Transcriptions & Arrangements of Tippett's Music

[From Meirion Bowen's book, Michael Tippett (2nd edition, Robson Books, 1997)]

 

In general, Tippett has been disinclined to allow works of his to be transcribed or other musical combinations : he is, in this respect, the exact polar opposite of Percy Grainger! Working amongst amateurs early on, he had made his own versions of works like The Village Opera and The Beggars's Opera, tailoring them to the forces available. But when it came to his own mature compositions, he was ill at ease with well-intentioned efforts to promote them by presenting them in formats other than the original. In the 1940s, Walter Goehr, for instance, made a version of the slow movement of his String Quartet No. 1, adding a double-bass to the cello line. The composer was unhappy with this. Where the task of arranging a work was more akin to composition, and involved transforming a piece into something new, uncovering latent dimensions and even giving it an entirely new title,and where he himself could thus participate in the process, Tippett felt more positive.

This happened rarely, however, as he tended to regard it as a distraction from his real task of producing fresh works. In 1958, he himself prepared the version for unaccompanied mixed chorus of the Five Negro Spirituals from A Child of Our Time - and these are now performed just as often as the oratorio itself, probably more. Also, in 1964, he made a transcription for flute, oboe and piano (or harpsichord) of Hermes's aria, 'O divine music' from his opera, King Priam. With the composer's agreement, a Salvation Army trumpeter who worked at Schott, Brian Bowen (no relation of the present writer!) arranged Tippett's Suite in D for brass band. Boyhood 's End has also been published in a transposed version for baritone and piano: but the composer feels that this and his Songs for Achilles are not intended for sopranos...!

The bulk of the published arrangements - or new versions - of specific compositions by Tippett have been the product of my own association with the composer in recent decades. The first of them was the reduced scoring of The Knot Garden, undertaken in 1984 at the request of Opera Factory/London Sinfonietta.

None of Tippett's five operas requires a vast orchestra. The Midsummer Marriage and King Priam have both been successfully toured around small British theatres for several years. In the former case, the orchestration is essentially that of a Beethoven orchestra, with, in addition, harp, celesta and a small amount of percussion. The key factor in King Priam is the strength of the string body: as has been observed, Tippett's re-thinking of the orchestra here involved doing away with the conventional division of violins into firsts and seconds, and the minimum number of players (6 violins, 4 violas, 4 cellos, 2 basses) is largely determined by those episodes where there is already extensive dividing up of the whole string body - e.g. in Act I scene 2 (fig 92 et seq.).

The soloistic tendencies within Tippett's orchestration are even more pronounced in The Knot Garden and it was that which made the reduction of its cohort of around 70 players to a minimum of 22. As it happened, only about a third of each Act required instrumental re-deployment (rather than re-orchestration), many pages of the score entailed no adjustments whatsoever, or only minor ones, and not a note of Tippett's music was changed. In the rest, a certain amount of doctoring facilitated the 'faking' of sonorities such as those of two piccolos or two double-basses. For balance purposes, I omitted the xylophone and occasionally reinforced tutti passages.

In rationalising the percussion parts so that only two players were needed, I sometimes requested other players in the ensemble to perform on percussion when they were unused for several pages on end. The chamber version requires versatility but no more virtuosity than was demanded by the original. For the most part, the string textures could be undertaken by soloists (3 violins, the third of them doubling as second viola; viola; cello and double-bass). In one or two episodes, the lack of a rich string sonority may be evident (e.g. in the duet for Denise and Mel in Act 2), but I have compensated as best I could and generally the strings balance with the rest of the ensemble quite well in this context. The other advantage is that the chamber-sized orchestra is rarely in danger of overwhelming the voices: which is one of the reasons the opera has since been undertaken by a number of student groups.

A reduced version of The Ice Break is feasible for many of the same reasons, but there are as yet no firm plans for one to be made. For the Houston premiere of New Year, I prepared a slightly reduced version of the score for NewYear, as the theatre pit was not large enough to accommodate Tippett's full requirement (about 53 players). But the composer's original is preferable.

