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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2020
‘Lateness’ is a musicological concept relevant to Tippett's oeuvre – if applied dialectically. His Triple Concerto (1978–9) is arguably the first work to reveal the ‘late’ trait of renewed lyricism and tonal transparency which together serve as an immanent critique of the fragmentation and dissonance of his second period (which began with King Priam). The co-presence of both sets of characteristics, whose synthesis is only partial, issues in a heterogeneity suggestive of a future social order in which the particular is not subsumed into the totality. This world-view sedimented in the musical structure constitutes a pluralism which invites comparison with, but may not be identical to, notions within postmodernism. Its paradigm may also have been distilled from the (problematic) social mediation of self which Tippett would have experienced as a gay person.
This article is based on a paper originally read at the International Musicological Society Congress in July 1997, in the session ‘British Music since Britten’. The present, considerably expanded and revised, version was completed during a period of research leave made possible by the Arts and Humanities Research Board and by the University of Newcastle upon Tyne.
1 Jones, Robert F., ‘Tippett's Atonal Syntax’, Michael Tippett O.M.: A Celebration, ed. Geraint Lewis (Tunbridge Wells, 1985), 119–42 (p. 128).Google Scholar
2 Kemp, Ian, Michael Tippett: The Composer and his Music (London, 1984). Kemp divides Tippett's published oeuvre of the time into four periods: 1934–52, 1952–8, 1958–76 and 1976–. It would not be a gross violation of Kemp's presentation, however, to interpret this as two main periods – 1934–52 and 1958–76 – between which the period 1952–8 was ‘transitional’, and after which the period beginning in 1976 was ‘late’ – both Kemp's own designations.Google Scholar
3 Bowen, Meirion, ‘String Quartet No. 5’, CD liner notes to Tippett: The 5 String Quartets, Lindsay Quartet (ASV: CD DCS 231).Google Scholar
4 Dahlhaus, Carl, Ludwig van Beethoven: Approaches to his Music (Oxford, 1991), 219.Google Scholar
5 Only the minor Caliban's Song (1995) followed.Google Scholar
6 Einfall, radio talk, prod. Natalie Wheen (BBC Radio 3, 20 February 1995); broadcast prior to the transmission of the previous day's London première of The Rose Lake.Google Scholar
7 Published as Tippett, Sir Michael, E. William Doty Lectures in Fine Arts: Second Series 1976 (Austin, TX, 1979).Google Scholar
8 See ibid, 34, 1.Google Scholar
9 Ibid., 45.Google Scholar
10 Kemp refers to these words as premonitory of a turn in Tippett's aesthetic values (Michael Tippett, 402). Derrick Puffett goes further in quoting them as self-incriminating evidence on Tippett's part for an alleged ‘sad decline’ in the composer's capabilities after King Priam (see Puffett, Derrick, ‘Tippett and the Retreat from Mythology’, Musical Times, 136 (1995), 6–14 (p. 12)).Google Scholar
11 Tippett, E. William Doty Lectures, 33–4.Google Scholar
12 Tippett uses the term Einfall in his essay ‘Archetypes of Concert Music’, Tippett on Music, ed. Meirion Bowen (Oxford, 1995), 89–108 (p. 107). Bowen also invokes Tippett's use of it in the radio broadcast of that title (see note 6 above). Elsewhere Tippett describes comparable moments of conception and the subsequent prolonged period of ‘gestation’, specifically with regard to the Second and Third Symphonies: see, for example, his sleeve notes to Symphony no. 2 (Argo, ZRG 535); Bayan Northcott, ‘Tippett's Third Symphony’, Music and Musicians, 20 (June 1972), 30–2 (p. 31); Michael Tippett, ‘Preface to Verses for a Symphony’, Moving into Aquarius (2nd edn, London, 1974), 157–9 (p. 157) (reproduced in modified form within ‘Archetypes of Concert Music’, 95–100 (see pp. 95–6)). Interestingly, the term Einfall also features in Adorno's aesthetics, in which it is used to describe the ‘irreducibly subjective’ moment in a work's creation, mediated within the form of the work through the ‘objective’ process of thematic working out (see for example Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, trans. Anne G. Mitchell and Wesley C. Blomster, London, 1987, 73–4, n. 31). Whereas for Adorno Einfall stands for a thematic idea which then enters a process of thematic development, for Tippett Einfall may not be an already formed musical idea at all, and what follows creatively is described by him as a process of accretion.Google Scholar
