Harrison Birtwistle 80

[Blotto]

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.

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! ... Finally,I heard the work in performance - and the sounds filling a recital hall (rather than emitted from the mono transistor radio that had been my sole source hitherto fore) brought out the delicacies of the instrumental colours and the aching lyricism that was struggling to break out from behind the furious exterior ...

Well - that was it! Hooked from that moment on ... 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.

I didn't see Suffolk as complaining about the music but acknowledging his reactions to it. I think your remark further back that Birtwistle is a traditional composer is initially surprising but also very helpful. I am beginning to hear in his music some of the basic occurrences of statement, transformation, concurrence (which is a kind of counterpoint, isn't it?).

The great difficulty to me is coming to terms with the musical construction material - or phrases or statements or call it what you will - which he presents. The pieces I'm beginning to recognise sometimes feel very much like gathered flotsam or driftwood which is put down in front of me, then picked up and gradually replaced in rows, stacks or bundles. And then it's left.

It really does seem to me that the obstacle to Birtwistle is the most 'forward' contradiction of it; a presentation is made (which is active, meaningful) of something apparently desultory (which is aimless, cursory). Again, like some of the art of Bram van Velde (below) or the writing of Beckett, it's therefore music which can easily frustrate a listener because it's calling over from across the road to tell you it's got nothing to say.



For me, as a listener with only very basic knowledge of musical method and technique, to appreciate music I'm completely dependent on feeling and the kind of passive analysis that fragmentary information equips one to undertake. That analysis goes something like this: "What's that? Is it something? What is it? Is it like anything else I've heard?" Not exactly scholarly! However, Birtwistle's music - its texts and subjects - can feel pretty highbrow, academic, abstruse. But is the music itself those things? I'm beginning to feel it's not; beginning to feel it may be collage, assembled intuitively of very simple, fundamental stuff. Is that absolutely wrong?

[Blotto]

PS: I was a bit disappointed that the Birtwistle thread I started on Talking about Music got shunted and merged down here. It's subject was general and quite different to this one and I hoped to talk with people like myself who knew little or nothing about the music as well as the more knowledgeable.

Having said that, of course, all contributions are gratefully received.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

PS: I was a bit disappointed that the Birtwistle thread I started on Talking about Music got shunted and merged down here. It's subject was general and quite different to this one and I hoped to talk with people like myself who knew little or nothing about the music as well as the more knowledgeable.

Having said that, of course, all contributions are gratefully received.

Yes - I thought that was your intention, which is why I didn't weigh in with my tuppence'a'penny's worth until Suffy's comments reminded me of my "history" with the work. I'd just add (for the moment) that Birtwistle's Music has never struck me as "highbrow, academic, abstruse" - I've always had an immediate emotional, physical and even sensuous reaction to it (it's a very "tactile" Music). The "what's going on here" business comes later. No different, in other words, to my response to all my favourite Music from Plainchant to Aaron Cassidy via Beethoven, Gamelan, Ella Fitzgerald, Feldman and others on the way - and beyond!

[Blotto]

Yes - I thought that was your intention, which is why I didn't weigh in

I hope you won't feel driven off by that remark, fg, because I assure you that I'm grateful for your suggestions and comment. They've been invaluable to me. It was only that some posters from more northerly sections seem not to visit this region and it is interesting to hear the whole range of experience and opinion.

[Serial_Apologist]

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'?

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.

[Richard Barrett]

Birtwistle's music is a by-word for difficulty

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.

[Richard Barrett]

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?

Yes, that's more or less what I was trying to say.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

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 think it often (by no means always) means "uses loud major sevenths and minor seconds as opposed to triads and gentler dissonances, dynamic extremes with sudden changes, as opposed to gradual, modulated transitions from one state to another, and a preference for individualistic woodwind sonorities rather than the blended sound of a large orchestra dominated by strings". If someone's Musical ideal is the language of the mid-late Nineteenth Century (and I say this without intending any slur on that repertoire - oh, yes, that reminds me: "jagged staccato rhytnmic patterns rather than legato periodic phrasing", too) then Birtwistle's can seem "difficult" to recognize as having any connection with "Music". (This is perhaps also true of a listener whose idea of "New Music" is confined to the Proms Commissions of the last ten years!)

