Musicians - Harrison Birtwistle

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	Musicians - Harrison Birtwistle

Sir Harrison Paul Birtwistle CH (born July 15, 1934) is one of Britain's most significant contemporary composers.

Birtwistle was born in Accrington in Lancashire and in 1952 entered the Royal Manchester College of Music in Manchester on a clarinet scholarship. While there he met fellow composers Peter Maxwell Davies and Alexander Goehr, who, together with pianist John Ogdon and conductor Elgar Howarth, formed the New Music Manchester group, dedicated to the performances of serial and other modern works.

Birtwistle left the college in 1955, then studied at the Royal Academy of Music and afterward made a living as a schoolteacher. In 1965 a Harkness Fellowship gave him the opportunity to continue his studies in the United States and he decided to dedicate himself to composition.

In 1975 Birtwistle became musical director of the newly-established Royal National Theatre in London, a post he held until 1983. He has been honoured with a knighthood (1988) and as a Companion of Honour (2001). From 1994 to 2001 he was Henry Purcell Professor of Composition at King's College London.

Works

Style

It would not be easy to fit Birtwistle into any sort of 'school' or 'movement'. For a time he would be referred to as a part of the 'Manchester School', a phrase invented as a parallel to the Second Viennese School
to refer to Birtwistle, Goehr and Maxwell Davies. The phrase has, however, since fallen out of use since the three composers were united only by their early studies in Manchester, not by musical style. His music is complex, written in a modernistic style with a clear, distinctive voice. His early work is sometimes evocative of Igor Stravinsky and Olivier Messiaen (composers he has acknowledged as influences), and his technique of juxtaposing blocks of sound is sometimes compared to Edgard Varèse. His early pieces made frequent use of ostinatos and often had a ritualistic feel. These have been toned down in recent decades as he has adapted and transformed the techniques into more subtle methods. With its strong emphasis on rhythm, the music is often described as brutal or violent, but this analysis mistakes the strong sound world for an attempt to evoke violent actions. The explicit violence of his first opera Punch and Judy - where the murder of Judy by her husband is so much more shocking when performed life on stage rather than by glove puppets in the classic British seaside entertainment - can be easily misinterpreted as a clue to the intention of his abstract music. The style is stark and uncompromising, but the intent is not to arouse such images. If they were transformed into works of visual art, they would be reproduced in bold primary colours, with little use of subtle shades.

His favourite image for explaining how his pieces work is to compare it to taking a walk through a town, especially the sort of small town more common in continental Europe than Great Britain. Such a walk might start in the town square. Having explored its main features we would set off down one of the side streets. As the walk continues we might glimpse the town square down different streets, sometime a long way off, other times quite close. We may never return to the square in the rest of the walk, or we may visit a new part of it that was not explored initially. Birtwistle suggests that this experience is akin to what he does in the music. His image conveys the way that a core musical idea is altered, varied and distorted as the piece of music progresses. The core music forms a reference point to which everything else is directed, even when we are walking in a completely different direction. Sometimes we will be less aware that it is the same musical material we are hearing; sometimes we may have been listening for a while before realising that we have heard this music before (just as one might have been looking up the street before realising that it is the town square that can be glimpsed through the traffic). He is not, therefore, suggesting that we imagine this walk through the town as a literal explanation of what is happening in the music; he does not 'recreate' the effect in the music (as Charles Ives does in some of his orchestral pieces).

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