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Cross-Currents and Convergencies: Britten, Maxwell Davies and the Sense of Place

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 January 2016

Arnold Whittall
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Extract

Anyone bold enough to claim that the British compositional scene is dominated at present by a mainstream whose principal godfathers are Tippett and Birtwistle might just as well extend the reductive flourish by observing that an alternative duo – Britten and Maxwell Davies – not only have less in common with each other but are also less influential, less ‘significant’. Despite obvious differences of style, Tippett and Birtwistle share a basic predisposition to internationalism and modernism. By contrast, Britten's resistance to modernism and Davies's aspiration to classicism combine with a more direct response from both composers to local, if not exactly ‘national’ features, and, by the criteria for mainstream membership given above, this means that they belong on the margins of contemporary musical life in Britain, not at the centre.

Type
Research Article
Information
Tempo , Issue 204 , April 1998 , pp. 5 - 11
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1998

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References

1 See the brief but valuable article on Weir, Judith in Contemporary Composers ed. Morton, B and Collins, P (London 1992), p. 955 Google Scholar: also Monelle, Raymond, ‘Scottish Music, Real and Spurious’ in Music and Nationalism in 20th-century Great Britain and Finland, ed. Mäkelä, T, (Hamburg 1997), pp. 87–110 Google Scholar, and Gloag, Kenneth, ‘James Clapperton's Recent Music’, Tempo 188, 03 1994, pp. 10–14 Google Scholar.

2 Tempo 120, March 1977, p. 4.

3 Tempo 120, March 1977, p. 6.

4 See, for example, ‘The Bottom Line’, Musical Times, September 1994, pp. 544–50.

5 See Griffiths, Paul, New Sounds, New Personalities. British Composers of the 1980s (1985), p. 36 Google Scholar.

6 See Griffiths, Paul, Peter Maxwell Davies (London 1981), p. 152 Google Scholar.

7 Composer's Note in the study score, Boosey & Hawkes, London 1994.

8 Composer's Note in the study score. See also the booklet with the Collins Classics recording. There is a brief account of the work's serial elements in McGregor, Richard E, ‘The Maxwell Davies Sketch Material in the British Library’, Tempo 196, 04 1996, pp. 17–19 Google Scholar.

9 ‘Along the knife-edge: the topic of transcendence in Britten's musical aesthetic’, in On Britten and Mahler, ed. Reed, Philip (Woodbridge 1995), p. 294 Google Scholar.

10 Cited in Eysteinsson, Astradur, The concept of modernism (London 1990), p. 210 Google Scholar.