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Michael Tippett

 
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: Sir Michael Kemp Tippett
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(born Jan. 2, 1905, London, Eng. — died Jan. 8, 1998, London) British composer. Tippett studied composition (1923 – 28) at the Royal College of Music. His early music was conservative, but in the late 1930s he developed a personal, modernistic idiom that was marked by rhapsodic lyricism, intricate counterpoint, and polyphonic rhythms that have a lilting, bounding quality. He devoted most of his energies to compositions with words (generally his own), including the cantatas A Child of Our Time (1941) and The Mask of Time (1984), and the operas The Midsummer Marriage (1952), King Priam (1961), The Knot Garden (1969), and The Ice Break (1976). Beginning with King Priam, his surging rhythms and lush harmonies gave way to a starker, more taut style. His instrumental works include symphonies and string quartets.

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Biography: Michael Kemp Tippett
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Although the compositions of Sir Michael Kemp Tippett (born 1905) are not frequently performed, he is considered one of England's most important composers.

Michael Tippett was born in London on Jan. 2, 1905, and was attracted to music at an early age. His formal training was at the Royal College of Music, after which he taught school for a few years. He resigned to devote all of his time to composition and moved to a small village, where he worked steadily for several years. Later he destroyed all these early attempts and went back to the Royal College for further study.

Tippett then became musical director of Morley College in London, a college for working men and women, a position he held during the war years when London was under repeated attacks. He became known to the musical world as a skilled choral conductor with a contagious enthusiasm for music. A pacifist with firm convictions, he was jailed for three months in 1943, when he refused to accept the duties assigned him as a conscientious objector, holding that his musical activities were more important.

The cantata A Child of Our Time (1939; first performance 1944), written in protest over the fierce Nazi pogroms, reflects Tippett's strong feelings about the inhumanity of war. The work includes several black spirituals which are used as symbols of all persecuted peoples, giving the cantata broad significance. Following the end of World War II, the cantata was performed in several European countries that had been occupied by the Germans.

Tippett resigned from Morley College in 1951 and devoted himself to composition and to occasional appearances on the BBC radio and television. He was awarded several honorary doctorates, named commander of the Order of the British Empire, and was knighted in 1966. In the same year, he was composer-in-residence at the Aspen Festival.

Tippett's main early instrumental works are Concerto for Double String Orchestra (1940), Fantasia Concertante on a Theme of Corelli (1953), and Concerto for Orchestra (1963). These works tend to classify him as a neoclassic composer insofar as he employs baroque contrapuntal textures and intricate rhythms. His operas show a more subjective side of his musical personality. The Midsummer Marriage (1955) is ritualistic and symbolic, a kind of 20th-century Magic Flute in its mixture of high seriousness and comedy. Later operas are King Priam (1962) and The Knot Garden (1970), with a psychoanalytic theme. He also composed several choral works and songs.

It is difficult to categorize Tippett's music, because it follows none of the well-publicized avant-garde trends, but neither is it old-fashioned or reactionary. His style is a highly individual one, based on medieval polyphony, madrigal techniques, baroque textures, and 20th-century rhythms and harmonies.

Tippett unveiled a new work, Symphony No. 3 for soprano and orchestra, in 1972. The London Symphony Orchestra commissioned it, with a text by the composer. It consisted of two parts: the first entirely instrumental, followed by a soprano in sequence with four blues parts. Symphony No. 3 made its U.S. debut in 1974. That same year, Tippett made a two-month tour of the U.S., appearing as the conductor in Chicago during the performance of Symphony No. 3. He later appeared at the U.S. premiere of the opera The Knot Garden in Evanston, IL, and at a performance of his Double Concerto by the New York Philharmonic.

The composer conducted a lecture tour in the U.S. in 1976, and the next year attended the world premiere of his Symphony No. 4, commissioned and performed by the Chicago Symphony. That year also marked the debut of his fourth opera, The Ice Break, Tippett's first opera in a contemporary setting. The drama focused on family problems, racial tensions, and the drug scene. At one point in the opera, there is a confrontation between two rival gangs, one led by a jazz clarinetist, and the other by a classical violinist. The Ice Break made its U.S. debut in Boston in 1979.

Tippett celebrated his 75th birthday with the world premiere of String Quartet No. 4 in January 1980. It was just one of many extensive performances in Great Britain and elsewhere celebrating Tippett's milestone. Later that year, Tippett wrote Triple Concerto, for violin, viola, cello and orchestra, which was commissioned by the London Symphony Orchestra.

