September 16, 1995. Worldwide, about a hundred million television sets were switched on on the Last Night of the Proms† People expected Rule, Britannia! and Land of Hope and Glory, cheered along with all their heart by a flag-waving crowd. They got the world premiere of an abrasive modernist saxophone concerto, listening to the threatening title panic† Before the play was over, the BBC’s phone was glowing red. May this cat whine be over. The composer of the work, Harrison Birtwistle, did not feel responsible for the fuss afterwards. Could he help that the average listener’s hearing was hopelessly underdeveloped.
Harrison Birtwistle passed away last Monday in his hometown, Mere, South England. He was 87 years old. Since the 1960s he has been one of the greatest of British avant-garde music. However, it was difficult for his work to be accommodated in a specific style or movement. His signature was too personal for that. In key words: labyrinthine multi-layered in design. Theatrical in operation. Sometimes unexpectedly lyrical, but more often prickly and unruly in sound.
Youth in Northern England
The stream of stern adjectives evoked by his sound world has often been associated with the landscape of his childhood. Birtwistle was born in Accrington, North England, in 1934. Think barren hills, gray skies and equally drab working-class houses. In his own words, his musical career started with what his mother called ‘flute lessons’. Only later did he find out that there was actually a clarinet in his briefcase.
After a time in the local concert band, eighteen-year-old Harry decided in 1952 to take his musical ambitions seriously. He went on to study at the Royal Manchester College of Music, where he co-founded the New Music Manchester Group with fellow students Peter Maxwell Davies and Alexander Goehr.
As a composer, Birtwistle has from the outset followed different paths than his continental colleagues. Although he greatly admired contemporaries such as Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez, he saw little in their serial composition techniques. As a clarinetist, as a musician of the unison line, he felt more related to the melodic idiom of Olivier Messiaen; with the clear structures of Igor Stravinsky and the physical sound approach of Edgard Varèse.
In 1957 Birtwistle made his composer debut with Refrains and Choruses, a quintet for four woodwinds and horn. It is striking how much the piece forms a kind of sneak preview of his later oeuvre. Rough-husked clusters. Penetrant high registers. But also: cunningly elaborated theatrical relationships between the instruments. The horn that rattles like a duck through the woods quartet points forward to the instrumental theater of Verses for Ensembles (1969), Secret Theatre (1984) and Five Distances for Five Instruments (1992).
Violence
Birtwistle’s big break came in 1968 when his first opera Punch and Judy premiered at the Aldeburgh Festival. The violence of both the libretto and the music caused a stir. Festival founder Benjamin Britten left the hall before the break.
Musical theater would nevertheless remain a common thread in Birtwistle’s oeuvre, witness mythical operas such as The Mask of Orpheus (1973-84), Gawain (1991), The Second Mrs. Kong (1994) and The Minotaur (2008). At the same time, the symphony orchestra continued to draw. The Triumph of Time (1972), based on a woodcut of the same name by Pieter Breughel the Elder, and the inimitable Earth Dances (1986) are among his best-known orchestral works.
In 1975 Birtwistle became music director of the newly formed Royal National Theater in London, a position he held until 1983. He was knighted in 1988 and made a Companion of Honor in 2001. From 1994 to 2001 he was Henry Purcell Professor of Composition at King’s College London. Among the major awards he has received are the prestigious Grameyer Award (1987) and the Ernst von Siemens Music Prize (1995).