John Buller (7 February 1927 – 12 September 2004) was a British composer.

Career

John Buller was born in London on 7 February 1927. His musical career began as a chorister at St Matthew's,

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. Although the BBC accepted a work of his in 1946, he opted to earn his living as an

architectural Architecture is the art and technique of designing and building, as distinguished from the skills associated with construction. It is both the process and the product of sketching, conceiving, planning, designing, and constructing buildings ...

surveyor Surveying or land surveying is the technique, profession, art, and science of determining the terrestrial two-dimensional or three-dimensional positions of points and the distances and angles between them. A land surveying professional is c ...

. Buller returned to music in his thirties, taking an external London University

BMus Bachelor of Music (BM or BMus) is an academic degree awarded by a college, university, or conservatory upon completion of a program of study in music. In the United States, it is a professional degree, and the majority of work consists of prescr ...

in 1964 after private study with Anthony Milner. He gave up his surveying work in 1974 and from then was a full-time composer. Perhaps his best known work is ''Proença'' (1977) for

electric guitar An electric guitar is a guitar that requires external amplification in order to be heard at typical performance volumes, unlike a standard acoustic guitar (however combinations of the two - a semi-acoustic guitar and an electric acoustic gu ...

, mezzo-soprano and

orchestra An orchestra (; ) is a large instrumental ensemble typical of classical music, which combines instruments from different families. There are typically four main sections of instruments: * bowed string instruments, such as the violin, viola, c ...

, which was selected by the 1978 International Rostrum of Composers in

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. Other works include ''The Mime of Mick, Nick and the Maggies'' (1978), ''The Theatre of Memory'' (1981), the opera ''Bakxai'' (1992), ''Bacchae Metres'' (1993) and ''Illusions'' (1997). In his obituary for John Buller in the Guardian, Martin Wainwright wrote, '...John's discovery of Joyce fuelled him for most of his creative life, and I think what became fundamental to everything he composed was the Joycean notion that imagination is nothing but extended memory, that the commonplace of our musical or aural consciousness is virtually infinite, so that the task of the composer is to go down to the elements of musical consciousness and reorder them. His voice, in everything, came from this vision, and maybe that is why it embraced a wider than usual range of idioms and contrasts, including popular elements.' Buller died in

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, aged 77 on 12 September 2004. Following his death,

BBC Radio 3 BBC Radio 3 is a British national radio station owned and operated by the BBC. It replaced the BBC Third Programme in 1967 and broadcasts classical music and opera, with jazz, world music, drama, culture and the arts also featuring. The st ...

's contemporary music programme ''Hear and Now'' devoted an episode to Buller's music.

Selected list of works

*''The Cave'' (1970) *''Two Night Pieces from Finnegans Wake'' (1971) *''Finnegans Floras'' (1972) *''Le Terrazze'' (1974) *''Proença'', for mezzo, electric guitar and orchestra (1977) *''The Ballad of Mick, Nick and the Maggies'' (1978) *''Theatre of Memory'', for orchestra (1981) *''Bakxai'' (The Bacchae) (1991–92) *''Bacchae Metres'' (1993) *''Illusions'' (1997)

Personal life

One of Buller's sons is the British

record producer A record producer is a recording project's creative and technical leader, commanding studio time and coaching artists, and in popular genres typically creates the song's very sound and structure. Virgil Moorefield"Introduction" ''The Producer as ...

Ed Buller.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Buller, John 1927 births 2004 deaths 20th-century classical composers English classical composers Musicians from London English male classical composers 20th-century English composers 20th-century British male musicians