Tippett's Tearoom

[Karl Henning]

BTW, I've not listened to The Ice Break yet . . . .

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BTW, I've not listened to The Ice Break yet . . . .

Don't worry. I haven't either.

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I just listened to @2mins of the first movements of the Symphonies 1-3. Never having heard them, I offer my first impressions:

No.1: my first thought was, Sessions No.2. Very Neo-Classical, spritely rhythms.

No.2: some strange Gladiator Movie? Roman brass fifth fanfare chugging with lightning fast string runs. Very energetic!

No.3: Wow, that's noisy! Clangorous. ill tempered!

I was certainly impressed to save for later. They were are three very 'fresh', all in their own way, too. I did sense the extreme busyness, like Hindemith on... what?, meth?,... definitely highly amped and hallucinating slightly. The string section in No.2 certainly gets a workout! I was certainly turned on to his personal demands for 'purity' of expression from the players,..hmm, Ives?, Langaard?, Brian?...  idiosynch...spell check not working...

Anyhow, very fresh. I'm staying away from No.4 just because. YT guided me next to Wellesz's 8-9, which also added to the feeling, reminding me of Searle and Frankel and and and

I really like your unique descriptions of Symphonies Nos. 1-3. Pretty funny stuff. But I urge you to listen to the 4th. You will not be sorry! Do you own a recording of it? If you own Solti's, then just go ahead and throw it out!

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What performance do you guys prefer of the Tippett's 2nd? Tippett himself conducting, Colin Davis, or Hickox? I really like Tippett's own performance of it, but each performance has it's own merits.

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"Luke...this is Obi Wan Kenobi calling you. We need you here...Luke..."

[71 dB]

Have you listened to any of his music since you made this post, 71 dB?

No, I haven't. It may take years before I do.

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No, I haven't. It may take years before I do.

Edit: It's a shame to read comments like this because I think one could easily drop whatever they're interested in and take 10-20 minutes out of their "busy" schedules to listen to a new composer.

[71 dB]

Edit: It's a shame to read comments like this because I think one could easily drop whatever they're interested in and take 10-20 minutes out of their "busy" schedules to listen to a new composer.

It's not about not having 20 minutes of time. It is about being curious enough in order to be able to concentrate properly.

Recently I have explored Stölzel, Hindemith and Berg. On non-classical size Carly Simon (heavily!), The Doobie Brothers, Kansas and little bit 10 CC and Premiata Forneria Marconi.

I am listening to Tippett's Piano Concerto (Spotify) as I write this. 

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I found this interview with Simon Rattle discussing A Child of Our Time:

http://www.youtube.com/v/XeHhoKJ-iQs

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Carly Simon (heavily!)

Oh dear...

I am listening to Tippett's Piano Concerto (Spotify) as I write this.

Good, let us know what you think...

[71 dB]

Oh dear...

Oh dear how talented she is! 

Good, let us know what you think...

Tippett - Piano Concerto - Philharmonia Orchestra - Sir Colin Davis - John Ogdon.

I didn't find this work particularly memorable. I think it lacks a beautiful Adagio or Largo part. Pretty much what I expected, not bad but not that interesting either, just like most composers.

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Tippett - Piano Concerto - Philharmonia Orchestra - Sir Colin Davis - John Ogdon.

I didn't find this work particularly memorable. I think it lacks a beautiful Adagio or Largo part. Pretty much what I expected, not bad but not that interesting either, just like most composers.

God forbid it lacks an adagio or largo. Sounds like you written off before you even listened to it. But whatever, just continue listening to Carly Simon and Doobie Brothers...lol.

By the way, the Ogdon/Davis performance can't touch the Shelley/Hickox performance IMHO.

[71 dB]

God forbid it lacks an adagio or largo. Sounds like you written off before you even listened to it. But whatever, just continue listening to Carly Simon and Doobie Brothers...lol.

By the way, the Ogdon/Davis performance can't touch the Shelley/Hickox performance IMHO.