Tippett celebrated his 80th birthday with a two-week tour of Texas in January, 1985. The Houston Symphony performed several of his best works, and Tippett conducted two of the pieces, despite suffering from blindness in his right eye. The Dallas Symphony Orchestra performed the U.S. premiere of Words for Music Perhaps, which was actually written 25 years prior. This piece combined chamber music with a narrator reading text and poems. Following Dallas, Tippett went to Los Angeles for the world premiere of his Fourth Piano Sonata, then on to England for a series of events commemorating his birthday.

Tippett wrote his fifth opera, New Year, which made its world premiere in Houston in 1989. Like his previous works, it was quite eccentric, providing wild imagery with emotional music. Tippett had previously stated he would write no more operas, but said New Year insisted on being composed. It made its European debut at Glyndebourne in July 1990. The following year, Tippett unveiled Byzantium, a setting for soprano and orchestra over the Yeats poem. It was commissioned by the Chicago Symphony and Carnegie Hall, each celebrating their 100th year.

At the age of 90, Tippett was still composing music. In 1995, the London Symphony Orchestra gave the first public performance of The Rose Lake, which Tippett called a "song without words." The orchestra devoted much of its concert season to music by Tippett in honor of his birthday. His rich but idiosyncratic scores continued to gain the recognition they so deserved.

Further Reading

Selected writings and broadcast talks of Tippett were published as Moving into Aquarius (1959). A collection of essays on various aspects of Tippett's music is Ian Kemp, ed., Michael Tippett: A Symposium on His Sixtieth Birthday (1965). Also, read Arnold Whittall's The Music of Britten and Tippett: Studies on Themes and Techniques (1982), which details the writings of Benjamin Britten and Michael Tippett.

British History: Sir Michael Tippett
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Tippett, Sir Michael (1905-1998). Composer. Of Cornish stock, hence his Celtic temperament, Tippett studied at the Royal School of Music. Disillusioned by the realities of the First World War, he turned to socialism, then pacifism (a conscientious objector in the Second World War, briefly imprisoned 1943). Tippett's own music was initially conservative, but he soon developed a strongly personal idiom based on complex rhythms and long lyrical phrases; to symphonies and chamber music were added oratorio (A Child of Our Time, 1941) and operas with his own librettos (The Midsummer Marriage, King Priam, The Knot Garden).

 
Columbia Encyclopedia: Sir Michael Tippett
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Tippett, Sir Michael, 1905-98, English composer, b. London. Tippett studied at the Royal College of Music. During World War II he was briefly imprisoned as a conscientious objector. His strongly held socio-political views as well as his humanistic approach and mystical bent are often reflected in his work. His music is typically neoclassical in form, and blends the tonal, the modal, and the contemporary. Tippett utilized British folk, American jazz, and African elements in some of his works. He was knighted in 1966. His compositions include a concerto for double string orchestra (1939); the oratorio A Child of Our Time (1944); four symphonies (1945, 1958, 1973, 1977); five string quartets (1928, 1942, 1946, 1979, 1991); the symphonic The Rose Lake (1993); and the operas Midsummer Marriage (1955), King Priam (1962), The Knot Garden (1970), The Ice Break (1977), and New Year (1989).

Bibliography

See his autobiography, Those 20th Century Blues (1990), Tippett on Music (1995), and biography by M. Bowen; study by E. W. White (1979).

Wikipedia: Michael Tippett
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Sir Michael Kemp Tippett OM CH CBE (2 January 1905 – 8 January 1998) was one of the foremost British composers of the 20th century.[citation needed]

Contents

Early years

Tippett was born in London of English and Cornish stock. His mother was a charity worker and a suffragette,[1] and he was a cousin of suffragette leader Charlotte Despard.[2]

Although he enjoyed his childhood, after losing their hotel business in southern France, his parents decided to travel through and live on the Continent, and Michael and his brother attended boarding schools in England. At that time, Tippett won a scholarship and studied at Fettes College, Edinburgh, but he soon moved to Stamford School after some extremely unhappy personal experience. This, combined with his discovering his homosexuality, contributed to making Tippett's teenage years lonely and rather stressful. Although he was open about his sexual orientation,[3] it seems that he started to feel emotional strain from a rather early age, and this later became a major motivation to his composition. Before his time at Stamford, Tippett hardly had any contact with music at all, let alone formal musical training. He recalled that it was in Stamford, where he had piano lessons and saw Malcolm Sargent conducting, that he decided to become a composer, although he did not know what it meant or how to start.

