The Cambridge Companion to Michael Tippett ed. by Kenneth Gloag and Nicholas Jones (review)

The Cambridge Companion to Michael Tippettis a welcome, if unexpected, addition to a series that has typically focused on securely canonized composers or broader topics. However compelling Tippett might have been as a composer or person, he simply does not inhabit the cultural position of a Bach or Beethoven, nor even a Vaughan Williams or Britten, all composers to whom volumes in the series are devoted. Editors Kenneth Gloag and Nicholas Jones admit as much in their preface, noting that “a great deal of [Tippett’s] music . . . is not being performed and has not been discussed extensively in the literature” (p. xv). Arnold Whittall puts forward several possible explanations for this relative neglect in the volume’s first chapter: that Tippett’s death fell too close to the centenary of his birth, that his significance in the last quarter of the twentieth century depended on Benjamin Britten’s death in 1976, or that the music itself might lack a “definable ‘staying power’ ” (pp. 3–4). Ultimately, Whittall elects not to pursue Tippett reception, providing instead the closest thing the collection has to an introductory essay, something of an overview of Tippett’s life and work with regular reference to a dialogue between “classic” and “modern,” which Whittall understands as central to the composer’s oeuvre. In other words, Whittall agrees with the volume’s editors that the question of Tippett’s significance is not yet settled and that the Cambridge Companion should not address that question explicitly. This is a different kind of Cambridge Companion, then: one that functions primarily to keep the conversation about a composer going, and in so doing, to advocate indirectly for that composer’s music and possibly to make another step toward his or its canonization, whatever that might mean in the twenty-first century.

One of the most useful functions of the Cambridge Companion series has been to give a sense of the state of research on composers and general topics, and the volume on Tippett does this well, though again without the convenience of a formal editor’s introduction to summarize trends and approaches. After the briefest of editorial prefaces and a useful chronology, the volume is arranged in two large sections: the first with essays on “contexts and concepts” (twentieth-century aesthetics, English “traditions,” early music, politics, sexuality, the creative process), and the second with essays focused on particular “works and genres” ( King Priamand related works, symphony, concerto, piano sonatas, string quartets, opera, nonoperatic vocal music). If the overall organization of the volume seems more inherited than inventive, it is salutary to encounter in multiple chapters extensive consideration of Tippett’s own ideas about genre, particularly his idea of individual genres conveying “historical” and “notional” archetypes. In other words, the partial organization along generic lines, however frequently encountered in other similar collections of essays, is justified here to a certain extent by the importance those genres and the concept of genre held for the composer.

One of the surprises of the volume, given the variety of writers and approaches they employ, is the extent of consensus about various issues in Tippett studies and the apparent absence of significant disagreement. A possible explanation for this is that Tippett studies at present rely heavily on the accomplishments of musicologist Ian Kemp (1931–2011), who also published widely on Kurt Weill and Paul Hindemith. It is to him that the volume is dedicated, and references to his Tippett: The Composer and his Music(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987) appear in every chapter. That is not to say that every scholar represented in the volume agrees with every deduction that Kemp made, but most doagree, to the extent that one feels on occasion as if Kemp’s framing of Tippett’s music is as much...