Monday is just about the only day I’m not around a computer, and wouldn’t you know it, it’s also the time that Harrison Birtwistle, ever the contrarian, died.
I know I’ve posted here before about my complicated relationship with this composer. Despite sharing his fascination with Gawain, Punch, the Minotaur, Anubis, Orpheus, King Kong, and any number of other subjects that form the bases for his operas and concert works, I find he’s someone whose music I have only ever moderately warmed up to.
In common with Peter Maxwell Davies, his former colleague of the Manchester School of composition, Birtwistle emerged from a working-class Lancashire background to radically modernize British music. But unlike Max, whose palpable sense of mischief made even his most scandalous works somehow approachable, Birtwistle never cracked a smile, unless perhaps it was at the audience’s expense.
I don’t really need music to be “easy,” necessarily, or even tonal. There are times when I can put on a Birtwistle record and totally go with it. But I don’t know that anything he has written has ever engendered much affection in me. This is not an objective assessment, of course, and perhaps you will react differently.
Interestingly, Birtwistle had a local connection. He attended Princeton University on a Harkness Fellowship, beginning in 1965. There, he completed his opera “Punch and Judy,” which begins with Punch tossing his baby into the fire This commences a murder spree that includes the stabbing of Judy, his wife. All is presented in human form, making it that much more disturbing than when enacted by puppets. The experience proved to be so unpleasant that Benjamin Britten walked out on the premiere.
Perhaps you will find something to latch on to in one of these pieces recommended by The Guardian.
If I had to recommend a place to start, it would be “Earth Dances” from 1986.
There is something primordial in Birtwistle’s work, but it is not someplace I generally choose to live. At least his music has integrity, which I can’t always claim for some contemporary works of an easier-going disposition.
See what you think.
Also, “The Moth Requiem” is a little gentler than most.
Birtwistle was 87 years-old. R.I.P.