All the other arrangements and transciptions in which I have collaborated with the composer have entailed some degree of elaboration of the original or even re-composition of a kind.

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Water out of Sunlight (1988)

> This is the title chosen by the composer for the string orchestra arrangement of his String Quartet No. 4 which I undertook at his request for the Academy of St Martin-in-the-Fields. While Tippett would never sanction an 'enlargement' of his first three and fifth string quartets, whose style is so linear, the harmonically dense, sonorously adventurous idiom of String Quartet No. 4 sets it apart from the others and lent itself well to transcription.

In a programme-note, Tippett explained his title thus: 'When I asked T. S. Eliot once why he had called his late poems Four Quartets, he told me the title arose from his passionate love and admiration for Beethoven's late quartets. I shared his passion; and certainly my own Quartet 4 relates to that world of intimate and intense musical sound. The most enduring image out of the poems for me has been the drained pool in the rose-garden, which comes at the start of Burnt Norton. The relevant lines are:


Dry the pool, dry concrete, brown edged,
And the pool was filled with water out of sunlight,
And the lotus rose, quietly, quietly,
The surface glittered out of heart of light,
And they were behind us, reflected in the pool.
Then a cloud passed, and the pool was empty.

...In the poem, the movement from 'drained pool' to 'water out of sunlight' comes more than once, as it does also in the quartet. The transcription from four solo strings to string orchestra should make the 'sunlight' brighter. Yet the journey from incohate murmurs to resplendent sound and back remain in essence the same.

The transcription of the Quartet still uses solo strings as a reference-point, featured, however, amongst a multiplicity of possible string textures. Some of these simply allot double-stoppings in the original to divided groups of players, or sharing out the passages in harmonics in the last movement. Some are used to build up a crescendo by adding players gradually or reduce their number gradually for a diminuendo. The implied echo effects of the final bars are realised within a 17-part string texture (hence the minimum number of players for the piece is 17). The episode in the slow movement between figs. 61 and 66 is also illumined by harmonics on chordal points of rest.

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The Heart's Assurance (1990)

Studying the piano-writing in this song-cycle (about whose difficulties of execution Britten was only the first of many executants to complain!), many connections can be observed between its sonorities and those to be found in other Tippett scores of the late 1940s, most notably The Midummer Marriage.

These connections are to some extent brought out in this orchestrated version, which uses flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, 4 horns, trumpet, harp and percussion (military drum, snare-drum, triangle) and strings.

Four horns may seem excessive in this chamber orchestra context. But as has been observed earlier, romantic horn-calls are fundamental to Tippett's orchestral idiom. Other pictorial ingredients of the kind found in The Midsummer Marriage suggest themselves - e.g. the opening of the Ritual Dances is echoed in the very first bars of the opening song; again, the third song is like a sketch for the third Ritual Dance . In the culminating fifth song, where the singer calls out across the battlefield, Tippett's allusion to The Last Post is now made explicity, in the echoing call of the trumpet off-stage.

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Prelude; Autumn, for oboe and piano (1991)

This version of one of the instrumental interludes from Tippett's Cantata, Crown of the Year was conceived as one of a series of tributes to the oboist Janet Craxton, first performed in December 1991 at a BBC Radio 3 concert by Nicholas Daniel and Julius Drake. In the slow outer sections the original oboe part isunchanged and is set against a keyboard version of string quartet accompaniment. The much faster central section, the oboe takes over some of the first violin part, while the original piano part is elaborated to accommodate string parts and bell sonorities, some of the textures modelled on those of Tippett's Piano Concerto.

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The Shires Suite (1995)

For a variety of reasons, this was not published until 1995. Written over a period of five years, with individual movements given their first performances independently of the final entity, the score went through several different editors' hands at Schott and was full of anomalies, inconsistencies and errors. When it was eventually prepared by the present writer for publication, Tippett was keen that there should be some alternative versions of the three movements involving chorus, so as to facilitate wider performance by schools' and youth orchestras.

