John Buller
John Buller (7 February 1927 – 12 September 2004) was a British composer.
John Buller
- Born
- 1927
- Died
- 2004
- Nationality
- United Kingdom
- Occupation
- composer
- Languages
- English
Reference Check
Propose documentary evidence for John Buller. A contribution is never written directly as fact: identity, source, rights and evidence gates still decide.
Sign in to contribute
World of VALÉORINE
Documentary connections
Only confirmed graph relationships appear here. Images are shown only when their identity and reuse rights both pass the documentary gate.
Documentary evidence
Documentary basis
Authority files
wikidata · Q6223817
VALÉORINE Encyclopedia
The documentary record
Statements marked “Documentary record” are set in the article beside the passage they confirm. Each is read from the authority records of the institutions named here; select “Prove” to see the record it was read from, where in that record, and when.
Institutions cited
Bibliothèque nationale de France · Deutsche Nationalbibliothek
Complete reading chain (JSON)In this article
Career
Career
John Buller was born in London on 7 February 1927. His musical career began as a chorister at St Matthew's, Westminster. Although the BBC accepted a work of his in 1946, he opted to earn his living as an architectural surveyor. Buller returned to music in his thirties, taking an external London University BMus in 1964 after private study with Anthony Milner. 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), Bacchae Metres (1993) and Illusions (1997). 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, BBC Radio 3's contemporary music programme Hear and Now devoted an episode to Buller's music.
Documentary record
John Buller (7 February 1927 – 12 September 2004) was a composer. The birth of John Buller is recorded on 7 February 1927 in London, and the death on 12 September 2004.
Selected list of works
Selected list of works
• The Cave (1970) • Two Night Pieces from Finnegans Wake (1971) • Scribenery (1971) • The Melian Debate (1972) • Finnegans Floras (1972) • Poor Jenny (1973) • Le Terrazze (1974) • Proença, for mezzo, electric guitar and orchestra (1977) • The Mime of Mick, Nick and the Maggies (1978) • Theatre of Memory, for orchestra (1981) • BAKXAI (The Bacchae) (1991–92) • Bacchae Metres (1993) • Mr Purcell's Maggot (1994) • Illusions (1997)
Personal life
Personal life
One of Buller's sons is the British record producer Ed Buller.
Text attribution
Licensing
Text attribution
Part of the biographical narrative on this page reuses licensed material. Its origin, revision and licence are recorded here.
The biographical narrative on this page is based on the Wikipedia article John Buller (composer), revision 1352257060 (EN edition), by its contributors. VALÉORINE has edited that text and built its own documentary record around it. The reused material is available under CC BY-SA 4.0, and this page's reuse of it is offered under the same licence. Everything else on this page — the chronology, the holdings, the evidence, the plates and the connections — is VALÉORINE's own record. Sources and licences.
Notes from the source article
Cited by Wikipedia
Notes from the source article
These works are cited by the source article, in its own numbering. They are recorded as its citations, not as sources VALÉORINE has verified.
- 1.Anderson, Martin. John Buller: Composer with a powerful and original voice. The Independent. 24 November 2004.
- 2.Wainwright, Martin. John Buller: New-music composer in tune with Europe's cultural past. The Guardian. 18 September 2004.
- 3.Anderson, Martin. John Buller. MusicWeb International.
- 4.Culot, Hubert. John Buller: Proença. MusicWeb International.
- 5.John Buller: Proença – The Theatre of Memory. NMC Recordings.
- 6.John Buller. Oxford University Press.
- 7.Hear and Now: John Buller Tribute. BBC Radio 3.
References
Citations
References
Each reference names the institution holding it, so a reader may go to the document itself.
reference work
Secondary witness
The Encyclopedia exists whether or not anything is for sale. Corrections are recorded rather than overwritten, and every version of this record is kept. Published 16 September 2026.
Elsewhere in Music memorabilia
44,023 published records in this field, each with its sources named.
- John BrowningPerson
- John Bruce YehPerson
- John BrunningPerson
- John BullPerson
- John BunchPerson
- John BundrickPerson
- John ButlerPerson
- John ButtPerson
Best supported in this field
For owners
Own a work by John Buller?
A specialist will read what you send and tell you what the house can establish, what it cannot, and whether the object is suited to sale. There is no charge and no obligation. The object stays with you throughout; nothing is shipped to us unless it is arranged in writing beforehand.