Harrison Birtwistle 80

[Quarky]

While we are waiting for S_A's transcribed notes, there is an interesting interview with HB by John Tusa: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00nc23w

HB has some interesting things to say about serialism. There was some piano music of his last night, including Gigue Machine. Must listen again, my immediate impression was this must be a serial piece - but no, he doesn't write serial music.

Difficult to find any analysis of Gigue Machine: Boulezian BlogSpot:
The 2011 Gigue Machine is, according to the composer, a ‘fantasia in two parts’, its counterpoint ‘linear and sonorous against something else that is very staccato’. To my ears, it sounded, both as work and performance, closer to Stravinsky than Variations from the Golden Mountain, but also in context drew upon the example of Mozart’s – and Mozart-Busoni’s – Gigue as well as Bach. Harmonies, again probably partly as a well-nigh unavoidable consequence of pianistic tradition, sometimes suggested German music from Bach to Schoenberg. And of course, there were the wonderful, machine-like ostinatos so typical and, again, so individual in their reinvention.

[Serial_Apologist]

OK - the Programme boadcast in 1987 was titled "A New Harmony?". It was introduced by Stephen Walsh, whose contributions I have not included, nor those of Bayan Northcott, whose position on innovation would best have been summed up as one of a musical language within the broad Euroclassical tradition, outworn in many respects by the turn of the 20th century, accounting for the musical revolution that unfolded during the years leading up to and just after WW1, but not the post-WW2 attempts in Darmstadt, primarily, to relaunch it. A massive communication gap had opened up between the contemporary composer and his or her audience in consequence, was Northcott's gist. The aesthetic positions of composers broadly from the Darmstadt generation were counterposed in what followed to those of not just Northcott, but also Robert Simpson, in my view the programme's straw man conservative, whose following comment was effectively the programme's opening gambit.

It should be noted that the following quotations have been taken out of the context of Walsh's linking continuity, and are not in any way intended to be read as responses one to another.

Robert Simpson: This is the first time in musical history when it's possible to be recognised as a composer without being a musician; to put things down on paper, at random, or not put things down on paper at all. But the public becomes alienated by this because they become intimidated - some thinking, well, I can't tell the difference between what's good and what's bad: the actual dividing line between madness and sanity, and rubbish and sense, is difficult to determine. Therefore I think one must have the courage to say, this is rubbish. And that's what doesn't happen very much, now.

Pierre Boulez: It has nothing to do with contemporary music; it has to do with a trend where people are completely enclosed in a finished world. I can compare it with people who buy their furniture, and they prefer to buy a very bad copy of beginning of the 19th century furniture, much more than buy something really modern - not because of the price, because you find rich people who buy terrible copies! - rather than give to modern designers and modern architects their way. It's not only a fact of music, it's a kind of society which is looking constantly to the past. It's disturbing, sometimes.

Robert Simpson: There's nothing that drives me into a homicidal mania more quickly than when somebody says to me: what style do you compose in? because I don't know what style I compose in. I don't really believe Beethoven knew what style he was composing in. In fact if you ask yourself that question, what style Beethoven wrote in, you can't answer it, because although you can recognise Beethoven in two bars, you simply cannopt say what it is that constitutes Beethoven's manner, his way of composing. And I think one should compose entirely from one's self: your own personality is the strongest thing about you, and the less selfconscious it is the stronger and more potent it is in fact. And music should go to the heart; it should reflect the fact that we have minds, we have hearts, we have two legs each, two arms each, we breathe by regular movements, we live by regular movements, we eat regularly, and we sleep regularly. I'm not saying it should have monotonous regularity about it; what I am saying, [is] perhaps following what Carl Nielsen said very succintly when he said, music is the sound of life.

TBC

[Serial_Apologist]

Elliott Carter: (on seeking some kind of stylistic convergence among composers within a sensed prevailing historical ambit): I think many of us did it voluntarily because it seemed like a good thing to do: we were members of society and owed society a certain kind of responsibility to write for them. It seemed to me at that point, it was between 1945 and '50, I began to think that this was not the thing that interested me as much as trying to find out what it was that had really started my interest in music, and what was basic to me and most important for me to write, in terms of pure music, without concern for a large audience [...] That popular audience I don't believe ever existed. This was one of the things that began to be clear to me: that the audience that is interested in older music is not interested very much in new music regardless of its style. They may be interested for instance in "The Pines of Rome" or "The Fountains of Rome" for a few years, because these pieces are entertaining - or pieces by Copland like "Billy the Kid"; but I think that these pieces seldom remain in the repertory because people really come to hear Brahms and Beethoven and so on at a concert, and it really doesn't matter what style the music is in in the end, even if it's something they immediately grasp; in the end they won't be very interested in it ...

