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Britten's Ambiguities; Tippett's Times; Metzer's Borrowings - Philip Rupprecht, Britten's Musical Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. viii + 358 pp. ISBN 0 521 63154 8. - David Clarke, The Music and Thought of Michael Tippett: Modern Times and Metaphysics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. xii + 343 pp. ISBN 0 521 58292 X. - David Metzer, Quotation and Cultural Meaning in Twentieth-Century Music. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. viii + 230 pp. ISBN 0 521 82509 1.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2020
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References
1 Benjamin Britten in an interview with Donald Mitchell, recorded for the CBC, February 1969. Quoted in Paul Kildea's article ‘In his Own Words’, Friday Review, The Guardian, 18 July 2003, 4. The article concerns the book Britten on Britten, ed. Paul Kildea (Oxford, 2003).Google Scholar
2 Michael Tippett, ‘Poets in a Barren Age’, Moving into Aquarius (2nd edn, St Albans, 1974), 155–6.Google Scholar
3 Rupprecht (p. 28) cites Tippett's remark that Britten's music works always ‘in relation to some tradition’. See Blyth, Alan, Remembering Britten (London, 1981), 66.Google Scholar
4 From an interview Britten gave to High Fidelity Magazine, December 1959, cited in Humphrey Carpenter, Benjamin Britten: A Biography (London, 1992), 51. Tippett added weight to this characterization when, in his fiftieth-birthday tribute, he cited Britten's comments to Murray Schafer that ‘my technique is to tear all the waste away; to achieve perfect clarity of expression, that is my aim’. Schafer, British Composers in Interview (London, 1963), 118.Google Scholar
5 This concept is based on Tippett's interpretation of Jung's formulation of image as set out in Carl Gustav Jung, Psychological Types, ed. Herbert Read, Michael Fordham and Gerhard Adler, trans. Helton G. Baynes, rev. Richard F. C. Hull (London, 1971). It is the subject of a detailed discussion in chapter 2 of Clarke's book, but may be partially summarized as ‘the essential vehicle of artistic communication, mediating between the inscrutable processes of the imagination [in a Jungian sense] and an all-too-imperfect empirical reality’ (p. 13). This, it is argued, is felt in the music as a ‘tension between the demands of musical syntax and a desire … to transcend it’ (p. 34). For the analyst this amounts to a dialectic between ‘the mental and the sensuous’ (p. 35).Google Scholar
6 The more comprehensive approaches taken by James Pritchett, Kyle Gann and Robert Adlington, on John Cage, Conlon Nancarrow and Harrison Birtwistle respectively, no doubt reflect the less extensive coverage of such composers' works at the times when those studies were written.Google Scholar
7 J. Peter Burkholder, All Made of Tunes: Charles Ives and the Uses of Musical Borrowing (New Haven and London, 1995).Google Scholar
8 See Edward T. Cone, The Composer's Voice (Berkeley, 1974); Carolyn Abbate, Unsung Voices: Opera and Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, 1991); Peter Kivy, ‘Opera Talk: A Philosophical “Phantasie”’, Cambridge Opera Journal, 3 (1991), 63–77; David Rosen, ‘Cone's and Kivy's “World of Opera”’, Cambridge Opera Journal, 4 (1992), 61–74; and Richard Taruskin, review of Abbate, Unsung Voices, Cambridge Opera Journal, 4 (1992), 187–97.Google Scholar
9 The stated aim of the book is to ‘explore the role of language in Britten's music with particular concern for questions of utterance’. By adopting such an approach, it is claimed, it is possible to address, from a new perspective, a central feature of Britten's art – ‘his intuitive ability to find compelling musical realizations for speech in all its diversity’ (p. 30).Google Scholar
