a
result, when he died in 1981 - at the age of 37 - the world was barely aware of
the artist it had lost. As performances of his music increased in number during
the 1990s and were greeted with critical acclaim, his music became better known
and he is now considered one of the finest composers Britain has produced in
recent years.
His music places itself firmly in the post-Darmstadt tradition: his magnum
opus, the Etudes en série (1965-72), is an obvious
successor to the major serial piano works of Boulez, Stockhausen and
Barraqué, both in scale and accomplishment. At the same time, his music
has many characteristics which give it a unique tone, placing it at some
distance from these composers: it displays a rare formal and poetic subtlety
allied to an elusiveness and ambivalence which is intentional and disturbing.
Hopkins began composing during his teens, his other main interests being
languages and literature, and by the time he left school in 1961 he had already
composed several serial works. His formal education as a composer started with
Nono at Dartington in the summer of 1961, followed by composition lessons with
Wellesz and Rubbra at Oxford University from October 1961 onwards (he also
revisited Nono at Dartington in the summer of 1962). The music he wrote at
Oxford was of a clearly post-Webernian cast betraying an interest in fine-spun
counterpoint rather than in textural effects. After graduation he started
composing Sous-structures (for solo piano), his earliest
acknowledged work. It demonstrates a remarkable leap forward relative to his
student pieces - it is considerably denser in texture, and more complex
formally, displaying a new level of originality.
It was during his time at university that he became aware of the music of Jean
Barraqué - and so when he travelled to Paris in order to study with
Messiaen in September 1964 (on a French Government scholarship), he took with
him an ambition to meet both Barraqué and Samuel Beckett, his other
chief influence. During that academic year he was initially a member of
Messiaen's class as planned, but subsequently withdrew from it, taking private
lessons with Barraqué from January to May 1965. While in Paris he
completed Sous-structures, then went on to compose
Musique de l'indifférence (for orchestra), as well
as Two Pomes and Sensation (both for
soprano and mixed quartet). The orchestral work, his only original piece for
the medium, is a substantial five-movement ballet on Beckett's poem of the same
name. While it has echoes of Nono's orchestral music from the 1950s it
undoubtedly also displays Hopkins' own powerful imagination, both in its
contrapuntal flair and its orchestral boldness. Sensation
sets poems of Rimbaud and Beckett, in an attempt to form a 'composite poet'.
Its wide-ranging counterpoint is an excellent example of Hopkins' variety and
flexibility of gesture, rhythm and line. With a vocal part of considerable
virtuosity (and a natural grasp of idiomatic French setting), Sensation could
almost be seen as a mini-opera: René Leibowitz acclaimed it as the
finest setting of French by a young composer he had ever come across. The
Two Pomes (Joyce), written during a single night, and in
some ways a study for Sensation, has its own evocative
delicacy - little wonder that it was for a long time Hopkins' only piece
published complete (by Universal Edition), and his most frequently performed.
Towards the end of his stay in Paris he began to work on the cycle of nine
Etudes en série which represents his largest and
most important work. Having decided to write such a cycle in December 1964 he
waited six months before beginning work in earnest in May 1965, by which time
his studies with Barraqué had ended. He had also just met, and gained
much encouragement from, the philosopher and musicologist Heinz-Klaus Metzger.
On returning to England in the Summer, Hopkins worked in London as a music
critic before moving to Tintagel (Cornwall), then the Isle of Man, where he
concentrated on composing (primarily the Etudes en
série), while earning his living writing articles and
translating from French and German. Although the first book of the Etudes
en série (nos.I-IV) had been played in 1968 and published
the following year, the cycle was not finally completed until 1972 (meanwhile
he had also written a related solo violin piece, Pendant,
in 1968-9); the Etudes en série then had to wait
until 1997 to be premiered (by Nicolas Hodges), and until 1999 for complete
publication.
After finishing the Etudes in the early 1970s Hopkins
completed only two further original works. The Nouvelle étude hors
série (1974 - for organ) is made up of rearranged
fragments of discarded pieces from the Etudes en
série project. Its counterpoint hangs together in a
fragile juxtaposition, barely daring to impose a coherence on itself. His last
work, En attendant (1976-7 - for flute, oboe, cello and
harpsichord) shares this fragility of form: its explicit subject is the attempt
and failure of the four instrumental 'characters' to build a coherent
continuity. The piece nevertheless does achieve coherence, pulling together a
wide range of materials in a remarkable and quirky way. These two are perhaps
his strangest achievements. During the same period he was working on several
major projects which had been conceived in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but
which remained incomplete at the time of his death. The surviving sketches for
these works include a substantial quantity of writings around the philosophy
and aesthetics of music which indicate with some clarity the direction in which
his work was leading, and at which his last two completed works also hint.
From 1977 Hopkins was a lecturer at Birmingham University, moving to Newcastle
University in 1979. He died of a heart attack on 10 March 1981, in Chopwell,
near Newcastle.
© 1997 Nicolas Hodges
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