From my point of view [I was trying to communicate more directly] - yes, exactly so. The reason for all that change in style was certainly a desire to communicate what meant a great deal to me in music, in both the feeling in the music and also the general conceptual models and ways of thinking, and the whole outlook, both on music and on life; and I was really being more direct in terms of what I wanted to say; I was trying to say it more precisely, more clearly and more forcefully.

It's always been a surprise to me, ever since I was a boy, that people liked old music so much more than contemporary music. because it seemed to me contemporary music in general is a great deal easier to understand by simple reason that it reflects our own lives and our own feelings, as we live today. I think contemporary music reflects every kind of thing: our sense of disorder, of chaos, of making order out of rather complicated situations - situations which no one ever thought would exist. Sometimes we try to understand them, make some kind of intelligibility. I think this is all reflected, and much more interesting than older music!

Edit: Olly Knussen was also interviewed in the programme

TBC

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Many thanks, S_A: this must be taking much of your time - fascinating stuff.

[Serial_Apologist]

Peter Maxwell Davies: I find that the experience that I normally go through every day, in normal life, is pretty intense, and - huh - I enjoy it even when it's dreadful and awful. And that kind of intensity of experience I find it very necessary to communicate; and I want to make that quite clear in the music. I think this problem of communication is one which tends to get composers stuck up a gum tree ... If you really have got a technique - and I try to have one - of composing clear, logical, sensible music - and I mean sensible - then that is going to be not so much a problem of communication concerning language, the actual fabric of the language itself, but the purposes to which that language is put. In other words, what that experience is about, which is put through that particular technical means. And that will probably, in my own case, become more difficult as I get older and have more experiences, and I hope more insights.

What I don't mean is that there is a return to tonality - this easy jump back into tonality as she was. This is one substitute for actual thinking about music, if you just take it and use it in quotes and don't do anything else with it. Of course, you will get some sort of audience; and you will get performances by people who don't want to take any trouble thinking or whatever about music that they're commissioning or playing. And I feel that so long as the thing is articulated in the large form as in the small form, in detail as in its huge articulation over half an hour, in the way that the ear can follow it - and the only guarantee that the ear can follow it is that your ear as a composer can follow it - if a composer has got that inner conviction that he hears what he is doing in his inner ear, and he can articulate it over that time, if he's any good - and this nobody can say at the time - then I hope that, as in the past, people will come along with it eventually.

I could very often myself sometimes be accused of childish games, messing around with magic squares or whatever, and I have been. But what I think I mean by childish games are preoccupations with non-musical elements borrowed from technology and philosophy, or pseudo-philosophy. I don't know about you, but there are always musical ideas working themselves out in my mind. I can tune in, like to a radio station, and listen to what's going on: there are usually half a dozen pieces brewing; and I don't know if they're all going on at the same time or not, but I can flick from the one to the other, listen to them, and drop in to the sound of it, and how it's developing, and what is necessary; and at some stage when that begins to sort itself out and I think, ah yes, we're getting somewhere when I drop in and tune in, then you start working out on paper, and finding out to what that particular material is working. And that might involve magic square working, it might involve serial working or whatever, but it is probably going to be an amalgam of all those things: every compositional thing that you've ever thought about will be, if not in the foreground, at least in the background which makes that particular manifestation possible. But I feel that the point at which you start to write the thing down on paper, is a continuation of a process which has been going on for quite a long time beforehand.

TBC

[Roehre]

Many thanks, S_A: this must be taking much of your time - fascinating stuff.

Seconded

[teamsaint]

Seconded

Absolutely thirded. thanks , S_A.

PMDs piece is an inspiring read.

[Serial_Apologist]

Pierre Boulez: The difficulty in music, or in the arts generally, is to make the right balance, or the right reflection, like a miror, between meaning and feeling, and between method and the source of your energy which is not elaborated - the source being a kind of natural source. All the great works of music, and the great works of art, are a kind of mirror reflection between genuine inspiration, between a kind of wild aspect of the personality which is reflected and gone through a filter of elaboration. I don't think that without these two aspects one can have a very valid work of art. Only reflective is not enough because it become academic, an academicism; and only wild is not enough because you don't really have a way of expressing yourself. If you only have abstract relationships then they cannot be perceived. They can be seen: for example by analysis the same succession of notes comes ten minutes later. Of course you can see it; but if you don't care for perception when you're composing, then all these relationships are lost. For instance, if you want that people notice these relationships, you have to underline with dynamics. Let's say in a piece like "Rituel" by me, you have polyphony which is, at the end, so intricate you can perceive it only as a kind of bloc. But the more complex it becomes, then your perception is disoriented and cannot perceive the melodic line as clearly. You know, you scan the tissue, let's say, and for once you are attached to the flutes, for instance, because they are stronger; after, you are attached to the violins, because suddenly they are well together, and after that you are listening to the two clarinets because they are in the high register, and so on and so forth. So, your perception goes from one to one, but you still have the melodic aspect which you can perceive from time to time going from group to group; and at the end, when all groups are superimposed, you hear a kind of chaos, and the only thing you can perceive clearly, is the percussion. You see? - your perception has gone from one layer to another one; but it is always very intentional with me, to play with perception clearly, and on the contrary with perception in a kind of haze.

