Listening Project

Well in this work there is something to be desired, as I explained. But I don't know enough of his other work to comment generally. His Varese recordings are exceptional and I have a disc of Bartok and one of Messiaen (both decent) but that's about it I'm afraid.

Sadly my G collection doesn't go back to 1967 and free access has now been denied us. Capitalism winning over altruism!

I have a few discs of Birtwistle's stuff: Panic/Earth Dances (superb), Silbury Air/Secret Theatre, Triumph of Time/Gawain, Pulse Shadows, Endless Parade. Lately I've been striving with the Violin Concerto. He is one of those composers who has a unique sound and those are always worth hearing.

Mark,

No, it was The Triumph of Time that was issued in that series: another superb piece, also given more than once by Boulez whilst at the BBC. John pritchard conducted the Argo disc, if I remember correctly.

Now Mark, no more timewasting with all this versifying!  Get down to your homework at once!

Chris, you're right that there is no need for more analysis. Music is always abstract, in a sense, even in the so called descriptive works. Our perception is the guiding force in the listening experience. On the other hand, Bazza is right too, since Sir Birtwistle chose a very strange title and the naming of the parts of his otherwise "abstract" work. So, we should at least know what the "intentions" and the "goals" of the composer were, at least as a guiding piece of information. Unfortunately, his statement that he tried to "bridge the gap between the abstract and theatre music" does not justify the title and the naming of the parts chosen.

Anyway, just for the record. You may continue with your "homework".

Parla

Like Monty Python's Oscar Wilde, "I wish I hadn't said that" - "that" being the brief quotation from Birtwistle's note on Tragoedia. Birtwistle's full note is much longer, and includes discussion of the Greek section titles. I could always try to scan it in. Of course it's important - it just looked as if a few words of Birtwistle were preempting discussion of the music itself. Nor am I even remotely a Boulez-batterer - his work as composer and musician were right at the centre of my own musical upbringing in London, in the time just after he ceased to be principal conductor of the BBCSO. I simply do find him a bit "safer" in this particular piece, and the issue may partly be that since Tragoedia is a modern classic it stretches players less than it used to. BTW, Boulez was the conductor of the old Calouste Gulbenkian LP of The Triumph of Time, which is on my shelves!

Don't forget, by the way, that Birtwistle has a long-standing interest in ancient Greek myth and drama; there's a character with the name Choregos in Punch and Judy, the incidental music to Aeschylus's Oresteia at the NT, and quite recently The Minotaur, which I've only seen on DVD. In his work it goes, notoriously, with commitments both to actual music-theatre and to instruments and instrumental groups that interact spatially and "dramatically." I think he mines a particular vein in Stravinsky and Varèse (think Ecuatorial) that's all about the role of ritual in aesthetic production, and you either buy it or you don't. Anyone who knows his opera Gawain will recall that the second part of the first act is an elaborate cyclical "masque" of the passing seasons. When I heard the opera on its initial run at Covent Garden, I found this utterly compelling. When I later got the CD - which it seems NMC aims to reissue - I discovered that for the piece's revival, which had been recorded, Birtwistle had drastically abbreviated that passage. I may have been in a minority of one in being disappointed, so I must be a true believer.

I'm within reach of a well-stocked music library, so will try to get a look at a score of Tragoedia - I'm now interested to see how far the "violence," which I admit to finding in the piece on listening to it, is written into the performance directions. Glad this has started up - I hope it doesn't turn into the Course à l'abîme.

Bazza, just for you, since you can’t access the 1967 Gramophone review:

Birtwistle on Tragoedia. He claims that:

“Tragoedia bridges the gap between ‘absolute’ music and theatre music. The work contains a specific drama but this drama is purely musical. The title does not imply ‘tragic’ in the Nineteenth-century sense. Tragoedia literally means ‘goat-dance’, and the work is concerned with the ritual and formal aspects of Greek tragedy rather than with the content of any single play.

“This idea is present in the work on various levels. The instruments are divided into three groups: wind quintet, harp, and string quartet. The ‘cello and horn being the ‘odd men out’ of their respective groups, act as individual opponents within the conflict, while the harp acts as linking continuo. This instrumental organisation is not a reference to Renaissance antiphony; it is simply a reflection. on the level of instrumentation, of the innate drama which is also expressed in the form of the work. The essence of the work’s structure is symmetry -more specifically, bilateral symmetry in which concentric layers are grouped outward from a static central pillar.”

Stephen Plaistow, the reviewer, writes:

There are points one could take up here. If the drama of Tragoedia is purely musical, how does the work “bridge the gap” between absolute’ music and theatre music? Why is the ‘cello ‘odd man out’ in a string quartet group? But one must avoid paying more attention to a composer’s programme-notes than to his music, and I think I think it sufficient to regard Birtwistle’s words here as describing the formal background against which he composed the music and not as a description of the progress and raison d’être of the music itself. After several hearings the music appears to me clearer and clearer and quite self-sufficient. After several readings, on the other hand, the programme-note seems less so.

So, there you are Bazza! I hadn’t read this when I made my own comments - honest! 

But as you can guess, I do agree!

Chris

Cheers, Chris.

DST, there must be more than two of us!  All the group I was with were against cuts, though we didn't know what he had in mind then!

Yes, I have the Decca Headline LP.  Nenia was the first Birtwistle work I knew, so it has a special place in my Birtwistlography. I also have the Punch and Judy LPs.  Both these I think have been reissued on CD, but my LPs are fine still.

Also...  I have a recording made from a BBC broadcast of one of the first run performances of the complete Gawain! A wonderful opera, much weakened structurally by the cuts, IMO.

Chris

PS: I think I may have been at that performance of Verses too!