'Poet in a barren age' - A profile of Sir Michael Tippett

Introduction by Meirion Bowen

Sir Michael Tippett's compositional career extends back to the mid-1920s when, as a student at the Royal College of Music, he was already formulating ambitious projects: and these included a large-scale choral work (with a text drawn then from a novel by H. G. Wells) on the nature of Time, which had to wait fifty years or so to come to fruition with The Mask of Time, his largest, most wide-ranging concert-hall work, whose texts came from a multiplicity of sources, ancient and modern, and whose variety of musical content is breathtaking.

When Tippett achieved maturity as a composer in the 1930s, he set himself the task of writing music in all the genres, thus his oeuvre included five operas, four symphonies, four piano sonatas, five string quartets, three major choral works, several concertos and other orchestral works (like The Rose Lake) which are sui generis, as well as a host of small-scale pieces of all kinds. The sonatas and string quartets, spanning his entire compositional career, offer fascinating signposts along the path of his artistic development. The operas, symphonies and choral works were all effectively works of synthesis: they each crystallised Tippett's ideas and experiences. From this point of view, it's worth mentioning that his major works were never just the product of immediate inspiration or stimulus: they tend to draw a lot on images stored up over many decades. Thus, despite the variety and scope of his music, it also manifests an underlying integrity.

Listening to his compositions as a whole, one becomes aware of a gradually unfolding vision, which almost takes for granted an ever-strengthening grasp on technique. There is very little in Tippett's output that could be called 'experimental' or 'work-in-progress'. His method was to conceive first the structure of a piece in general and focus gradually on the details. His friend and artistic mentor, T.S. Eliot told him that for him, as a poet, 'the words come last', so with Tippett, the notes come last. Like Stravinsky, Tippett needed almost physical contact with actual sound in order to compose, so he always worked at the piano, conjuring the different timbres of an orchestra, a string quartet or whatever, with extraordinary sureness and accuracy. Everything in a Tippett composition was thus 'heard' in advance, and the proportions of a piece were manifestly well-calculated.

In Tippett's early musical development there were some notable shaping influences. He was quickly ensanred by the music of Beethoven: he heard the nine symphonies for the first time conducted by Henry Wood at the Proms and not long after attended complete cycles of the string quartets in contrasting performances by the Busch and Lener Quartets. A f riend of his lent him a set of 78 rpm recordings of the Beethoven quartets and he listened to them so repeatedly that eventually he had to discipline himself to put them aside. When he came to compose quartets himself, the example of Beethoven loomed large: and his symphonies and concertos also attempt to recreate what he regards as Beethovenian 'archetypes'.

Second in importance to Beethoven was the impact of sixteenth-century madrigals and church music. Even as a student, Tippett realised that he was going to be primarily a contrapuntal composer. His second period of musical study - with the noted expert on 16th century music, R. O. Morris, in 1930/31 - helped him attain this goal. A third revelation was the vocal music of Purcell, which he came across by accident in the early 1940s. Tippett championed Purcell's Odes and church music in the legendary concerts which he conducted at Morley College in wartime London, featuring such artists as the countertenor Alfred Deller and the tenor Peter Pears (with Benjamin Britten often singing in the choir!). From Purcell Tippett acquired a fascination with the ground-bass: but above all, he emulated his predecessor's theatrical methods of setting words to music.

Tippett cherished the tradition of folk-song and dance in his native country, but refused to be bound by it. His own early musical invention was nourished by vernacular music of all kinds and it remained a vital element in his make-up, reaching out to such recent manifestations as reggae and rap in his fifth opera, New Year (1985-8).What distinguishes Tippett's early music from that of his contemporaries is, in fact, his deployment of 'additive rhythm' - a kind of rhythm made up of unevenly spread accents, generating both tension and excitement within the musical structure and always defying the tyranny of the bar-line. This he learnt as much from Stravinsky as from English folk-music.

Right back to his student days, Tippett rejected the nationalism proclaimed by Vuaghan Williams and others: he avoided also taking refuge in bland pastoralism. His cantata, Boyhood's End, for instance, was at the opposite pole to the many pre-war settings of, say, A. E. Housman. Hudson's recollections of his pristine experiences of nature in early life, so vividly brought to life in Tippett's cantata, belong in the Southern Hemisphere: 'to lie in the long hot grass in January ' is something quite remote from English experience ! At the same time, Tippett's dramatic treatment of Hudson's text brought a breath of fresh air to English word-setting.

Tippett shared with Elgar, Holst, and Britten a closeness to European culture that gave their music a broad and substantial basis.While Elgar and Britten owed more to Germanic models, Tippett (like Holst) tended to cast his net wider: in particular, from his early days, he was drawn to the music of Debussy and much of his idiosyncratic empiricism has its roots in a Francophile sensitivity to sounds as individually perceived 'moments' - chords, sonorities, textures, 'discovered' at the piano. In his late works, these assume the status of 'epiphanies' - sudden moments of illumination within the flow of the musical argument.

Tippett's allegiance to Beethoven-ian formal methods was a kind of counterbalance to this intuitive aspect of his creative processes. But it constituted neither a sterile academicism, , nor a neo-classic, puritanical reaction against the anarchic, subjective freedom of late romanticism. Rather,it was a vehicle for serious, trenchant discourse, a means to assert the intellectual side of his nature. Craftsmanship remained of fundamental importance to his music, long after he found alternatives to the Beethovenian sonata-allegro, and no matter what direction his music took, or how diverse its ingredients. .

