Who is composer Harrison Birtwistle?

Whether opera or concerto, for chamber or orchestra, Birtwistle’s music was often theatrical in its conception, with musicians encouraged to move around the stage. Throughout his career Birtwistle collaborated regularly with the London Sinfonietta, and on Sunday 5 March, the orchestra present a special tribute to the composer. Ahead of that performance, here’s a little more insight into a man who The Guardian’s Ivan Hewitt described as ‘a deeply English composer who was also internationally renowned as a great modernist’.

He was born in Lancashire

Harrison Birtwistle was born in 1934, in Accrington, Lancashire, where his parents worked in the family bakery business. Encouraged by his mother, Birtwistle began his musical career with the clarinet, which he played in the North East Lancashire military band. Perhaps as a nod to this, Birtwistle’s music is often scored for woodwind, brass and percussion without strings, and sometimes has a brass band feel to it.

His childhood experiences would influence his later compositions

Birtwistle often reflected fondly on the natural world of his childhood, where his family home was surrounded by wooded valleys and rolling countryside. But in the 1950s industrialisation made its mark on his immediate landscape when two enormous cooling towers appeared in the next field. This contrast and imposition of the modern on the traditional, undoubtedly impacted Birtwistle, as reflected many years later when, asked to capture the essence of music, he used the phrase ‘continuity which has been fractured’. 

An affinity with classical themes and characters can also be traced back to Birtwistle’s childhood, a time when he had a dog called Urk, named after Hercules. As a composer he would often use classical myths and legends as inspiration for his pieces, among them; Orpheus, Pan, the Green Knight and the Minotaur.

He was something of a musical pioneer in the 1950s

Birtwistle’s music lessons initially came courtesy of a local bandmaster. Then in 1952, at the age of 18, Birtwistle won a scholarship from Accrington Grammar School to the Royal College of Music to study clarinet and composition. When in Manchester he founded the New Music Manchester group alongside other notable composers, including Peter Maxwell Davies and Alexander Goehr. In contrast to the traditional pastoral style of the time, New Music Manchester embraced modern tonalities and composing techniques.

He marked his transition from musician to composer by selling his clarinets

In 1965 Birtwistle gave up his position as Director of Music Cranborne Chase School in Wiltshire to take up a Harkness fellowship at Princeton University in the US. At the same time, as a statement of intent to become a composer, he also sold his clarinets. Whilst in the US Birtwistle’s composition was transformed as he was drawn to the ritualistic elements of Greek theatre. This is evident in two works from that same year; ‘Ring a Dumb Carillon’, and the work for the Melos Ensemble, ‘Tragoedia’. It was ‘Tragoedia’, with its structure based on the formal divisions of Greek tragedy, that led the composer to greater things – notably his first opera ‘Punch and Judy’, which was based on the work and completed in 1967.

He was deeply conscious of the theatrical and visual elements of performance

Over the course of his lifetime, Birtwistle wrote six full-length operas, each of which holds its own astonishing and brilliant musical and theatrical gestures. Of these, he was particularly proud of Mask of Orpheus, completed in 1986, which he once described as “perhaps the most complex work of art ever made”. This opera sees the contradiction and variety of myths as inherent, and instead of a linear plot, reveals multiple possibilities and stories at once. His fascination with theatre undoubtedly ran deep, and in 1975 he became Musical Director of London’s Royal National Theatre.

‘The notion of how you look as opposed to how you listen has always been of great importance to me’

Harrison Birtwistle

Even his orchestral works often involved physical movement

In example, in ‘Ritual Fragment’ (later reworked as ‘Cortege’), a piece written for the London Sinfonietta’s late Musical Director, Michael Vyner, the players form a semi-circle and move into the centre when they carry the solo. Somewhat similarly, in his piece ‘Secret Theatre’ Birtwistle creates competing instrumental monologues, with players standing on one side of the stage when they adopt the melody, and then standing on the other side of the stage to play the accompaniment. The result is a piece, and performance, which flits erratically between chaos and calm.

He was fascinated by the myth of Orpheus, the inventor of music

Much of Birtwistle’s music drew on his love of poetry and language, finding inspiration in myths, and folklore, and his operas often centred around such themes. He would often return to the figure of Orpheus, the inventor of music, and much like the legendary Greek poet, the composer’s pieces seem to set out to invent music from scratch, to find the very beginning of music. Birtwistle’s unique approach in this sense can be heard in the deep seismic roar that begins his ‘Earth Dances’ and the breathing sounds which open ‘The Mask of Orpheus’.

He inadvertently upset many classical music traditionalists in 1995

This was the year that the composer wrote his saxophone concerto, ‘Panic’. Commissioned by John Drummond and written for alto saxophone, jazz drum kit, woodwinds, brass and percussion, ‘Panic’, latterly described by The Guardian’s Tom Service as ‘a pulverising piece of uncompromising energy’, received its premiere at the 1995 Last Night of the Proms. This being a concert associated with ‘traditional’, ‘patriotic’ works, Birtwistle’s composition caused uproar, with the BBC reportedly receiving thousands of complaints over its inclusion and The Daily Mail describing it as ‘a horrible cacophony’. 

He once composed a piece featuring hooters from barges moored in the Thames

For the opening of Tate Modern in 2000, Birtwistle was commissioned to compose a piece to be performed in the Turbine Hall by the London Sinfonietta in the presence of Her Majesty The Queen. His piece ‘17 Tate Riffs’ consisted of two layers, a background of naturally and electronically produced birdsong and taped drones, created from the sounds of barges, and a fanfare performed by five groups of three musicians placed around the hall. The initial plan had been for the performance to be played live by barges moored outside the gallery on the Thames, but unfortunately this proved impossible.