My transcription of the choral parts took its cue from the general emphasis in the Suite on canonic imitation, so that they were now to be performed by three spatially separated antiphonal groups, apart from the orchestra. Groups A and B consists of flute and clarinets (with a minimum of 2 players on each line); Group C consists of a horn and trumpet. The placing of the groups obviously varies according to the hall where the Suite is performed, but the aim is to obtain the maximum degree of excitement the imitative exchanges between groups. At the end the horn and trumpet are as far in the distance as is practical, to obtain the effect of a magical echo. Some of the choral parts in the central Cantata are meanwhile transcribed for on-stage orchestral brass and strings. The overall intention is to have the maximum number of players taking part, the maximum diversity and theatricality in its sonorous impact.

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New Year Suite (1990)

The New Year Suite was prepared concurrently with the opera from which it is taken. Tippett was nevertheless concerned that it should be an independent piece that could stand up in its own right and not be merely a collection of excerpts. The outcome is thus a continuous composition, lasting about 25 mnutes, in thirteen episodes that offer musical portraits of two of the main characters - Donny and Jo-Ann. They are set in the context of the New Year celebrations of Act II. Additionally, Tippett wanted the worlds of fantasy and dreams within the opera recreated for the concert-hall.

Thus, as in the opera, the orchestra includes electro-accoustic elements on tape. In some episodes, the voice-parts in the original are transferred to appropriate instruments and there is some extra linking music and occasional enrichment of the original texture.

The Suite opens with taped music for the landing of the Space Ship, to be followed by the Prelude to Act 2, introducing the New Year rituals: the Shaman's Dance and the Hunt for the Scapegoat. In the opera, Donny was picked upon as the scapegoat, so here he is presented in two numbers, his Skarade (Act I) and his Dreamsong (Act III). At this halfway point in the Suite, there is a dream interlude (distance voices on tape), to be followed by Jo Ann's Dreamsong (Act I), her love scene with Pelegrin and dance in the Paradise Garden (Act III). In the last three episodes, the New Year rituals resume with the Beating out of the Scapegoat (the Bad Old Year) and the Ringing in of New Year, with Auld Lang Syne; as the celebration dies down, the taped music takes over, and the Space Ship takes off again.

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Festal Brass with Blues (1983)

Tippett has composed numerous small pieces for brass - four original fanfares, and a fifth arranged by the present writer from the seventh movement of The Mask of Time. In his Praeludium for brass, bells and percussion (1962), he developed the fanfare into a much larger scale prelude, using the mosaic tehcnique of his recently completed King Priam to create sharp contrasts between the different components in the ensemble - six horns and two tubas offset against three trumpets and three trombones in turn, all of them complemented by the bells and percussion. The thematic ingredients are stated, re-stated, varied, condensed and overlapped in the most subtle way.

In Festal Brass with Blues , Tippett' s sole excursion into brass band composition, he embarked on something even more ambitious, a one-movement fantasy largedly based on themes from his Third Symphony - hence its title. In thehe opening part of the work, a gradual accumulation of ideas (some derived from the Symphony) and a mixture of counterpoint and antiphonal contrasts, produces a festival mood, of sorts. As in the transition from the purely orchestral part of the symphony to its vocal blues, so here, at the climax, Tippett quotes the opening of the finale of Beethoven's Ninth Sympony, continuing with a transcription of the slow blues that follows (plus the quiet linking music that precedes it), with the flugelhorn taking the main solos (as in the Symphony). As this is all developed, the texture thins considerably, and though the earlier music returns, the polarity established between festal outbursts and reflective, ironic blues remains right up to the quiet, mysterious end to the work.

