Harrison Birtwistle 80

[Blotto]

[Serial_Apologist]

And so, after a long and arduous journey containing many circumlocutions, he arrived at his destination, only to find that it was where he had started.

[Blotto]

I see this every now and again, especially on this forum, and I really don't understand it. What is meant by "difficulty" here? If it's "distance from traditional norms and expectations of someone who generally listens to classical music" I would say it's pretty low on the scale of difficulty.

I can only hope to illuminate you by offering my own experience.

The composite material is often rather formless-seeming to my unfamiliar ear which makes it very difficult to catch and retain. In turn, therefore, it can be impossible to detect repetition, variation and contrast. The piece can so seem shapeless and without any direction. It is unclear what it wishes to express but as often, it can be a puzzle when the subject is apparent quite why the writer would wish to express it in this elusive, taxing form.

Ferneyh, above, points out the abrupt changes of dynamic, sometimes harsh and shrill. The instrumental configurations that the music is distributed amongst can lead it to be heard as further scattered, further diffused.

So, the form is elusive and the style can be unpleasant. In that regard, it's difficult. Birtwistle's music has an audience who often like and admire it but I would guess that the larger number of listeners encountering it find it puzzling and glum, if not actually repellent. They don't feel it speaks to but shouts at them and they're aren't really very sure why. And all the while, there's a body of obviously capable, intelligent people declaring the music superb to baffle the deflected listener still more. It isn't music which helps the ordinary listener to like it because the bulk of the sensed emotion it expresses seems negative. Many listeners to music will go to it to find beauty, sympathy and some kind of consolation. The sombre, the dull, the funereal, the brutal aren't qualities which, if sensed, will charm or intrigue every listener.

[Quarky]

This is probably highly presumptious on my part, given that Richard has not come back with a reply, but insofar as I understand your questions, I would think they are about right. Or maybe this is just projection on my part, because I do these days tend to listen to music with a possible ear for how it might have been received to the acculturated ear of the times in which it was written and performed. So, one approaches a work by say CPE Bach listening out for what would have surprised and maybe shocked audiences at its first performance. For me this approach also serves to reveal features in earlier music which remain in later music in much more radicalised forms - features that I may very well have dismissed as not worthy of consideration. Why therefore, I am led to ask myself, did a later composer whom I strongly admire obviously not overlook this or that particular feature? And the reason, obviously, is that he or she did not share my particular prejudices! This occurred to me yesterday in listening to a passage in Beethoven's "Diabelli Variations" which I now realise had manifest influence on Schoenberg's Suite Op 25.

Congratulations to all and Blotto in particular for the best thread of 2014 (imv)! Following which I have put my hands in my pocket for a few more HB CDs.

However I am uncomfortable with this theory of putting my ears in the position of a listener who would have listened to the music at the time at which the music was composed. This may be OK for the experts familiar with all ages and styles of music, but for more run of the mill listeners, I feel it is too onerous a requirement. I tend to listen to all music with a similar ear, looking for inner meanings within the music, and for the music to carry me someplace, or at least give me pause for thought /musing. So Bach, Beethoven, Birtwistle, Boulez, Basie, Brubeck, Beatles, Bowie, may each in their own way have the desired effect. Of course there has to be regard for the style or type of music in order to get to the core of the piece, but this does not strike me as requiring a fundamental repositioning (the last concert I attended at King's place featured new commissions plus some Purcell. The Purcell aria seemed every bit as challenging / "difficult" as the new commissions) .

The danger in my view is being attracted to a style of music rather than looking somewhat deeper into the music.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

My problem addressing your concerns, Blotto, is that I find it difficult to relate your description of the Music to my experience of it - I don't find it "formless-seeming", or "shapeless and without any direction". It isn't in the conventional structures of Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Music any more than its Tonal/Harmonic material follows the conventions of those eras either, but the course of the Music follows its own logic and it moves in very definite directions. There are three essential structural "markers" that recur; exact repetition (as in the Soprano Saxophone motto that reappears unchanged throughout The Triumph of Time - until it "explodes" at a moment that is very clearly, "traditionally" The Climax); the continually changing melodic line that comes to the fore of the texture, fades away, recurs (changed but clearly the "same" material) later, as if it's been going on somewhere whilst the other Music has been playing (the Cor Anglais melody in The Triumph of Time); and "block" material, recurring like a Rondo episode in a piece - except that Birtwistle rarely repeats anything literally: when he gets to a section where a structural repeat is required, he doesn't look back at how the section sounded before, instead, he tries to remember what he did, and welcomes the discrepencies, as these allow variation, growth and mutation. (The essentials are still there, so that the repetition is recognizable, but the differences create progression.