While the post-war avant-garde took their starting-point from Webern and looked for ways of imposing order upon supposedly anarchic atonality, Tippett followed his own instincts, technically, never rulying anything out, refusing to be bound by dogma and indifferent to fashionable cults and coteries. His deployment of diatonic tonality acquired a distinctive slant. His fondeness for building tonal schemes around chords in fourths enabled him to add a dimension of ambiguity, a blurring of key-definitions (e.g. in Symphony No.1 and The Midsummer Marriage) that became one of his main fingerprints. Early critics attributed some of this to the influence of Hindemith, but it was more a product of his Francophile leanings, isolating sonorities in a pointilliste manner, eliding key-differentiation for allusive effect.

Tippett's personal self-discovery through Jungian analysis reinforced also his creative tendency to search for meanings below the surface, to uncover collectively applicable messages: hence the theatrical synthesis he was to attain in A Child of Our Time and The Midsummer Marriage: hence also his desire to relate to the archetypes underlying classic musical forms, rather than just their surface procedures. The expansions of his musical language - rhythmic and melodic early on, harmonic and textural later - are always thus a means to an end.

The intellect matters in Tippett's work. Early on, he distanced himself from coteries and cults, shrewdly determining his own artistic goals. In his maturity, it is possible to discern a kind of dialectic between the compositions themselves and what they might have become - a consequence of the self-critical, self-questioning appraisal of genres, content and styles that was essential to his pre-compositional thinking.

Tippett's music also uninhibitedly celebrates the human body. Dance is as important to him as song, its physicality the threshold of that eroticism which courses deeply through his music - overwhelmingly so in The Midsummer Marriage and the Corelli Fantasia , returning again with almost equal intensity in New Year. Born into a society that veiled all physical intimacies in euphemism, Tippett, an unabashed homosexual, aligned himself with contemporary playwrights and novelists - from Wedekind to Pinter, Proust to Kundera - in an unfettered, unstereotyped exploration of human sexuality: its extremes of tension and ecstasy, violence and tenderness became a major concern within his work.

Erotic exploration and compositional innovation can be considered two very important, complementary facets of Tippett's creative personality. To draw such a parallel may seem specious and glib: another of those short-circuit methods that brush aside nuance and subtlety of reference, linking works of art to sociological or political ideas in the crudest possible way. But it is a matter of sheer fact that these two elements within Tippett's personality flowered together - as the composer himself acknowledged - at the time he wrote his First String Quartet. And right into Tippett's late eighties, his sexual and compositional drives remained unusually strong. Both then suddenly declined and stopped altogether. Such a connection should not be overlooked or ignored.

As the expressive spectrum of his music (and particularly its explicitly erotic component) broadened during the 1960s, his own harmonic and tonal language also suddenly took off into free atonality. But unlike Schoenberg, he felt no need for any systemization. For concurrently he had investigated other technical parameters and with these his new-found atonal freedoms fitted well: fresh concepts of instrumental sonority and texture; radical alternatives to classical musical logic, that replaced its carefully planned transitions between scenes and equally well signposted episodes of development and recapitulation with cinematic jump-cutting, flash-backs and fast-forward temporal displacements. To an unusual and unpredictable extent, Tippett's innovations all cohered into a comprehensive and distinctive idiom.

Sometimes, in consequence , Tippett broke through from art into activism. Now if subversion has always been part of his temperament, he was never by nature an agit-prop artist or a propagandist, preferring to locate immediate problems, crises and catastrophes within a wider perspective: hence the abiding strength and universality of application - and the appeal - of A Child of Our Time and The Heart's Assurance. When Tippett does, however, point an accusatory finger, as in his Third Symphony, or when he stands up to demand 'One humanity/one justice' , at the end of New Year, the effect is electrifyingly well-timed and justified.

More often than not, artistic values take precedent, indeed remain paramount. The strongest thread running through all Tippett's work - at its simplest, at its most complex - is an abiding faith in art as 'apprehensions of the inner world of feelings'. While accepting much in modern technological society, Tippett quotes a warning given by Darwin:

"The loss of these tastes (for one or more of the arts according to our predilections) is a loss of happiness and may possibly be injurious to the intellect and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature."

Tippett's music has thus to be judged not only by its engagement with external issues - with matters of life and death, of joy and suffering - but by its advancement of all manner of musical techniques in order to tap those inner resources of feeling and understanding. Ultimately, he considered his compositions as 'artefacts' with a life of their own, capable of surviving independently in a a world. In answer to Holderlin's cry, 'What are poets for in a barren age', Tippett was quite clear:

"..I know that my true function within a society which embraces all of us is to continue an age-old tradition,fundamental to civilization, which goes back into pre-history and will go forward into the unknown future. This tradition is to create images from the depths of the imagination and to give them form whether visual, intellectual or musical. For it is only through images that the inner world communicates at all. Images of the past, shapes of the future. Images of vigour for a decadent period, images of calm for one too violent. Images of reconciliation for worlds torn by division. And in an age of mediocrity and shattered dreams, images of abounding, generous, exuberant beauty."

©Meirion Bowen