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Date: | Thu, 27 Jan 2000 12:19:47 +0100 |
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I wrote:
>>Gawain has an interesting story, full of knights, kings and fays...I
>>would guess thats quite appalling to children. Secondly Birtwistle is
>>*not* an atonal composer!
and Robrert Clemens replied:
>Musically, A. is completely correct, of course: HB is not an atonal
>composer in the conventional sense of the word. His use of dissonance is
>nothing to frighten a hardcore Metallica fan (or Searle, if you prefer a
>marginally more reputable eg); but people often misrep him as a hardcore
>atonalist because he shares the most annoying characteristic of the breed:
>a complete lack of understanding of the principle of dynamic contrast.
Well with Birtwistle its a strange thing: either people love his music
or they hate it. Robert obviously belongs to the latter group, me I think
to the first. Its true he often uses quite drastic dynamic contrasts, but
for me they fit to the composition. And he does it not in such a nearly
penetrant way like Kancheli.I think one should know quite a few works of
a composer to really judge about his music and Birtwistle wrote a couple
of just nice works e.g. Imaginary Landscape, Secret Theatre and Silbury
Air...these are not too dissonant/dynamic, at least for me. Gawain - I
do not really like it, actually - is maybe a bit overdone, some sort of
affected post-Wagneristic thing. I much prefer Birtwistles Mask of Orpheus
- which is more convincing for me as a kind of new concept of musical
tragedy (a blend of sounds and vision) - over the more traditional (as an
opera concept) Gawain. I also like Searl a lot! Its really a pity that
the cpo discs with the 5 symphonies are basically the only music of Searl
available on CD (at least here in Europe). I hope for more!
By the way, a funny typo I did in my first message! The *appalling* should
have been *appealing* of course (maybe a Freudian typo?).
Many thanks also to Nadine, Don and Steve who expressed exactly my thoughts
about the original topic of this thread, which I with my poor English did
not dare to bother the list with!
Achim Breiling
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