Background
John Buller was born in London on 7 February 1927.
John Buller was born in London on 7 February 1927.
Buller returned to music in his thirties, taking an external London University Bachelor of Music in 1964 after private study with Anthony Milner.
His musical career began as a chorister at Street Matthew"s, Westminster. Although the British Broadcasting Corporation accepted a work of his in 1946, he opted to earn his living as an architectural surveyor. He gave up his surveying work in 1974 and from then was a full-time composer.
Perhaps his best known work is Proença (1977) for electric guitar, mezzo-soprano and orchestra, which was selected by the 1978 International Rostrum of Composers in Paris.
Other works include The Mime of Mick, Nick and the Maggies (1978), The Theatre of Memory (1981), the opera Bakxai (1992), and In his obituary for John Buller in the Guardian, Martin Wainwright wrote, "..John"s discovery of Joyce fuelled him for most of his creative life, and I think what became fundamental to everything he composed was the Joycean notion that imagination is nothing but extended memory, that the commonplace of our musical or aural consciousness is virtually infinite, so that the task of the composer is to go down to the elements of musical consciousness and reorder them.
His voice, in everything, came from this vision, and maybe that is why it embraced a wider than usual range of idioms and contrasts, including popular elements." Buller died in Sherborne, Dorset, aged 77 on 12 September 2004. Following his death, British Broadcasting Corporation Radio 3"s contemporary music programme Hear and Now devoted an episode to Buller"s music