the ages I had dreamed

Tomorrow I'm off to the Cheltenham Festival to perform the UK Premiere of Harrison Birtwistle's Crowd.  The recital's sold out, but here are some more detailed reflections on this great new work. 

Despite no direct connection, I can't stop hearing Auden's The Sea and the Mirror throughout the piece: at once from your calm eyes, / With their lucid proof of apprehension and disorder, / All we are not stares back at what we are.

HARRISON BIRTWISTLE: CROWD

Harrison Birtwistle writes:

“This piece is an exploration of resonance.  My choice of title reflects my interest in the essential nature of the earliest harps, which is their quality of resonance. Crowd (etymologically related to the Celtic crwth, cruit and crot) was the English term used for instruments of the lyre class, and ultimately for a frame harp, from pre-Christian to medieval times.

Crowd's slow-moving harmonic structure allows space for the strings to vibrate freely.  In performance, therefore, the resonances of sustained notes – in particular those marked with a short pause – should not be cut off artificially to create a silence.  The pauses, and the slightly shorter hesitations starting at b.121, should allow for this resonance without interrupting the continuity of the piece.”

Birtwistle, of course, best describes his own piece.  Within the work, four ideas stand out:  resonance (deliberately sparse pedal changes, for example, which always damp the strings as one semitone is exchanged for another); complex patterns (melodic and rhythmic); and elements of suprise and unpredictability playing about the delicate structures (such as hesitant pauses).  Birtwistle is also interested in the idea that resonance is at the heart of the harp's special and fundamental character, hence the title's reference to the earliest harps, and not to a crowd of people.   

Patterns upset by random elements are at the heart of all Birtwistle's work. To summarise a vast oeuvre with almost criminal brevity, it boils down to a preoccupation, shared by many great artists, with the differences between the flawless order art appears to glimpse in the distance, and the imperfections both of the world, and in ourselves. While it is in the artist's nature always to strive for something perfect, reality gets in the way, by chance events or our human limitations.  Birtwistle's recurrent interest in ancient things (as in Crowd's Old English associations) also evokes this desire for order:  to invent an archaic world anew suggests perpetual recurrence, cyclic unity and wholeness.   

It is Birtwistle's habit, when asked to comment on what governs his work as a whole, to cite other people.  One such quote Birtwistle has supplied is from the psychologist, Bruno Bettelheim:

“All autistic children demand that time must stop still.  Time is the destroyer of sameness.  If sameness is to be preserved, time must stop still in its tracks...In the autistic child's world the chain of events is not conditioned by causality we know.  But since one event does follow another, it must be because of some timeless cosmic law that ordains it.  An eternal law.  Things happen because they must, not because they are caused.”

Non-autistic people (including Birtwistle) realise that, if such cosmic continuity does exist, we will never see it.  Even within ourselves, however intellectually able we may be, we are all subject to sensual and irrational impulses as part of our human condition.  It is Birtwistle's recognition both of the external chance whims to which we are all subject, and the internal conflicts that define us as individual human beings, that makes Crowd, for me, so deeply moving.  It is powerfully intellectual music, written with an astounding understanding of how the harp can sound most effective – but it is also profoundly human.   

By the time we reach our mid-twenties, most of us know what it is to construct systems, believe them perfect, and learn that they are not. Musicians, in particular, are constantly dealing both with music's beauty and wonder, and the mistakes we make as we try to create it. This is why we are, like Birtwistle in other works, fascinated by the Orpheus myth: about the power of music and the frailty of the musician.  The harp's resonance in Crowd is similarly ambivalent.  The harpist does not control it the resonance, but it is the instrument's heart.