- Date: 1990
- Composer: Sir Harrison Birtwistle
- Period: Modern (1910-1949)
Review
"Violence is a by-product of my music; it's not something I put in. I am not expressing violence. It's the nature of the material that I use, perhaps, that equates with violence." -- Harrison BirtwistlePerhaps Harrison Birtwistle is right to deny that his music "contains" violence -- how can music contain anything, better yet something as problematic as violence? And yet, one confront the idea of violence in so many of Birtwistle's works. They shimmer a bloody sheen, unfold at savage odds with their own contour; force beats against counter-force, space and time confuse one another. His works confront the listener with an uncanny persistence, always "against-the-grain," and remind one of what Leonard Bernstein said about the older English master Benjamin Britten -- that "there are gears grinding and not quite meshing...making great pain." Not quite meshing, or meshing much too hard.
In this light, Birtwistle's 1990 work Ritual Fragment might be a key to the mysterious wounding power of this composer's work. Composed for the 15 core members of the London Sinfonietta and dedicated to the memory of their former director Michael Vyner, this relatively brief work is a hard, spasmodic muscle of music, one of Birtwistle's most knotted and penetrating creations. Already the title, Ritual Fragment, reveals the double edge of Birtwistle's inimitably imagined brutality. Possibly it's a brutality between flow and interruption, between an obsessive, totalizing process and the shards which lodge firmly in its path. Hence a "ritual" (wanting only to complete itself) executed with "fragments" (lacking only their complete self). In this regard, Birtwistle's Ritual Fragment takes a lesson from the composers much admired compatriot, painter Francis Bacon. Bacon often spoke of the "violence of representation," the default cruelty one commits simply by painting a portrait; desperately, bitterly, viciously, the brush locks the face's most ephemeral and impalpable peculiarities into lacerating gaze and dumb, dry pigment.
The amazing effect of Bacon's portraits -- where the countenance often appears literally flayed, bloodied by the artist's barbarous eye, seized and split on the canvas -- resonate through Birtwistle's strident score. Ritual Fragment's conductorless ensemble unfolds in gear-grinding spasms which test its cohesive limits. Legions of musical ideas pour forth, but each retains the fibrous, thorny contour of its respective soloist; trumpet blazes, horn blows hard and viola shreds and shrieks, piano treads an inflexible tactus. Executed with Birtwistle's meticulous barbarity, these individual figures each make their way from background to foreground back again, the ensemble resembling a body whose bones clamor to escape through rips in the skin.
Perhaps the most wrenching aspect of such events -- what tempts the word "violence" rather than merely "intensity" -- is the utterly cryptic nature of what occurs. Like so many of Bacon's smeary demi-visions, and so many of Birtwistle's own scores, Ritual Fragment is an unrepentant "secret theater." And it is perhaps only because its vigor is so intractably mysterious -- and so enchanting -- that we suspect (in the words of another English dramaturge) "these violent delights have violent ends." ~ Seth Brodsky, All Music Guide
