First published by English National Opera, October 2019
“Start with the note ‘e’, and you don’t have to make the decision. It’s as good a place to start as any. Then if you write ‘d’, you know where you stand in relation to ‘e’.”
Start with a myth. Harrison Birtwistle often does. The myths he chooses aren’t always simple, the music he writes definitely isn’t simple, but the choice of subject matter, he says, is very simple. He goes for stories that have always been there. Like one note’s relationship to its neighbour, the knownness of a myth is an anchor that lets him roam. “When telling a myth,” he says, “tell a famous one. So everyone already gets what it’s about. That allows me to use the music to do what I would do anyway. It allows me to go for it.”
That’s one explanation for it. Since his earliest pieces, Birtwistle’s music has been a place for gods, monsters and earthy archetypes. “Well, give me another subject!” he retorts when asked: why myths? “What do you want me to write about otherwise? Sentimentality?!” That last word dropped like it’s contaminated. Time and again, he has returned to rituals rough and divine, exploding or rerouting those rituals along the way, merging primitive rites with exquisitely distilled moments of love or violence. He has made pieces out of bible stories (The Last Supper) and mummers tales (Down by the Greenwood Side). He has made brutal characters out of puppets (Punch and Judy), folk balladry (Bow Down, setting the staggeringly cruel Two Sisters), old English legends (Gawain) and newer cinematic legends (The Second Mrs Kong). He’s written cameos for satyrs (the unbound solo saxophone of Panic) and for singing sheep (Yan Tan Tethera). Sometimes, his beasts have a humanity so unexpectedly tender it makes us weep (The Minotaur).