Born in Accrington, Lancashire, in 1934, Harrison Birtwistle was encouraged to pursue his passion for music at an early age. His mother bought him a clarinet when he was seven, and arranged for him to have lessons with the local bandmaster. Harrison Birtwistle soon was proficient enough to perform in the local choral society’s productions of Messiah, to join the local military-style band and to play in the orchestra accompanying the Gilbert and Sullivan performances.
In 1952 he entered the Royal Manchester College of Music on a clarinet scholarship. He studied clarinet and composition. In 1965, he sold his clarinets to devote himself to composition, and received a Harkness Fellowship, which gave him the opportunity to continue his studies at Princeton University, where he completed the opera Punch and Judy. With The Triumph of Time and Verses for Ensembles, it established Harrison Birtwistle’s reputation in British music.
In 1972 he wrote his only film score, that of The Offence, starring Sean Connery.
From 1973 to 1984 his lyric tragedy The Mask of Orpheus was performed by the world’s leading music groups. The opera is structured around a non-linear portrayal of events, told by two sets of singers performing contradictory versions of the same event. Harrison Birtwistle was inspired by Satie’s Trois gymnopédies which he likened to viewing the same musical object from different angles.
Harrison Birtwistle’s works approach music through abstraction and the same musical ideas can consist of deconstructed compositions or repetition with extensive variation, for instance. His music is structured like a drama rather than following the rules and logic of classical music forms. As a result, his writing is often theatrical in conception, even when he is not composing a visual piece that involves stage action.
In 1975 Harrison Birtwistle became the musical director of the newly established Royal National Theatre, a post that he held for eight years. Some large-scale works from the following decade are the concertos Endless Parade for trumpet and Antiphonies for piano, the operas The Second Mrs Kong and Gawain and the orchestral score Earth Dances.
Harrison Birtwistle was made a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1986. In 1987 he received the Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition and he was honoured with a knighthood in 1988.
He was Henry Purcell Professor of Music at London King’s College from 1994 to 2001 and Director of Composition at the Royal Academy of Music in London. In 1995 he was awarded the Ernst von Siemen Music Prize.
Also in 1995, the saxophone concertante work Panic received a high-profile premiere at the Last Night of the BBC Proms to an estimated worldwide audience of 100 million. In 2001, when Harrison Birtwistle was made a Companion of Honour, The Shadow of Night had been commissioned by the Cleveland Orchestra for the pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard and the violinist Christian Tetzlaff, to be conducted by Christoph von Dohnányi. The next year, Pulse Shadows, a meditation for soprano, string quartet and chamber ensemble won the Gramophone Award for best contemporary recording.
Harrison Birtwistle has been featured at many majors festivals and concert series, including Lucerne Festival, Stockholm New Music, Holland Festival, Wien Modern, the Konzerthaus in Vienna, the South Bank Centre in London, Settembre Musica in Turin and Milan, Wittener Tage, Salzburg Festival, Glyndebourne and the BBC Proms.
His music has attracted famous international conductors like Daniel Barenboim, Pierre Boulez, Christoph von Dohnányi, Peter Eötvös, Elgar Howarth, Oliver Knussen, Antonio Pappano, Simon Rattle and Franz Welser-Möst.
It is not easy to link Harrison Birtwistle’s music to any particular school or movement. His works combine a modernist aesthetic with mythic power; it is a complex music with a clear and distinctive voice. His early work is sometimes evocative of Stravinsky, who, abandoning the linear emotional continuities of the late Romantics, resorted to an anti-expressive technique of juxtaposing contrasting blocks of sound within rigid rhythmic grids. Messiaen is another composer acknowledged by Harrison Birtwistle as an influence. With Varèse, they are known for their extensions of Stravinskian techniques. Their concept of musical time differs from the mainstream construction of tension and release, momentum and direction, forward-directed time of the Western Classical and Romantic music. Harrison Birtwistle’s musical time was circular, similar to that of the seasons or the ever-repeating life-cycle, where events come round again and again.
In 2015 he received his seventh British Composer Award.
In 1952 he entered the Royal Manchester College of Music on a clarinet scholarship. He studied clarinet and composition. In 1965, he sold his clarinets to devote himself to composition, and received a Harkness Fellowship, which gave him the opportunity to continue his studies at Princeton University, where he completed the opera Punch and Judy. With The Triumph of Time and Verses for Ensembles, it established Harrison Birtwistle’s reputation in British music.
In 1972 he wrote his only film score, that of The Offence, starring Sean Connery.
From 1973 to 1984 his lyric tragedy The Mask of Orpheus was performed by the world’s leading music groups. The opera is structured around a non-linear portrayal of events, told by two sets of singers performing contradictory versions of the same event. Harrison Birtwistle was inspired by Satie’s Trois gymnopédies which he likened to viewing the same musical object from different angles.
Harrison Birtwistle’s works approach music through abstraction and the same musical ideas can consist of deconstructed compositions or repetition with extensive variation, for instance. His music is structured like a drama rather than following the rules and logic of classical music forms. As a result, his writing is often theatrical in conception, even when he is not composing a visual piece that involves stage action.
In 1975 Harrison Birtwistle became the musical director of the newly established Royal National Theatre, a post that he held for eight years. Some large-scale works from the following decade are the concertos Endless Parade for trumpet and Antiphonies for piano, the operas The Second Mrs Kong and Gawain and the orchestral score Earth Dances.
Harrison Birtwistle was made a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1986. In 1987 he received the Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition and he was honoured with a knighthood in 1988.
He was Henry Purcell Professor of Music at London King’s College from 1994 to 2001 and Director of Composition at the Royal Academy of Music in London. In 1995 he was awarded the Ernst von Siemen Music Prize.
Also in 1995, the saxophone concertante work Panic received a high-profile premiere at the Last Night of the BBC Proms to an estimated worldwide audience of 100 million. In 2001, when Harrison Birtwistle was made a Companion of Honour, The Shadow of Night had been commissioned by the Cleveland Orchestra for the pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard and the violinist Christian Tetzlaff, to be conducted by Christoph von Dohnányi. The next year, Pulse Shadows, a meditation for soprano, string quartet and chamber ensemble won the Gramophone Award for best contemporary recording.
Harrison Birtwistle has been featured at many majors festivals and concert series, including Lucerne Festival, Stockholm New Music, Holland Festival, Wien Modern, the Konzerthaus in Vienna, the South Bank Centre in London, Settembre Musica in Turin and Milan, Wittener Tage, Salzburg Festival, Glyndebourne and the BBC Proms.
His music has attracted famous international conductors like Daniel Barenboim, Pierre Boulez, Christoph von Dohnányi, Peter Eötvös, Elgar Howarth, Oliver Knussen, Antonio Pappano, Simon Rattle and Franz Welser-Möst.
It is not easy to link Harrison Birtwistle’s music to any particular school or movement. His works combine a modernist aesthetic with mythic power; it is a complex music with a clear and distinctive voice. His early work is sometimes evocative of Stravinsky, who, abandoning the linear emotional continuities of the late Romantics, resorted to an anti-expressive technique of juxtaposing contrasting blocks of sound within rigid rhythmic grids. Messiaen is another composer acknowledged by Harrison Birtwistle as an influence. With Varèse, they are known for their extensions of Stravinskian techniques. Their concept of musical time differs from the mainstream construction of tension and release, momentum and direction, forward-directed time of the Western Classical and Romantic music. Harrison Birtwistle’s musical time was circular, similar to that of the seasons or the ever-repeating life-cycle, where events come round again and again.
In 2015 he received his seventh British Composer Award.