pelodelperro | Harrison Birtwistle - Nomos @pelodelperro | Uploaded 10 years ago | Updated 2 days ago
Nomos, for amplified wind quartet & orchestra (1968)
BBC Symphony Orchestra
Paul Daniel
The famous British architecture scholar Sir Nikolaus Pevsner once declared that the "law" of English art is the line, not the body. While fulsome and sensuous color may belong to the Italians, and overwrought shadow and detail to the Germans, the edge, the contour, and the vertex, the ray, are the legal property of the English mind, exquisite and proud in its lyrical and Euclidean gifts. So when knighted composer Sir Harrison Birtwistle writes a work in which a single melodic line gradually grows, amplifies, and conquers an entire orchestra -- and then entitles the work Nomos, Greek for "Law" -- one might follow Sir Pevsner and say that Sir Harry is the music paragon of English imagination.
One might follow Sir Pevsner, and yet -- since when does line not make body? Since when does body eschew line? Taken by itself, Pevsner's claim appears a naïve definition of English art, and certainly fails to grasp the extraordinary nature of Birtwistle's music. Of course, Birtwistle has fixed on "line" from his childhood days as a clarinetist through to the friezes of his 1996 work Pulse Shadows. But what makes a foundational work like the composer's early Nomos (1968) so explosively effective is not a "Boolean" approach; neither its merely linear aspect, nor its corporeal element, satisfies alone. Rather, Nomos sets up a rich, productive tension between line and body; it wedges itself exactly in the gap between both, and turns that gap into an arena of combat. The "law" of Nomos is not at all pre-established, but hard-won amidst a parade of antagonists.
Typical of Birtwistle, the battle in Nomos carries a double-edged reference to the world of Greek antiquity: as already mentioned, the title alludes to law in the political and social sense, the strictures and commands of the state. But the word nomos was also used as musical terminology, referring to the laws governing melodic patterns on the aulos, the Greek reed pipe. And this instrument, in turn, carried great martial significance: following Plato's notions of musical affect, the aulos -- when playing the suitable nomos -- possessed the power to stir soldiers into battle.
Hence the tone of Nomos -- militant, eruptive, and searching -- and hence its antiphonal structure: the orchestra is set up against an amplified quartet of flute, horn, clarinet, and bassoon. A fourfold-aulos, this quartet unfolds and amplifies its long, cable-like line with masterful timing, ever progressively growing in strength. The orchestra likewise grows, not as an aulic song (or what Birtwistle would later call a "cantus") but as a continuum of bursts and blows, thick, vertical, monolithic.
Sir Pevsner would be happy to know that, by the end of Birtwistle's score, the aulos-line triumphs over the massive body; Sir Harry lives up to his role as King of musical longitude. But, on the other hand, Birtwistle's line is an architecture scholar's nightmare: Nomos is the conquest by living, pliant breath over "economy" -- "law of the house" -- which is the heart of all architectural venture. [allmusic.com]
Art by Lyonel Feininger
Nomos, for amplified wind quartet & orchestra (1968)
BBC Symphony Orchestra
Paul Daniel
The famous British architecture scholar Sir Nikolaus Pevsner once declared that the "law" of English art is the line, not the body. While fulsome and sensuous color may belong to the Italians, and overwrought shadow and detail to the Germans, the edge, the contour, and the vertex, the ray, are the legal property of the English mind, exquisite and proud in its lyrical and Euclidean gifts. So when knighted composer Sir Harrison Birtwistle writes a work in which a single melodic line gradually grows, amplifies, and conquers an entire orchestra -- and then entitles the work Nomos, Greek for "Law" -- one might follow Sir Pevsner and say that Sir Harry is the music paragon of English imagination.
One might follow Sir Pevsner, and yet -- since when does line not make body? Since when does body eschew line? Taken by itself, Pevsner's claim appears a naïve definition of English art, and certainly fails to grasp the extraordinary nature of Birtwistle's music. Of course, Birtwistle has fixed on "line" from his childhood days as a clarinetist through to the friezes of his 1996 work Pulse Shadows. But what makes a foundational work like the composer's early Nomos (1968) so explosively effective is not a "Boolean" approach; neither its merely linear aspect, nor its corporeal element, satisfies alone. Rather, Nomos sets up a rich, productive tension between line and body; it wedges itself exactly in the gap between both, and turns that gap into an arena of combat. The "law" of Nomos is not at all pre-established, but hard-won amidst a parade of antagonists.
Typical of Birtwistle, the battle in Nomos carries a double-edged reference to the world of Greek antiquity: as already mentioned, the title alludes to law in the political and social sense, the strictures and commands of the state. But the word nomos was also used as musical terminology, referring to the laws governing melodic patterns on the aulos, the Greek reed pipe. And this instrument, in turn, carried great martial significance: following Plato's notions of musical affect, the aulos -- when playing the suitable nomos -- possessed the power to stir soldiers into battle.
Hence the tone of Nomos -- militant, eruptive, and searching -- and hence its antiphonal structure: the orchestra is set up against an amplified quartet of flute, horn, clarinet, and bassoon. A fourfold-aulos, this quartet unfolds and amplifies its long, cable-like line with masterful timing, ever progressively growing in strength. The orchestra likewise grows, not as an aulic song (or what Birtwistle would later call a "cantus") but as a continuum of bursts and blows, thick, vertical, monolithic.
Sir Pevsner would be happy to know that, by the end of Birtwistle's score, the aulos-line triumphs over the massive body; Sir Harry lives up to his role as King of musical longitude. But, on the other hand, Birtwistle's line is an architecture scholar's nightmare: Nomos is the conquest by living, pliant breath over "economy" -- "law of the house" -- which is the heart of all architectural venture. [allmusic.com]
Art by Lyonel Feininger