10 This consists of the view that the meaning of human utterance is entirely dependent upon its social context and use. In Peter Grimes, for example, speech acts and naming are understood as gestures that are not made in innocence, but which acquire political dimensions: ‘An audience cannot think Peter's identity independently of the choric hate speech of the Borough … This reciprocally formed operatic subjecthood is legible in the score's concentration on one central theme as the relay between individual and society’ (p. 73).Google Scholar
11 Donald Mitchell, ‘A Billy Budd Notebook (1979–1991)‘, Benjamin Britten: Billy Budd, ed. Mervyn Cooke and Philip Reed (Cambridge, 1993), 111–34 (p. 128).Google Scholar
12 In this instance, the mode of orchestral utterance is, of course, characterized by its detachment from the action of the vocalists and, in the case of Claggart's music, from the body of the singer.Google Scholar
13 See Brett, Philip, ‘Salvation at Sea: Billy Budd’, The Britten Companion, ed. Christopher Palmer (London, 1984), 133–43; Clifford Hindley, ‘Britten's Billy Budd: The “Interview Chords” Again’, Musical Quarterly, 78 (1994), 99–126; Arnold Whittall, ‘“Twisted Relations”: Method and Meaning in Britten's Billy Budd’, Cambridge Opera Journal, 2 (1990), 145–71.Google Scholar
14 See, for example, Benjamin Britten: The Turn of the Screw, ed. Patricia Howard (Cambridge, 1985), 81–2. Rupprecht suggests that the opera's argument ‘never escapes a kind of hermeneutic circularity, for there is no way to hear themes in isolation’ (p. 177).Google Scholar
15 In this way, it is argued, the two themes are used to convey the idea of corrupted innocence. This is reflected in Miles's ‘Malo’ song, which shares the ‘mechanical sequence constructions’ of both themes (p. 168). It is also suggested that the ‘ghostliness’ of the themes makes up for any perceived loss of ambiguity through the presence of singing ghosts. This is a response to Gary Tomlinson, Metaphysical Song: An Essay on Opera (Princeton, 1999), 155–6.Google Scholar
16 For an outline of some of the more overtly determinist interpretations in Humphrey Carpenter's biography, see Mervyn Cooke's ‘Introduction’ to The Cambridge Companion to Benjamin Britten, ed. Cooke (Cambridge, 1999), 1–10 (pp. 6–7). Also see Hindley, Clifford, ‘Homosexual Self-Affirmation and Self-Oppression in Two Britten Operas’, Musical Quarterly, 76 (1992), 143–68.Google Scholar
17 Letter of 6 November 1954, cited in Carpenter, Benjamin Britten, 361.Google Scholar
18 This characterization of Victorian values draws on John C. Somerville, ‘The High and Low Point in the History of Childhood’, The Rise and Fall of Childhood (Beverly Hills, 1982), 160–78 (p. 168).Google Scholar
19 Further literal-mindedness is reflected in Britten's use of serial technique when Aschenbach sings of delighting in fastidious choice (see p. 250).Google Scholar
20 Rupprecht notes Colin Graham's remark that ‘Mann's story is sadistic in its treatment and observation of Aschenbach's plight and Britten's is compassionate’. Colin Graham, ‘A Personal Note for Today’, New York Metropolitan Opera Playbill, 18 February 1994.Google Scholar
21 As Rupprecht notes, much has already been made of this quotation. See Roseberry, Eric, ‘“Abraham and Isaac” Revisited: Reflections on a Theme and its Inversion’, On Mahler and Britten: Essays in Honour of Donald Mitchell on his Seventieth Birthday, ed. Philip Reed (Woodbridge, 1995), 253–66; and Mervyn Cooke, Benjamin Britten: War Requiem (Cambridge, 1996).Google Scholar
22 Since the work conveys a narrative, Rupprecht describes it as an opera inflected by ritual experience rather than a ritual itself, although its performance, ‘at the level of each single gesture, draws near to a ritual’ (p. 222).Google Scholar
23 Mervyn Cooke, Britten and the Far East: Asian Influences in the Music of Benjamin Britten (Woodbridge, 1998).Google Scholar
24 The implication of Rupprecht's interpretation – that the Sumidagawa original is not life-affirming or optimistic – is, however, problematic.Google Scholar
25 Arnold Whittall, ‘“Is There a Choice at All?”: King Priam and Motives for Analysis’, Tippett Studies, ed. David Clarke (Cambridge, 1999), 55–77 (p. 77).Google Scholar
