This article is an expanded version of papers read at the Thirtieth Annual Conference of the Royal Musical Association, held at Trinity College, Cambridge, and at the Newcastle University International Tippett Conference All versions of the text were researched and written during a period of study leave made possible by a grant from the Research Committee of the University of Newcastle upon TyneGoogle Scholar

1 Tippett, Michael, ‘Poets in a Barren Age’ (c 1971–2), Moving into Aquarius (2nd edn, London, 1974), 148–56 (pp 155–6) Many of Tippett's essays published in the now out-of-print collections Moving into Aquarius and Music of the Angels Essays and Sketchbooks, ed Meirion Bowen (London, 1980) have been reprinted in Tippett on Music, ed Meirion Bowen (Oxford, 1995) When this is the case in subsequent quotations I provide references to both sources, including any changes to titles in the later volume Occasional changes to wording are also made in Tippett on Music, but quotations are always taken from the earlier volume Where possible I also provide the original date of the essay in question References to Moving into Aquarius are always to the second edition.Google Scholar

2 Philip N. Furbank, Reflections on the Word ‘Image‘ (London, 1970).Google Scholar

3 See Tippett, Michael, Those Twentieth Century Blues An Autobiography (London, 1991), 62–3 Other texts by Jung which Tippett is known to have read include The Secret of the Golden Flower (Jung and Richard Wilhelm), Psychology and Alchemy, The Integration of Personality (reported in Those Twentieth Century Blues, 89), C G Jung's Letters (see ‘Postscript’, Moving into Aquarius., 163–7 (pp. 166–7)) and Über die Archetypen des kollektiven Unbewussten (see ‘Sketch for a Modern Oratorio’, Music of the Angels, 127–87 (pp 131, 178, 180), Tippett on Music, 117–77 (pp. 121, 168, 170)).Google Scholar

4 Tippett, Introduction, Moving into Aquarius, 11, Preface, Tippett on Music (text slightly modified), viii.Google Scholar

5 Tippett, ‘Contracting in to Abundance’ (1944), Moving into Aquarius, 19–27 (p 23) (The passage from which the quotation is taken is omitted in the slightly revised version of the essay, ‘The Composer and Pacifism’, Tippett on Music, 282–6).Google Scholar

6 Tippett, ‘Towards the Condition of Music’ (1961), Music of the Angels, 17–27 (p 24), Tippett on Music, 7–15 (p 13)Google Scholar

7 Tippett, ‘Drum, Flute and Zither’ (1953), Moving into Aquarius, 67–84 (p. 81)Google Scholar

8 Carl Gustav Jung, ‘Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious’, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (1934), ed Herbert Read, Michael Fordham and Gerhard Adler, trans Richard F C. Hull, Collected Works, 9/i (2nd edn, London, 1968, repr. 1971), 3–41 (pp 23–4).Google Scholar

9 Tippett, ‘Contracting in to Abundance’, Moving into Aquarius, 22, ‘The Composer and Pacifism’, Tippett on Music, 283Google Scholar

10 Jung, ‘Psychology and Literature’ (1950), The Spirit in Man, Art, and Literature, trans Richard F. C Hull (London, 1967; repr 1984, 1989, 1993), 84–105 (p. 105)Google Scholar

11 Jung, ‘On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry’ (1922), The Spirit in Man, 65–83 (p. 75)Google Scholar

12 Jung, ‘Psychology and Literature’, 101–2.Google Scholar

13 Tippett, ‘What I Believe’ (1956), Music of the Angels, 49–55 (p 52), 'Aspects of Belief, Tippett on Music, 237–44 (p 239)Google Scholar

14 Tippett, ‘Poets in a Barren Age’, Moving into Aquarius, 156Google Scholar

15 Tippett, ‘Towards the Condition of Music’, Music of the Angels, 20, Tippett on Music, 9 (punctuation slightly modified)Google Scholar

16 Jung, Psychological Types (1921), ed Herbert Read, Michael Fordham and Gerhard Adler, trans Helton G Baynes, rev Richard F C Hull, Collected Works, 6 (London, 1971), 442Google Scholar