In parallel with these structural "markers", Birtwistle also uses his own "take" on the "Montage" technique of Debussy, Stravinsky, Varese or Messiaen - where contrasted material breaks into the course of a section, in the manner of a cinematic "cut" from an interior scene between two characters, to a noisy outdoor street scene, to the interior of a car travelling at night, back to the two characters, one of whom can now be recognized as the car driver (the next time we see the film, we also see that the car was in the street scene, too). And, because this is Music, Birtwistle goes one better and is able to present two or three different "scenes" simultaneously as well as in sequence: it's a presentation of new ways in which Music can be experienced - one that might seem confusing at first (just as the first cinema-goers to experience a Close-Up shouted "Show her legs!" in fierce protest) but with continued experience, it reveals its own logic and (and this is the important bit) its own beauties - and considerable beauties thare are, too.

So your main paragraph:

So, the form is elusive and the style can be unpleasant. In that regard, it's difficult. Birtwistle's music has an audience who often like and admire it but I would guess that the larger number of listeners encountering it find it puzzling and glum, if not actually repellent. They don't feel it speaks to but shouts at them. And all the while, there's a body of obviously capable, intelligent people declaring the music superb to baffle the deflected listener still more. It isn't music which helps the listener to like it because the bulk of the sensed emotion it expresses seems negative. Many listeners to music will go to it to find beauty, sympathy and some kind of consolation. The sombre, the dull, the funereal, the brutal aren't qualities which, if sensed, will charm or intrigue every listener.

... well, the same can be said about Gotterdammerung, can't it? Birtwistle's Music comes from a tradition that demands repeated listening in order to "follow" it (and there are some listeners who are just happy to enjoy the sheer bloody racket it makes) - which some regard as an "arrogant" standpoint. But, if you're a composer who believes that Music is more than just "light entertainment", but is instead a way of exploring and communicating the full spectrum of human thought and feeling, and if you want to present these new ways of expression with others, then you are in essence honour bound to follow where the Music itself ends up taking you. This is then an experience you share with your listeners, no matter how few of them there are, and no matter how misunderstood or disliked it is by "the larger number of listeners". And, with luck (and as is happening with Birtwistle's Music) what you do reaches out to larger numbers of people, who become increasingly aware of the unique and valuable beauty that this Music - and only this Music - has to offer.

[Richard Barrett]

the form is elusive and the style can be unpleasant. In that regard, it's difficult.

To add to what fg has been saying: (a) I remember my first experiences of hearing modern composition, feeling also that the form was elusive but hearing this in terms of attraction rather than repulsion... since then of course I've come to an understanding of how a great deal of music is supposed to "work" but I still remember (and am attracted to, and maybe attempt to evoke) this feeling of excitement at something which seems at a first glance to be beyond my grasp; and (b) with regard to "unpleasant", within a musical context I would say that the main issue is not initially whether a sound or a style is "pleasant" or "unpleasant" but whether it seems to involve the kind of expressivity and coherence which would make me want to try to get to know it, even if I couldn't explicitly put my finger on what that expressivity and coherence might consist of.

[Richard Barrett]

However I am uncomfortable with this theory of putting my ears in the position of a listener who would have listened to the music at the time at which the music was composed. This may be OK for the experts familiar with all ages and styles of music, but for more run of the mill listeners, I feel it is too onerous a requirement.

But I don't think it's a "requirement" at all, nor do I think think it involves a familiarity with "all ages and styles of music", which I certainly don't have; it's really just a state of trying to hear things with a certain freshness, with as few preconceptions and prejudices as possible.

[jayne lee wilson]

I can only hope to illuminate you by offering my own experience.

The composite material is often rather formless-seeming to my unfamiliar ear which makes it very difficult to catch and retain. In turn, therefore, it can be impossible to detect repetition, variation and contrast. The piece can so seem shapeless and without any direction. It is unclear what it wishes to express but as often, it can be a puzzle when the subject is apparent quite why the writer would wish to express it in this elusive, taxing form.

Ferneyh, above, points out the abrupt changes of dynamic, sometimes harsh and shrill. The instrumental configurations that the music is distributed amongst can lead it to be heard as further scattered, further diffused.

