I’m not the only football-obsessed composer

I was in Sweden a few weeks ago, where my music was presented in Stockholm in the most recent International Composer Festival. One of the orchestral works performed was my football-themed ‘Eleven’ (11 players, melodies of 11 notes, chords of 11 pitches and various football chants woven into the fabric of the score). I’m not the first composer obsessed with the beautiful game. Bohuslav Martinu’s ‘Half-time’, written in 1924, was inspired by the supporters of his team, Sparta Prague. And more recently there have been bold examples by English composers Mark-Anthony Turnage (who worked chants for his beloved Arsenal into his orchestral piece ‘Momentum’) and Benedict Mason, in whose opera Playing Away even the ball sings an aria. But the most sustained composerly football obsession is found in the work of Dmitri Shostakovich, who was a qualified referee. He wrote two overtly football-inspired scores. In his ballet The Golden Age a Soviet football team visits the West, and their captain gets captured by fascist agents. He is then sprung from prison by his teammates. Shostakovich also wrote a football scene for a 1944 wartime performance by the NKVD Song and Dance Ensemble. This was commissioned by Lavrentiy Beria, Stalin’s chief of police (and another football fan). It was a commission Shostakovich could hardly refuse.

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I gave one of the Oakeshott Lectures in Oxford towards the end of last year. Until now they were known as the Roger Scruton Memorial Lectures. My lecture was entitled ‘Music and the Sacred: in antiquity and in modernity’. One of the reasons I am interested in the intersection between music and religion has quite a lot to do with Roger Scruton, especially his book Death-Devoted Heart: Sex and the Sacred in Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde.