Page "Harrison Birtwistle" Paragraph 10

Birtwistle's favourite image for explaining how his pieces work is to compare them to taking a walk through a town — especially the sort of small town more common in continental Europe than Britain.

Such a walk might start in the town square.

Having explored its main features, we would set off down one of the side streets.

As the walk continues, we might glimpse the town square down different streets, sometime a long way off, other times quite close.

We may never return to the square in the rest of the walk or we may visit a new part of it that was not explored initially.

Birtwistle suggests that this experience is akin to what he does in the music.

His image conveys the way that a core musical idea is altered, varied and distorted as the piece of music progresses.

The core music forms a reference point to which everything else is directed, even when we are walking in a completely different direction.

Sometimes we will be less aware that it is the same musical material we are hearing ; sometimes we may have been listening for a while before realising that we have heard this music before ( just as one might have been looking up the street before realising that it is the town square that can be glimpsed through the traffic ).

He is not, therefore, suggesting that we imagine this walk through the town as a literal explanation of what is happening in the music ; he does not ' recreate ' the effect in the music ( as Charles Ives does in some of his orchestral pieces ).