Harrison Birtwistle 80

[Blotto]

Harrison Birtwistle

This afternoon, I've continued with a very gradual exposure to some music by Harrison Birtwistle. A few weeks ago, it seemed to be an unknowable clamour of shrieks and rumbles; a desultory, fragmentary and formless noise in which nothing registered for me as solidly discernible.

Happily, following suggestions by kind members of this board, a few pieces have begun to come into focus. Today, his Clarinet Quintet's softness and The Triumph of Time's murmuring have begun to explain themselves.

Birtwistle's music is a by-word for difficulty and there must be a wide range of experiences of it as he seems to be a contemporary composer about whom almost everyone has feelings and opinions.

Has anyone else struggled with Harrison Birtwistle? Struggled and lost or won? Has his music come easily to anyone?

[visualnickmos]

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

[umslopogaas]

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.

[Blotto]

It's a matter of taste really. As far as contemporary music is concerned, personally I'm most interested in music which seeks new ways to engage and expand the perception and the imagination of listeners (and with older music I'm most interested in trying to put myself in the position of a listener for whom it would have done those things, which is the main reason for my interest in historically-informed performance practice), and which therefore treats tradition (if at all) as a point of reference rather than a surrounding environment, so to speak, or an object of faith. And this would be the reason why the Birtwistle pieces that I feel closest to are things like Mask of Orpheus, Punch and Judy and Earth Dances. I can try, sometimes successfully, to put myself in the mindset which views tradition in a different way from my own (ie. as a creative musician), but what I notice is that when there's something I don't like about a Birtwistle piece it's usually an "old" aspect of it rather than a "new" one.

I'm not sure that I've understood (in fact, I'm fairly sure that I haven't, so apologies for what follows). A chief reason for my failure may be that I don't know the three Birtwistle pieces you list but I infer that they contain more of the 'new' than the 'old'. May I ask, what would be examples of these aspects in the music for you?

You mention interest in "historically-informed performance practice". Am I right in understanding you to mean that you approach the performance from the imaginative point of view of someone whose own musical imagination would have been expanded by new music of the past in its own day; that you aim to identify and appreciate what would have been experienced as the new in the spirit and technique of the past?

In the point about tradition, I took your meaning that you conceive tradition as a simple, internal viewpoint rather than an external, encompassing culture? And that you find the capacity and habit of conceiving other viewpoints enables you - even where you may care little for it personally - to stand imaginatively in the place, for example, of a listener to Birtwistle for whom his music is an expansion or development of a mutual (Birtwistle and listener) view and tradition of music?

I very much doubt I've got that right. But, if I do have it, may I ask if you make a practical gain and use from this process of 'standing in'?

[Suffolkcoastal]

Though I've gradually come to terms with many composers of Birtwistle's generation and found at least some works that I can appreciate, Birtwistle is still a no go area, I find his music ugly, empty and suffocating and to be quite honest it gives me a genuine headache. I've listened to many of his works and even heard The Triumph of Time live, for which I couldn't even raise one single clap, I've listened a few times to it since and I get the same impression of a series of badly orchestrated chords stuck in a rhythmic quagmire. I've been recommended various works to listen to which I have dutifully tried, but often can't even get through a few minutes. So sorry fellow MBs he remains firmly out of bounds for me and probably always will do. By the way I feel similarly about Turnage another contemporary composer whose music I cannot abide.

[pilamenon]

I bought a recommended CD of his a few years ago, as a challenge, and got enough out of it to be glad to have done so. It features Secret Theatre, Silbury Air and Carmen Arcadiae Mechanicae Perpetuum played by the London Sinfonietta directed by Elgar Howarth. Of course, none of it's easy, but with some guidance from the notes, it was rewarding. Silbury Air is the piece I'm most familiar with, and not at all ugly. But I would imagine most people have to be in a very focused frame of mind to listen to Birtwistle, and it is clearly strong stuff that divides opinion. Good luck with your exploration.

[Roehre]

I got my very first Birtwistle LP in the Summer of 1977, the Decca LP HEAD 7 with Nenia: The Death of Orpheus, The Fields of Sorrow and Verses.
Difficult music for me then, but not more so than the late Beethoven quartets, which were for me then extremely difficult music too (and even more so than the Birtwistle to be honest ).

It helps if you are curious and have got to discover the world of classical music yourself without any help by peers or parents, hence completely unbiased....

[Blotto]

I got my very first Birtwistle LP in the Summer of 1977, the Decca LP HEAD 7 with Nenia: The Death of Orpheus, The Fields of Sorrow and Verses.
Difficult music for me then, but not more so than the late Beethoven quartets, which were for me then extremely difficult music too (and even more so than the Birtwistle to be honest ).