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Triumph : a paraphrase on The Mask of Time (1992)

 

Triumph was commissioned by a consortium of American university wind bands: and it should be notedthat their instrumental line-up is quite different from that of brass bands. Here, Tippett adds even more explicitly to the paraphrase genre, by means of which Liszt and others in the nineteenth-century enabled operatic and orchestral music to reach wider audiences, and which has always been absolutely germane to jazz and commercial popular music (even though no one probably has ever made use of the term in those contexts). A 'paraphrase' is much closer to an original composition than a transcription: and this one, on music from The Mask of Time, might be compared with the nineteenth-century operatic overture, in that it incorporates some of the most important motifs and episodes, at the same time remaining an independent work in its own right.

The core of Triumph is drawn from the sixth movement of The Mask of Time, which, as has already been observed, is a triptych centred on the poet Shelley. The work begins with the scene-setting introduction to this movmenet, but this is cut short: instead, the cosmic metaphor of 'Sound' that opens The Mask of Time - the recurrent Ur-motif of the entire work - is invoked (actually tranposed up a semitone) before the music for the triumphal chariot begins, with its ever-present ground-bass. This continues, as in the original, with the episode in which Shelley drowns at sea: and the 'Sound' motif returns after the bells and woodwind have tolled for the burning of the poet's body.

The Mask of Time ends with a triumphal assertion of human survival in a destructive world. Triumph ends with a simlar final gesture of triumph of its own: as in Beethoven's Egmont Overutre, the music suddenly changes direction and fanfares blaze out in a climax of virtuosity. This section is (like Fanfare No. 5) a new version of the third of the instrumental interludes based onVeni Creator Spiritus in the seventh movement of The Mask of Time. The embellishments to the hymn are elaborated further here: and the hymn itself is made more prominent. But the last few bars - continuing from a transcription of the chorus's lines Fire and Arithmetic - are new.

The mosaic character of Tippett's scoring - 'for voices and instruments' , as he himself put it - made it possible to replace the 'blocks' of sonority for solo singers and choral groups with wind sonorities fresh to the work - four saxophones, cornets and tenor tubas (or baritones) - though they are deployed freely, not just as exact equivalents. And while Tippett, in the drowning-at -sea episode, built his original music around a brass motif from his Fourth Symphony, but using only one bass tuba, here the two bass tubas are reinstated.

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Suite, The Tempest (1995)

 

Tippett's incidental music for The Tempest was first heard in a production at the Old Vic Theatre, London, in April 1962. Apart from the three Songs for Ariel which were subsequently pulblished, he produced dances, mood-music and a more extended piece for the masque scene of Act IV. The musical director at the theatre, John Lambert, also used some of the music for a ballet score for the London Dance Group in 1964. Meanwhile, The Tempest became the main reference-point for Tippett's third opera, The Knot Garden: he incorporated quotations from some of his Ariel songs both in the opera and in the song-cycle. Songs for Dov which followed.

Little was heard of the rest of his Tempest music until 1985, when Andrew Parrott and Ian Cotterell devised for BBC radio, A Vision of the Island, intermingling Tippett's music with a lot of Shakespeare's own idalogue. A concert version of this, To the Elements be Free! , devised by Parrott and Roger Savage, was presented by the Nash Ensemble at the Barbican's ninetieth birthday celebrations for the composer in February 1995.

But Tippett was never particularly happy with the music as it stood. Thus, when invited by the BBC to contribute something to their celebrations (also in 1995) of the terecentenary of Purcell's death, he agreed to a two-foldplan : the composition of a new Song for Caliban - which was premiered separately in a Westminster Abbey concert given on November 21, the actual date of Purcell's death - and a re-organisation, refurbishment and enlargement of the rest of the incidental music to make a proper concert suite, using a larger mixed ensemble (14 players in all) than that of the original theatre band. This final Suite was first performed on December 14, the same year. It comprises eleven numbers, intermingling songs and dances as follows:

  1. Prelude
  2. Song for Ariel I: 'Come unto these yellow sands'
  3. Dance
  4. Song for Ariel II: 'Full Fathom Five'
  5. Solemn Dance
  6. Trumpet Tune with Boogie
  7. Caliban's Song
  8. Interlude: Dreaming
  9. Masque
  10. Song for Ariel III: 'Where the Bee sucks'
  11. Exit Dance

