British Music after Britten by Arnold Whittall (review)

The seventeen chapters that make up Arnold Whittall's British Music after Britten initially appeared as journal articles, largely in the Musical Times, but equally in Tempo, Music & Letters, and Theory and Practice, as well as in the volumes The Cambridge Companion to Michael Tippett (ed. Kenneth Gloag and Nicholas Jones [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013]) and Aspects of British Music of the 1990s (ed. Peter O'Hagan [Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003]). Whittall notes that the majority of the essays are from the period 2004–18, but most have been "lightly revised" and "updated" and have been "placed in new contexts and have changed their character as a result" (p. xiii). One might be forgiven for assuming that this volume, as the fourteenth in the Aldeburgh Studies in Music series, is the most Britten-adjacent monograph in the series by one of the modern era's most significant contributors to discourses and analyses of British music (and Britten) studies. Although lacking a bibliography, the footnotes within each chapter guide the reader to ample secondary reading and references.

Whittall's introduction opens with the day of Britten's death, 4 December 1976, yet immediately pivots to the dominant musical figure of that era, conductor (and composer) Pierre Boulez. Whittall frames British music in 1976 with that year's Jahrhundertring (Centenary Ring), produced at the Bayreuth Festival by Boulez and Patrice Chéreau, which Whittall deemed that year's "most memorable musical event" (p. 1). Fleetly, Whittall distinguishes composers who fell into the Boulez camp—those composers he conducted, such as Harrison Birtwistle—and those whose output may have had a closer affinity with "Britten-like techniques," whom Boulez did not conduct (p. 1). Whittall notes that, "judging from the compositional picture around the year 2019," modern composers born concurrent with Britten's 1976 death may find greater sympathies with Britten's compositional model than that of Boulez (pp. 1–2). "Attempting to pinpoint the presence of 'Brittenisms' in some composers and their apparent absence in others," writes Whittall, "seemed a uniquely unrewarding enterprise; to write this book about 'British Music after Britten' as if composers were primarily concerned to emulate and even imitate a single seductive musical model would be as naïve as to interpret 'after' as imposing an absence that somehow determined the essence of each and every British composer's activity since 1976" (p. 3). Thus, while the long shadow of Britten's presence is cast from the title of the volume over its contents, the volume does not ubiquitously compare and contrast post-Britten composers with his contemporaries and successors. (Nevertheless, Britten occupies nearly four columns in the index, and references to Britten or his works appear in twelve of the essays.) Whittall asserts, "Being haunted by Britten is not the same as being anxious about his possible influence," and continues, "Composers haunted by Britten might also be predisposed to learn from Britten" (p. 5).

No review could do justice to the expansive breadth of Whittall's collection except to acknowledge that his probing intellect continues to set a high bar infrequently matched by his peers. Among his generation of scholars, Whittall's productivity is seldom rivalled (which is further underscored by the footnotes that point to his additional writings and publications). The volume is bookended by chapters devoted to Michael Tippett. Whittall's own Music of Britten and Tippett: Studies in Themes and Techniques (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982) formally linked the two composers academically in a way previously asserted in the press, through their lifelong friendship and through their dedications of major works to one another in the 1960s. In "Tippett and Twentieth-Century Polarities," Whittall adroitly argues that Tippett's "angle on twentieth-century polarities was unfailingly rich, challenging, and memorable," filled with "disparities" likely more valuable "to his contemporaries than his actual practice" (p. 33). Positioning Tippett (1905–1998) among his contemporaries born between the start...