sir harrison birtwistle
page six

I often hear your music visually. Are there any painters analogous to your music?

I don’t know what painting sounds like! The person who had a great influence on me was Paul Klee. It’s not so much a one-to-one relationship with a particular painting, or making a musical interpretation of a picture; it’s a sort of way of thinking about things, the way he… How can I put it? What he does, is he improvises his intuitions. And I think that is something I have been very concerned with.  

Are you familiar with the works of Cy Twombly?

Yes, very much, the one who paints things that look a little like graffiti.  

Are his paintings too unstructured for you?  

No, I can appreciate it for what it is, but we are also talking about what things have influenced me. Let’s put it this way: When you have painters like Cy Twombly or Bacon who smudge paint on their canvases, or put it on with a rag, or throw it, or mix it with chemicals with certain properties that make it smear-there is no equivalent to this in music. What you have to do in music, to create that smear, is to compose every ingredient. We deal in quarter and eighth notes, and consequently when composers write about music, it’s always technical. Whereas when you read what painters write about their art, it’s very much the opposite, it’s very creative. So in that way I’ve been influenced by painters.  

As a composer I found that in many serial methods of composition I was unable to compose with "curves" and only to compose with dots and lines, to make a crude analogy. Do you feel constrained by serial processes and methods?  

Well, I would attend Milton Babbitt's lectures and have no idea what he was talking about. I could appreciate the manipulation of the pitches that had these properties, and they did interesting things with them, but my main criticism of that style of composition is that when you get into a system, you have to follow the system. And I get very bored by the system. In the course of writing music, I find that there are other things taking place, and certain contexts are open, which are more interesting than other principles.  

Is your compositional method pre-planned, or does it involve improvisation?

I use whatever I can and whatever I’ve got. The problem with systems is that I can never get them to be in an one-to-one relationship with the music that was originally in my head. And so I found a way out of it-I found a way out of it with Tragœdia, by improvising little bits of material, even chords and melodies, and then subjecting that to analysis, like looking at it under a microscope. I found that certain things that I improvised had properties that were irrational, and it was the irrational things that interested me, not the rational ones. And by subjecting that to analysis, I found that I could make more of that.

I like the ideas. I like the early music, like Sonatas and Interludes. With a lot of the late things, I have no idea what’s happening. I can understand intellectually, as a concept; but the manifestations in sound… nothing seems to matter, but maybe that’s what it is. If so, it’s the opposite to me, I think, it’s absolutely the opposite to what I do.