Birtwistle: Tragoedia

I came to Harrison Birtwhistle's music as someone drawn in by BBC Radio 3's increasingly diverse musical policy, in particular through a season which included many of the pieces included here.

My own musical background is in industrial/avante garde rock, so the strangeness and superficial 'difficulty' in the sound is, if anything, an attraction, but the underlying complexity and - even - lushness of this music is a revalation. I've encountered music that attempts moods of mystery, reflective melancholy and ritual invocation before, but nothing where technical accomplishment and execution live up to the artist's conception to such overpowering effect.

. . and here are one hundred and fifty minutes of performances, for the price of a single CD! By all accounts, this offers a superb introduction to the range of Birtwhistle's work.

If you're looking for a way in, the earth opens here.

There are arguably two places to start with Birtwistle's music; either with the epochal meta-operatic ritual theatre of The Mask of Orpheus, or this, which is a representative overview of his creative timeline. There is no point in pretending that Birtwistle's music is easy, whether as music, or emotionally, or even conceptually. Everyday human emotions like pleasure, joy or romance are entirely absent. The drama of human life, placed firmly in the context of nature is essential to just about everything he does. His work is often described as violent, and while there is violence there, it is more often than not more evocative of tough, gruelling labour, as though hefting a pickaxe through flinty soil, to find Viking treasure. Landscape is omnipresent; English, British, or just generically Northern. These are not the bounteous willow lands of the English pastoralists, but the ancient rocky bones of landscapes laid bare by geological aeons of weather and upheaval.

Musically, rhythm, or what he calls pulse, is the central element in Birtwistle's language. His underlying rhythms are frequently highly irregular, seeming to stumble, and demanding great attention from the listener to keep up with. Such rhythms are often juxtaposed in more or less comfortable polyrhythmic counterpoint. Mercurial mid-ground layers may thread through these huge skeletons, while the foreground is typically erratic and highly unstable, with melody as such, largely dispensed with. Exotic harmonies and diverse sonic effects, often utilising a broad variety of percussion, create tapestries that are at once highly modernistic and yet brimming with prehistoric resonances. Birtwistle's origins are with Stravinsky, which is most musically apparent in the earlier works, but formalistically ever-present in his adoption of the dramatic logic of Greek ritual theatre, which informs all his works in some way. I also hear much of the later Tippett in the details of his writing. One reason I remain incredulous when people dismiss Tippett as a minor composer, is that he is there to be heard in anyone of any repute that has come after him. However, Birtwistle is a true musical giant, and the power and vision of his own voice far subsumes those of any of his creditors.

So why listen to Birtwistle? Because he takes us to places that no one else quite can do. He takes us to the places musically, that Ted Hughes took us to with poetry. He takes us into the Northern landscape; the hearts of mountains, the endless flow of waters, the whispering depths of woods and forests, and into the secret belly of the Earth herself. And in perfect complement to these ecological themes is a philosophical dimension to his music that penetrates to depths few other composers dream of. Death, pain and the struggle of birth and survival are ubiquitous in Birtwistle; not as tiny human dramas, but as the pulse and essence of life and existence itself. Eliot too, we might hear; `Come in under the shadow of this red rock... and I will show you fear in a handful of dust'. Sounds depressing? It is not. While this is serious music for serious minds, there is so much that is exhilarating and that is often strange and beguilingly beautiful that, like all great artworks, it is impossible to imagine ever fully exhausting their meanings. As I say, unfathomable depths.