Musical studies

He registered as a student in the Royal College of Music, where he studied composition with Charles Wood and C. H. Kitson, and the former's teaching on counterpoint had profound influence on Tippett's future compositional style; many of his works, despite the complicated sonority, are essentially contrapuntal. At the RCM, Tippett also studied conducting with Adrian Boult and Malcolm Sargent. In the 1920s, living simply in Surrey, he plunged himself into musical life, conducting amateur choirs and local operas. Later, he taught at Morley College.[3]

Unlike his contemporaries William Walton and Benjamin Britten, Tippett was a late developer as a composer and was severely critical of his early compositions. At the age of 30, he studied counterpoint and fugue with R. O. Morris. His first mature compositions show a fascination with these aspects.

Formerly a member of the Communist Party, in 1935 Tippett broke with them to join the Trotskyist Bolshevik-Leninist Group.[2] He soon moved on to pacifism and joined the Peace Pledge Union. In the Second World War he registered as a conscientious objector, but refused to accept a condition involving giving up his musical work at Morley College; this led to a sentence of three months imprisonment in Wormwood Scrubs, which he meticulously listed in his Who's Who entry. He later served as Chair and then President of the Peace Pledge Union, and one of his last public acts was to unveil the Commemorative Stone to Conscientious Objectors in Tavistock Square, Bloomsbury, London, on 15 May 1994, International Conscientious Objectors' Day.

Maturity

From the mid-1960s until the early 1970s, Tippett had a close relationship with the Leicestershire Schools Symphony Orchestra (LSSO), conducting them regularly in the UK and on tour in Europe and generally supporting the state-funded musical education programme that had produced an orchestra of such high standards. He conducted the LSSO almost exclusively in 20th-century music, including Gustav Holst's The Planets, Charles Ives's Three Places in New England (see external link to Putnam's Camp video below), Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, Hindemith's Symphonic Metamorphoses on Themes of Weber and many new works by English composers. Under Tippett, the LSSO, an orchestra of ordinary secondary school children aged 14 to 18, regularly performed on BBC radio and TV, made commercial gramophone records and established new standards for music-making in an educational context. Many leading British performers had their first experience of orchestral music in the LSSO under Tippett.

Tippett was knighted in 1966, and awarded the Order of Merit in 1983. He remained very active composing and conducting. His opera, New Year, received its premiere in 1989. Then came Byzantium, a piece for soprano and orchestra premiered in 1991. His autobiography, Those Twentieth Century Blues also appeared in 1991. A string quartet followed in 1992. In 1995 his ninetieth birthday was celebrated with special events in Britain, Canada and the US, including the premiere of his final work, The Rose Lake. In that year a collection of his essays, Tippett on Music, also appeared.

In 1996, Tippett moved from Wiltshire to London. In 1997, in Stockholm for a retrospective of his concert music, he developed pneumonia. He was brought home to England, where he died early in 1998.

Music

Tippett was regarded by many as an outsider in British music, a view that may have been related to his conscientious objector status during World War II and his homosexuality.[4] His pacifist beliefs led to a prison sentence during the war: in 1943, at the height of the war, he was summoned to appear before a British government tribunal to justify his conscientious objector status. Instead of receiving an absolute exemption, he was ordered to do full-time farm work. However, Tippett refused to comply with this ruling and was subsequently imprisoned for three months at HMP Wormwood Scrubs.

For many years his music was considered ungratefully written for voices and instruments, and therefore difficult to perform. An intense intellectual, he maintained a much wider knowledge and interest in the literature and philosophy of other countries (Africa, Europe) than was common among British musicians. His (sometimes quirky) libretti for his operas and other works reflect his passionate interest in the dilemmas of human society and the enduring strength of the human spirit.

Tippett was never a prolific composer, and his works, completed slowly, comprised five string quartets, four concerti, four symphonies, five operas and a number of vocal and choral works. His music is typically seen as falling into four distinct periods. The first period (1935–1947) includes the first three quartets, the Concerto for Double String Orchestra, the oratorio A Child of Our Time (written to his own libretto at the encouragement of T. S. Eliot and first performed by Morley College Choir) and the First Symphony. This period is characterised by strenuous contrapuntal energy and deeply lyrical slow movements. The second period, from then until the late 1950s, includes the opera The Midsummer Marriage, the Fantasia Concertante on a Theme of Corelli, the Piano Concerto, and the Second Symphony; this period features rich textures and effervescent melody. The third period, the 1960s and '70s, is in stark contrast, and is characterised by abrupt statements and simplicity of texture, as in the opera King Priam, the Concerto for Orchestra and the Second Piano Sonata. The fourth period is a rich mixture of all these styles, using many devices, such as quotation (from Ludwig van Beethoven and Modest Mussorgsky, among others). The main works of this period were the Third Symphony, the operas The Ice Break and New Year, and the large-scale choral work The Mask of Time.

