Steve Martland’s death in May last year, aged just 58, took away one of British new music’s most distinctive and fiercely independent creative voices. Charismatic and impossible to pigeonhole, he was a passionate believer in the transformative power of music, whether psychological or political. His music had a presence whether you responded to it or not.
That presence was obvious in the pair of works framing the tribute that percussionist Colin Currie included in his Southbank Centre residency. The 2008 Van Gogh-inspired Starry Night, for marimba and amplified string quartet,in which Currie was partnered by members of the Aurora Orchestra is effectively a huge, minimalist toccata, in which strings and marimba vie for attention before combining forces for the thrilling climax. Though delicacy isn’t a word usually associated with Martland’s music, the textures and the rhythmic cross-currents that it creates are about subtle persuasion as much as confrontation.
But Horses of Instruction, from 1995, one of his best and best-known pieces, is much more direct, and has lost none of its abrasiveness. Currie joined cellist Oliver Coates and former members of the Steve Martland Band for the original sextet version of the score, with its driving electric and bass guitars, raucous saxophone and insistent piano, fusing the transatlantic minimalism of Steve Reich with the in-your-face aggression of Louis Andriessen.
In between came John Adams’ Chamber Symphony, played with deft precision by the Aurora Orchestra under Nicholas Collon, Dave Maric’s Trilogy, a solo workout for Currie over more sampled and processed percussion, which brings together Javanese gamelan and African drumming, and the Fantasia Upon One Note by another of Martland’s favourites, Henry Purcell. But it was Martland’s own music that, rightly and memorably, had the first and the last word.
• Final concerts in Metal Wood Skin, the Colin Currie Percussion Festival, on 7 and 11 December. Box office: 0844 875 0073.
• This article was amended on 14 November 2014. Before his death, Martland was thought to have been born in 1959, but it later emerged that he was born five years earlier, making him 58 when he died.
