Enter Birtwistle ARTS
MICHAEL NYMAN
It has been left to Harrison Birtwistle to hold the fort for 'progressive' English music this week. While the Proms are indulging a Walton mini-festival, Edinburgh is given over to a rather superfluous Britten retrospective. Mean- while the two performances of Birtwistle's opera Punch and Judy at Edinburgh (the first since its premiere at Aldeburgh in-June) and the first bearing of his Nomos for orchestra at the Albert Hall on 23 August—by far the most notable of this year's Prom commissions—mark the arrival of Birtwistle as a composer.
If he has taken longer in the process than his so-called Manchester School associates, Alex- ander Goehr and Peter Maxwell Davies, it is partly through lack of opportunity, but mainly that his earlier works; though not by any means miniatures, are cast in the form of vocal and instrumental chamber music. His first orchestral piece, Chorales (1960), which had to wait seven years for performance, showed that Birtwistle's main problem—a big one—was how to control both technically and formally, the exuberant fertility of his imagination. Charles Rennie Mackintosh's borrowed dictum 'there is hope in honest error: none in the icy _perfections of the mere stylist' is not inappropriate here.
It was perhaps too scion for Birtwistle to have learnt any lessons from Chorales, when, in 1965, as a study for Punch and Judy, he com- posed Tragoedia. This was an instrumental' piece using as a framework ritual aspects of Greek drama, which served to focus Birtwistle's style by coupling a new vertical strength to his proven lyrical flexibility. It is not uninstructive to reflect on the number of times that Greeic drania and music have been misinterpreted with pOsitive results—after all, wasn't there a group of -hack theorists in Italy at the end of the sixteenth century whose errors led them to invent opera?
Nomos is Birtwistle's first large-scale piece since Tragoedia to create successfully its own self-supporting `Span'—a structure which con- tinuously grows and is not dependent, as many of his earlier pieces largely were, on closed musical forms. First reactions to the dedicated perfoimance by the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Colin Davis, were to the 'aural Peispet- live of the work—ranging from the delicate 'Chinese' tinklings of harp and pitched percus- sion to, uncontrolled outbursts of brass and violent build-ups of the full orchestra. But re- peated listenings enable one to grasp the slow inner rhythm, and the way in which Birtwistle builds his fascinating 'span' by an essentially lapidary process.
The title Nomos refers to the musical accom- paniments of the Greek epics, and it is only when one sees the piece as a heroic narrative that its-formal proportions become clear. Much as I dislike literary analogies—Birtwistle's music always has an archetypal feeling, so that Nomos does not tell a story but all stories— the positioning and phasing of the caesuras suggest the end of a heavily deed-laden para- graph, after which the tale is tak'en up again. The narrative themes undergo a continual shift in meaning and the opposition of forces —the division of the orchestra itself is re- thought, into self-contained but interlocking
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groups of instruments—creates an inner ten- sion which is not completely resolved when the music finally peters out somewhat perfunc- torily. But, in the last section, we perceive a new reality as the music has been raised one level—in that only the four amplified wind in- struments are left playing material itich a non- amplified quartet started originally.
Birtwistle has also successfully resolved the linear and vertical aspects. The basic material is a series of thematic lines, which are coloured, like organ registration, to form closely or widely spaced clusters, at first stated singly but subsequently combined in evolving patterns, while the linear evolution is constantly punc- tuated by complex chords and percussion fusil- lades. It is as though a series of transparent perspex 'textures' are overlaid in ever-differing proportions, each combination progressively giving rise to another colour complex, shot through with brilliant shafts of light.
From 'archetypal heroic narrative' to 'arche- typal opera' is a short step, for Birtwistle and his librettist Stephen Pruslin conceived Punch and Judy as a freezing of normal operatic situations into a sort of universal allegory. The plot follows the familiar story in which Punch successively disposes of the various characters and, in this version, thereby achieves his ultimate desire, his Dulcinea, his Pretty Polly. The transfer from one area of stylisation (the puppet show) to another (operatic stage) is effected brilliantly on the formal level and shows a radical rethinking of operatic conven- tions (arias, ensembles and so forth) in terms both of the ritualisation of the plot and of Birt- wistle's needs as a composer. For, as with a film scenario, each action is broken down into a' series of shots, each shot being a short self- contained musical entity. These units—word games, chorales, adding-song—gradually in- crease in number during the opera, as the plot progresses, and are repeated throughout the re- current action-cycles.
But,= since the opera is intended to make its effect, like Elektra, cumulatively (it runs for two hours without a break), the cycles should surely' get tuceessiVely 'shorter and not longer. In fact; "ecthditicitilnE 61 the audience by the formalisation is so strong that it is only where Judy steps out of the charmed circle during the third - murder (by musical instruments) that one's attention flags.
Pruslin's libretto, in parts pretentious, has drawn from Birtwistle a surprising wealth of music, much of it piercing and violent, but in the Quest-Love music very tender and in the nursery rhymes and riddles attractive, amus- ing and singable. We may look forward to a further hearing when the very efficient English Opera Group production comes to town next year (at the old Sadler's Wells Theatre, in Rosebery Avenue).
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