The original instrumental pieces are here extended and enriched to make them sound less like 'incidental music'. Music adapted from Act I of The Knot Garden - a trumpet tune and boogie-woogie - leads at its climax straight into Caliban's song, the fast ground-bass of the boogie giving way to the slow ground bass of thge new song, a setting of the text, 'Be not afeard, the isle is full of noises." This song ends, 'I cried to dream again', and leads without a break into 'Dreaming', a transcription for harp and viola of the slow movement of Tippett's The Blue Guitar (which itself had incorporated harp and viola motifs from his Fourth Symphony and fourth opera, The Ice Break) .

Tippett's original Masque movement has been pruned slightly and re-scored so that it now comprises a duet for tenor and baritone, followed by a baritone solo: both are settings of lyric poems roughly contemporary with The Tempest. The final Exit Dance is based on sarabande-like dance piece which Tippett had first composed for the Paradise garden scene in The Mask of Time and re-used in Act 3 of New Year: this leads finally into a reprise of part of the Solemn Dance.

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Suite: The Ice Break

 

  1. Prelude: At the Airport
  2. Olympion's arrival
  3. Hannah reflects
  4. Conflict
  5. Nadia's Dream of Childhood and Death
  6. Yuri's recovery

Sir Michael Tippett's fourth opera, The Ice Break, was first produced at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, in 1976. Its plot and libretto, devised and written by the composer, deal very much with issues of today, such as political persecution and racial strife. Ever present throughout is a chorus - an exultant, celebratory crowd liable to break out any moment into violent conflict.

In essence, the opera concerns Lev, a teacher, who is reunited with his wife Nadia and son Yuri, whereupon tensions immediately erupt between parents and son. Tempers rise further when Yuri's girl-friend, Gayle, makes sexual advances to the black superstar Olympion (who has arrived just after Lev) and is rebuffed. In a subsequent race-riot, Olympion and Gayle are both killed and Yuri severely injured. After an operation, Yuri is able to walk again and is reunited with his father - too late, however, to mend relations with his mother, for she has just died. The title of the opera - a reference to the exhilirating, if frightening sounds of the ice breaking on the great Northern rivers, signalling the arrival of spring - provides the opera with its central metaphor: the possibility of reconciliation and renewal, a theme common to many of Tippett's works.

Influenced greatly by the techniques of film and television, The Ice Break contains no transitions between scenes, switching simply from indoors to outdoors, or from one situation to another without breaks.

The six movements of this Suite aim to recpature some of this sharp-edged theatricality, along with the contrasts between the uninhibited, extrovert behaviour of the chorus and the inward reflections of the principal characters.

Written for an ensemble of five - flute (doubling piccolo), clarinet doubling bass-clarinet, violin, cello and piano - some of whom also play percussion instruments, it can only represent to a limited extent the sound-world of the operatic score, which featured two electric guitars and a plethora of percussion. Many original wind and string solos have, however, been retained.

The brief opening prelude is a snapshot of the crowd at the airport awaiting Olympion's arrival: and in the second movement, the black champion boasts of his supreme status.

The third movement is a transcription of an aria from Act 2, in which Gayle's friend Hannah, a black nurse, searches within herself for some meaning to the conflicts around her. As in the opera, wild competing solos from violin and clarinet - spatially separated on stage here - lead off the riot, which culminates musically in a melange of different tunes.

The fifth movement depicts Nadia on her deathbed, recalling the sleigh-rides of her childhood and the ice breaking on the rivers at the start of spring. The ice-break motif heard here recurs in the final movement, when Yuri recovers and is reconciled with his father.

Commissioned by Cantamen with funds provided by the Stereo Society of New York, the Suite: The Ice Break was prepared by Meirion Bowen in consultation with the composer. Cantamen gave its world premiere at Discoteca Nickhavanna, Barcelona, on May 1, 1994.

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