Harrison Birtwistle 80

[Tony Halstead]

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

Wonderful... Sandy Goehr's music 'speaks to me' as does his (prose) writing in a more meaningful way than anything by the other members of the 'Manchester School', even though they ( HB and PMD) are - in terms of public perception - (dare I say it) more 'famous' and 'feted' than Goehr.

[Richard Barrett]

even though they ( HB and PMD) are - in terms of public perception - (dare I say it) more 'famous' and 'feted' than Goehr.

Well, they certainly are, there seems little doubt about this! (And thanks from me too for all this, S_A.) I find it very strange to read Goehr's wrigglings to explain that he's turned to writing tonal music but not because he's going back to the past (which is exactly what he is doing, for reasons eloquently set out by Elliott Carter in his comments on what's contemporary about contemporary music). Maxwell Davies deals with this question in a much more straightforward and honest-sounding way I think. Also the way Goehr talks about throwing out "technique" and becoming more "immediate" in the manner of Jackson Pollock... I can't think of a single work of Goehr's I've ever heard that really sounds as if he's trying to do such things, to me it all sounds grey, turgid and contrived, I feel as if I must be missing something important.

[Blotto]

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"

I can see you're making a point about people who speak slang/colloquial English but not what the point itself is? What do you mean?

[ahinton]

Well, they certainly are, there seems little doubt about this! (And thanks from me too for all this, S_A.) I find it very strange to read Goehr's wrigglings to explain that he's turned to writing tonal music but not because he's going back to the past (which is exactly what he is doing, for reasons eloquently set out by Elliott Carter in his comments on what's contemporary about contemporary music). Maxwell Davies deals with this question in a much more straightforward and honest-sounding way I think. Also the way Goehr talks about throwing out "technique" and becoming more "immediate" in the manner of Jackson Pollock... I can't think of a single work of Goehr's I've ever heard that really sounds as if he's trying to do such things, to me it all sounds grey, turgid and contrived, I feel as if I must be missing something important.

Yes, thanks to S_A from me, too, for posting that. But leaving aside what Goehr says about having turned to writing tonal music and regardless of how convincing of otherwise his avowed reasons and aims might be (and also leaving aside for a moment that Goehr's music has little appeal for you, either for those or other reasons), do you personally believe that it is no longer possible for a composer to espouse the writing of tonal music - or to turn to doing so - without inevitably forging or renewing some kind of relationship with musics of the past, wilfully or otherwise?

I, too, raise my eyebrows about the notion of "throwing out 'technique'", if for no better reason than that it seems to suggest some kind of cop-out and might even be taken to imply a sort of creative laziness, even if that's not what Goehr thinks that he means. I also fail to understand why Goehr appears to perceive the quest for a sense of immediacy as somehow incompatible with the exercise and development of "technique". Mozart wrote his first symphony long before he was ten; he wrote his G minor string quintet quite a few years later. Remarkable as the first of these is as an achievement by a child, did he not develop "technique" in the intervening years and, as he obviously did, was there something somehow wrong about his having done so? Perhaps I'm misinterpreting Goehr here and maybe I'm just being dense, but I simply don't get what he's on about.

[Quarky]

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.

Many thanks for posting your notes, S_A. The comments by the composers as to how they compose certainly shows up the shallowness of Robert Simpson's jibe.

[Richard Barrett]

The comments by the composers as to how they compose certainly shows up the shallowness of Robert Simpson's jibe.

Indeed. They're all trying to articulate something about what composition means to them, while he's grumbling incoherently about "rubbish".

[Bryn]

I can see you're making a point about people who speak slang/colloquial English but not what the point itself is? What do you mean?

Hmm. This will would more than it gained by exegesis but it was not the colloquialisms that comprised the target but the image of 'class' and hauteur presented by M. Boulez. It helps if you are familiar with the scene from the film. Unfortunately it is not among those available on YouTube.

[Serial_Apologist]

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.

I agree: Boulez is a French establishent figure; I was thinking more in terms of Bayan Northcott's rather supercilious attempt at irony in criticising Boulez for in effect being the very nostalgist in his attachment to serialism for which he (Boulez) had once condemned others.

[Richard Barrett]

I was thinking more in terms of Bayan Northcott's rather supercilious attempt at irony in criticising Boulez for in effect being the very nostalgist in his attachment to serialism for which he (Boulez) had once condemned others.

Oh, sorry for misreading you there.

As for serialism, it's not over until it's over. Unlike the (re-)embrace of tonality as described by Goehr, involving oneself in the evolution of serial thinking (I don't mean Schoenberg's "composition with twelve tones" but the more generalised viewpoint initiated by Stockhausen, much of whose Aus den sieben Tagen is quintessentially serial composition even though it contains no notated material whatever!) does not involve nostalgia; it's a "universe in constant expansion" as Boulez himself put it.