Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Love it or loathe it, few would disagree that the music of Harrison Birtwistle stands amongst the most assured, original and challenging music ever to have been produced by a British composer. While for some the uncompromisingly modernist surface of his music can be an obstacle to closer acquaintance, for others, it is Birtwistle's articulation of deep aspects of the human psyche that continues to excite and fascinate. In this book, Jonathan Cross - a leading commentator on contemporary music - aims to uncover the sources of Birtwistle's thinking, and to present a critical account of his musical, dramatic and aesthetic preoccupations through an examination of such topics as theatre, myth, ritual, pastoral, pulse and line. He offers a range of contexts within which the music can be understood so that the curious and the initiated alike may be drawn towards new and enriching experiences of the extraordinarily powerful music of Harrison Birtwistle.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

Harrison Birtwistle is nothing if not controversial: Adlington calls him "the most eminent and acclaimed of contemporary British composers"; Michael Oliver (dubiously) dubs him "a great composer, perhaps the greatest now living." Highly thought of in England and Germany, Birtwistle is respected in the US but actually not played a great deal. And even an English critic famously dismissed one of Birtwistle's major pieces as "pure cacophony." Joining Michael Hall's Harrison Birtwistle in Recent Years (1998), both these slightly adulatory volumes are by fine British scholars and excellently written, and both will be very difficult for nonspecialists to digest. These are truly complementary works. Adlington (Univ. of Nottingham) focuses on Birtwistle's music in the large cultural context, eschewing close technical/theoretical analysis of the works and leading the reader through the complexities of cultural, dramatic, and rhetorical theory ranging from Aristotle to Adorno (and beyond). Literate, well informed, and well organized (by general themes--theaters, roles, texts, times, sections, layers, audiences--and by individual works), this is a book for advanced students, fans of the avant-garde, and fellow practitioners. Cross (Univ. of Bristol, editor of Musical Analysis) writes even more elegant prose, but his book bristles with analyses--detailed, comparative, arcane, and occasionally absolutely bewildering; despite its ludicrous claim that it is "accessible to anyone with an interest in modern music," this book will also bewilder anyone not familiar with Birtwistle's considerable output. Organized around themes similar to Adlington's--theaters, myth and ritual, verses and refrain, etc.--Cross's book seems unnecessarily diffuse, scattering its references to single works throughout many chapters. Despite his difficulty, Birtwistle is important enough to deserve his innings. Both these books do him justice and are recommended to very serious music libraries (but not the fainthearted). W. Metcalfe; emeritus, University of Vermont