Harrison Birtwistle, "Grimethorpe Aria"

-- Liner Notes --



The brass band occupies a special place in British musical life. Widely admired, yet almost completely isolated from other forms of music making; entirely amateur in its playing status, yet at its highest level, virtuosic in instrumental technique; deserving a new, rich, continuing repertoire, yet extremely conservative in its musical taste, it presents for the present day composer a paradox, at once an exciting potential medium, yet one whose specialised instrumentation and cautious musical approach combine to produce a somewhat daunting challenge. Nevertheless, in the past few years several composers outside conservative circles have tackled the problem with great enthusiasm, enlivening and revitalising a repertoire which had become in-bred and stale.

Each of the composers on this disc has come to the brass band from a different background: Henze from the main-stream of European tradition with no previous knowledge of such' a grouping of brass instruments: Takemitsu, the Japanese composer, by way of the brass ensemble (itself previously unknown to him) and in an arrangement of my own: Birtwistle from childhood memories of bands playing in his native Accrington in the north of England-and co-incidentally in a neighbouring village of Grimethorpe where he had relatives living in the late 40s: and myself from the inside as a former bandsman.

Birtwistle's GRIMETHORPE ARIA, was the first work commissioned by the Grimethorpe band from a leading composer and dates from 1973. Uncompromisingly bleak in mood, mostly slow in tempo, its anguished, pessimistic harmonies have not yet endeared it to band audiences reared on more ear-tickling fare. Like Henze, though in a different way, Birtwistle has re-structured the traditional scoring, rejecting the hierarchy of massed cornets and unison tubas in favour of individual parts. The result is a dense, yet multi-layered texture, massive in the great climaxes of the work (doubled in this performance on the two bands).

The shape of the piece may be summarised as follows:



Grimethorpe Aria, startled the band public of 1973 into an awareness of a wider musical world; fortunately for audiences of the future its strongly felt and realised emotional content will assure it a place in band history of much more significance than any mere passing succes de scandale-rather as a masterpiece of the repertoire. -- Elgar Howarth

Harrison Birtwistle, "Fields of Sorrow"

-- Liner Notes --

The Fields of Sorrow shares the Orpheus-orientation with Nenia (the text by Ausonius from the Aeniad refers to the souls of lost lovers wandering around the underworld); and shares the spatial, symmetrical layout of the voices and instruments with Verses, though the actual constitution of the instrumental groups develops the single-timbre principle of Nenia.

Unlike Nenia, however, the continuity of The Fields of Sorrow is not dependent on the text, but is laid out in the formalised manner of Verses. But gone is the hard-edge, high-contrast dynamism of Verses, and not merely because it would be inappropriate in a setting of the text. For in his third phase Birtwistle has initiated a primarily melodic, nondynamic, processional style which might appear to have more in common with first phase works such as Monody for Corpus Christ; than with the post-Tragoedia music.

Harrison Birtwistle, "Chronometer"

-- Liner Notes --

Chronometer is entirely made up from the sounds of clock mechanisms which have been computer-analyzed and regenerated onto 8 tracks. (Reduced in this recording by two.)

In the original recordings both air- and contact-microphones were used to collect sounds from widely differing sources: for instance the Natural Science Museum, London, provided some of the oldest clock sounds still available, while Big Ben was the source of the ostinato which dominates the piece. Besides repetitive sounds, the strikings and bell mechanisms of the clocks were also collected.

About 100 different recordings, of varying durations, were analyzed by the computer electronic music system at EMS, London. Al1 subsequent manoeuvres were made by computer regeneration rather than by tape-montage techniques. The programme used toreinterpret the graphic and numerical music score was MUSYS.

The most obvious musical structures in Chronometer are: the solid repetitive slow sound of Big Ben with which it starts and which is dominant throughout; three 2-minute interludes of very fast complex sounds where every change is preceded by a short pure signal; a number of very dense, short, fast-moving structures with complex dynamics; and a series of transformations of the striking and chiming of the 'Wells Clock', with which the piece ends.

Some sections are much changed from the actual recordings - almost any specifiable alteration to a sound can be made with this method - while some of the most complex juxtapositions use frequencies and timbres as close to the original as possible. -- Peter Zinovieff

Harrison Birtwistle, "Nenia"

-- Liner Notes --

Nenia--The Death of Orpheus, composed in the year after Verses, initiated the third creative phase, which has already produced important works for voices and instruments, such as The Fields of Sorrow and An Imaginary Landscape, and a large-scale orchestral work, The Triumph of Time: all, perhaps in a way, 'studies' for the grand opera Orpheus (as Tragoedia was for the chamber opera Punch and Judy, 1967).