I did write that after listening to the whole concerto. It's my initial opinion after just one listening. Who knows what I think later on.

I was limited to what is available in Spotify (not much Tippett, unfortunately).

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I did write that after listening to the whole concerto. It's my initial opinion after just one listening. Who knows what I think later on.

I was limited to what is available in Spotify (not much Tippett, unfortunately).

Yes, well that's good. Please do listen again. I think you will find it a very strong work. As I mentioned before, Tippett didn't make much of an impression on me when I first heard him either.

[71 dB]

Yes, well that's good. Please do listen again. I think you will find it a very strong work.

Maybe, but not today! 

As I mentioned before, Tippett didn't make much of an impression on me when I first heard him either.

It has taken me years to appreciate many composers too.

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Listening to A Child of Our Time (w/ Hickox/LSO) again and what an outstanding composition this is. Such heartfelt emotion and the Negro Spirituals were a masterful creative stroke. Luke, do you have the score to this work? I wonder what kind of harmonies it uses? Uh oh, I asked a loaded question. That's okay I love reading Luke's epic posts about Tippett's music. I'm so glad he's passionate about this music as much as I am.

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So I read through an interview with Tippett (a link I believe I provided many pages back) and boy did he confuse the hell out of me...lol. His answers are never straight-forward at all. He always seems to dance around the question and answers parts of it as if he's doing some kind of coordinated dance routine. Thank goodness his music was his voice! I never read his librettos but I actually may look over The Midsummer Marriage tonight to try and make some sense of it.

[Luke]

MI, I'd urge you strongly to get hold of the Ian Kemp biography I've been talking about. It explains Tippett's views, and their fluctuations over time, wonderfully well. Kemp knows everything about Tippett, it seems. Re the Midsummer Marriage, for instance - this is a complex opera with complex sources; though the essence of it is very simple, there is so much going on behind the scenes that it is almost impossible even to talk about it clearly without getting tangled up.  And yet Kemp manages, spectacularly well, in a lengthy, penetrating discussion of the opera, its roots, its sources, its meanings and finally its music. 70 -odd pages of the book are devoted to this one opera alone!

It will also answer your questions about Child of Our Time. Yes, I do have the score, and yes, I will happily do a bit of analysis on it for you, but Kemp's subtle understanding of the kinds of tonal tensions engendered by Tippett's formal scheme is perfectly-pitched and leaves little to be said. Tippett intended his harmonisation of the spirituals to be exceedingly natural and pure in its diatonicism, to the extent, he said, that is 'excludes all harmonies whatsoever'. From the spirituals he extracted the characteristic bluesey third (from the fifth degree to the flattened seventh), and this minor third becomes the source interval of the whole work. Funnily enough, I deduced this when I was just a boy, long before I read Kemp's book, but I also felt that there was a consistent motivic use not just of thirds but of of sixths (the inversion of the third), and that there was a point in the work where the use of thirds and sixths shifted in emphasis (the most obvious and telling examples being the descending 6th at the beginning 'It is winter' becoming the rising 6th near the end 'it is spring' - this at least it obvious and a major idea in the music). I can no longer remember quite what I was thinking back then - I was only a teenager - but I do remember being very sure of it! 

In genera Tippett's tonal structures are derived from his readings of D'Indy and his theories of tonal brightness and darkness (not really that different from standard tonal practice, but more thorough-going). What is remarkable about Tippett - and because it is hidden in the sturcture of the works, not easy to see at first - is quite how logical and consistent his following of this fundamental idea is. Kemp's diagram of the tonal structure of the work is very revealing.

