Musical evocations of the uncanny in David Bedford's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

The music of British composer David Bedford (1937-2011) offers perhaps the most convincing meld of progressive rock and "serious" art-music styles. A classically trained composer, Bedford orchestrated Kevin Ayers' album Joy of a Toy (1969) and joined Ayers' band for one album, Shooting at the Moon (1970). In this band he met Mike Oldfield, leading to a longstanding collaboration throughout the 1970s. Oldfield's massive success with Tubular Bells (1973) led to Bedford also receiving a Virgin recording contract; Bedford's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, based on the poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, was released in 1975. Bedford draws upon several musical devices to evoke the uncanny and liminal in the mysterious spirit realm portrayed in Coleridge's poem, including chromatic mediant relationships, polytonality, and avant-garde sound-mass effects. I focus on several recurring musical devices, tracing their evolution over the course of the album and their relationship to Coleridge's narrative gloss.