The Music of Harrison Birtwistle (review)

The Music of Harrison Birtwistle. By Robert Adlington. (Music in the Twentieth Century.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. [xiv, 242 p. ISBN 0-521-63082-7. £42.50.]

The sixty-fifth birthday of Harrison Birtwistle in 1999 prompted a rush of scholarly assessment which in addition to Adlington's contribution included books by Michael Hall (Harrison Birtwistle in Recent Years [London: Robson, 1998]) and Jonathan Cross (Harrison Birtwistle: Man, Mind, Music [London: Faber & Faber, 2000]). These publications are evidence of Birtwistle's status as Britain's most eminent living composer; a position that is confirmed by the commissions and performances he has received recently, and supported in an inverted fashion by the antimodernist protests that took place in the 1994 performances of Gawain, as well as by the hostile reaction to the premiere of Panic at the 1995 Last Night of the Proms. Reactions to Birtwistle range from the considered opinions of experts to the disparate, often hostile, views of the general public. The Music of Harrison Birtwistle will inevitably be of more interest to the former group than the latter, though it is not beyond the reach of an interested amateur. More precisely, it is pitched at a level that will appeal to a student with some knowledge of modernism--and, perhaps, of a few scores by Birtwistle--while also offering perspectives of significance to those with a more expansive knowledge of this repertory.

Adlington's study is at once a handbook to Birtwistle's oeuvre and an attempt to understand it by means of the areas described in chapter headings such as "Theatres," "Times," and "Layers." He discusses all the scores published before the appearance of the book as well as some unpublished and withdrawn works. (The recent stage work The Last Supper is not included.) The clear advantages of this thematic approach are that, by and large, it avoids descriptions held together by a biographical thread and places well-known scores alongside lesser-known experiments; the disadvantages are that it sometimes splits discussion of scores between several sections (a problem partly alleviated by an index of works) and forces the reader interested in the chronology of Birtwistle's development to turn rather frequently to the list of scores provided. If the desire simultaneously to address important issues and to be inclusive inevitably creates a certain tension, it is one worth living with because the text undoubtedly provides a useful starting point for someone wishing to become acquainted with a particular score without sacrificing substantial discussion of important topics. In the latter capacity, Adlington is at his best in the opening "Theatres" chapter, when considering big ideas such as violence, myth, narrative, and ritual. Elsewhere, he provides stimulating discussions of temporality, especially with regard to The Triumph of Time, and of forms and roles when considering Secret Theatre, for example.

As these topics might suggest, the author is fully aware of the criticisms leveled at modernism, offering a fair-minded and considered response to such accusations. Indeed, his clearly stated aim of moving beyond technical detail to what he calls "hermeneutic criticism" (p. 1) is a direct response to a widespread frustration with the abstractions of modernist music and musicology. In fact, in an understated way, the most striking feature of this book is that, like much recent musicology, it addresses issues of human agency and value; but does so, unlike much current musicology, in a repertory that is supposed by many to resist such topics. In part, then, it contributes to the project of addressing the aesthetics of modernism that the latter's own discourses were at pains to suppress. The result is that Adlington is prepared to take on issues such as the often mythologized violent images in Birtwistle, his masculine perspective, his unsympathetic writing for the female voice, and his lack of compromise. On all of these topics the author presents both sides of the argument while leaving readers to reach their own conclusions--one does detect that Adlington is uneasy with the brutality...