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Sir Harrison Paul Birtwistle CH (born July 15, 1934) is one of Britain's most significant contemporary composers.
Birtwistle was born in Accrington in Lancashire and in 1952 entered the Royal Manchester College of Music in Manchester on a clarinet scholarship. While there he met fellow composers Peter Maxwell Davies and Alexander Goehr, who together with pianist John Ogdon and conductor Elgar Howarth formed the New Music Manchester group, dedicated to the performances of serial and other modern works.
Birtwistle left the college in 1955, then studied at the Royal Academy of Music and afterward made a living as a schoolteacher. In 1965 a Harkness Fellowship gave him the opportunity to continue his studies in the United States and he decided to dedicated himself to composition.
In 1975 Birtwistle became musical director of the newly-established Royal National Theatre in London, a post he held until 1988. From 1994 to 2001 he was Henry Purcell Professor of Composition at King's College London.
Birtwistle's music
Birtwistle's pieces are in a complex, modernistic style. His early work is sometimes evocative of Igor Stravinsky and Olivier Messiaen (composers he has acknowledged as influences) and his technique of juxtaposing blocks of sound is sometimes compared to Edgard Varèse. His music makes frequent use of ostinatos and often has a ritualistic feel.
Among Birtwistle's better-known pieces is the first work he is happy to acknowledge, the wind quintet Refrains and Choruses (1957); the piano pieces Harrison's Clocks (1998); the orchestral works The Triumph of Time (1971) and Earth Dances (1986); and the operas Punch and Judy (1967), The Mask of Orpheus (1984, for which Birtwistle won the 1987 Grawemeyer Award in Music Composition), Gawain (1990), The Second Mrs Kong (1994) and The Last Supper (2000).
Popular perception of Birtwistle
Though well established and widely respected in the classical music world - modules on his music feature in many University undergraduate music courses - Birtwistle was relatively unknown in the general public until the mid 1990s. Though he had been honoured with a knighthood in 1988, two events brought him to public attention.
A group of anti-modernist musicians calling themselves 'The Hecklers', led by Fredric Stocken, stunned the audience at the 1994 revivial of Gawain at the Royal Opera House, London. They disrupted the performance, drawing attention to their campaign to rid contemporary music of anything post-Romantic.
Birtwistle gained some notoriety in 1995 when his piece Panic for drum kit, alto saxophone and orchestra, was premièred at that year's Last Night of the Proms. His music had not previously been heard in so public a forum and most of the press did not hold back its negative criticism of the piece; traditionally the second half of the concert features mainstream, popular and patriotic music. Though the first half will often incoporate pieces that reflect the overall theme of each year's season, and modern works, such an uncompromising piece had not previously been programmed.
See also List of compositions by Harrison Birtwistle.
Reading
- Adlington, R., The Music of Harrison Birtwistle (CUP, 2000)
- Cross, J., Harrison Birtwistle: Man, Mind, Music (Faber & Faber, 2000)
- Hall, M., Harrison Birtwistle (Robson Books, 1984)
- Hall, M., Harrison Birtwistle in Recent Years (Robson Books, 1998)