The death has been announced of the eminent British composer Sir Harrison Birtwistle. He died at his home in Mere, aged 87.
Born in Accrington in 1934, he began composing alongside playing the clarinet in theatre bands. He studied at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester where he quickly gained a reputation for his musical creativity alongside the likes of Alexander Goehr and Peter Maxwell Davies — part of what was later described as 'the Manchester School'.
Acclaim and notoriety
By the late 1960s and early 1970s he had gained both critical acclaim as well as notoriety, for his chamber opera 'Punch & Judy' and the immense 'The Triumph of Time'. He was the Musical Director of the Royal National Theatre in London from 1975 to 1983.
His uncompromising, deeply complex compositions combined dissonance and aggression with tempered, ethereal beauty; his inspirations drawn from his love of poetry, language, ritual, legend and folklore.
His output was championed by some of the greatest names in orchestral world — from Pierre Boulez and Simon Rattle to Daniel Barenboim.
Grimethorpe Aria
In 1973 he was commissioned through Elgar Howarth to write 'Grimethorpe Aria', which was first performed by the band under the composer's direction at the Harrogate Festival that year.
Howarth wrote of it. "In mood it relates closely to 'The Triumph of Time — being in the same general adagio tempo, pessimistic and bleak in feeling. Texturally too, it has close parallels with that piece, the instrumentation being often dense and multi-layered.
Birtwistle in fact has created a new sound from the traditional instrumentation of the brass band, dispensing with the unison writing normally associated with cornet and tuba sections in particular, giving each player a separate and independent part."
Howarth described the work as being "structured into three continuous sections; a slow, almost reluctant, beginning leading to brief phrases on solo flugelhorn and tenor horn, a middle section where a choir of cornets and baritones are interrupted in their cantilena by fierce, harshly punctuated fanfares from the other cornets and trombones — a section which climaxes in a huge tutti of massive dynamic — and finally an elegiac coda begun by two solo euphoniums and continued to the close by solo flugelhorn and tenor horns."
Performances
It was later performed at the 1974 Proms at the Royal Albert Hall by Grimethorpe and Black Dyke.
In 1976 it was recorded on a seminal LP, 'Grimethorpe Special', alongside works by Toru Takemitsu, Hans Werner Henze and Howarth himself. It was also featured as part of the band's six-part 'The History of Brass Band Music' series on the Doyen label.
Major live performances of it since have been rare — although it was featured as part of a major 'Changing Britain' musical retrospective at the Southbank in London in 2015, performed by Tredegar Band.
Following its performance it was described as both a "touchstone and paean"of its time — "its funereal pessimism a harbinger of elegiac musical possibilities as well as a future obituary notice of record to the cataclysmic aftermath of the 1984 Miners Strike."
He later wrote 'Salford Toccata' in 1989, as well as the trumpet solo 'Five Little Antiphonies for Amelia' and a number of brass ensemble works.
He stated in 1999 that "I can only do one thing, and there is nothing else".
Echoes
The New York Times said his works were "something strikingly new but heavy with echoes from the past and, indeed, the future."
'Gawain', 'The Minotaur', 'Earth Dances' (compared to Stravinsky's 'Rite of Spring') and 'The Mask of Orpheus' (which took almost a decade to write) sealed his position as one of the greatest British composers of the 20th century — although controversy was never far away.
In echoes of 'Punch & Judy', which allegedly saw Benjamin Britten walk out halfway through, his Clarinet Concerto, 'Panic' written for the Last Night of the Proms in 1995 was labelled a "horrible cacophony"and resulted in hundreds of complaints to the BBC.
Birtwistle found it all rather amusing. "I was treading on a sacred cow and the attendant manure. 'Panic' was the nearest piece I've got to fun!"
You can find Birtwistle's music 'difficult' or not, or like one piece more than another. But it seems to me that you can't be indifferent to it. And that's the mark of a great artist, I thinkOliver Knussen
Great artist
The composer Oliver Knussen said: "You can find Birtwistle's music 'difficult' or not, or like one piece more than another. But it seems to me that you can't be indifferent to it. And that's the mark of a great artist, I think."
However, awards and accolades continued to come his way. He was the most honoured composer in history of the Royal Philharmonic Society Awards. Harrison Birtwistle was knighted in 1988 and made a Companion of Honour in 2001.
Giant figure
Following the announcement of his death, BBC Radio 3 controller Alan Davey said: "He was a giant figure in classical music — a composer who unflinchingly followed his instinct that humanity deserves to be reflected in complex, unflinching music that permeates the soul and grasps what it is to be human in these times."
He is survived by three sons and six grand-children. His wife Sheila Duff whom he married in 1959 died in 2012.