13 Tippett, , E. William Doty Lectures, 44.Google Scholar
14 Ibid., 45.Google Scholar
15 Ibid., 44.Google Scholar
16 Arnold Whittall makes a similar point when he talks of Tippett's resistance to his earlier resistance to tonality. See his ‘Resisting Tonality: Tippett, Beethoven and the Sarabande’, Music Analysis, 9 (1990), 267–86 (p. 283).Google Scholar
17 Tippett, , E. William Doty Lectures, 45.Google Scholar
18 It may be the case that the moment described in the Doty Lectures has more than one outcome. Its role as depicted here is in galvanizing an entire style period, but a further specific work which could be traced back to that moment is the String Quartet no. 5, whose slow movement is modelled on the Heilige Dankgesang from Beethoven's op. 132; it is quite conceivable that this was the quartet movement to which Tippett referred (though he does not identify the actual work in question). Peter Wright makes a detailed comparison of these two movements in his ‘Decline or Renewal in Late Tippett? The Fifth String Quartet in Perspective’, Tippett Studies, ed. David Clarke (Cambridge, 1999), 200–22 (pp. 212–20).Google Scholar
19 My use of the term ‘slow movement’ is to some extent mnemonic. As described below, the Triple Concerto is in one sense conceived as a single-movement work operating under a kind of cyclic principle; accordingly individual ‘movements’ have the status more of major sections. However, the relationship between these formal units and their counterparts in a more traditional archetype of the concerto genre is still quite recognizable; hence ‘slow movement’ is used here as a less ambiguous alternative to, say, ‘slow section'.Google Scholar
20 Bowen, Meirion, Michael Tippett (2nd edn, London, 1997), 197.Google Scholar
21 A further twist, however, is that in Kemp's different formulation of lateness these features are contributing criteria, adding greater provisionality to this ambivalence.Google Scholar
22 See Tippett, Michael, Those Twentieth Century Blues: An Autobiography (London, 1991), 258. Tippett also notes here that he had been lent a copy of recorded gamelan music by Aubrey Russ in the 1930s. It is probable that this informed his invocation of gamelan textures in the first movement of his Sonata no. 1 for Piano (1936–8). According to Mervyn Cooke this represented the first allusion to the gamelan in the work of an English composer; see Cooke, Britten and the Far East: Asian Influences in the Music of Benjamin Britten (Woodbridge, 1998), 15.Google Scholar
23 Bowen, , Michael Tippett, 200, 268 n. 9. The author cites Example 320 of the McPhee volume as an instance of the transcriptions to which Tippett referred; see McPhee, Colin, Music in Bali: A Study in Form and Instrumental Organization in Balinese Orchestral Music (repr. New York, 1976), 337.Google Scholar
24 For an account of the relationship between Britten and McPhee see Cooke, Britten and the Far East, ch. 2. As Cooke points out (pp. 25ff.), the source of McPhee's to which Britten turned was not his Music in Bali, which was completed only long after the two had lost touch, but his two-piano arrangements, Balinese Ceremonial Music, which he and Britten recorded on a 78 r.p.m. set for Schirmer in 1941. Britten's relationship with McPhee is also discussed by Philip Brett in his ‘Eros and Orientalism in Britten's Operas’, Queering the Pitch, ed. Philip Brett, Elizabeth Wood and Gary Thomas (New York and London, 1994), 235–56 (pp. 237–8).Google Scholar
25 These motives are drawn in particular from the hemitonic pentatonic subset of the scale, known as selisir in its Balinese version. The transposition of the pentatonic scale used by Tippett in the slow-movement melody, B♭–D–E♭–F–A, is exactly that used by Britten in parts of Death in Venice and in The Prince of the Pagodas; by Poulenc in his Concerto for Two Pianos; and by McPhee in the third piece of his Balinese Ceremonial Music (see Cooke, Britten and the Far East, 32). However, whereas in these instances the five-note set is centred on B♭, in Tippett's case the centre is F, providing the structurally salient flattened-seventh element, E♭, discussed above.Google Scholar
26 Collisson, Stephen, ‘Significant Gestures to the Past: Formal Processes and Visionary Moments in Tippett's Triple Concerto’, Tippett Studies, ed. Clarke, 145–65.Google Scholar
27 Whittall, Arnold, The Music of Britten and Tippett: Studies in Themes and Techniques (2nd edn, Cambridge, 1990), 297.Google Scholar