Works

Stage

Orchestral

  • Symphonies
    • Symphony No. 1 (1944-45)
    • Symphony No. 2 (1956-57)
    • Symphony No. 3 (1970-72)
    • Symphony No. 4 (1976-77)
  • Concerto for Double String Orchestra (1938-39)
  • Little Music for Strings (1946)
  • Suite in D (written for the birthday of Prince Charles, 1948)
  • Variation on an Elizabethan Theme (1953, part of a composite work composed by Arthur Oldham, Tippett, Lennox Berkeley, Benjamin Britten, Humphrey Searle, and William Walton)
  • Fantasia Concertante on a Theme of Corelli (string orchestra, 1953)
  • Divertimento on Sellinger's Round (chamber orchestra, 1953-54)
  • Concerto for Orchestra (1962-63)
  • Severn Bridge Variation (1966, part of a composite work composed by Malcolm Arnold, Alun Hoddinott, Nicholas Maw, Daniel Jones, Grace Williams and Tippett)
  • The Rose Lake (1991-93)

Concertante

  • Fantasia on a Theme of Handel (piano and orchestra, 1939-41)
  • Piano Concerto (1953-55)
  • Triple Concerto (violin, viola, cello and orchestra, 1978-79)

Choral/Vocal

  • A Child of Our Time (oratorio, 1939-41)
  • The Source (1942)
  • The Windhover (1942)
  • Boyhood's End (tenor and piano, 1943)
  • Plebs Angelica (1943)
  • The Weeping Babe (1944)
  • The Heart's Assurance (tenor and piano, 1951, premiered by Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears)
  • Dance, Clarion Air (A Madrigal for Five Voices, 1952)
  • 4 Songs from the British Isles (1956)
  • Crown of the Year (cantata, 1958)
  • Hymn: Unto the hills [Wadhurst] (1958)
  • Music [Words for Music, Perhaps] (1960)
  • Lullaby (1960)
  • Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis Collegium Sancti Johannis Cantabrigiense (choir and organ, 1961), commissioned by George Guest for the Choir of St John's College, Cambridge.
  • Songs for Ariel (high voice and piano, 1962)
  • Songs for Achilles (tenor and guitar, 1961; related to King Priam)
  • The Vision of St Augustine (baritone, chorus and orchestra, 1963-65)
  • The Shires Suite (orchestra and chorus, 1965-70, written for the Leicestershire Schools Symphony Orchestra - see external links below)
  • Songs for Dov (tenor and chamber orchestra, 1970, related to The Knot Garden)
  • The Mask of Time (oratorio, 1980-82)
  • Byzantium (soprano and orchestra, 1988-90)

Chamber/Instrumental

  • String Quartets
    • String Quartet No. 1 (1934-35, revised 1943)
    • String Quartet No. 2 in F sharp (1941-42)
    • String Quartet No. 3 (1945-46)
    • String Quartet No. 4 (1977-78)
    • String Quartet No. 5 (1990-91)
  • Piano Sonatas
    • Piano Sonata No. 1 (1936-37, revised 1942 and 1954), originally entitled Fantasy Sonata
    • Piano Sonata No. 2 (1962)
    • Piano Sonata No. 3 (1972-73)
    • Piano Sonata No. 4 (1983-84)
  • Sonata for Four Horns (1955)
  • The Blue Guitar (solo guitar, 1982-83) (Performer's Guide to Michael Tippett's The Blue Guitar Doctoral Thesis by Orlando Roman)
  • Preludio al Vespro di Monteverdi (Organ Solo, 1946)

Band

  • Praeludium (brass, bells and percussion, 1962)
  • Festal Brass with Blues (1984)

Notes

  1. ^ Jessica Duchen, "A man of our time". New Statesman, 1 January 2005.
  2. ^ a b Obituary of Michael Tippett by J. J. Plant in Revolutionary History, Vol. 7, No. 1 (1998)
  3. ^ a b Michael Berkeley, 'One must have a chaos inside'. The Guardian, 18 December 2004.
  4. ^ Michael Berkeley, "Joyful oblivion". The Guardian, 26 August 2005.

References

  • Kemp I (1984) "Tippett: the composer and his music, Eulenberg, London
  • "The selected letters of Michael Tippett" (2005), Schuttenhelm T (ed.), Faber and Faber, 2005
  • "Those Twentieth Century Blues", Micheal Tippett, Random Century, 1991,

External links

Videos


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Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. © 2006 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. All rights reserved.  Read more
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British History. A Dictionary of British History. Copyright © 2001, 2004 by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.  Read more
Columbia Encyclopedia. The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition Copyright © 2003, Columbia University Press. Licensed from Columbia University Press. All rights reserved. www.cc.columbia.edu/cu/cup/.  Read more
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