Harrison Birtwistle

Harrison Birtwistle’s music explored a unique fusion of uncompromising modernism and English folk culture, articulated through ritualised dramatic structures and complex techniques (such as medieval organum and isorhythm) in an idiom capable of immense power. Birtwistle was born in 1934 in the Lancashire town of Accrington, where he played clarinet in the local band; he later regarded his teenage reading of ancient Greek tragedy (in paperback translations) as a formative experience. At Manchester’s Royal Northern College of Music he encountered like-minded radical colleagues in the composers Peter Maxwell Davies and Alexander Goehr, trumpeter/conductor Elgar Howarth, and composer/pianist John Ogdon. Birtwistle’s first representative work was Refrains and Choruses (1957) for wind quintet, where each of the five instruments is deployed as a character in an abstract ritual drama besides its purely musical function. Birtwistle steadily developed and expanded this approach to produce masterworks including Tragoedia (1965) for chamber group, the chamber opera Punch and Judy (1966-67), the orchestral The Triumph of Time (1971-72), and the vast operatic “lyric tragedy” The Mask of Orpheus (1973-84), drawing on multiple versions of the Orpheus myth. Other major opera scores included Yan Tan Tethera (1983-84, a “mechanical pastoral” about two rival shepherds and their flocks), Gawain (1990-91, based on Arthurian legend), and The Minotaur (2005-07, exploring the myth of the Cretan labyrinth). In 2016, six years before his death, Birtwistle completed one of his last and finest orchestral works, Deep Time.