It’s been a decade since Jennifer Walshe described “The New Discipline” in a program text for Borealis Festival. This was not a school or a style, but a way of working that she saw shared across music she was witnessing, “where the physical, theatrical and visual aspects are as important as the sonic.” The text is a one-two combo: it says, Yes, this is happening, then asks, how can we make it better? Channelling Neil Warnock motivating his Sheffield United side ahead of a trip to Arsenal, Walshe argues the way forward is through discipline, and by becoming multi-skilled DIY-ers unafraid to give or receive direct feedback.
Like much of Walshe’s research, it seems ahead of its time. She namechecks a number of contemporaries working in that “New Discipline” way—James Saunders, Matthew Shlomowitz, Neo Hülcker, Steven Takasugi, herself—to which you could add many influential composer-performers operating in Britain in the decade since: Elaine Mitchener, Laura Bowler, Neil Luck, and, for the past 13 or so years, the experimental music theater quartet Bastard Assignments.
Bastard Assignments grew out of southeast London’s DIY new music scene. The community of scratch nights gradually brought together four composer-performers: Edward Henderson, Caitlin Rowley, Timothy Cape, and Josh Spear. (All four also studied at Trinity Laban.) They began by playing each other’s compositions, and later moved towards a process of group composition.
If Bastard Assignments’ work has always had a healthy sense of the what if?, what’s changed of late is their approach to time. What was previously a place for rapidly assembled performances has morphed into a cooler, less urgent space, dedicated to creating longer, more methodical pieces conceived, rehearsed and tweaked over greater time-spans. At a recent rehearsal in New Cross, Bastard Assignments were in full flow rehearsing their new music theater piece “PIGSPIGSPIGS”—for Borealis Festival in March, later Spor in Copenhagen and finally at Wigmore Hall in 2026—a play that uses magic, myth, found objects and absurdity to expand out an English farming family’s domestic scenario into something conceptually and psychologically adventurous.
You can go into granular detail about Bastard Assignments’ working practices, and try to bottle the alchemical process of how group composition works. Or, you can sit back and marvel at the results: weird, risky, absurd, yet grounded and serious. And, in a new music context which leans towards the conceptually conservative—or at least the risk-free—for Bastard Assignments, continuing to make these questioning works, whose answers range from opaque to ineffable, seems a genuinely radical act in itself.
Earlier this week, Henderson, Rowley, Cape and I spoke on Zoom about their work.
Unlimited access to our