26 Elsewhere in his book Clarke describes this as diremption – the gap between things as they ought to be, in the intellligible world, and things as they actually are, in the empirical world.Google Scholar
27 At the same time, Tippett can be seen positively embracing the fragmented nature of his musical materials. As Kenneth Gloag points out, ‘Whereas in A Child of Our Time he attempted to mediate between his disparate materials and impose an artificial unity upon them, in The Mask of Time he now accepts fragmentation as the consequence of the intertextual allusions and extra-musical aspirations. That Tippett came to this position reflects his own changing perception of the world that surrounded him.‘ Kenneth Gloag, A Child of Our Time (Cambridge, 1999), 99.Google Scholar
28 For more information on Tippett's writings see Venn, Edward, ‘Idealism and Ideology in Tippett's Writings’, Michael Tippett: Music and Literature, ed. Suzanne Robinson (Aldershot, 2002), 35–59.Google Scholar
29 A number of these chapters had appeared in print in various journals, but their relocation in one source generates a series of dialectical exchanges they otherwise would have been denied.Google Scholar
30 The ironic, in this context, is based on the early Romantic conception, as expressed in the work of Friedrich Schlegel, in which it is the necessary opposite of the affirming, enthusiastic and inspired. In this sense it lies alongside the critical and reflective.Google Scholar
31 Clarke argues that the principal text for providing insights into Tippett's idea of a late style is his E. William Doty Lectures in Fine Arts, Second Series, 1976 (Austin, TX, 1979).Google Scholar
32 These ‘emancipation-seeking sonorities’, it is argued, become important to the evocation of a world beyond appearance. The choice of words here follows on from Clarke's desire to find the right aesthetic language as a prerequisite for an analysis of compositional issues (p. 105).Google Scholar
33 Clarke cites the prelude to Act 1 of King Priam as an example of ‘unaestheticized experience of the Dionysiac’ (p. 72). To my ears, an even more powerful example would be Achilles' ‘war cry’, which brings Act 2 to a frenzied end. This is further emphasized by the contrast between this vocal style and the one Achilles uses earlier in the act, in the tent setting of scene ii.Google Scholar
34 This process is related to Tippett's own formulation of a (subjective) ‘notional archetype’ acting critically upon an (objective) ‘historical archetype’. See Borthwick, Alastair, ‘Tonal Elements and their Significance in Tippett's Sonata No. 3 for Piano’, Tippett Studies, ed. Clarke, 117–44, and Michael Tippett, ‘Archetypes of Concert Music’, Tippett on Music, ed. Meirion Bowen (Oxford, 1995), 89–108.Google Scholar
35 See Example 5.7 (p. 176), which reveals the use of interval class 5 as a stable element, and Example 5.10 (p. 194), which illustrates the prominence of both ics 5 and 6. Example 6.2 (p. 214) also explores the role of ic 5 in the Triple Concerto.Google Scholar
36 The example provided concerns figures 56–8 in the Concerto for Orchestra, first movement; see Example 4.2 (p. 110). Another example appears in chapter 4, on The Vision of Saint Augustine, with reference to the contrasting strata at figures 131–2. This manifold, presented through simultaneity rather than succession, is interpreted as a possible metaphor for Augustine's understanding of God's view of time in eternity, ‘in which all events, past, present and future, are simultaneously available’ (p. 116).Google Scholar