It's only approaching from the languages of Ferneyhough, Lachenmann, Stockhausen, Johnson, Cassidy, Bilione, Sciarrino, Cardew, Barrett*, Saunders and even Cage and Feldman that the "traditional" Classical elements become clear. Just as there is a twelve-year-old somewhere looping sound files of different fabrics that will become an entirely new type of Music in a decade or so that will start to put those composers' ideas in a light closer to the Western "Classical" Traditions than might seem now. It's all to do with perspective ("No, Dougal: these are New - those are far away!")

* = I think this is the first time I've addressed someone else directly in the third person.

[Roehre]

.....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.

Exactly way I normally listen to music -at least the pieces at that moment new to me, including Birtwistle's

[Richard Barrett]

I think it often (by no means always) means "uses loud major sevenths and minor seconds as opposed to triads and gentler dissonances, dynamic extremes with sudden changes, as opposed to gradual, modulated transitions from one state to another, and a preference for individualistic woodwind sonorities rather than the blended sound of a large orchestra dominated by strings". If someone's Musical ideal is the language of the mid-late Nineteenth Century (and I say this without intending any slur on that repertoire - oh, yes, that reminds me: "jagged staccato rhytnmic patterns rather than legato periodic phrasing", too) then Birtwistle's can seem "difficult" to recognize as having any connection with "Music". (This is perhaps also true of a listener whose idea of "New Music" is confined to the Proms Commissions of the last ten years!)

Indeed. I wonder what people who find Birtwistle difficult would make of Stockhausen's Mikrophonie I:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EhXU7wQCU0Y

... which uses hardly any recognisable pitch-intervals at all, or any traditional instruments let alone woodwinds playing sevenths and seconds. Surely something like this makes Birtwistle really sound like the conscious and at least partially reverent inheritor of a (IMO) specifically English compositional tradition that he is?

I'm interested also in the idea that composing "like constructing a crossword puzzle", by which I guess is meant "according to systems devised by the composer", has any fundamental bearing on the emotional impact of the music, because I don't believe it does. Why can't Birtwistle's "machines" be considered as musical elements just as expressive as anything else? For me one of the most exciting things about experiencing music (and this can serve as a further answer to Blotto's question to me earlier on) is not to confirm my emotional response, but to expand it. I imagine this is why I have a problem understanding what is really meant by "difficult music."

[ahinton]

Indeed. I wonder what people who find Birtwistle difficult would make of Stockhausen's Mikrophonie I:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EhXU7wQCU0Y

... which uses hardly any recognisable pitch-intervals at all, or any traditional instruments let alone woodwinds playing sevenths and seconds. Surely something like this makes Birtwistle really sound like the conscious and at least partially reverent inheritor of a (IMO) specifically English compositional tradition that he is?

An interesting thought -and one that makes good sense, too.

I'm interested also in the idea that composing "like constructing a crossword puzzle", by which I guess is meant "according to systems devised by the composer", has any fundamental bearing on the emotional impact of the music, because I don't believe it does.

Nor I; I don't even believe that it can - or, at the very least, I fail to understand how it can.

Why can't Birtwistle's "machines" be considered as musical elements just as expressive as anything else? For me one of the most exciting things about experiencing music (and this can serve as a further answer to Blotto's question to me earlier on) is not to confirm my emotional response, but to expand it. I imagine this is why I have a problem understanding what is really meant by "difficult music."

