2020 - A Medium with a Message
Article from 20:20 Magazine
Ian MacDonald makes an unusual case for the relevance
of Lloyd's traditionalist values
"Lloyd’s Celtic/Hellenistic otherworldliness explains much about him which academic analyses of his style and formal techniques can't. For example, his traditionalist sense of 'meaning' in music and life, naive to the modernist, clearly derives from intimations of a spiritual dimension co-existent with the material one. The same can be said of his ideas about creative inspiration, so similar to those of mediums: "Something comes into my head and I see either a colour or a sound. It's not at all intellectual. I don’t just manipulate notes. I just get a feeling and then the notes come along."
Possibly Lloyd is himself mediumistic (his childhood illnesses and experience of shellshock point that way). This might explain why his inspiration, dependent, like a medium’s 'communications', on fluctuations in his physical vitality. It would also account for Lloyd's trance like Schubertian expansiveness. While this will seem like nonsense to militant modernists, it needs pointing out that their scepticism, whether philosophical or artistic, explains little of any interest about an anomaly like George Lloyd. If he is truly ‘en rapport’ with another era - a composer of Elgar's time alive and writing in, and about, our own - we ought, rather than sneer, to be grateful for the alternative view. For one thing, it's not as if his contemporary competitors are composing so much that's worth getting excited about. For another, it's a safe bet that the best of Lloyd's music will outlive them all."
