BeforeThe Mask: Birtwistle's electronic music collaborations with Peter Zinovieff

Hall, Tom

doi:10.1017/cbo9781316145326.005

Cited by 4 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 15 publications

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“…The idea of this composition originated during Birtwistle's schoolteaching in the 1960s 10 . The text for this dramatic scene (in a way a one-act opera) was written by a close friend of Birtwistle, Peter Zinoviev.…”

Section: The Way To Orpheusmentioning

confidence: 99%

Harrison Birtwistle’s “Orpheus-Project”: Images of Melancholy

Tatiana

2019

Vestnik SPbSU. Arts

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British composer Harrison Birtwistle (b. 1934) is considered to be one of the most striking figures of contemporary classical music. The most important idea which crosses many of his pieces is the multiple embodiment of the Orpheus myth. Orpheus is interpreted not only as a person with his own tragedy, but also becomes an umbrella phenomenon embracing his mythic brother Linos, his wife Euridice, and different aspects of the voyage to the Underworld: wandering in the kingdom of Hades, conducting a dialog with the King of the Dead, as well as various-level reflections on the whole myth (allegoric, metaphoric, symbolic). Embodying all these aspects, the composer takes a wide range of texts (from Ausonius and Boethius, to Christopher Logue and Sir Thomas Wyatt, to Rainer Maria Rilke and Peter Zinoviev) and produces a number of works of different genres: instrumental pieces (Linoi), cantatas (The Death of Orpheus, Meridian), choral compositions (Fields of Sorrow, On the Threshold of the Night), operas (The Mask of Orpheus, The Corridor), and song cycles (Orpheus Elegies). Thus, Birtwistle's reflections on Orpheus form a series of works that display the whole range of images and situations contained in the myth, taken from different angles that can be compared to Picasso's famous series of reinterpretations of Las Meninas. One feature common to all these compositions is:that they are emotionally charged with a deep melancholy characteristic of a composer who recognizes in himself this kind of temperament as his peculiarity, and inspired by his famous predecessor, Dürer and Dowland.

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Section: The Way To Orpheusmentioning

confidence: 99%

Harrison Birtwistle’s “Orpheus-Project”: Images of Melancholy

Tatiana

2019

Vestnik SPbSU. Arts

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“…120 This sense of symbiosis can indeed most clearly be seen in Punch's relationship with Choregos. 123 The climax of Punch's series of murders is his attack on Choregos, whom he inserts into a kind of throne in the stylised shape of a bass-viol and proceeds to bow to death (Figure 2). 124 128 But he is also the narrator, and he begins and ends the opera, literally providing its frame.…”

Section: Traditionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Historically, the choregos is not precisely a chorus or narrator, but rather a patron of the theatre, the one who pays for the chorus. 129 He might even be said to embody the institutional authority of the teacher and curator that Bourdieu, writing in 1966, saw competing with the personal authority of the creator-here Punch-for cultural legitimacy, in a relationship of both opposition and complementarity. 130…”

Section: Traditionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In the opening duet, for example, Punch 'turns suddenly to Choregos' and sings 'A sound that sings and sounds a thousand wounds' (91) Punch kills Choregos with his own tools, just as he kills the Doctor with a hypodermic syringe and the Lawyer with a quill pen (64). And yet, his appropriation of Choregos' tools is much more extended: in addition to the act of bowing, we also see Punch bang a cymbal, a trumpet and a drumb over Choregos's head (100,106,113), in an aggressive act of 'crowning', while the murder itself is more extensively represented in sound. In other ways, too, Punch seems associated with music alongside Choregos, rendering them doubles.…”

Section: [Figure 3] [Example 2]mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Beard tends to focus on the more ironic, 'transgressive' side of this tension, reading the work through the lens of Pierrot Lunaire, earlier criticism on Birtwistle tended to cast Punch and Judy as more indebted to tradition than in conflict with it. In his 1984 book on Birtwistle, Hall suggests that Birtwistle 'selects contexts which have the weight of tradition behind them' (although here he may be thinking more of the Punch and Judy show than the art-music tradition) 100. He observes that 'the various categories of opera' at work in Punch and Judy 'are palpably obvious'(58), and talks about its references to the baroque and to the St Matthew Passion in terms of modeling and shared expressive aims(65)(66).…”

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Confronting Opera in the 1960s: Birtwistle's Punch and Judy

Wiebe¹

2017

J. R. Music. Assoc.

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Birtwistle's Punch and Judy arrived at a crucial moment for new opera. It premièred in 1968 at the Aldeburgh Festival, the home of a vision of British opera that Punch and Judy seemed actively to confront. However, Punch and Judy also engaged closely with operatic traditions and institutions, and while its Aldeburgh première is remembered as a scandalous provocation, a closer look at this event suggests that the opera was welcomed as a subtle intervention into the British operatic scene rather than a repudiation of it. The opera itself, moreover, performs a similar sense of revolt as inseparable from tradition, of individuality as inseparable from institutions and audiences, and of the supports for artistic production as necessarily also constraints.

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HARRISON BIRTWISTLE'S CHRONOMETER: AN UPDATE

Hodges

2023

Tempo

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BeforeThe Mask: Birtwistle's electronic music collaborations with Peter Zinovieff

Cited by 4 publications

References 15 publications

Harrison Birtwistle’s “Orpheus-Project”: Images of Melancholy

Harrison Birtwistle’s “Orpheus-Project”: Images of Melancholy

Confronting Opera in the 1960s: Birtwistle's Punch and Judy

HARRISON BIRTWISTLE'S CHRONOMETER: AN UPDATE

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