Genre is held together by expectations – of sounds, shapes, moods, levels of complexity (or lack thereof) and where they all ought to lie in the course of a performance or a work. The problem is that these expectations get tangled up in the expectations surrounding composers, musicians and musical institutions, expectations based on their context and background. Anna Meredith, a Royal College of Music composition graduate who was commissioned by the BBC Proms in 2008 and 2009, understands that when she straddles the worlds of concert and popular musics, it's all frustratingly relative. She recently told Wire magazine, ‘I had a piece played in [London's] Purcell Room one night and a gig the next, and of the two reviews, one went ‘garish, monotonous, repetitive’ and the next was, ‘inaccessible, abstract, experimental’.’Footnote ¹

Evaluating CDs that mark a special attempt to bridge that gulf will bring particular challenges, then. Each of the releases under review here comes from a classically trained figure branching into various aspects of popular music. If it is anything more than a coincidence that all three releases are the results of projects created by women, it might be because gender, like genre, can also present a set of expectations to be transcended by those whom it frustrates.

Anna Meredith's ‘Varmints’ appears on Moshi Moshi, a record label that has played a major role in British indie rock and pop for nearly 18 years, providing a platform for acts such as Bloc Party, Florence and the Machine, Disclosure and Architecture in Helsinki. Meredith's robust, repetitious, texture- and metre-focused writing is not only recognisable on the album's 11 tracks, but finds a notably sure footing in the relatively starker, short-form statements (between two and seven minutes) of a moderately experimental indie rock album. In this case, it is a rock idiom in which the characteristic dominance of electric guitars and drum kits within a band structure is somewhat ceded to synthesisers and strings. Meredith herself is part of the band, singing and playing clarinet, an opportunity not typically afforded to the concert composer.

The reception of ‘Varmints’ in the popular-music press has noted with interest Meredith's training and achievements in concert music, often assuming that it gives her an advantage in approaching the genre of indie rock and electronics. This assumption rests on further, longstanding assumptions both of popular music's comparative simplicity and of the universally applicable nature of classical training with respect to the demands of music-making and sound itself. But ‘Varmints’ puts Meredith in stiff competition with over 20 years' worth of similar albums by more practised acts, bands associated with formally complex styles such as post-rock and math rock, not least on Moshi Moshi: in this context, ‘Varmints’ struggles to be either unique or exemplary. In the context of new (concert) music, meanwhile, its simplicity is apt to be heard as a step backwards rather than forwards or sideways.

Perhaps neither of these conceptions is really the point, however. Just as much as it falls between two genres, ‘Varmints’ allows Meredith to explore shapes and moods that can seldom be found in each of them alone. One of the album's most attractive qualities is the exultant, even infectious mood in which barking or cascading riffs on wind instruments are layered, augmented, and metrically wrong-footed. One hopes that ‘Varmints’ is not just a one-off for Meredith, a holiday from concert music: further exploration of this area could well hone a distinctive voice.

If ‘Varmints’, located within indie music, represents something of a middle ground between concert music and chart pop, composer Kate Simko's debut album with the London Electronic Orchestra is more of a superimposition of the two, incorporating conservatoire-style playing of piano, strings and harp into richly produced, syncopation-friendly house music. Like Meredith, Simko is a graduate of the Royal College of Music, as are the members of her all-female ensemble. Similarly, Simko's label, The Vinyl Factory, is a major independent player, having released records by Florence and the Machine (again), Massive Attack and the xx, a song of whose Simko covers here. Schubert is also covered: ‘Ständchen’ is a ‘recomposed version’ of the eponymous song from Schwanengesang, given a 4/4 kick drum.

The album doesn't seem to be aiming for an intensive dancefloor experience, however, but something smoother, something to set a mood, and as such the connotations of genre are difficult to listen past. For better or worse, the listener may find it hard to shake the initial impression that they find themselves in a high-end boutique (or luxury apartment ad) in which an equal mixture of sophistication and streetwise savvy is to be communicated. If these connotations fade, however, the album presents an accomplished example of luxuriously orchestrated house music, which is its own reward.

Miniaturised Concertos | Maché is on Métier, a label that has a substantial catalogue of twentieth- and twenty-first-century concert music; though it advertises this album as ‘fus[ing] classical art-music with popular idioms and new techniques of performance and recording, involving many of Britain's top names in the worlds of DJ-ing, electronics and sound design’, this ‘fusing’ is to a significantly lesser extent than for the labels supporting Meredith and Simko. The brainchild of pianist Kate Halsall, this release comprises two discs and a video that can be streamed online. Disc A features four works commissioned by Halsall for two pianos (for which she is joined by Fumiko Miyachi) and various other instruments, all relatively close to contemporary concert music in style: Naomi Pinnock's Always again alternates the pianos' violent, angular chords with some jarringly subtle percussion before ending with contemplative sonorities; similarly, Philip Cashian's skill with hovering piano sonorities is on display in Furor, though it too begins viciously; Colin Riley's Hanging in the Balance channels Cage's Sonatas and Interludes with its use of prepared piano and electronic effects; Andrew Poppy's Swimming with the Stone Book comes closest to rock by blending electric guitar, bass and keyboard into a series of tableaux, each with its own carefully balanced harmonic and textural consistency.

It's Disc B, however, that really fuses the classical and popular idioms. Its four tracks are made up of elements of 17 short pieces by 17 composers, many of them specially prepared and almost all featuring piano, chewed up (‘maché’) and woven into bricolages by Halsall and sound designer James Waterworth. The results are wonderfully diverse not just in their sounds, shapes, moods and levels of complexity, but in performance style, with many of the elements taking up the more informal creativity, recording technique and presentation of indie and experimental popular musics, something matched at a higher level by the intervention of Halsall's maché technique.

This technique perhaps better achieves the diversity that composers and musicians frustrated by the constraints of genre crave than does the replication and adoption of a single alternative genre, in this case one each from popular music such: indie rock and house. It is not enough simply to adopt a different but pre-existing genre, or to fuse the hallmarks of existing genres into some new chimera: genre itself must be dismantled, or at least imagined as temporary and finite against a plurality of possibilities. Equally, however, the continuity and consistency of genre is often a source of great value and appreciation. Tellingly, the albums by Meredith and Simko both close with intimate, even poignant strings, conjuring an atmosphere of emotion through classical harmony and vibrato – evoking Bach concertos and Romantic string quartets, it is as if both composers are looking back to those central, most deeply prized areas of the Western classical music tradition, and are keen not to leave them behind entirely.