TBC

[Serial_Apologist]

Alexander Goehr: What I'm concerned with - and as I get older I'm more concerned with - is immediacy. And I want to create a situation where I can write a piece as I visualise it, and not engage in a long labour of developing a thing necessarily; like when you write an opera or symphony, or big piece, it's going to take a long time; and I think that one of the bad results of serial practice, and the influence of Schoenberg in particular, was that you started with a little idea like a seed and you developed it into an oak tree and diligently toiled away at it. I want to find a way, rather like a painter, or Jackson Pollock who flung pain at the canvas, where I can immediately write the whole piece down. And at the moment I'm doing that in quite a traditional way: I'm exploring the way composers might have conceivably done it in the past. But that is my concern , it's immediacy - because otherwise I feel the piece depends too much on filigree and fine workmanship, and good technique and such things - which to some extent one feels one has after a number of years, and I want to throw it out; and I think composers ought to throw out technique.

In a sense you might be excused for seeing me as part of such a development - yet I wouldn't myself consider myself part of it. I dislike Neo-Romanticism as practised say, by Rochberg and Penderecki, very much indeed, because I think it's a posture, and a mask of a different kind. it's the Neo of it that I dislike. And if you say, how can you say that, when you yourself, after many years of writing some sort of serial music,. are now writing tonal music? I just say that I consider that I'm always doing the same thing: that I am trying to formulate musical material which is rich and has the possibility of development and explloitation in some way, and that the fact that it has got more tonal over the years has to do, not so much with any homage to the past - which in a sense I don't give a damn about - but has for me - and this is purely personal - always has to do with the problem of writing any kind of piece. The reaon why I write tonal music is because the disciplines of writing tonal music are different from the disciplines of writing serial music: your approach to the concept of space and time in a different way, and that really is all that is about, as far as I'm concerned. And the other thing, however, that wouldn't be quite truthful - the other aspect would be that somehow much of the soundworld that fascinated me 25 years ago has simply gone stale, and towards finding a new one in a sense I want to reinstate the potency which comes from leading-note harmony. It sounds so much more potent, at the moment, than those endless chords of sevenths and fourths, which don't sound so good, they're not exciting to me any more.

I think we sometimes play at being great masters. Everybody I know only wants to write masterpieces, or consider themselves in the same breath as the great classical composers. I think it would be actually a better idea if we modelled our musical culture on a Baroque situation which wasn't quite so pretentious, because it's not our aims as composers that ought to be smaller, but our freedom would be greater if we weren't pretending to such high levels: there'd perhaps be more ordinary music which wasn't expected to continue.

TBC

[Serial_Apologist]

Peter Maxwell Davies: I do feel that the technical and expressive possibilities of music now are wide open - pretty wonderful, I think - and it's marvellous to be living now, and working with these possibilities I find enormously exciting and stimulating. I really do think that in quite a lot of the works I 've heard in the past few years there's a line going from beginning to end, where an audience has got a hope of actually having a line going right through, based on principles of harmony and rhythm and so on, which are not the old ones, but recogniseably related to the old ones. And I feel this is very much what must happen toward the end of the 20th century: that after a period where everything has gone into a melting pot, there must be, when it all cools down a bit, some kind of crystallisation, and a realisation that... children's hour is over, if you like, and that we've got to grow up a bit, and not indulge in little games with ourselves - if I can use such an expression! - in the corner.

Alexander Goehr: It's a sad thing that the last composers who had really made a big impact on a wider public are Britten, Shostakovitch and Messiaen, and that nobody of the composers we respect and admire, the leading lights among us, makes any particular impact upon anybody, as far as I can see. And without an art which hits people between the eyes I can't see it as a rich period. I think the Neos and the Minimalists - Steve Reich - and some of the developments with former serialists, are groping: we're in the dark. I think. By the end of the century, there's going to be formulated out of all this some sort of musical practice which will be identifiable, but at the moment I defy anybody to give an account of what modern music is now, other than to grope around, and get hold of objects here and there.

