Download University of London Foundation Day:

Chancellor, by authority of the Council, I present to you this person on whom the Council desires
you to confer the honorary degree of Doctor of Music.
Sir Harrison Birtwistle
Sir Harrison Birtwistle is without question one of the greatest living composers, and one of the
most significant figures in contemporary music of the past half-century.
He was born in Accrington, Lancashire in 1934, and from an early age studied the clarinet and
composed in a style he later described as ‘sub Vaughan Williams’. From 1952 to 1955 he
attended the Royal Manchester College of Music, which at the time was a veritable hotbed of
musical modernism, far in advance of such musical taste in the capital. Many of his
contemporaries in Manchester were to become future luminaries of British music, including Sir
Peter Maxwell Davies, Alexander Goehr, Elgar Howarth and John Ogdon.
From 1957-58 Birtwistle studied at the Royal Academy of Music. During this time he wrote
Refrains and Choruses for wind quintet (which we are to hear in the Interlude), the first
composition he still acknowledges, and which received its first performance at the 1959
Cheltenham Festival. He developed slowly as a composer and his output in the early 1960s was
relatively slender. Perhaps the defining moment was when he was awarded a Harkness
Fellowship in 1966, which enabled him to spend two years studying in the United States. Whilst
there, he finished his first large-scale work, the opera Punch and Judy, premiered by the English
Opera Group in June 1967 at Aldeburgh. Whether or not Benjamin Britten actually walked out
of this performance may never be definitely established, but it was clear to many other musicians
and critics that a major new talent had arrived on the scene. It remains a work of supreme power
and character to this day, and sits as one of British musical theatre’s most original creations.
Birtwistle’s career now began to gather momentum, with Nomos, his first BBC Proms
commission in 1968 and Verses for Ensembles in 1969, the first of many works written for the
London Sinfonietta, but it was in 1972 that his large-scale orchestral work, The Triumph of Time,
brought his music to the attention of a wider public.
From 1975-83 he was music director at the National Theatre in London, which culminated in his
extraordinary score for the Oresteia of Aeschylus, a production created in collaboration with
poet and translator Tony Harrison and director Peter Hall. The intertwined elements of
mythology, ritual and theatre, central to Aeschylus’ dramas, became increasingly important
concerns for Birtwistle, leading to his second full-length opera, The Mask of Orpheus, first
performed at the English National Opera in 1986. In it, Birtwistle combines one of the most
fundamental myths of western culture with radical and innovative theatrical and musical
techniques. Theatre in the broadest sense also shapes many of his non-operatic vocal and
instrumental works, through elements of ritual and cyclic structures. For example, his Secret
Theatre of 1984 divides the ensemble spatially into a largely melodic ‘cantus’ and a highly
rhythmic ‘continuum’, the whole piece creating, in Paul Griffiths’ words, “the accompaniment to
a concealed opera we do not need to see.”
For all his reputation for writing music of tremendous energy and even violence (most
memorably in his 1995 BBC Proms commission Panic), there is a complementary strain of
lyricism which is equally central to his vision. Pulse Shadows (completed in 1996) is a key
example of this aspect of his work, alternating instrumental movements for string quartet with
songs for soprano and chamber ensemble, delicate settings of the elusive and profound poetry of
Paul Celan. In this vein, I recall the exquisite harmonic frisson in 17 Tate Riffs for the opening of
Tate Modern and the World Premiere recording made at the Royal Academy of Music at that
time.
Over the years, Birtwistle has received a long succession of commissions from the world’s
leading opera companies, orchestras, contemporary music groups, chamber ensembles and
soloists and it is only possible to mention a few highlights amongst so many distinguished
works: the monumental Earth Dances, written for the BBC Symphony in 1986, Endless Parade
for virtuoso trumpeter Håkan Hardenberger in 1987, Gawain for the Royal Opera House, Covent
Garden, in 1991, Exody for the Chicago Symphony in 1997 (which I hasten to add, with
shameless partisanship, received an equally stunning performance soon after at the Academy),
The Tree of Strings for the Arditti Quartet in 2007, and most recently, The Minotaur also for the
Royal Opera House, given its first performances earlier this year.
His music has attracted many of the world’s leading conductors, including Pierre Boulez, Sir
Simon Rattle, Daniel Barenboim and Christoph von Dohnanyi.
He has also received many honours, including Fellowship of the Royal Academy of Music, the
Grawemeyer Award and Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres in 1986, a British knighthood in 1988,
the Siemens Prize in 1995 and he was appointed a British Companion of Honour in 2001. He
has also been Henry Purcell Professor of Music at King’s College, London and both Director of
Contemporary Music and Visiting Professor of Composition at the Academy. I recall with great
fondness the time Sir Harry welcomed me to his wonderful silk factory-house in Wiltshire to
give a much-needed steer. His memorably sage advice, as we walked amongst various species of
Deadly Night Shade in his exotic garden, was focused towards a rigorous but enlightened
curriculum to serve the needs of ambitious and talented young composers.
Birtwistle has always been extraordinarily tenacious and single-minded in pursuing his own
creative muse, and has never allowed himself to be swayed by the shifting winds of musical
fashion. Daniel Barenboim has said that he regards Birtwistle, along with Elliot Carter and Pierre
Boulez, as one of the three most significant voices in contemporary music, and at the age of 74,
he continues to write some of the most exciting, challenging and innovative music of our age.
Chancellor, it is with great pleasure that I ask you to confer the Honorary Degree of Doctor of
Music honoris causa on Sir Harrison Birtwistle.
Delivered by Professor Jonathan Freeman-Attwood, Principal, Royal Academy of Music