37 By this point, Clarke's insistence on Tippett's modernist credentials begins to sound a little over-earnest. I also begin to hear features (like the comic, pastoral and dance elements) which point to a specifically English form of modernism. Although these are not such obvious components of The Vision of Saint Augustine (exceptions, perhaps, being the pastoral string texture at the opening, and the dancing fanfares at the end of Part I), Clarke's description, to my mind, over-emphasizes the ‘tortured’ mosaic interpretation. It is also at odds with Kemp's suggestion that the piece ‘belongs to the tradition of such works as Elgar's The Dream of Gerontius or Delius's Sea Drift’. Ian Kemp, Michael Tippett: The Composer and his Music (London, 1984), 401.Google Scholar
38 As evidence for this comparison, Clarke points to processes that are more mechanistic than organic, the lack of middle- or background progression towards a goal, the fact that the work ends where it began, and the lack of forward temporal momentum in the Byzantium chord, around which other objects are arranged spatially.Google Scholar
39 Anthony Clare and Michael Tippett, ‘In the Psychiatrist's Chair’, The Listener, 116, no. 2973, 14 August 1986, 11. Clarke's statement tropes Isaiah Berlin's remark that Tippett's ‘moral and metaphysical ideas and symbols’ present the listener with ‘a vision of experience about whose authenticity there can be no doubt’. Isaiah Berlin, in Michael Tippett: A Symposium on his 60th Birthday, ed. Ian Kemp (London, 1965), 62.Google Scholar
40 Eliot, T. S., ‘Tradition and the Original Talent’, Selected Essays (3rd edn, London, 1951), 13–22 (p. 18).Google Scholar
41 Michael Tippett, Those Twentieth Century Blues: An Autobiography (London, 1991), 274.Google Scholar
42 Tippett, E. William Doty Lectures in Fine Arts, Second Series, 1976, 38.Google Scholar
43 Arnold Whittall, ‘Byzantium: Tippett, Yeats and the Limitations of Affinity’, Music and Letters, 74 (1993), 383–98. Whittall notes that ‘Byzantium has the effect of questioning, not simply experiencing, the composer's perceived affinity with the poet. It cannot therefore be regarded primarily as an artefact’ (p. 393).Google Scholar
44 Clarke also explores ways in which Byzantium develops a dialectical stance towards the Stravinskian aesthetic by contrasting Tippett's use of octatonicism with its use in Stravinsky's Song of the Nightingale; see pp. 251–4.Google Scholar
45 David Cairns, ‘Tippett and The Midsummer Marriage’, CD booklet to the Lyrita re-release of the Royal Opera House's 1971 recording under Sir Colin Davis (Lyrita Recorded Edition, 1995), 4–9 (p. 6).Google Scholar
46 Kemp, Michael Tippett, and Arnold Whittall, The Music of Britten and Tippett: Studies in Themes and Techniques (2nd edn, Cambridge, 1990).Google Scholar
47 Notable exceptions to this include dialectics between an aesthetic of transcendence and Tippett's views on the Polish uprising of 1956, discussed in chapter 4 in relation to The Visions of Augustine, and between the televisual and the (early Romantic) sublime in chapter 5 in relation to The Mask of Time.Google Scholar
48 Clarke states that ‘just as the biblical epic stands behind certain of Handel's oratorios, so, I would argue, aspects of the aesthetics of television inform The Mask of Time’ (p. 154). One of the ways this is expressed is through the ‘parcelling up of complexes of ideas into bite-size chunks’, as seen in Tippett's editing of Shelley's ‘Triumph of Life’ text (p. 156).Google Scholar
49 See Gates, Henry Louis, Jr, The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism (New York, 1988).Google Scholar
50 Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyperreality, trans. William Weaver (New York, 1986), 146–7. This view is, surely, in need of critique. A modified version might be, to paraphrase Joseph Auner, a realm with found objects from a vague and undifferentiated historical past. See Auner, ‘“Sing it for Me”: Posthuman Ventriloquism in Recent Popular Music’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 128 (2003), 98–122 (p. 120).Google Scholar
51 The exception to this is his discussion of Oswald's ‘DAB’. Although this is fairly limited in scope, and is based upon Kevin Holm-Hudson's ‘Quotation and Context: Sampling and John Oswald's Plunderphonics’, Leonardo Music Journal, 7 (1997), 17–25, it does point in some interesting directions.Google Scholar
