Perhaps, though, there were shadows from the start. It’s Gonna Rain (1965)—Reich’s Op. 1, a multitracked montage of a street preacher’s warning, from the time when thermonuclear war seemed very possibly imminent—is dark not only in its verbal message but also in the composer’s musical treatment, repeating that message over and over and also eroding the words. There’s another connection here with Reich’s recent work in the religious theme, even if the scene has shifted from a San Francisco sidewalk to the quiet of the studio, Bible open on the desk. In All Your Ways has a place along this burgeoning branch in Reich’s output, taking its title from Proverbs 3:6: ‘In all your ways submit to him, and he will direct your paths.’

The darkness, when it properly arrived in Reich’s ouput, became fully embodied with the harmonic complexity and ambiguity he introduced into his music—or more likely found entering it. Poignancy is often exacerbated by the searing tone of violins played without vibrato, a sound that arrived in this concert with Radio Rewrite (2012). But there’s also a whole other stratum of complexity and ambiguity in the music’s rhythm. For as long as Reich’s music lay stable in pulse, we were safe. With changes of metre, trouble came. While always streamlined, the music became more finely ramshackle in its behaviour, and though changes would be signalled in advance, they might still disconcert. The music could go off the rails. It could just stop.

Clapping Music (1972), dispatched at the start with smart rhythm and a nicely fleshy touch to the sound, allowed the evening to set out from the openness and virtuoso display of early Reich. Two Pianos (2020) was then a misstep, not only in zooming forward almost to the present but also—and more—in how its irregular rhythms stuttered and confused, even as the stumbling successions of complex chords and bare fifths (recalling Reich’s admiration for his predecessor by eight centuries Pérotin) intrigued. According to the website of the composer’s publisher, Boosey & Hawkes, this was the first performance—with no information as to why it was taking place six years after the work was composed. Short, at four minutes, it seems destined to remain an oddity in Reich’s output.

Clapping Music, though, was a happy choice of starter in other ways, not least in establishing a rhythm that was to urge its irresistible, supersyncopated way into

Reich’s music, perhaps for good and certainly as far as Double Sextet (2007). This—generating, through twenty minutes and more, to lift an exuberant phrase repeatedly up the steps of a scale—gave the first half a joyous end and left me, in the interval, trying to remember a beau présent that was printed in the programme for the Barbican’s celebration of Reich’s seventieth birthday, in 2006:

revise it revise it revise it revisit it

revise it revise it revisit it revive it

revise it revisit it revive it revive it

revisit it revive it revive it revive it

the river rises

the river serves the cities’ thirst

the river is ever

revive it revive it revive it revisit it

revive it revive it revisit it receive it

revive it revisit it receive it receive it

revisit it receive it receive it receive it

Now we have his ninetieth in sight, and the Barbican is again doing the honurs, with the Colin Currie Group repeating their Edinburgh programme. The new piece also has performances in Europe and North America coming up.

Back to last night, when the première was neatly set up by Quartet, which Reich composed for the Colin Currie Group in 2013. Coming after this, and all that went before in the first half, In All Your Ways glid, serene and luminescent. (I know ‘glided’ is now standard as the past of ‘glide’, but I like ‘glid’ and it has a relevant meaning in Scots as an adjective: ‘smooth, easy in motion’.) The instrumentation was the biggest of the evening—pairs of flutes, clarinets, marimbas, xylophones and pianos, plus string quartet)—but the music appeared to be afloat, hovering. Or the impression could flip and it would be us in the air, looking down on a garden of forking paths.

