“A revolting, nauseating slog,” “a quarter of an hour’s worth of relentless, faceless, arbitrary blarney,” “stunningly pointless and stupid,” “five minutes of mindless, superficial prolefeed,” “hackneyed, dated, superficial rubbish,” and “empty vessels of cheap, surface-deep, musically moribund sound masquerading as something bold and individual” are just some of the many colorful phrases writer Simon Cummings has used to describe new pieces of contemporary music from the UK and abroad. Though I’m yet to find an all-time favorite verdict on his site 5against4, “the basest flogging of a rotted carcass that may once have resembled something equine” is certainly up there as the most memorable.
And yet, in spite of his criticisms—or rather, precisely because of them—Cummings has been a loving friend of contemporary music since he started his site in 2007, dedicating ample space and attention to unsung music he is convinced will survive when “the sieve of time” eventually does its job. (Recent projects include an immersion in the music of Gloria Coates, and a long series on the music of Allan Pettersson.) Beginning his online presence on the early blogging and social networking platform LiveJournal around 2001, the 5against4 name came about in 2007, launching the new site proper as he started his PhD in composition in 2008. Cummings, a freelancer who operates a Patreon to recover some of the costs, has considered opening the site up to other writers, but couldn’t quite let go of a project wrapped up in his personal journeys through music. You’re 5against4, aren’t you?, people ask him at contemporary music festivals. “I should just change my name by deed poll,” Cummings says.
“As a critic, [I] often disagreed with him but always wanted to read him, which is surely the whole point,” Andrew Mellor wrote on X last month following the death of former Spectator opera critic Michael Tanner. From my experience, Cummings’ articles are most likely exchanged with giddy glee between composerly friends in private: heartened that someone has taken an interest in new work that extends to more than a few sentences, and relieved when somebody has boldly, and often entertainingly, gone against the grain.
And in an age where music writing on the new, complex, or unusual is squeezed into ever-smaller spaces, 5against4 is positively lavish in its coverage to contemporary music, and it’s interesting to see how that breathing room remolds the perception of pieces where the die was previously thought cast. Take Helmut Lachenmann’s infamous stylistic left-turn “Marche fatale.” It’s a piece Cummings deems a failure, not because of how it fits into the (oversimplified) framework of regression after progression (“Anyone with even a slight awareness of Lachenmann’s fearless, irreverent musical language won’t find it remotely strange that a work like this should have come from his pen,” he writes) but because the structure completely falls apart in the second half.
We spoke about being friends with the people you’re writing about, being “really fucked off” about recent Last Night of the Proms commissions, and the wisdom of “Ratatouille”’s Anton Ego.
Unlimited access to our