52 For an alternative reading of Moby see Auner, ‘“Sing it for Me”'. Although Auner observes that songs by Moby, Radiohead and others result in human voices being ‘mechanized and drained of subjectivity’, his description of mechanized voices entering a web of cultural meaning does at least posit the productive potential of the posthuman for, in the words of Katherine Hayles, ‘opening up new ways of thinking about what being human means’; Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago, 1999), 285.Google Scholar
53 The point is made that Oswald's CD cover grafts Jackson's head onto a female body, but this is not used to undermine the idea that the voice represents the essence of Jackson. On p. 179 this has been modified to ‘the individuality of superstar performers like Jackson rests upon distinct qualities, such as voice and image’, but soon after the argument reverts to ‘performers are nothing more than timbre’ (p. 180). Quite how all this relates to Jackson's artificiality is not clear either. For an alternative view see Bradby, Barbara, ‘Sampling Sexuality: Gender, Technology and the Body in Dance Music’, Popular Music, 12 (1993), 155–76. Bradby observes that acts such as M/A/R/R/S were concerned with sampling men's ideas, whereas Black Box sampled women's bodies (p. 172).Google Scholar
54 This example relates to that of Lucia's reminiscences in Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor, which Metzer cites at the start of his chapter on madness. In this scene, directly following the murder, the orchestra presents fragments of earlier moments of her life in the opera.Google Scholar
55 Another, rather different, portrayal of madness is discussed in Rupprecht's consideration of Death in Venice, during the section entitled ‘“Bliss of Madness”: The Shattered Operatic Self in Act 2‘. Here Rupprecht points to the restraining role of the orchestra, as Aschenbach's passionate utterances are held within the ostensibly strict framework of a passacaglia.Google Scholar
56 Numinous is meant in the sense that Abbate uses it to describe music that is heard by characters on the stage.Google Scholar
57 See p. 78, note 9. See also Herbert H. Buchanan, ‘A Key to Schoenberg's Erwartung (Op. 17)‘, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 20 (1967), 434–49.Google Scholar
58 Some of these attempts are outlined in Metzer's footnote.Google Scholar
59 Robert Falck, ‘Marie Pappenheim, Schoenberg, and the Studien über Hysterie’, German Literature and Music, An Aesthetic Function: 1890–1989, ed. Claus Reschke and Howard Pollack (Munich, 1992), 131–44.Google Scholar
60 For a critique of psychoanalytical interpretations of Erwartung see Street, Alan, ‘“The Ear of the Other”: Style and Identity in Schoenberg's Eight Songs, Op. 6‘, Schoenberg and Words: The Modernist Years, ed. Charlotte Cross and Russell A. Berman (New York, 2000), 120–7.Google Scholar
61 Similarly, Clarke interprets Tippett's use of a quotation from The Midsummer Marriage in the Triple Concerto as staging a rapprochement with his past (see p. 213). Also of note is Rupprecht's formulation of a rhetoric of quotation in Britten's Lachrymae: Reflections on a Song of Dowland, for viola and piano (1950; see pp. 14–21). He also discusses Britten's Tristan references in Death in Venice, which form a background harmonic-contrapuntal presence ‘of which Aschenbach seems unaware’ (p. 251), and which present ‘a topography of the divided self’ (p. 252).Google Scholar
62 The Mingus work was a protest against the Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus, who called in the National Guard to prevent black schoolchildren from entering certain schools; and the implication – although this seems less well founded – is that Davies's work mocks King George III.Google Scholar
63 Robin Holloway, ‘Benjamin Britten: Tributes and Memories’, Tempo, 120 (1977), 5–6.Google Scholar
64 Kemp, Michael Tippett, 451.Google Scholar