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"The Tyranny of Fun for ensemble" (commissioned by Birmingham Contemporary Music Group)

The research aim of "The Tyranny of Fun" was to discover how the composer/researcher’s musical language would be affected and infected if he were to be accompanied on his creative journey by Balanchine, Ravel, Edgar Allan Poe, “Sleaze” from the discos of 1970’s New York, and his own past self.

Ravel’s music and Balanchine’s choreography for "La Valse" has its own clear dance-based references, "The Tyranny of Fun" transposed these to the discos of 70’s New York although filtered through a creative membrane that revealed few clues of its origins. Just the number of beats per minute – derived from an analysis of a Boulez recording of "La Valse" – and fleeting fragments of musical material were permitted to seep through.

In her 2011 paper, ("Balanchine’s 'La Valse': Meanings and Implications for Ravel Studies"), Mawer suggested that "La Valse" had as its literary inspiration Poe’s "The Masque of the Red Death". So a disease was about to strike the dancers of Diaghilev’s Paris just as it was those of New York, a disease represented by Ravel through the infection of predominantly diatonic material by increasing chromaticism. "The Tyranny of Fun" reimagined encroaching disease through the use of live electronic sounds triggered by a newly developed motion-sensor that introduced debilitating interventions created from recordings of the composer’s breathing.

These observations summarise a research process that built on scholarship and analysis but within the context of a personal creativity with its own long history of respect and fascination for the world of the "Ballet Russes". "The Tyranny of Fun" can therefore be read as introspective archaeology that nevertheless speaks to others of horrors and delights unimagined even by Diaghilev.

"The Tyranny of Fun" was commissioned by Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, which gave the first performance conducted by Ryan Wigglesworth in February 2013.