17 IbidGoogle Scholar

18 Ibid., 433Google Scholar

19 Schafer, In Murray, British Composers in Interview (London, 1963), 97Google Scholar

20 Jung, Psychological Types, 443Google Scholar

21 Ibid., 442Google Scholar

22 Tippett, ‘A Composer's Point of View’ (1945), Moving into Aquarius, 14–18 (pp 14–15), Tippett on Music, 3–6 (p. 3).Google Scholar

23 The volume is described by David Ayerst as being ‘among the most thumbed books on [Tippett's] shelves … which [he] first read in 1932 or 1933’ See Michael Tippett A Symposium on his 60th Birthday, ed. Ian Kemp (London, 1965), 64–8 (p 66) See also Tippett, Those Twentieth Century Blues, 62Google Scholar

24 Jung, Psychological Types, 443Google Scholar

25 See ibid., 437.Google Scholar

26 Tippett, ‘A Composer and his Public’, Moving into Aquarius, 94–100 (p 100); Tippett on Music, 277–81 (p 281) The ending of this essay was the model for that of ‘Poets in a Barren Age’, which prefaces this articleGoogle Scholar

27 Jung, Psychological Types, 445Google Scholar

28 Ibid., 474Google Scholar

29 Jung, ‘On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry’, 65–83 (pp 75–6)Google Scholar

30 Schafer, British Composers in Interview, 97Google Scholar

31 This description paraphrases various statements quoted above, as well as accounts cited by Richard E. Rodda, ‘Genesis of a Symphony Tippett's Symphony No 3’, Music Review, 39 (1978), 110–16. See also Tippett, ‘Spontaneity and Measurement’, E. William Doty Lectures in Fine Arts, ii Sir Michael Tippett (Austin, Texas, 1979), 25–45Google Scholar

32 Tippett, ‘Towards the Condition of Music’, Music of the Angels, 24, Tippett on Music, 13Google Scholar

33 Tippett is also alluding here to ideas in Susanne Langer's Feeling and Form (London, 1953), as a footnote in ‘Towards the Condition of Music’ makes clear Although no particular page reference is given, it is likely that he had a passage such as the following in mind 'The tonal structures we call “music” bear a close logical similarity to the forms of human feeling – forms of growth and of attenuation, flowing and stowing, conflict and resolution, speed, arrest.Google Scholar

Such is the pattern, or logical form, of sentience, and the pattern of music is that same form worked out in pure, measured sound and silence Music is a tonal analogue of emotive life.' Langer, Feeling and Form, 27Google Scholar

34 Tippett, ‘Towards the Condition of Music’, Music of the Angels, 24, Tippett on Music, 13.Google Scholar

35 Tippett, ‘Music and the Senses’ (unpublished essay, 1972), 2; quoted in Rodda, ‘Genesis of a Symphony’, 114.Google Scholar

36 See for example Tippett, ‘Air from Another Planet’ (1952), Moving into Aquarius, 43–9 (Tippett on Music, 34–9); ‘What I Believe’ (1956), ‘Towards the Condition of Music’ (1961), and the chapter ‘Michael Tippett’ in Schafer, British Composers in InterviewGoogle Scholar

37 Tippett, ‘Towards the Condition of Music’, Music of the Angels, 24, Tippett on Music, 13Google Scholar

38 Strictly speaking ‘aria’ is too strong a word, since Tippett has made a point in the opera of paring down all lyrical excess in the interest of forward dramatic movement Nevertheless, this is one of the moments when he allows his characters breathing space to express their feelings in reaction to the dramatic situation.Google Scholar

39 See Jung, , ‘Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious’, 27–9Google Scholar

40 Jung, ‘On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry’, 70.Google Scholar

41 See Tippett, , ‘Air from Another Planet’, Moving into Aquarius, 44, ‘Schoenberg’, Tippett on Music, 25–46 (p. 35). ‘To use platonic language the Idea can only be expressed by the Image ’ Tippett is not at all specific about his reference here: he may be alluding to Plato's distrust of artistic mimesis voiced in The Republic, though the only named Platonic dialogue to which Tippett refers in any detail in his writings is the PhaedrusGoogle Scholar