It helps if you are curious and have got to discover the world of classical music yourself without any help by peers or parents, hence completely unbiased....

As it happens, in part, it was hearing Fields of Sorrow this afternoon that led me to make this thread. It's the first piece which on first hearing was completely occupying and fulfilling. For those who don't know it, it's a 10 minute choral and instrumental piece which depicts the passing through a forest of two lovers' souls. The music somehow has the weightless, breathless slow, floating motion of the beings and the familiar fear and eeriness of trees' oblivious existence which one can sometimes feel in a dull, quiet wood.

It does feel as if certain recognitions or acceptances need to be made to appreciate some of Birtwistle. The sticks and bricks that his music is made of in the 70s seem often to be quite unremarkable. What somehow becomes remarkable is that they are given prominence and so the unremarkable is made notable without any change in its state. It feels very much an equivalent of quite pure, unforced mark-making in art; the rough and unpredictable, the sometimes shapeless, sensed forms, the even meaningless qualities are the focus of interest. The slow quiet of the clarinet quintet is a kind of music made of irrelevance.

It feels perverse to follow that remark by noting that one prominent quality which I keep finding in his music is a surprising one because it's actually a kind of cool rhapsody. Fields of Sorrow seemed thoroughly to exemplify that.

[Blotto]

Though I've gradually come to terms with many composers of Birtwistle's generation and found at least some works that I can appreciate, Birtwistle is still a no go area, I find his music ugly, empty and suffocating and to be quite honest it gives me a genuine headache. I've listened to many of his works and even heard The Triumph of Time live, for which I couldn't even raise one single clap, I've listened a few times to it since and I get the same impression of a series of badly orchestrated chords stuck in a rhythmic quagmire. I've been recommended various works to listen to which I have dutifully tried, but often can't even get through a few minutes. So sorry fellow MBs he remains firmly out of bounds for me and probably always will do. By the way I feel similarly about Turnage another contemporary composer whose music I cannot abide.

I can sympathise with this description of Birtwistle. The most curious thing about it is that it can seem trivially ugly. It doesn't appear even to have made any distinct effort to be notably unattractive. Its constituent parts can have qualities of banality; short, shapeless, directionless. But I think that banality in the material is where the music can deceive. For me, at least, the constituent bits' modesty has made them tricky to notice, identify and remember. In turn, that makes their reappearances and transformations impossible to spot so that there's no sense of progress in the piece. I feel what I'm beginning to do is adjust to the material, beginning to spot it and concentrate on it so that clear changes begin to appear in the music. It's very much a musical crossword puzzle with bits running across and over others but I'm beginning to wonder if some of the music doesn't have an almost Beethovenian economy in how much music is made from so little initial material.

[Suffolkcoastal]

I think blotto you are quite close as I'm pretty sure that Birtwistle's composition method is a bit like constructing a crossword puzzle. I had his method described to me once by an enthusiast who knew him. I don't think he liked my response very much!

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

I think blotto you are quite close as I'm pretty sure that Birtwistle's composition method is a bit like constructing a crossword puzzle. I had his method described to me once by an enthusiast who knew him. I don't think he liked my response very much!

Interesting that Music you described as "empty" should arouse such passions, Suffy. The Music that strikes me as "empty" is the stuff I've forgotten after a couple of minutes. (Or even whilst it's playing!)

[Suffolkcoastal]

Probably fhg because I find the way it sounds and is written totally alien, and by empty I mean devoid of natural emotion, cold and calculating like a machine. This causes I suppose the hostile reaction we all have to something decidedly unpleasant. But yes it is odd how music that is to me so mechanically empty can create such an emotional response. Why we tend to have individual reactions to various composers and why each one can produce completely opposite reactions is a discussion that could almost be endless.

[jayne lee wilson]

In some respects I count myself lucky not to have had any musical tutoring or training (though with an excellent amateur & club pianist in the house - Dad - playing everything from Chopin to Bing Crosby to the Beatles, surrounded by the stuff) - it meant that my musical education was courtesy Radio 3 and the Gramophone Magazine (Dad was too busy practising & playing to ever sit down and listen... hardly saw the guy), so I simply followed their leads to fulfill my curiosity sans prejudice against any style or era. So it really was Stockhausen one week, Beethoven & Bartok the next etc...Music In Our Time in the afternoon, then the evening concert of Brahms from the RFH... it would never have occurred to me to try to find some common ground between Birtwistle and Beethoven because I listened very instinctively, drawn by sound or emotion-in-sound, "musical images"...