Appropriate, then, the title. Reich in his note tells us that the basic four-note pattern, intended as an ‘instrumental setting’ of the title, ‘can be heard, now and then, throughout the work’, but this understates the case, for the pattern is everywhere, always in even values, often in the neighbourhood of a triad (D minor in bars 74-5, diminished triad on A in bar 77). From it the rippling ways or paths emanate, unless, in another delightful Reichian ambiguity, it is emanating from them. A page from the score—not long past the first change of rhythmic unit, from sixteenth note to eighth, and simultaneously of key signature, from three sharps to two flats—may gave a hint of the interweaving of figure and ground, and of the continuous flow:

Perhaps there is more here for mute wonder at accomplishment, in composition and in performance, but we in the audience could not help take to our feet almost as soon as the piece was over—and stay there as Currie, his arms raised at the rear and a

flautist joining us in our applause, returned to the stage. ■

Probably because I don’t know what’s going on here.

After all, there are reasons to resist this music—one reason, in particular, which is the presence in all three pieces, at increasing distances from their endings, of moments when whirly tubes rise up, or ‘corrugaphones’, to give them their fancier names. I didn’t like these things when I heard Im Entfalten at its first performance, in Donaueschingen last year, and I didn’t like them just now. (An audio recording of that Donaueschingen performance, François-Xavier Roth conducting, is available on YouTube, as is an audio recording of Im Entschwinden, also from its first performance, by Klaus Mäkelä and the Orchestre de Paris in Vienna in 2023.) Lucerne had gone to the trouble of finding examples in an attractive bright blue, but that wasn’t why the problem just vanished. It was still there in the boring sound and in how the toys, swung round and round, usurped the visual scene. It simply wasn’t important. It was beside the point.

So what was the point?

So much more.

Oh, so much more that I’m already sorry I raised these snakes in the grass. Let them go.

You could say that the point was nothingness: the arrival at, the unwrapping, and the disclosure of nothingness—and all three in response to episodes in the Christian Bible. Im Entschwinden takes its absent text from the climax of the Emmaus narrative:

And it came to pass, as he sat at meat with them, he took bread, and blessed it, and brake, and gave to them. And their eyes were opened, and they knew him; and he vanished out of their sight. (Luke 24:30-31)

With regard to Im Entfalten, Andre offers only that it ‘refers to one of the central points of the Gospel: disappearance’, which of course is what happens at Emmaus. Then with Im Entsiegeln we move forward to the last book:

And when he had opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven about the space of half an hour. (Revelation 8:1)

(There is a fourth piece, third in the sequence, Im Enthüllen [In Unveiling], which Andre wrote for Matthias Pintscher and the Kansas City Symphony to play earlier this year, and which Pintscher will bring to Munich on October 9.)

Silence, the vanishment of sound, is the topic—not, though, the dead silence we feel when nothing is being played but the living silence of what is just discernible or what quietly but firmly stays, as pedal tones do through much of this music.

Above that palpable silence—the silence of quiet breathing—Andre comes in with noisier material that may shock: crashes from a thundersheet or tamtam, footsteps, or of course in the last piece the voice of the solo soprano.

OK, a question again: Do these things have such power because we have placed ourselves, as if in a church, in the presence of the sacred—because we have accepted the invitation to rewitness events of extraordinary power: the appearance and disappearance of someone presumed dead, the silence in heaven or, in Im Enthüllen, the silence of God as he rests from the labours of Creation?

I don’t think so. The music itself, purely as moving sound, all evocation aside, achieves the awesome. Those footsteps: they suggest some great being that the music has brought before us, invisible yet present up there on the stage. In Im Entfalten, the piano and associated instruments start a succession of such steps that’s broken off and then resumed in Im Entsiegeln. And a giant voice—giant but hardly rising above a breath—is with us from long before a real human voice arrives.

When that voice does, extraordinary things start to happen. Eerens—who, astonishingly, took over the role only a couple of days ago—can project the faintest glimmer or shadow of sound over whatever the orchestra, sometimes vociferous at this point, is bringing forward. Or, as it seems, she can open her mouth and project nothing at all, so that it’s the orchestral vocalization that appears to be coming out of her throat. She can accomplish dangerous leaps with complete security and yet still with an effect that’s scary. This is danger as the signal of mighty things being set in motion, at whatever remove.