42 See ‘The Artist's Mandate’ (no date), Moving into Aquarius, 122–9 (pp 124–5, 128); Tippett on Music, 287–93 (pp. 289, 292) The text in question is Plato's PhaedrusGoogle Scholar

43 Tippett, ‘Air from Another Planet’, Moving into Aquarius, 46; ‘Schoenberg’, Tippett on Music, 36.Google Scholar

44 Again see ‘The Artist's Mandate’, Moving into Aquarius, 123–6, Tippett on Music, 288–90Google Scholar

45 As recounted for example in Carl Dahlhaus, ‘What is Developing Variation?’, Schoenberg and the New Music, trans Derrick Puffett and Alfred Clayton (Cambridge, 1987), 128–33.Google Scholar

46 A similar conceit is also presented earlier in this final section ‘What, what, what can it be, / that throbs, throbs in every nerve, / beats, beats in the blood and bone / down through the feet into the earth, / then echoed by the stars?‘Google Scholar

47 One suspects that Tippett's use of register is often meant to mirror a topography of the psyche His emphasis of the bass register in particular seems in many works intended to evoke – perhaps even stir – the ‘primordial depths’ of the unconscious. See also the discussion of archetypes in part III of this essayGoogle Scholar

48 In, for example, Arnold Whittall, The Music of Britten and Tippett. Studies in Themes and Techniques (Cambridge, 1982), 5; and idem, ’ “Byzantium”: Tippett, Yeats and the Limitations of Affinity’, Music and Letters, 74 (1993), 383–98 (pp 395–7)Google Scholar

49 The exceptions are violin pizzicato chords after Figure 380 in the score, the characteristic timbre of Andromache's preceding diatribe, evoking her continuing scornful presenceGoogle Scholar

50 Pound, Ezra, ‘Vorticism’, Gaudier-Brzeska. A Memoir (London and New York, 1916), 109 Quoted in Furbank, Reflections on the Word ‘Image‘, 39Google Scholar

51 See Puffett, Derek, ‘Tippett and the Retreat from Mythology’, The Musical Times, 136 (1995), 6–14 (p. 12).Google Scholar

52 I should stress that ‘semiotic’ here is used to imply meaning in the broadest, most neutral sense – in sharp contradistinction from Jung, for whom the term implied an allegoric representation of something already known.Google Scholar

53 Andrew Samuels, Bani Shorter and Fred Plaut, A Criticai Dictionary of Jungian Analysis (London and New York, 1986), 45–7 An interesting connection is also made here between these dualistic schemata and recent empirical research on the functioning of the cerebral hemispheresGoogle Scholar

54 Ibid., 46Google Scholar

55 Composer's note to the vocal scoreGoogle Scholar

56 See Schafer, , British Composers in Interview, 97Google Scholar

57 Jung, ‘The Psychology of the Child Archetype’ (1940), Collected Works, 9/i, 151–81 (p. 173) As Brooke points out, Jung himself did not arrive at a definitive stance on the relation between psyche and body, shifting between an implicit Cartesian dualism and a more phenomenological position bearing strong parallels with Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger. See Brooke, Roger, Jung and Phenomenology (London and New York, 1991), chapter 5.Google Scholar

58 Weiskel, Thomas, The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence (Baltimore and London, 1976), 23–4.Google Scholar

59 Ibid., 24.Google Scholar

60 Music of the Angels, 37–43 (p 43), Tippett on Music, 16–21 (p 21)Google Scholar

61 ‘The Artist's Mandate’, Moving into Aquarius, 128–9; Tippett on Music, 292Google Scholar

62 Ibid., Moving into Aquarius, 122; Tippett on Music, 287.Google Scholar

63 Jung, Psychological Types, 445.Google Scholar