Keith Burstein

Keith Burstein born 1957 as Keith Burston is an English composer, conductor and music theorist with Jewish family origins. He is noted for his fervent championing of tonal music as a valid contemporary composing style.

Musical approach and philosophy (including theory of "Super Tonality")

Keith Burstein's early musical approach was informed by the culture of atonalism in which he was educated at the Royal College of Music, and his early compositions were written in the atonal style. Burstein made a dramatic shift towards composing tonally during the late 1980s. In a 2002 interview with The Independent newspaper, he reflected "What had happened to me was a sort of Damascene conversion, I suppose. I suddenly saw that atonalism was a dead end. Once you accept that melody is everywhere, and always has been, in folk music and pop and rock, you see that it's not reactionary to write a tune.". He began pursuing tonal composition and reinvestigating more traditional forms such as requiems, church chorales and brass band music. Although both Burstein have sometimes dubbed his style as "neo-romantic", he has stated that his education in atonalism has informed his musical approach. He has been described by the Hampstead & Highgate Express as "a contemporary master of tonality" and by The Daily Telegraph as "an ardent new romantic post-modernist."
Burstein has developed his approach into a theory he initially dubbed "Romantic Futurism", realigned as "New Tonalism" and now calls "Super Tonality". He views this approach as a fusion of atonal and tonal composition – in which tonality is used to release the expressive power of dissonance – and considers it to represent " wider horizon… that carries atonalism and all the other -isms with it, and creates a forward-looking fusion." Super Tonality acknowledges the philosophy and reasoning behind the original atonal experiments of Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern and others, but strongly questions the dominance of these and related forms in contemporary classical music and in modern music critical theory. Burstein has also suggested that this style of music can be composed by musicians "who were fired in the white heat of the atonal avant-garde and who dedicated themselves to that depth of knowledge and practise within the most highly-charged furnaces of experiment". He has cited Arvo Pärt as one of the other composers whom he believes is working in this area.
Burstein's outspoken stance has sometimes led to friction between himself and others in the contemporary classical music establishment. He has accused "moribund atonalist dogma" of having stifled musical debate in the world of contemporary classical music. He has also challenged the idea that "the intrinsic worth of a musical piece is defined solely by its 'intellectual' content; and that the degree of intellectuality is signified entirely by the degree of atonalism involved in its construction."
Burstein is also known for a strong commitment to humanism and to issues of social concern. This is expressed in the subject matter of several of his works, including The Year's Midnight – A Meditation on the Holocaust and the opera Manifest Destiny, in which would-be suicide bombers reject violence in favour of a desire for peace. He is associated with the Stop The War Coalition, giving press conferences with Bianca Jagger and Walter Wolfgang and performing benefits alongside Julie Christie and Michael Nyman.

Biography and career

Family background

Keith Burstein was born in the English coastal town of Brighton: his birth name was "Keith Burston", and he was one of the two sons of Samuel and Barbara Burston. The family surname was an Anglicised version of Burstein, the original Russian-Jewish family name of Samuel Burston's ancestors. The family was musical – Keith's parents, uncles and aunts were all orchestral musicians, and one of his cousins is the composer Paul Lewis. Both Samuel and Barbara Burston were orchestral violinists and had played in the orchestras for the Royal Opera House and Sadler's Wells Theatre as well as the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and the BBC Ulster Orchestra. They also played in the Hallé Orchestra, Manchester
Keith Burstein reassumed his original family name in the late 1980s, at the same time that he was discovering his own voice as a composer. He has commented that this was part of a process of self-discovery at the time, and not related to religious beliefs. However, he has also noted that his Jewish ancestry perhaps formed a "subliminal linkage" to his decision to compose the Holocaust-themed choral work The Year’s Midnight in 2000.

Musical education

Originally tutored in piano by Hove-based music teacher Christine Pembridge, Keith Burstein attended the Royal College of Music from 1977. While attending the college, he studied composition with Bernard Stevens and John Lambert. During this time he was exposed for the first time to the contemporary classical music of Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez, and became a committed enthusiast for atonal and experimental music. After graduation, he studied with Jonathan Harvey on a Ralph Vaughan Williams Trust bursary. Burstein has commented that at the time of his studies there was widespread talk of a "malaise", or "vacuum" in contemporary classical music, but that there were no simultaneous ideas regarding how this problem might be solved.