Indeed. What is "difficult" music? Music that might have presented difficulties to its composer to compose, perhaps but, even if so, what relevance does really have to the listener? As someone (I cannot now recall who) once said, there is no such thing as difficult music - only difficult listeners. OK, one does not always "get" - or indeed expect necessarily to "get" - every piece at first hearing, but then what's wrong with that? Must every listening experience of necessity yield 100% of the work upon first encounter? If so, why? I struggled for years with Schönberg's violin concerto but once I'd heard it played by Hilary Hahn I couldn't help but wonder why; I find works such as Busoni's Doktor Faust, Elgar's first symphony and Schönberg's D minor string quartet (to pick three totally at random) unfailingly give me something at each listening that I'd not especially noticed in previous ones. Is either case indicative of "difficult" music?

[Serial_Apologist]

I imagine this is why I have a problem understanding what is really meant by "difficult music."

I think the problem lies insofar as there are works in which a composer has acumulated layers of such detailed interrelational complexity that the listener can have difficulty knowing where to listen. He or she - the listener - may then feel that he is not giving the composer due credit by not being able to orientate him or herself or find something to hang onto, a sort of hand to guide them through the composition. Given that most pop music to this day adheres to diatonic harmonic procedures familiar to Mozart, it is I would think understandable that with the plethora of music shoved at people at every turn being of this kind, ones expectations are shaped thereby, and probably over-challenged by too dramatic a departure from such practices as interrupted cadences for the listener's anticipation. Many one-time avant-garde composers have returned to an equivalent of Schoenberg's practice of indicating the main thematic line with the word "Hauptstimme" so the conductor could bring this out for the listener lacking a score; I have heard Maxwell Davis speaking of maintaining a perceptible thread from beginning to end of a composition as a practice at one time overlooked by such as himself and others, and Boulez pointing out audible continuities in a piece like "In Memoriam Bruno Maderna". Possibly concessions to listener fallibility in this respect are what distinguishes the traditional from the non-tradition-bound composer or spontaneous improviser, if one dare put it like that - and I personally certainly feel "helped" by Birtwistle's clarity of means and expression. However, there are ways of listening to complex new music which can embrace the complexity, so that one can be freely disposed to listen to any given aspect, thematic on non-thematic, as feeding into the richnesss of the picture in the way that, say, an unnoticed weed can positively contribute in a geometrically planned garden. This might be rather akin to making the listening experience a total experience, as in walking slowly through a wood taking in every sound and sensation, because even if this may amount to a disrespectful slur on the effort a Brian Ferneyhough may expend on nuanced precision, at a certain point even the biggest control freak acknowledges that how the work is experienced, and even what takes place within it, is to an even greater extent than intended out of his or her hands, and might even sound better for that!!!

[Serial_Apologist]

OK, one does not always "get" - or indeed expect necessarily to "get" - every piece at first hearing, but then what's wrong with that? Must every listening experience of necessity yield 100% of the work upon first encounter? If so, why? I struggled for years with Schönberg's violin concerto but once I'd heard it played by Hilary Hahn I couldn't help but wonder why; I find works such as Busoni's Doktor Faust, Elgar's first symphony and Schönberg's D minor string quartet (to pick three totally at random) unfailingly give me something at each listening that I'd not especially noticed in previous ones. Is either case indicative of "difficult" music?

An experience I had only yesterday, listening to my recording of the "Diabelli Variations", of all things! Maybe the difficulty is often in proportion to the long-term satisfaction quality music can give, because the quality to some extent resides in the process of acquaintanceship, which is as with people who don't throw themselves at one or give away all there is to know about them in one encounter.

[Richard Barrett]

even if this may amount to a disrespectful slur

But it doesn't, at all. I think (believe) that every piece of music (umm... within reason) has some kind of point of entry through which I can pass towards appreciating it more broadly and deeply, and if I can't find that point of entry it's principally my own problem (rather than for example the music being "empty... devoid of natural emotion" etc.), finding a solution to which is inevitably going to enrich my existence in some way.

[Roehre]

... I think (believe) that every piece of music (umm... within reason) has some kind of point of entry through which I can pass towards appreciating it more broadly and deeply, and if I can't find that point of entry it's principally my own problem , finding a solution to which is inevitably going to enrich my existence in some way.

A statement I fully concur with