So, the form is elusive and the style can be unpleasant. In that regard, it's difficult. Birtwistle's music has an audience who often like and admire it but I would guess that the larger number of listeners encountering it find it puzzling and glum, if not actually repellent. They don't feel it speaks to but shouts at them and they're aren't really very sure why. And all the while, there's a body of obviously capable, intelligent people declaring the music superb to baffle the deflected listener still more. It isn't music which helps the ordinary listener to like it because the bulk of the sensed emotion it expresses seems negative. Many listeners to music will go to it to find beauty, sympathy and some kind of consolation. The sombre, the dull, the funereal, the brutal aren't qualities which, if sensed, will charm or intrigue every listener.

Dear Blotto, please don't take it as a condescension if I say you keep falling into the same trap, as you move from attempted structural description to a negative emotional response, always against the background I evoked earlier of "Classical Balance & Proportion, warmth, consolation and reassurance.." Applying strenuous concentration, desperately seeking some fragmentary echoes of classical formal shapes (statement, development, melodic repetition etc..) can only lead to disappointment & rejection: from this angle HB's music fails to be what you desire... this is why I suggested, long long ago, submitting to the experience rather than applying your attention to it. Hence SA's image of walking through a wood, calmly observant...

After World War 2, artists had to find new forms of expression to deal with an utterly changed, often desperately violent and destructive world; Stockhausen said that his music represented "the stage after destruction"; the formal abandonment, sonic experimentation, aleatorics and electronics - all ways of dealing with sharp, vivid and aggressive new experiences, attempts to realise in sound the human condition post-1945, post Hiroshima, carpetbombing, industrial genocide; post-newtechnology, sexual freedom, instant communication & material gratification,....fast planes, fast cars; shopping in The Global Village.

Fhg's description of those lost abandoned voices in Refrains & Choruses, my own attempt at describing the physical experience offered to the imagination's ear by Endless Parade...these are attempts to find a fresh way of formulating a response to new music, just about as new as it can be, which hardly offers much connection back to the music that "classical musiclovers" feel most affection for. There is a jagged discontinuity in what we think of as "Classical" or "Art" music, falling somewhere between the late-Romantic, Serialist and Modernist or avant-garde decades of the 20th Century - and no easy way to bridge it.

If a listener, bravely travelling into Birtwistle's often dark and intense Imaginary Landscapes, finds herself approaching that bourn from which no traveller returns.. it's small wonder if she runs away from it, seeking over and again that warmth and reassurance, the consolation of an older musical philosophy, an ideal of order, structure and balance - but never forget, ever, how shocking Beethoven's 3rd or Mozart's 40th Symphonies once sounded; they were a response to new emotions too, both from the tormented inner world and the outer one of human conflict, error and destruction.

[Richard Barrett]

Very well put, Jayne. I would add that the sense of looking for an avenue of renewal could be (and, for some, definitely is) as relevant now as it was in 1945, even if media and governments would have us believe that we've been living in civilisation and peace since then. I was also reminded of the different kind of renewal (also starting earlier) represented by the work of John Cage. One of Cage's most celebrated ideas was to make music that encouraged listening to what were previously considered "unmusical" sounds as music, even of course going to the point of emptying a composition of all intentional sounds in order to make this clear (not that it is clear to many people still, but that's another twenty threads!). The converse of this, which isn't mentioned so often, is that one could listen to music with the same kind of intention and awareness one might bring to listening to "other" sounds... I was listening the other day to Cage's late orchestral piece 108 and experiencing it indeed as an "imaginary landscape" of slowly-shifting quasi-natural sounds and perspectives - so, more or less precisely what you and S_A describe as "walking through a wood, calmly observant".

In a nutshell, the "difficulty" people often experience with different musics (which might apply just as strongly to a teenager brought up exclusively on pop music encountering Mozart for the first time) seems to me really a question of having the wrong expectations, whether "balance and proportion" etc. or anything else. I guess letting go of expectations is a step too far for some listeners.

[teamsaint]

I hesitate to post these couple of thoughts,on this great thread. In fact I posted and deleted them last night.

Anyway, there is a an extraordinary section of a few pages in " The rest is Noise" where the awful wartime experiences of many of the big names of post war music, ( Xenakis, Ligeti, Stockhausen, Henze ) are laid out. From there you just follow the music into the chaos and political charades of the late C20.

Secondly, when faced with the new( and often complex) a simple question helps me . " Why did the composer choose to write it like this?"