But I think you are asking about harmony, not tonal structure. Truth is, it is hard to give general rules about Tippett's harmony, because it is essentially empirical. Later on, and first found in the Sonata for Four Horns (which though a small piece, Kemp sees as very important, and I agree) there is a chord which is to be found in much of his later music, a kind of fused tonic and dominant but missing a third
e.g. C-G-B-D; and earlier on there are certain types of behaviours to be observed, some of them deriving from Sibelius (again, Kemp is massivley strong on all this stuff). But essentially he does what he needs to when he he needs it. The beginning of Child of Our Time is completely triadic, with grinding dissonant basses and chromatic slides everywhere. But as Kemp points out, what is also happening here is that Tippett is paraphrasing a couple of phrases from Wagner (one from Parsifal, one from Meistersinger). Throughout this piece, and in other works, one finds this happening sometimes - the music gently suggests other music, in gesture and shape, without actually quoting it. Later points in Child of Our Time, for instance, call phrases of Handel (Messiah) to mind. This is deliberate, probably. Every time this happens there seems to be a reason for it, an expressive or psychlogical correlation which Tippett is wishing to draw between the older piece and his own, so as to deepen the resonances of his music.


I'm still engrossed in Kemp's book myself, FWIW. It is such a satisfying read. I said I'd add to my post about the Triple Concerto with a few extra points Kemp makes, so here they are, condensed:

Tippett revealed that he conceived of the work as a progress from one day to the next, or IOW 'as a natural cycle flowing from begining to end and admitting none of the sharp contrasts associated with more individual experience'. That is why the pieces is cyclic and continuous. The outer movements are 'day', the middle movement 'night', and the interludes twilight and dawn respectively. This is why - I missed this - the second interlude quotes the dawn chorus from the end of Midsummer Marriage. The 'clatter of percussion' which precedes this 'is a musical equivalent of the sudden streaks of red that shimmer across the dark colours of a night sky', deriving from this phrase of Yeats:

All metaphor, Malachi, stilts and all. A barnacle goose
Far up in the stretches of night; night splits and the dawn breaks looses;
I, through the terrible novelty of light, stalk on, stalk on;
Those great sea-horses bare their teeth and laugh at the dawn.

Kemp suggests that Tippett's fascination with the phrase 'gong-tormented sea' from another late Yeats poem, Byzantium, might lie partly behind the heavy presence of tuned gongs in the work - of course it was this poem that he set later, after the Kemp was written, and IIRC this phrase which was of particular importance to him when he set it. The real stimuls behind the gongs was a visit to Indonesia shortly before composing the piece, and the music does occasionally suggest gamelan in specific ways such as those I mentioned (pentatonicism, scoring) and also, as Kemp says, in the way the music just stops. Kemp describes the form of the piece as I do, and adds the important idea that 'Tippett's procedure may suggest the truism that things will always begin and end in the same way but that their middles will be different; it gains significance here because it is in the middle, the slow movement, that the transcendent moments occur. In the processTippett shows that transcendence is a gift that can occur anywhere - at the beginning (the symphony), the middle (the concerto) and the end (the quartet)' (Kemp rightly sees these three works as closely related)

The other thing that stuck in my mind from Kemp, which I wanted to post here, was a slight counter-argument to John's that Tippett was such a dreadful conductor. Somethng about Tippett - his humility, maybe, his humanness - seems to invites people to see the flaws in him and to magnify them up. This applies to his music, his libretti, his writings, and his conducting, perhaps. There is no doubt that Tippett was not a great conductor; I am sure what John says of him is correct. IIRC Mike (Knight) has also been conducted by Tippett, and has said similar things. But then in Kemp we read of Tippett as a young man, conducting his own South London Orchestra, which was made up of professional players, and we read the opinion of the orchestra's leader, who subsequently played for many well-known conductors, that Tippett, at this time anyway, 'was a genuinely fine conductor whose closest counterpart was Rafael Kubelik.' Tippett did study conducting, after all, with both Malcolm Sergeant and Adrian Boult, standing by the latter's side for four years in rehearsals.

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Wow, Luke epic post. Thanks so much for the time and effort you put into it! I really need to pick up Kemp's Tippett book.

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Ian Kemp's book on Tippett is incredibly difficult to find because it's out-of-print and the prices sellers are asking for it in like new condition (the only condition I would buy a used book in) online are just ridiculous.