Although Nenia shares both the Orpheus legend and librettist (Peter Zinovieff) with the opera, they are in no other way connected. The title refers in fact to a particular kind of ancient Roman funeral dirge and to the name of the goddess that was invoked. Even though the instrumental resources of Nenia are highly reduced copared to Verses, one notices that Birtwistle has now begun to group instruments according to uniform timbres, in contrast to the mixed timbre ensembles of Verses. Thus the basic instrumental continuity of Nenia is carried by a homogeneous group of three bass clarinets. Until, that is, one breaks away (at the words 'The snarls of venomous, jealous women awoke Orpheus') and becomes a solo B flat clarinet.

This change, and the wide range of vocal techniques the soprano soloist is asked to produce, is of course dictated by the exigencies of the text. Humming, pitched and normally inflected speech, phonetic extension, arioso and outright melody are all called into play--sometimes simultaneously--by the need to provide narrative, declamation, song or the invocation of the name EURIDICE and, after the entry of the B flat clarinet, ORPHEUS.

Harrison Birtwistle, "Panic"

John Harle, saxophone
Paul Clarvis, drum kit
BBC Symphony Orchestra
Sir Andrew Davis

Harrison Birtwistle, "Five Distances for Five Instruments"

Harrison Birtwistle, "Antiphonies"

-- Liner Notes --

...If the completion of Gawain in 1991 is taken as the next important point of articulation in [Birtwistle's] career, then Antiphonies was the first large-scale instrumental example of the language that Birtwistle developed for the epic scale of that operatic subject.

Examples of that bold, rhetorical style erupt frequently through the highly patterned surface of Antiphonies, in which the role of the solo piano is less like that of a conventional concerto soloist and much more like the ambiguous role that Birtwistle gives his instrumentalists in Secret Theatre, which he wrote in 1984. There the wind players seem to be engaged in a ritual that operates according to a hidden set of rules while the strings supply the background textures. The string writing has a similar function in Antiphonies, while the exchanges between the iano and the rest of the orchestra move on a separate musical plane above them.

Yet the soloist's function is very much that of a coordinator and unifier; the piano writing is dense and heavily chordal, and acts as a kind of harmonic centre to the work, so that the orchestra is free to operate independently. The 'antiphonies' of the title are created by the way in which the harps and tuned percussion echo the piano at crucial moments, a description of one of the ways in which the work progresses rather than a definition of its principal method of working. And though there is a hint of a reprise in the quiet ending of Antiphonies Birtwistle has spoken of the beginning and end of the work as arbitrary, as though a door were being opened and closed on music which was continuing indefinitely.

Harrison Birtwistle, "Silbury Air"

-- Liner Notes --

The commission from the Koussevitsky Foundation that elicited silbury Air clearly demanded something very different. By 1976 the composer had composed the first two acts of his large-scale 'lyric tragedy' The Mask of Orpheus (eventually to be completed in 1983), and with that had effectively rounded off one phase in his creative development. The kinds of musical and dramatic continuity explored in the opera were replaced in Silbury Air and subsequent works by an investigation of how discrete and unrelated musical objects may be connected in a coherent and meaningful way.

In Silbury Air the relationship between the objects is regulated by the use of a 'pulse labyrinth' with which the score is prefaced. This array of carefully proportioned metronome speeds and durations indicates paths which the music may follow through the work, and the juxtapositions of pulse which are allowed, but it does not prescribe the overall structure; that remains within the composer's gift. In the course of the piece the music threads its way three times through the labyrinth, twice returning to its starting point; on the third occasion any further exploration is prevented by the intrusion of a sequence of four harp chords borrowed from an earlier work and hence not part of the network at all.

The point to which the music returns is a quiet pulsing E played by the strings; from that it grows outwards each time towards the statement of a melody, perhaps the very 'air' of the work's title. Silbury Hill is a famous and mysterious archaeological site in south-west England, a prehistoric man-made mound imposed upon the countryside. Birtwistle has frequently referred to his music as 'imaginary landscapes' through which the listener must journey, to be confronted with its recurrent features from ever-changing perspectives. Silbury Hill offers just such an artificial landscape, and one which carries with it an aura of magic. In Silbury Air it is the emergence of the melody that casts a spell over the work, giving it shape and purpose, imposing itself upon Birtwistle's carefully controlled and intricate landscape.

Harrison Birtwistle, "Carmen Arcadiae Mechnaicae Perpetuum"

The London Sinfonietta
Elgar Howarth

-- Liner Notes --

Soon after the first performance of Silbury Air in 1977, Birtwistle wrote a shorter work to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the formation of the London Sinfonietta the following year. Where the raison d'etre of the preceding work turns out to be melody, that is the one element excluded by design from Carmen Arcadiae Mechnaicae Perpetuum ('The Perpetual Song of Mechanical Arcady'). It juxtaposes six kinds of musical mechanism to create, a jagged, pulse-dominated structure, forcing them into continuity by the superimposition of separate dynamic and registral schemes. These move on a different time-scale from the mechanisms, so that repetitions acquire varied and distinct characters, and the pauses between them on long held pitches assume increasing importance as the work richochets through its course. The climax is reached at such a moment, when the extremes of dynamic and register are suddenly thrown into violent opposition.

