First published in The Herald on 23 November, 2016
I wonder what Michael Tippett would have made of our times. What kind of lush, kinetic music he would have summoned in response to a geopolitics of post-truths and hypernormalised hate speech. This was the composer who began work on a pacifist oratorio the day Britain declared war on Germany in 1939, who later went to prison as a conscientious objector. He made the opening words of that oratorio as bleak and urgent as the way he was feeling: “The world turns on its dark side,” sings the chorus.
One of my favourite Tippett quotes relates the artists of today — his day, our day — to an age-old tradition that, he said, “goes back into prehistory and will go forward into the unknown future. This tradition is to create images from the depths of the imagination and to give them form. […] Images of vigour for a decadent period, images of calm for one too violent. Images of reconciliation for worlds torn by division. And in an age of mediocrity and shattered dreams, images of abounding, generous, exuberant beauty.”