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sir
harrison birtwistle
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Harrison Birtwistle is ‘the most forceful and uncompromisingly original British composer of his generation’
(The New Grove). He was born in Accrington, in the north of England, in 1934. Large-scale works from the
past decade include the operas Gawain and The Second Mrs. Kong, the concertos Endless Parade
for trumpet and
Antiphonies for piano, and the orchestral score Earth Dances, which has been toured and recorded by Christoph
von Dohnányi and the Cleveland Orchestra. Recent scores include The Cry of Anubis, for tuba and orchestra,
and Panic, scored for saxophone, drummer and orchestra, which received a high profile premiere at the Last
Night of the 1995 BBC Proms, with an estimated worldwide audience of 100 million.
Mr. Birtwistle was knighted in 1988; he received the Siemens Prize in 1995. Recordings of his
music (by Pierre Boulez, Oliver Knussen, Sir Simon Rattle, Daniel Barenboim, and others) are available
on the Collins Classics, Decca, Philips, Deutsche Grammophon, Etcetera, NMC and CPO labels.
Joshua Cody and Kirk Noreen, directors of the Ensemble Sospeso, spoke with him the week of
Sospeso's portrait concert of the composer in September 1999.
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Thank you for taking a few minutes out of your day to speak with us. What is the status of your opera? Is it finished? |
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Well, I can see the whites of its eyes. I don’t know whose eyes they are, but…
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Perhaps we should start at the beginning. How did you first begin composing? |
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I started composing just as soon as I knew notation of music. It seemed to be a very natural
thing to do—not natural, but obvious, for some reason.
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Were you interested in the arts back then, were you creative? |
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Well, I was only a child, sort of seven or eight.
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What was the music like, the juvenalia? |
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Well, I still have one. The first piece I ever wrote was a gavotte, and I used it in my opera
Punch and Judy.
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Were you interested in modernism, in contemporary music? |
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No, no, that came much later.
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And when that occurred, what were some works that made an initial impact? |
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Well, I was a clarinetist; I started my life as a clarinetist, and for all intents and purposes I was going to be a clarinetist. Being a composer was something that Beethoven did: nobody, really, was a composer. In fact, when I was a student, there was no such thing as composition; in this country [England], it is a relatively new thing to study composition. Now, you can do it everywhere. You could study composition in America long before you could in England.
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What do you think the merits are of studying composition? Is composition something that can be taught? |
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Certain obvious things can be taught. I try to teach a bit of composition; some people I can say a lot to, some I cannot. I think I am fairly subjective in that respect. It’s very hard to be objective as a teacher. I try to be, you know, but then again one doesn’t want a lot of Birtwistle clones.
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I’m not so sure about that. |
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No, no. I wouldn’t want that. It’s a difficult problem, teaching. There are things that can be taught. My feeling, after being in America a bit, and what little teaching I’ve done in England, is that there’s a sort of lack of awareness in a lot of students; I found that in America a lot.
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Awareness? |
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Well… the background of music, or the music that they know. They tend to only know the music that is put in front of them. They seem to lack a sense of inquiry.
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I think there’s a discrepancy, sometimes, in the way students relate to classical music versus the way they relate to popular music. Often they’re enthusiastic about the latter, and study the former. Both are music, both are the same phenomenon, essentially. |
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Yes—it’s a tricky one, isn’t it?
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