Harrison Birtwistle, "An Imaginary Landscape"

-- Liner Notes --

By the time he composed An Imaginary Landscape three years later Birtwistle was beginning to move towards the sound world of his stage work on the Orpheus legend. if one wanted to find a portmanteau title for a Birtwistle work of that period, (which includes his most celebrated early score, The Triumph of Time) then 'imaginary landscape' would be as good as any. It is a title first used by John Cage for a series of electronic works in the early 1950s but it is peculiarly appropriate for a composer who has frequently used a geographical metaphor to describe the way a listener might orientate his or herself in his music: 'One starts, stops, moves around, looks at the overall view, fixes one's attention on a particular feature or on a detail of that feature or on a fragment of that detail or on the texture of that fragment.'

Birtwistle calls An Imaginary Landscape a 'processional', and the progress of the music is that of a steadily unfolding musical frieze which seems to be oblivious to the passage of normal human time. The ensemble of brass, percussion and double basses is divided into instrumental choirs, which are reassigned in the middle of the work; the groups of instruments call to each other, oppose or ally themselves with their colleagues, until finally they abandon their separate identities to play together for the final, very quiet chorale, composed in memory of the composer's mother. -- Andrew Clements

Harrison Birtwistle, "Nomos"

-- Liner Notes --

Through the 1960's Birtwistle had explored the conventions and rituals of Greek drama, and for a commission for the 1968 Promenade concerts he went back to the same rich source. In classical Greek the word nomos had two meanings; it signifed the law, the social and political order of the state, but it was also used to denote the melodic patterns for the playing of the reed pipe, the aulos, used to accompany dramatic recitations and to send troops into battle.

That abrasive wind sound seems to be evoked in Birtwistle's work by the quartet of amplified soloists - flute, clarinet, horn, bassoon. Throughout Nomos they unfold the work's basic musical formula, and the continuity of this remorselessly unfolding melody contrasts with the highly sectioned music for the rest of the large orchestra [without violins], in which the musical material is constantly recycled and reassessed. Overlaid on this musical discourse is a strikingly simple dramatic device: at the start of the work the wind quartet is barely audible, but grows steadily louder as the work progresses, until it obliterates and silences the orchestra altogether. The "law", Birtwistle's melodic formula, has finally asserted itself. -- Andrew Clements

Harrison Birtwistle, "Tragoedia"

[1:36] Prologue
[2:15] Parados
[3:49] Episodion: Strophe I - Anapest I
[1:34] Antistrophe I
[2:23] Stasimon
[3:50] Episodion: Strophe II - Anapest II
[2:21] Antistrophe II
[2:45] Exodos

Ensemble InterContemporain -- Pierre Boulez

SIR HARRISON BIRTWISTLE

There is no more distinctive voice in British music today than that of Harrison Birtwistle. From the elemental, ritual clarity of Tragoedia in 1965 through to the wild, scandal-provoking Panic for saxophone, drum-kit and orchestra 30 years later, Birtwistle has followed a clearly defineid artistic path and pursued a highly personal kind of modernism in music.

Born in Accrington in Lancashire in 1934, Birtwistle studied at the Royal Manchester College of Music in the 1950s, and was one of a group of talented and influential musicians to emerge from the college, including the pianist John Ogdon and fellow-composers Alexander Goehr and Peter Maxwell Davies. Musical revolution was in the air: while continental Europe experienced its effects first in the application of the new theories derived from the music of Webern, in works such as Boulez's two-piano Structures of 1952, it was only in the next decade that the impact of Birtwistle's contemporaries was generally felt in British musical life. While elements of mime and drama crossed into that great classical arena, the concert hall (in Ligeti's hilarious Aventures, the provocative antics of Bussotti and, closer to home, the works of Peter Maxwell Davies himself), Birtwistle's own theatrical response was far more radical. Taking his cue from Stravinsky's seminal ballet score Agon, he absorbed the structural principles of Greek tragedy and made them his subject-matter, producing the work that made his name and established his unmistkable voice, Tragoedia. -- Kenneth Chalmers

Harrison Birtwistle, "Endless Parade"

BBC Philharmonic Orchestra
Elgar Howarth, conductor
Hakan Hardenberger, trumpet
Paul Patrick, vibraphone

Inspired by a parade Birtwistle witnessed in Puccini's hometown of Lucca, the composer writes,

"I became interested in the number of ways you could observe this event: as a bystander, watching each float pass by, each strikingly individual yet part of a whole; or you could wander through side alleys, hearing the parade a street away, glimpsing at a corner, meeting head on what a moment before you saw from behind. Each time the viewpoint was different, yet instantly identified as part of one body."