Tippett's 1st Symphony

[Daniel]

Is Tippett's text at the same time too direct and too oblique? This could be said to also be a feature of the music, and not only here.

Actually re-reading your response I think I somewhat misunderstood you yesterday, and I'd say your description of aspects of Tippett's words and music as sometimes being simultaneously 'too direct and too oblique' is a very good one, though I guess for obliqueness to exist in music it needs text or at least an implied subject such as a title, to react against. And the 'blues' music of the Third Symphony would certainly appear oblique in relation to its subject, yet at the same time I think Tippett saw the directness of blues as a lingua franca as a virtue in his desire to make connections.

[Richard Barrett]

'too direct and too oblique'

I was trying to get at the "problem" experienced by some in his texts, to find a way of seeing it as other than a problem. And then I thought, one could also say this about the music, which many people also have a problem with. But I think obliqueness can occur in music without explicit outside references, for example in the relationships between its elements.

[Daniel]

But I think obliqueness can occur in music without explicit outside references, for example in the relationships between its elements.

Yes that's true, but would one say 'that's too oblique' about the relation between two musical elements, like you might about the text and music here? I'd have thought a 'too' oblique musical idea would just sound like new idea.
Interesting comparison perhaps in obliqueness between music and text, and music and image, which is exploited almost to the point of cliche in film sometimes (quiet song played over scene of intense horror etc), but has the ability to make powerful emotional point. I wonder if this kind of contrast was what Tippett was thinking of with his 'I drank in sorrow with her milk' etc?

[Richard Barrett]

I'd have thought a 'too' oblique musical idea would just sound like new idea.

I'm not sure I've expressed myself as precisely as I would like to have done about obliqueness in this context, although I think I know what I'm trying to say. An oblique relationship between musical materials might be one of those that characterises Schubert's D946 Klavierstücke; the non-A elements in their ABA(CA) forms are "new ideas" of course, whose ("oblique") relationship to the A material brings into being a more complex expressive identity which could be interpreted in many different ways, in other words asking rather than answering the question of what these materials or "ideas" are doing in the same piece. This is (approximately) the kind of thing I have in mind when talking about obliqueness in Tippett's 3rd symphony.

[Daniel]

Very interesting, Richard, and the Schubert example casts what you're saying in a much clearer light, as far as I'm concerned. The chemistry inherent in the reaction between different ideas seems as bottomless as the human brain, it's just that some composers choices seem to spark off more of a response in one's own subconscious than others.

[Richard Barrett]

The chemistry inherent in the reaction between different ideas seems as bottomless as the human brain

Indeed doing the chemistry is as good a way as any to explore and try to understand something of those depths! (Now where's my Bunsen burner?)