Composer, born in Accrington, Lancashire, NW England, UK. He studied at the Royal Manchester College of Music and the Royal Academy of Music in London. While in Manchester he formed with other young musicians the New Manchester Group for the performance of modern music. In 1967 he formed the Pierrot Players with Peter Maxwell Davies; much of his work being written for them and for the English Opera Group. In 1975 he was appointed musical director of the National Theatre, and in 1993 became composer in residence to the London Philharmonic Orchestra at the South Bank Centre. Two works of 1965, the instrumental Tragoedia and vocal/instrumental Ring a Dumb Carillon, established him as a leading composer. Among his later works are the operas Punch and Judy (19667), The Masque of Orpheus (197384), Gawain (1990), and The Second Mrs Kong (1994). Other works include The Fields of Sorrow (1971), Pulse Sampler (1981), Panic (1995), The Woman and the Hare (1999), and Theseus Game (2002). He was knighted in 1988 and made a Companion of Honour in 2001.
Sir Harrison Paul Birtwistle CH (born July 15, 1934) is one of Britain's most significant contemporary composers.
Life
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 1975 Birtwistle became musical director of the newly-established Royal National Theatre in London, a post he held until 1983.
At the 2006 Ivor Novello Awards he criticised pop musicians at the event for performing too loudly and using too many cliches.
Style
It would not be easy to fit Birtwistle into any sort of 'school' or 'movement'. His music is complex, written in a modernistic style with a clear, distinctive voice. 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 live 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.
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. 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 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).
An early variant of this technique involved literally cutting up the music, the most blatant example being Verses for Ensemble. Having composed a portion of music, Birtwistle would then cut it arbitrarily into a number of sections. These might be randomly rearranged, and new introductions and epilogues composed before composing yet more music to link them together. This method was intended to give the whole piece unity, by having musical material with its own inner coherence scattered amongst musical material that still related to the core material but did not necessarily relate to itself.
Another image for what Birtwistle frequently does in his abstract music can be seen in the events of the first Act of his opera Gawain. The result is music that is often very episodic in structure. Here a readily identifiable music motif — a blow from the tom-toms, followed by scurrying figures from the strings and woodwind — is elaborated in a number of different ways as the piece progresses.
As a result, even when he is not writing a visual piece involving stage action, Birstwistle's music is frequently described as dramatic in construction. The music is not following the logic and rules of classic music forms such as sonata form but the structures of a drama. Though not normally signalled by the change of position, this sort of changing role is constantly seen in his music.
Popular perception
Though well established and widely respected in the classical music world — modules on his music now feature in many university undergraduate music courses — Birtwistle was relatively unknown in the general public until the mid-1990s.
A group of anti-modernist musicians calling themselves 'The Hecklers', led by Frederick Stocken, attempted to disrupt the first night of the 1994 revival of Gawain at the Royal Opera House, London. Having remained silent throughout the performance, their strategically-placed sympathisers broke into a tirade of catcalls at the conclusion in an attempt to draw attention to their campaign to rid contemporary music of anything post-Romantic.
Birtwistle gained particular notoriety in 1995 when Panic was premièred at that year's Last Night of the Proms. His music had not previously been heard in so public a forum and most of the press did not hold back its negative criticism of the piece; traditionally the second half of the concert features mainstream, popular and patriotic music.
List of major works
For a comprehensive list, see List of compositions by Harrison Birtwistle.
Refrains and Choruses (1957), wind quintet Punch and Judy (1967), opera Nenia: The Death of Orpheus (1970) The Triumph of Time (1971), orchestra Grimethorpe Aria (1973), brass band Silbury Air (1976–77), chamber orchestra The Mask of Orpheus (1984), opera, which won the 1987 Grawemeyer Award in Music Composition. Earth Dances (1986), orchestra Harrison's Clocks (1998), piano Gawain (1990), opera Antiphonies (1992), piano and orchestra The Second Mrs Kong (1994), opera Panic (1995), alto saxophone, jazz drum kit and orchestra The Last Supper (2000), opera
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