Difficulty seems to be oddly problematic in music as opposed to other areas of life. New , interesting and initially troublesome are often seen as positive attributes in, say, literature, visual art, film etc, but somehow negatives in music.

IMO this is to do with a cultural norm that the people at the top like and foster. Music is just too powerful ,and needs controlling.......

[Richard Barrett]

an extraordinary section of a few pages in " The rest is Noise"

... although one of the faults of that book is the way it reduces so many aspects of compositional style to autobiography...

[Quarky]

World War II? Obviously fundamental influence on Continental Europe composers, but for Cage and other US Composers I would have thought Jazz, American sub-culture, and drugs were more important influences.

And of course matters were moving even before World War I. Prom 56 performed "5 pieces" premiered at the Proms in 1912. The best performance I have heard. Jurowski mentioned the polyrhythms, and this I felt gave the music greater continuity. Totally agree with Jayne:
"PROM 56, LPO/JUROWSKI.

HDs Ratings Part 2 (Schoenberg Op. 16): Sound 10/10, Performance 10/10.

Terrific power from the LPO with vivid colours and characterisation. Wonderfully idiomatic 2nd Viennese, postMahlerian sound, that ominous sense of a culture on the verge of collapse into War. The 3rd, "colours" movement was less quiet than usual, beautifully projected into the broadcast acoustic.
ABSOLUTELY SUPERB IN EVERY RESPECT! A stunning partnership on top form, living and breathing the music's essence"

[Richard Barrett]

World War II? Obviously fundamental influence on Continental Europe composers, but for Cage and other US Composers I would have thought Jazz, American sub-culture, and drugs were more important influences.

Drugs only existed in the US, you say? And Cage was completely untouched by jazz. And it should also not be forgotten that American musical culture was massively influenced by European emigrés like Stravinsky and Schoenberg. Or that the postwar avant-garde looked principally for inspiration to Webern, who had died in 1945. But that's Alex Ross's book for you: the story is the most important thing, the facts are selected to fit into it.

[Blotto]

Congratulations to all and Blotto in particular for the best thread of 2014 (imv)! Following which I have put my hands in my pocket for a few more HB CDs.

Thank you very much, Ob. Birtwistle does make an interesting subject for discussion, doesn't he. Can I ask what you've forked out for?

[Blotto]

Apologies but I missed your replies in the merger of the threads.

I have to confess - I've not heard one single note of his music. Not through deliberate avoidance - just never crossed that particular path.

That surprises me because - for a contemporary composer - he seems so prominent and present that, over time, he's almost unavoidable. The diversity of his music guarantees it pops up all over the radio schedules. But it may be that this is a trick of the light caused by an artificial prominence in his birthday year. It was only attending the Barbican performance of Gawain that I was exposed to his music for any length of time. Prior to that, I doubt I'd have stayed in the room very long when it was broadcast, though not from real aversion so much as the simple difficulty of being unable to hear it as music with any kind of pattern or form. I'd always have gone to nature to get pleasure from noise.

I have struggled, and won at least a partial victory. I'm not a musician and I dont understand his music, but he clearly deserves respect. I even went to The Mask of Orpheus at the Coliseum, and proudly have the programme to prove it. I have that work on CD and also Gawain, the string quartets and The Moth Requiem. None of them are easy, and any of them would clear most of my friends out of the living room before you could say Birtwistle, but I am confident they are worth perseverance.

For you, like me, u, the struggle is continuing, it seems. Are you able to say what it is you hear or catch that encourages you to persevere?

I found myself eventually, initially hearing a very few moments in the texture of the sound which were more familiar and recognisable as music rather than cacophony which then gave me some kind of anchor in it. From there, I began to be able to notice musical shapes - though not really what I'd call melody; melody to me always having the property of being memorable.

From there, though, I began to hear some loveliness in the sound which until then had a sort of unpleasant blandness. I am really no more than at the entrance to something which I am not sure will welcome me but the clarinet quintet was a turning point for me. It's so undemonstrative - as I remember it - that it's perverse. "Why is it speaking if this is all it has to say?", I felt. But by degrees, the insistent softness of the clarinet's music began to draw my attention to the fundamental sound of the instrument, for which result the music seemed merely a means. And that has developed into a feeling that, sometimes at least, in Birtwistle his music fundamentally reverts the attention to the instrument rather than the tunes it plays. There is something 'first principles' in some of his music, a sense that it is prehistoric though that contradicts what ferneyhough and Richard B have to say about it.