Though rooted in British landscape, Birtwistle broke new ground with his disturbing yet compelling music, as Ivan Hewett explains
ILLUSTRATION: MATT HERRING
When people want to praise a composer’s music they often say ‘it’s instantly recognisable’. But that is a back-handed compliment, since it’s a quality that’s actually not so hard to achieve. You just need to invent a few ‘tricks’ or mannerisms and repeat them endlessly.
Harrison Birtwistle’s music is indeed instantly recognisable, but not because it’s always the same. In fact the variety of his music is extraordinary. There’s the muffled sadness of Nenia: The Death of Orpheus, where the three clarinets and piano move hesitantly in a perpetual twilight, tinged with the silvery sound of bells. There’s the frightening power of his opera The Minotaur, where the thundering percussion and growling bass portray the power of the tormented, misunderstood beast, trapped in his labyrinth. There’s the savage energy of The Axe Manual, where the pianist and percussionist caper in a dance of weirdly off-kilter rhythms. And there’s the incredible complexity of the later orchestral works such as Earth Dances, where the layers of music evoke natural processes unfolding at their own different speeds.
So what marks all these very different things out as belonging to Birtwistle and no one else? Firstly, there’s a special kind of logic, a way of thinking in musical notes. Birtwistle was often described as a modernist, and indeed he was in the sense that he turned his back on familiar harmonies and musical gestures, and set out to create a new musical language from scratch. That immediately made him an outsider, because reinventing music from scratch was something English composers just didn’t do. We left that to those dogmatic and forbidding Europeans, the ‘Angry Young Men’ born ten years before Birtwistle: Pierre Boulez, Luigi Nono, Karlheinz Stockhausen. Birtwistle was undoubtedly inspired by them, just as he was inspired by modernists of earlier generations, above all Igor Stravinsky (the aloof, antique ritualism of Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale and Agon lie behind much of Birtwistle’s music).
It was a lonely path Birtwistle chose to follow, in an English musical establishment dominated in his formative years by Michael Tippett, Malcolm Arnold and above all Benjamin Britten. To gauge Birtwistle’s distance from that world you only have to compare his first opera Punch and Judy, premiered in June 1968 at the festival co-founded by Britten, the Aldeburgh Festival, with Britten’s own most recent opera, A Midsummer Night’s Dream. This is suffus