But I felt an instinctive attraction for Birtwistle immediately - it spoke to me as much as Mahler or Shostakovich might. There weren't many recordings, but early experience of Verses for Ensembles or Triumph of Time were big deals. I recall some critic, after a Prom performance of Triumph, saying that the music got stuck where Mahler's 2nd opens (the oboe solo) and never moved on, and I remember thinking, well, you've got that wrong... I guess I lacked his educational bias.

I do think it must be very difficult, after half a lifetime of loving Classical Music (as some kind of Classical & Romantic "core repertoire"), to listen to Harry B and find a positive response, without looking for the wrong features, absent links back to some basically 18th or 19th Century tradition...statement & development...
... (the physical & emotional extremes (or absences) of Birtwistle's music, in a cultural context of Classical Balance & Proportion, warmth, consolation & reassurance, may be a bigger problem still).
.
I guess early obsession with Mahler, and then finding the Schoenberg of Op.16 and the Berg of Op.6 (Gramophone & R3-inspired curiosity again, thanks to a local record library - I'm a true product of Public Services!) meant that Birtwistle (or the Max Davies of the mid-60s) wasn't such a big leap, really....
So when Radio 3 had their Barbican weekend on Birtwistle (1988, all live, all day..) I was truly primed to respond! I recorded everything.**

But what if I'd had childhood piano lessons every week with someone telling me of the beauties of Mozart and Brahms and getting me to practise them...?

**Curious fact: between 1983 and 1987, for reasons too autobiographically complex to explain, I listened to nothing but Rock & Pop (and loved it)... came back to Classical by pure chance - a friend's acquisition of an Aiwa ghettoblaster...)

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Probably fhg because I find the way it sounds and is written totally alien, and by empty I mean devoid of natural emotion, cold and calculating like a machine. This causes I suppose the hostile reaction we all have to something decidedly unpleasant.

Again, I'm interested in your language - the Music obviously arouses anger in you, but you say that this isn't a "natural emotion". Surely, if it is "devoid of emotion" (I'm not sure what an "unnatural emotion" might be) then you would be indifferent to it; it wouldn't have so forceful an impact upon you?

I say all this not to "get at" you, Suffy, but because my very first encounter with Birtwistle's Music (the Refrains & Choruses which I heard when I was about fourteen or fifteen one afternoon on R3) provoked very similar reactions: I absolutely hated it! In fact, for several days after, I couldn't stop annoying people who hadn't heard the broadcast by talking about this horrible piece I'd heard that was just high and loud one second and low and quiet the next with no reason, and all of it in semitone clusters. I just couldn't forget the piece - for all the wrong reasons: I wanted to hear it again, just to prove how hideous it was! But this was the mid-seventies, and there wasn't a recording that I could find (it had been recorded by Phillips in 1966, but it wasn't a feature in the record shops I frequented) so it was a couple of years before I heard it again. I was surprised, both by how much of the piece I had remembered (this work had "entered" and "held" my imagination: pure entertainment!) and by how much I'd missed the first time. I still didn't "enjoy" the listening experience, but I was even more intrigued. Finally,I heard the work in performance - and the sounds filling a recital hall (rather than emited from the mono transitor radio that had been my sole source hithertofore) brought out the delicacies of the instrumental colours and the aching lyricism that was struggling to break out from behind the furious exterior: the voice of the ignored, the humiliated, the patronized - desperate to be heard, forced to speak in voices of outrage, seeking peace.

Well - that was it! Hooked from that moment on, I sought out performances, scores and recordings of this man's Music (and Birtwistle was only 23 when he wrote Refrains & Choruses!) each one opening my ears to new possibilities of what Music can do and how this can be achieved; quite literally life-changing in my case. I hope I've made clear in several other Posts and Threads how highly I regard the Music of Elgar, Holst, RVW, Britten & Tippett - and it is with my love of that Music in mind that I say that, whilst there are some works that I don't "connect" with, I find Birtwistle's Music the finest and most rewarding produced from these islands since that of Byrd.

[Suffolkcoastal]

The reactions are indeed very interesting fhg, I'm not sure if you misunderstood my earlier post, but it is Birtwistle's music that I find devoid of emotion and like a calculating computer. But as I mentioned it is strange how it produces an emotional response of total revulsion in me. Yet it is the same response I get from a lot of Mahler's music, but from the opposite extreme of far too much the other way. But both composers I would describe as intensely claustrophobic ('straightjacket in a padded cell' as I call it), to me but for opposite reasons.
We are all different of course and we find out plenty about ourselves in the music we listen and the reactions it provokes in us. I like and admire a lot of PMD's music and I've a greater appreciation these days of Alexander Goehr's music too, but Birtwistle will remain a closed door I fear.