Elliott Carter: It's very unlikely that figures of this sort of towering importance [eg Beethoven] will ever again appear, because of the great variety of our society. It will be like the way moving pictures are today - there were once these old movies that filled these huge houses, and now all these houses have been cut into two, three and four parts, and we have Cinema 1, Cinema 2, each showing movies for specialised audiences. And I think this is the way it will be with contemporary music, with music in general from now on. Ever since I can remember we've been coming to a consensus: people said back in the 1920s, finally we'll all begin to write the same; and in the 1930s, the time of Milhaud and Poulenc, everybody felt we were finally coming into a consensus; and as soon as it became a consensus it broke apart again. What I've often thought [is] that a consensus is a sign of decline.

Ends.

[Serial_Apologist]

Many thanks, S_A: this must be taking much of your time - fascinating stuff.

Thanks, ferney - also Roehr and teamsaint.

I am glad I saved that cassette because the composer pronouncements which I've reproduced seemed important at the time, a view I have had no reason to revise in the years which have since elapsed.

[Blotto]

Pierre Boulez: It has nothing to do with contemporary music; it has to do with a trend where people are completely enclosed in a finished world. I can compare it with people who buy their furniture, and they prefer to buy a very bad copy of beginning of the 19th century furniture, much more than buy something really modern - not because of the price, because you find rich people who buy terrible copies! - rather than give to modern designers and modern architects their way. It's not only a fact of music, it's a kind of society which is looking constantly to the past. It's disturbing, sometimes.

Boulez seems to lack imagination. The past is all around us and what we're constituted from; of course, people see and respond through their vision and sense of the past, especially when the future promises them destruction.

I wonder if his intellectualism is a symptom of Boulez's narrow-mindedness? How significant it is that he doesn't apply his criticisms to those of limited or skant means but only to the affluent? What a banal parallel.

Thanks, Serial. This is all very interesting.

[Bryn]

Boulez seems to lack imagination. The past is all around us and what we're constituted from; of course, people see and respond through their vision and sense of the past, especially when the future promises them destruction.

I wonder if his intellectualism is a symptom of Boulez's narrow-mindedness? How significant it is that he doesn't apply his criticisms to those of limited or skant means but only to the affluent? What a banal parallel.

Thanks, Serial. This is all very interesting.

Shades of that scene with on the boat in The Long Good Friday as the hired chef pontificates:


Underling 1 looking at the French chef doing the caterng:

"E's a right ol' ponce"

Underling 2

"Well, he's French i'n 'e"

[Serial_Apologist]

Boulez seems to lack imagination. The past is all around us and what we're constituted from; of course, people see and respond through their vision and sense of the past, especially when the future promises them destruction.

I wonder if his intellectualism is a symptom of Boulez's narrow-mindedness? How significant it is that he doesn't apply his criticisms to those of limited or skant means but only to the affluent? What a banal parallel.

Thanks, Serial. This is all very interesting.

This was the double-edged sword of modernism, and in Boulez's case it is not without note from a certain undifferentiated perspective that he had done rather well out of state support over the preceding 10 or so years, (IRCAM). There is a lot to be said for the view that harking after an illusory bygone age is a sign of social and political decline: it is the yearning as opposed to the understanding of historic forces affecting the present that implicates the nostalgia merchants. Much as one can criticise Boulez for becoming one of the establishment, I don't think one can accuse him of being one such, although Bayan Northcott has a go in a part of the programme from which I took these quotes, saying that harking back to the ordered world of 1950s integral serialism was itself a nostalgic quest of a kind Boulez had himself condemned in Stravinsky and that whole movement towards Neo-Classicism in the 1930s and '40s. I can only speak up for modernism for what it might have meant or represented - which is what it did across a wide spectrum of progressive thinking across Europe in the 1920s (apart from Britain), and some hoped it could regain following WW2. 27 years ago seems in a different age now; even watching videoed TV programes on history, politics and the arts from 20 years ago, which I now spend a lot of my evenings doing, evoke a different time; even the ads were more tasteful!

[Richard Barrett]

Much as one can criticise Boulez for becoming one of the establishment, I don't think one can accuse him of being one such

I must beg to differ. His position of political power within the French musical world has been pretty unparalleled in modern times, I would say; and, as a further example, his embrace of Bayreuth in general and Wieland Wagner in particular aren't the work of someone outside the establishment. I do admire much that he's done, as both composer and performer, but I can't be alone in wishing that his appetite for power and influence, and enthusiasm in wielding it, hadn't truncated his compositional output so much.