Sir Harrison Birtwistle turned 70 last month and is celebrating with a flurry of new music. His eighth opera, The Io Passion, premiered at the Aldeburgh Festival in June. A setting for baritone of three poems by the polymath pianist Alfred Brendel was featured at the Proms recently. An earlier Proms concert saw the British premiere of The Ring Dance of the Nazarene, a new choral work. And when we spoke over the weekend, the premiere of a new orchestral work was only hours away (see review below). Night's Black Bird is the first of the Roche Commissions, a new programme featuring an annual work funded by the pharmaceuticals giant in collaboration with the Lucerne Festival, Carnegie Hall and a big ensemble, which for the first three years is the Cleveland Orchestra.
“By setting it up as an annual thing, they can make an important contribution to the lives of orchestras,” Birtwistle says. “Orchestras often commission things but not as regular events.” The final rehearsal of the new piece having gone well, our meeting in a Lucerne hotel finds him in a reserved but congenial mood. Typically, he looks a bit scruffy and speaks without the slightest pretence. Despite his status as perhaps Britain's pre-eminent composer, he has never concealed his roots as the only son of Lancastrian farmers.
“When I was approached by Roche to write a piece, I had just completed The Shadow of Night, which coincidentally was also commissioned by the Cleveland Orchestra. I was still ‘in' that piece, in a way. And writing music is a bit like being on a journey. You see things along the way and think: ‘That would be a good place to stop next time.'”
The new piece, Night's Black Bird, gave him a chance to follow up on ideas that arose in writing The Shadow of Night. It also takes some expressive character as well as its title from lute songs by the 17th-century English composer John Dowland. “His music has an expressive quality that has disappeared. And it lacks the sentimentality of 19th-century expressive lyricism, which 20th-century composers avoided.”
My question whether the new piece, like many of Birtwistle's other works, follows an intricate compositional procedure brings a tart rejoinder. “That's my business, isn't it? It's not a matter for public consumption. It's like asking what brand of paint an artist uses. Writing music isn't like constructing a building from an architectural plan; it's more like pouring liquid into a vessel and getting it just to a point that it doesn't overflow. I want people to be able to enjoy it as music.”
Does that mean he is concerned about building audiences for new music? “I really feel that that's somebody else's problem. If I've done anything, it's by sitting in a room and writing. This is a hard question, of course, because I care very deeply about it. One of the problems is that music has never been so divided between pop and ‘serious'. We really should be talking about good and bad music, and there's a fair splattering of bad in each. But the bad pop music devalues the whole premise of what music is. And then there is that terrible word ‘elitist'. How do you compromise an idea? And what about the people who do understand it?”
Birtwistle made his first contribution to new music not as a composer but as a clarinettist in the New Music Manchester Group, which also included the composers Alexander Goehr and Peter Maxwell Davies. “But I was always a composer in my head.” He is credited with decisively breaking with an English tradition of lyricism and nostalgia but is unspecific about early influences. “There are two kinds of influences those you are conscious of and those that come in under the door. When I was growing up, modern music was Vaughan Williams. European music Stravinsky, Schönberg, Hindemith entered the picture after the war. Messiaen really grabbed me, though he doesn't so much any more.”
Birtwistle had the obligatory encounter with serialism, yet found that “it never created the music that was in my head”. His rejection of the technique has not made matters any easier for his listeners. His music is still on the cutting edge of modernism. Now that composers are branching in many directions, has he ever considered tonality as a resource? With a simple smile and shake of the head he lets you know that that was never a possibility.
Other plans for his birthday year include more time in Lucerne, where he is the festival's composer in residence, then three months at Harvard. “I told them I would come but that I had no idea what I'd be doing.” Still, he is prepared for the diversity of styles to be expected at an American university. “The important thing is to help young composers realise their responsibilities to their own ideas and to push those ideas to a conclusion.”
Isn't it good that composers are now free to do their own thing without the pressure of writing in a certain style? “Actually, it shows we're in a state of crisis,” he says, arguing that if you look historically at the subject of creativity, something always appears for people to rally around, as they did with cubism and serialism. “Right now we need something to come how do they say it in baseball? out of left field.”
In the meantime he perseveres. He is currently occupied with a new opera for Covent Garden on a subject drawn from Greek mythology, a source of inspiration for much of his music. “It's called The Minotaur, and I'm writing it for [the bass] John Tomlinson in the title role; Ariadne will be a mezzo and Theseus a tenor or high baritone. I see the opera as taking place in a kind of bullring, with a large role for the chorus.”
Coincidentally with his residency at Harvard, he has a commission from the Boston Symphony Orchestra. As he himself says, he makes his best contribution when he sits in a room and writes, and we can look forward to the fruits of that effort.
