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