28 Songs of Experience: Michael Tippett at Eighty Five, dir. Mischa Scorer (Antelope West Productions, 1991).Google Scholar
29 This compares with Christopher Mark's discussion of Tippett's ‘metaphorical’ use of musical materials, which ‘stand for’ their traditional functions, rather than actually realizing them; see his ‘Tippett, Sequence and Metaphor’, Tippett Studies, ed. Clarke, 95–116.Google Scholar
30 This characterization converges in essence with Whittall's view of tonality in Tippett's later music, ‘in which tonal extension and tonal contradiction coexist, and there can be no stable synthesis of these divergent tendencies’ (Whittall, ‘Resisting Tonality’, 283–4).Google Scholar
31 See, for example, the accretions for piccolos and E♭ clarinets above the cello ‘song’ at Figs. 66ff. of the slow movement, or the woodwind roulades over the long cello melody in the penultimate section of the fantasia-like finale (Figs. 169ff.). Embryonic versions of these procedures can be found still earlier, for example in The Midsummer Marriage (1946–52), at such places as the introduction to Act 2.Google Scholar
32 Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (2nd edn, London and New York, 1986; repr. 1989, 1992), 32.Google Scholar
33 Alastair Williams, New Music and the Claims of Modernity (Aldershot and Brookfield, VT, 1997), 7.Google Scholar
34 This reorientation within the sphere of art might in turn be seen to be paralleled by developments within political discourses of the latter part of the century – whereby, for example, environmentalism, feminism and the politics of race, ethnicity and sexuality have complicated, even deconstructed, the agenda of a progressive politics based principally on a critique of capitalism and the class structures engendered by it.Google Scholar
35 Tippett, E. William Doty Lectures, 51.Google Scholar
36 Ibid.Google Scholar
37 Ibid., 52.Google Scholar
38 Music of the Angels: Essays and Sketchbooks of Michael Tippett, 17–27 (p. 26; see also p. 24); this essay is reprinted in Tippett on Music, 7–15 (pp. 14–15; see also pp. 12–13). For further commentary by Tippett on European music's need to be aware of other global cultures see his 1958 essay ‘Too Many Choices’, Moving into Aquarius, 130–44 (pp. 141–2); also in Tippett on Music, 294–306 (pp. 303–4). Moreover, Tippett kept faith with this notion of plurality right up to the end of his life, as is witnessed in his late essay ‘Dreaming of Things to Come’, Tippett on Music, 307–9 (here his vision ultimately veers towards the theatre as the forum for such manifestations of pluralism).Google Scholar
39 Paddison, Max, Adorno's Aesthetics of Music (Cambridge, 1993), 60.Google Scholar
40 Annan, Noel, Our Age: The Generation that Made Post-War Britain (repr. London, 1991), 375. Also quoted by Arnold Whittall in his ‘“Byzantium”: Tippett, Yeats and the Limitations of Affinity’, Music and Letters, 74 (1993), 383–98 (p. 398).Google Scholar
41 See Annan, , Our Age, 375.Google Scholar
42 Ibid., 377.Google Scholar
43 With these ideas I allude also to the ‘theory of communicative action’ of Jürgen Habermas – perhaps the most significant of post-Adornian critical theorists of the Frankfurt school. Habermas's theories stem from a recognition of the need to reformulate the ‘project of modernity’ from within, in order to rescue it; this notion, as well as the period when it began to emerge (the late 1970s), invites interesting parallels with the issues under discussion in this and the previous section. See Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, trans. Thomas McCarthy, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1984–7). I have found Alastair Williams's discussion of Habermas and others helpful in considering questions of music's situation after modernity: see Williams, New Music and the Claims of Modernity.Google Scholar
44 See Tippett, , ‘Archetypes of Concert Music’, 101–3.Google Scholar
45 Adorno, Theodor W., ‘Subject and Object’, The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, ed. Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt (Oxford, 1978), 497–511 (p. 500).Google Scholar