Early musical career and the Grosvenor Group

Keith Burstein initially made his name as a conductor and commissioner of contemporary music – primarily as founder of chamber ensemble The Grosvenor Group. This ensemble existed between 1983 and 1993 and performed works by Schoenberg, Webern, Stockhausen, Harrison Birtwistle, Edward Elgar, Brian Ferneyhough, Oliver Knussen, Mark-Anthony Turnage and Luciano Berio among others. Burstein has subsequently described the ensemble as "an attempt to explore the landscape and to find a pathway forward". The group received considerable critical acclaim during its existence. In a 1986 review of one of their concerts, The Times newspaper commented that "they played as though their very lives depended upon it."
However, Burstein's priorities were beginning to alter due to his growing interest as a composer in reassessing and reincorporating tonality into contemporary music. Although the Grosvenor Group performed three of Burstein's compositions during its lifetime, these were atonal works inspired by his education at the Royal College of Music. Burstein would eventually sideline his conducting work in favour of full-time composing.
After the dissolution of the Grosvenor Group, several members went on to join the Chamber Orchestra of Europe. Burstein continued to compose for varied groups of musicians, covering ensemble pieces, choral and solo vocal music and large-scale orchestral works. Some members of the Grosvenor Group would continue to collaborate with him as part of an occasional musical group called the Keith Burstein Ensemble.

Work premiered during the early 1990s

Keith Burstein's first substantial tonal work was the Marchioness Requiem, an eighty-minute work commissioned as a memorial for the victims of the Marchioness disaster and scored for large chorus, soloists and orchestra. A chamber version of this work has been performed many times, although the full score remains unperformed.
During this period, Burstein premiered his work at a variety of unusual London venues. These included St Bride's Church, Westminster Cathedral Hall, the Design Museum, Conway Hall, and St James Garlickhythe Church. Other compositions written and performed during this decade included the sixteen-song cycle Songs of Love for vocal soloists and ensemble, the choral/organ piece Hymns Of Benediction, and 1994's Prayer For Peace.
Burstein also wrote two pieces for the 26-piece BT Brass Band – 1991's Eternal City and 1994's Leavetaking. The former was described by The Independent Magazine as "messianic, mystical, visionary... a spectacularly doomy piece for massed brass, all heart – bursting chords and cascading scales", while What's On Magazine drew attention to the "axis of largely consonant harmonies, lifting stray phrases high above the main architecture."
The Guardian, by contrast, found that Eternal City made "all the intellectual demands of Mills and Boon pulp fiction; it deals in emotional commonplaces. It's music by the yard. The conspiracy among BBC and critics claimed by Burstein and his allies is wrongly identified: it isn't a conspiracy against conservative neo-romanticism, it's against bad music like this". Many years later Burstein would retrospectively challenge these accusations in the composer's notes on his homepage; pointing out that the sophisticated use of polyphony and dissonance in Eternal City was belied by the review, stating that the BBC and critics had generally represented him fairly, and querying the logic that states that neo-romanticism is inherently conservative.

Work premiered during the late 1990s

In 1995, Burstein composed A Live Flame for orchestra and tenor. A memorial piece for the late leader of the British Labour Party, it was premiered in 1997 by London Musici at St John's, Smith Square, London, with tenor soloist Richard Coxon. The composition was described by The Sunday Times as being "nothing short of alchemy" and by the London Evening Standard as being "dignified and beautiful."
In 1996, Burstein met and talked with the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt, who was subsequently to become a mentor. Pärt was instrumental in gaining Burstein a commission to write music for the nine-hundredth anniversary celebrations of Norwich Cathedral. Pärt had already secured the commission for his own composition I Am The True Vine but opted to split the commission fee and opportunity with Burstein, who contributed his own Missa Brevis to the concerts.
In a 3 June 1997 article announcing the premiere of A Live Flame, The Times described Burstein as a "composer who used to organise bands of hecklers to go about wrecking performances of modern atonal music, particularly anything by Sir Harrison Birtwhistle." Burstein successfully sued Times Newspapers Ltd. for libel in 2000, pointing out that he had "never interrupted any concert or performance of any sort. It would have been inconceivable to interrupt anybody's performance." In court, it was demonstrated that The Hecklers' demonstration had taken place during the audience applause following the Royal Opera House performance of Birtwistle's Gawain. The booing was deemed by the court to have constituted legitimate comment/response rather than an interruption or "wrecking". Burstein was awarded £8000 in damages.
The last Burstein piece premiered during the 1990s was The Gates Of Time. This was commissioned by The Thomas Tallis Society of Greenwich to mark the Millennium. It was premiered at St Alfege Church, Greenwich, London, during October 1999.