The Music Of Harrison Birtwistle

This book gives a comprehensive view of Harrison Birtwistle's music, considering its wider cultural significance.

Love it or loathe it, few would disagree that the music of Harrison Birtwistle stands amongst the most assured, original and challenging music ever to have been produced by a British composer. While for some the uncompromisingly modernist surface of his music can be an obstacle to closer acquaintance, for others, it is Birtwistle's articulation of deep aspects of the human psyche that continues to excite and fascinate. In this book, Jonathan Cross - a leading commentator on contemporary music - aims to uncover the sources of Birtwistle's thinking, and to present a critical account of his musical, dramatic and aesthetic preoccupations through an examination of such topics as theatre, myth, ritual, pastoral, pulse and line. He offers a range of contexts within which the music can be understood so that the curious and the initiated alike may be drawn towards new and enriching experiences of the extraordinarily powerful music of Harrison Birtwistle.

This collection represents current research on Birtwistle's music, reflecting the diversity of his work through a wide range of perspectives.

Hailed at its premiere at the London Coliseum in 1986 as the most important musical and theatrical event of the decade, The Mask of Orpheus is undoubtedly a key work in Harrison Birtwistle's output. His subsequent stage and concert pieces demand to be evaluated in its light. Increasingly, it is also viewed as a key work in the development of opera since the Second World War, a work that pushed at the boundaries of what was possible in lyrical theatre. In its imaginative fusion of music, song, drama, myth, mime and electronics, it has become a beacon for many younger composers, and the object of wide critical attention. Its central themes of time, memory and identity, loss, mourning and melancholy, touch a deep sensibility in late-modern society and culture.

'Anyone with the smallest interest in composition - not just concertos but novels, buildings, lives, you name it, should read this absorbing, spiky, dazzling book.' Adam Thirwell, TLS Books of the Year Harrison Birtwistle is recognised worldwide as one of the greatest of living composers, behind such works of trail-blazingly modern classical music as The Shadow of Night and The Mask of Orpheus, famously staged at the English National Opera in 1986, and winner of the Grawemeyer Award. His music is both deeply original and highly personal, yet he has always been notoriously reticent about explaining either his music or himself. In this 'conversation diary', spanning six months, he talks openly to the distinguished writer and critic Fiona Maddocks (author of the acclaimed Hildegard of Bingen: The Woman of her Age), offering rare insights into the challenges, uncertainties and rewards which have shaped his life and work since childhood, and which remain with him today as he enters his ninth decade. We see the composer in the privacy of his Wiltshire studio and garden, and in the public glare of the elite Salzburg and Aldeburgh Festivals. But mostly he is at his kitchen table, talking about the essential aspects of his life - family, cooking, cricket, landscape, pruning trees - and reflecting on the never easy-process of composition. What distinguishes him and his remarkable music is an ability to see the extraordinary in the everyday, giving rise to work that is both elemental and profound. For anyone concerned with the future of music this book is essential reading.

Retelling of the myth of the Cretan Minotaur, this book considers the inner world of the Minotaur himself, and suggests a dark and compelling reason for Ariadne's intense relationship with Theseus.

A definitive source study of the stage works of Harrison Birtwistle, one of Britain's foremost living composers.

David Beard presents the first definitive survey of Harrison Birtwistle's music for the opera house and theatre, from his smaller-scale works, such as Down by the Greenwood Side and Bow Down, to the full-length operas, such as Punch and Judy, The Mask of Orpheus and Gawain. Blending source study with both music analysis and cultural criticism, the book focuses on the sometimes tense but always revealing relationship between abstract musical processes and the practical demands of narrative drama, while touching on theories of parody, narrative, pastoral, film, the body and community. Each stage work is considered in terms of its own specific musico-dramatic themes, revealing how compositional scheme and dramatic conception are intertwined from the earliest stages of a project's genesis. The study draws on a substantial body of previously undocumented primary sources and goes beyond previous studies of the composer's output to include works unveiled from 2000 onwards.