46 The following account develops issues first raised in my ‘Tippett In and Out of “Those Twentieth Century Blues”: The Context and Significance of an Autobiography’, Music and Letters, 74 (1993), 399–411 (pp. 407–10). Meirion Bowen also takes up the theme of the relationship between Eros and creativity in Tippett (see his Michael Tippett, 245–7). This connection includes Bowen's only mention of Adorno, in which the latter is dismissed as representative of critics inclined to make ‘specious and glib’ parallels between such phenomena. While there are various grounds on which one might take issue with the latter, and while there is certainly much in the Tippettian mind-set that puts up interesting resistances to Adornian ideas, Bowen's characterization of Adorno – as one who used ‘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’ (p. 247) – is simply factually incorrect. Paradoxically, it is the very sophistication of Adorno's thought – specifically his application of the concept of mediation – that holds out the potential to validate such connections and to evaluate them in a suitably nuanced way – as I hope to indicate below.Google Scholar
47 See Kemp, , Michael Tippett, 36–7; Tippett, Those Twentieth Century Blues, 52–63, 112.Google Scholar
48 Tippett, , E. William Doty Lectures, 11.Google Scholar
49 Ibid.Google Scholar
50 Ibid., 12, 13.Google Scholar
51 For example, while the biography on which Kemp was engaged at the time would include the first authorized public reference to a specific gay romance – with the artist Wilfred Franks – mention of all other gay relationships would be absent or suppressed; moreover, Tippett explicitly requested his biographer not to use the word ‘homosexual’ in his monograph. (I am indebted to Ian Kemp for this information.)Google Scholar
52 Tippett, Moving into Aquarius, 130–44 (p. 138); Tippett on Music, 294–306 (p. 300).Google Scholar
53 Moving into Aquarius, 140; Tippett on Music, 302.Google Scholar
54 There could be considerable mileage for research into the Cold War era as a shaping force in Tippett's social consciousness. Certainly Tippett's perceptions of social domination seem to be expressed through issues relating to that political climate. Shostakovich is invoked in this connection in more than one of Tippett's essays; moreover, he and Solzhenitsyn are mentioned a number of times in the Doty Lectures – given shortly after the completion of The Ice Break, in which opera the resemblance of the character Lev to a figure such as Solzhenitsyn is barely concealed.Google Scholar
55 Paddison, Adorno's Aesthetics of Music, 23.Google Scholar
56 For discussion of Britten's deployment of Balinese scale forms in Death in Venice see Cooke, Britten and the Far East, ch. 8; also idem, ‘Britten and the Gamelan: Balinese Influences in “Death in Venice”’, Benjamin Britten: Death in Venice, ed. Donald Mitchell (Cambridge, 1987), 115–28. Interestingly, the musical example from McPhee's Music in Bali which Bowen instances as one of the models for the pseudo-gamelan sounds in the Triple Concerto featured among the gamelan pieces which McPhee transcribed in Balinese Ceremonial Music and recorded with Britten many years earlier (see notes 23–4 above).Google Scholar
57 Brett, ‘Eros and Orientalism'.Google Scholar
58 As, for example, in Tippett's interview with Anthony Clare in the BBC Radio 4 series In the Psychiatrist's Chair, first broadcast in August 1986 (transcribed in a much shortened form in The Listener, 116, 14 August 1986, 10–11); or his interview with Natalie Wheen in the Channel 4 television documentary Tippett's Time, dir. Deborah May (Phantom Empire, 1995).Google Scholar
59 Tippett, Those Twentieth Century Blues, 277–8, 1–2.Google Scholar
60 For Tippett's identification with Dov see his essay ‘Dreams of Power, Dreams of Love’, Tippett on Music, 220–7 (pp. 223–4); for his identification with the orphan state of Jo Ann and Donny see Bowen, Michael Tippett (2nd edn), 131–2.Google Scholar
61 See Tippett, Those Twentieth Century Blues, 227–43 (pp. 231–3, 242–3). The relationship with Hawker lasted from 1957 to 1974; Tippett also describes the clandestine beginnings of his relationship with Meirion Bowen in the mid-1960s, which became official after the break-up with Hawker.Google Scholar
62 The dream took place when Tippett was holidaying in Turkey in 1987; the composer also reports how in the same episode he awoke to sounds of the dawn muezzin which found their way into the main ensemble in Act 2 of New Year. See ibid., 276–8.Google Scholar
63 Tippett, E. William Doty Lectures, 45.Google Scholar
64 Ibid., 44.Google Scholar
65 Encapsulated in his now well-known statement, ‘Images of vigour for a decadent period, images of calm for one too violent. Images of reconciliation for worlds torn by division’ (Tippett, ‘Poets in a Barren Age’, Moving into Aquarius, 148–56 (p. 156)).Google Scholar