Cornelius Cardew gets half a page; there's a short paragraph on Gavin Bryars; but what about Michael Nyman and Howard Skempton? Back in the late 1970s, when the lexicographers of Grove were hard at work, it can't have been easy knowing what to do with a generation of young British composers united only by their remoteness from the musical establishment. The next Grove will certainly want to see them differently. Even Skempton, one of the quietest and least conspic-uous exponents of what was once called English 'experimental' music, will be due much more than passing mention.
Skempton's music has never been easy to encounter. Much of it is too tiny, too intimate, to transfer well to disc, and you need to be in the right place at the right time to hear it played live. So a recording of Lento is very welcome indeed. It won't do the piece justice merely to describe it as an enigmatic orchestral chorale, solemn and melancholy, that makes faltering progress through a sequence of mostly minor chords, going nowhere in particular until eventually it just stops. Like Gorecki's Third Symphony––a very distant cousin––the simplicity of its surface is calculated to impart a nobility of purpose, a sincerity of feeling. Like the Gorecki, it is the stuff that cults are made of. It just happens to be shorter, wordless, English, and yet to hit the headlines.'