A Harrison Birtwistle Playlist

Harrison Birtwistle died on April 18 at the age of 87. He was regarded as one of the foremost composers of his generation, a member of the so-called Manchester School alongside Alexander Goehr and Peter Maxwell Davies. His music attracted adjectives like ”iconoclastic” and “uncompromising”; one famous anecdote recounts Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears walking out of his 1968 chamber opera, “Punch & Judy,” when it was performed at the Aldeburgh Festival. There is no doubt that his music has a unique force and impact, perhaps because of the way Birtwistle digested a whole host of influences—Boulez, Webern, Boulanger, Messiaen, Satie, Renaissance polyphony and lute music, Greek classical drama—into something that still sounds wholly its own (though not, perhaps, wholly of this earth). But it is also music of remarkable tenderness, particularly in late works like “The Moth Requiem” or his recent “Duet for Eight Strings.” 

Birtwistle’s music means a huge amount to me. I discovered it in high school, and it made the equally thrilling rubicon of Stravinsky’s music sound, by comparison, like Delius. For a while my most prized possession as a teenager was a score of “Le Sacre du Printemps” signed by Birtwistle—I had met him at a concert—until, of course, I lent it to a girl in youth orchestra who I liked, and never got it back. At least she went on to study composition.