7 - The golden bird and the porcelain bowl: Byzantium and the politics of artefacts

Summary

What did Tippett mean by ‘artefact’?

‘Artefact’ is a word that hovers problematically around Tippett's last works. The association originates from the composer himself, but he borrows the term from W. B. Yeats. ‘In Yeats's jargon’, we read in Those Twentieth Century Blues, ‘an artefact is a work of art that is entirely separated from its creator – where the personal emotion has disappeared into the magnificence of the craft’. And in the eyes of many – Tippett's included – the epitome of such an aesthetic apotheosis, in both construction and subject matter, is Yeats's late poem ‘Byzantium’ (1930). Hence it is no surprise that when, in the late 1980s, Tippett turned to set the poem he had long loved the same ideal would rank within his own creative criteria: ‘My setting, which extends the fairly short poem into a big song lasting about 27 minutes, had to be just such an artefact’, he writes. And this is reinforced in the preface to Byzantium (1989–90): ‘I identified completely with [Yeats's poem's] emphasis on the notion of artefacts, enshrining values that can be set against the impermanence of the everyday world and the complexities of the human beating heart’. There is another cultural-historical connection in this regard, namely T. S. Eliot, who first encouraged Tippett to read Yeats, and in whose essays, notably ‘Tradition and the individual talent’ (1919), the composer states he ‘first met the notion of artefacts’.