I have often suspected that contemporary classical music’s failure to seriously engage with hip-hop puts the lie to any claim it might make to be on the avant-garde of anything. So when I heard that the young Irish/Welsh composer Anselm McDonnell had released an album with three Birmingham-based rappers (Barrowclough, Joel the Custodian and Kosyne) it felt like water in the desert.

The centrepiece of the album is the eponymous Politics of the Imagination (2023), a half-hour ‘hybrid rap/theatre/spoken-word play’ (to quote the press pack) written in collaboration with the three rappers, and scored for them and three other musicians (clarinet, cello and percussion, plus electronics; the musicians here are from Crash Ensemble). In it, Stephen, a politician (played by Barrowclough), and Danny, an activist and erstwhile schoolfriend (Joel the Custodian), enter a lift manned by Gerard (Kosyne) and debate politics. Stephen and Danny are both idealists, or more precisely utopians, but they have radically different ideals of utopia: Stephen envisions a world of ‘Futuristic brutalism you can see your face in… / twenty million innovations / Flying cars, iron bars, skyscrapers and vapours’; Danny’s utopia is one rather of living in harmony with nature and caring for one’s community. Gerard forces each utopian to face the ugly whole of their utopias by magically making the lift open on to the first one, then the other. When Stephen and Danny exit the lift to Stephen’s utopia, they find that humanity has been killed off by hyper-intelligent AI; when they go to Danny’s utopia, they get chased back to the lift by a bloodthirsty mob for an unspecified reason. Back in the lift, they come around to Gerard’s position that instead of trying to realise utopias, we should work collaboratively as communities.

In some respects, the text (libretto?) is half-baked. Stephen and Danny are persuaded of the errors of their ways with astonishing rapidity and for reasons that are decidedly weak. No explanation is given, for example, as to how Danny’s utopia gives rise to angry mobs. In fact, in the versions of utopianism that I’ve encountered, violence is prohibited. Further, Gerard’s position is not ‘above’ the disagreement between Stephen and Danny: it involves the utopian demand for a world wherein community-based collaboration is not stifled (by, for example, poor education or greed). So the text doesn’t have the intellectual subtlety or sophistication of, to mention another sci-fi rap concept album, clipping.’s Splendor and Misery – and I think the occasionally stilted rapping is a reflection of this.

Nevertheless, there’s a lot to like about Politics of the Imagination. The founding idea is great fun and generally well-dramatised; the three rappers are mostly lithe and creative in their interplay; there are some excellent lines, including some cracking jokes (Kosyne gets the best of those). And McDonnell has some fine musical judgement: rapping is so dense in itself that it’s hard to imagine how anything more obtrusive than a beat could complement it, let alone the notoriously dense contemporary classical music; and rap uses musical regularity, anathema to contemporary classical music, as a springboard for its rhythmic complexity. McDonnell manages, at least sometimes, to square that circle. Often (as in ‘Elevator Music 1’) he finds a riff that is both strange enough and regular enough to work in both traditions; other times (as in Stephen’s whispered conversation with a prisoner in ‘The Penthouse’) he pulls back and lets the rappers create their own pulse. It also helps that the rappers’ flows tend to be slow and crisp, which allows the music to breathe.

So Politics of the Imagination isn’t an unalloyed success – but it is consistently enjoyable and interesting. And it sounds fresher than most contemporary classical music these days does.

Awkward stance
The other substantial work on the album is the fifteen-minute The Union Is Our God (2021), performed by four members of the London Symphony Orchestra (LSO) under Darren Bloom. This work is a reflection on the marching-band music of Northern Ireland and its uneasily-coexisting aspects of sectarianism and high musicianship. The imposing martial sounds of the lambeg drum, side drum and fife (here represented by a piccolo) occasionally erupt from extended periods of quiet atmospherics. McDonnell well brings out the sinister side of this music, but where this piece differs from, say, the bitter and fully ironic militarism of Shostakovich, is that the martial instruments’ parts are also written with a loving care that means the piece never disavows this musical (and political) tradition. In an album of music so tied to recognisable political movements that it is in danger of becoming propaganda, this courageously awkward stance is refreshing – a reminder that artists should always be ill at ease.

Two smaller works round out the album. The other rap collaboration is the five-minute Stop Small Boats (2023), also co-written with Barrowclough, Joel the Custodian and Kosyne, and performed by the same Crash musicians as on Politics of the Imagination, with which it is of a piece (except without the theatre). There are the same musical strengths and weaknesses. Its fine writing for electronics is typified by the excellently filthy opening gesture for synth and cello, and its weak melodic writing is typified by the clarinet line that immediately follows, moving through the texture supposedly ‘drawn from Rishi Sunak’s merry intonation’, but totally failing to cohere, as if someone is playing clarinet next door. The rapping, too, ranges from charismatically delivered tongue-twisters (‘Numerous natives; the narrative’s nucleus new to us’) to verses that get stuck in ruts (such as the extended rhyme scheme on ‘later’ (neighbour, chamber, wager, behaviour, dictator, favour).

Finally, Cross-Purposes (2020) seems to have been included out of an archival instinct: a very focused political satire of Dominic Cummings’ mendacious excuse for breaking Covid lockdown rules in 2020, though this primary foundation of its meaning is becoming less and less available to listeners. It’s a well-crafted piece all the same. It was written for Crash Ensemble’s [Reactions] (2021) and is here performed by Louise McMonagle and Heather Roche of the LSO.

One final point. Although the album cover art is headshots of the three rappers, the only name credited there is McDonnell’s. If this album had been released under a hip-hop label, he would have been lucky to get credit this prominent (and it would have been as a producer), but the norms of classical music allow him to get sole top billing. This sits ill with me – as if for all McDonnell’s admirable efforts to bridge these two most distant of genres, the extent of the artistry of hip-hop still isn’t fully understood by the contemporary classical world. No doubt I am reading too much into a design lapse that has some trivial explanation. But we should be mindful of the raced history of this sort of lapse.

Politics of the Imagination is available as a digital download. Visit https://anselmmcdonnell.bandcamp.com/album/politics-of-the-imagination.

Click on the image below to listen.