Shall we call it transcendence? ■

Postscript: Having rediscovered my copy of the programme book, I can add a couple of quotatations relevant to Andre’s practice and to how, in the shimmering hover between the not quite heard and the not quite not heard, intensity drives up asymptotically on the approach to silence.

He writes:

I experience the message of the Gospels also as a compositional treatise, with regard to attention, transformation, in-between spaces.

Perhaps this explains—or at least states—how his response to his subject matter goes beyond illustration. Of course there remains the possibility out there of a kitsch of the ineffable-impalpable. But if the gates of heaven are now shut and we cannot touch the truth, we may gesture towards it, and perhaps the vibrant vividness—as well as the hopeless pointless poignancy—of that gesture may also increase towards infinity with the artist’s resolution and excision of the extraneous, which would certainly include anything having to do with expression or striving to convince.

Then there is this, from the German Catholic theologian Margareta Gruber:

For Andre, the vanished Resurrected One leaves behind another category of presence—and he wants to make this audible. And he creates a music that’s fragile and marked by great delicacy and caution: noli me tangere—that eludes our conceptual grasp, to reveal itself in the act of letting-vanish.

A music that at once exquisitely ensnares and decisively resists. ■

Post-postscript: a recent interview with the composer

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Barenboim and the Chicago Symphony gave three performances in their home hall and a fourth at the Proms that summer. Over the next couple of years the piece was presented in Amsterdam (Peter Eötvös) and Berlin (Sian Edwards). Then it stumbled, and stopped. According to the publisher, Boosey & Hawkes, there have been only four performances this century and none since September 2014 (again at the Proms, soon after the composer’s eightieth birthday, Andrew Litton conducting the BBC Symphony; recording on YouTube).

Birtwistle was in New York for Christmas, having made the visit, so he said, to see the new Richard Serra sculptures at the Dia Center for the Arts. ‘I prefer seeing sculpture in enclosed spaces,’ he explained. ‘These are like dinosaurs in a cage.’

His music has some of the same qualities as Serra’s work: monumentality, weight, severedness, the sense of an alien presence that is both extremely ancient and as new as today. Recently he completed a big orchestral work, Exody, which will be given its premiere next month by Daniel Barenboim and the Chicago Symphony. It is, he said, ‘a celebration of leaving. Its full title is Exody 23:59:59, the second before midnight. So it’s about the ending of the century, but also about leaving in general.’

Further than that he was unwilling to go. When asked how a half-hour piece could express a particular instant in time, he would say only: ‘Well, it can’t do that, can it?’ And to the remark that there must then be some sense in which the music relates to the moment before midnight he replied: ‘Mmm, there is.’

After a long pause he went on. ‘The piece is like a journey. When I describe my pieces, they all come out sounding the same, and perhaps they are. But having said that, I think there are some very different things in the way Exody speaks, in what the journey is. It’s very much a journey into a labyrinth and out again. Where you enter therefore has to be where you leave, and the piece begins and ends with the music that ended my last orchestral piece, Antiphonies: the widest C possible on the orchestra. There are also other points where it comes back to a place where it’s been before.

‘I’m interested in the whole notion of what a journey is. Whenever you’re traveling, there’s the prescribed place you’re attempting to get to, but there’s also the moment where you are within the journey—the scenery, if you like. Even more interesting for me is the question of right and left, the fact that when you’re looking at something, along the journey, you’re all the time cutting out other things. You can’t see everything all the time. And so the question of continuity and discontinuity also interests me—how you make discontinuities that in another way add up to a continuity.

‘I like to think the continuity is given, and it’s a matter of where you choose to put the eye—or, in the case of music, the ear—to make the continuity fractured. For instance, I made some things in the piece that are like frames. They have no context. They just happen, and then they’re gone again. It’s as if you open a trapdoor and see something else going on underneath. But it’s very difficult to know how to make a sort of logic out of the illogicality. That’s the problem. Francis Bacon said something interesting about that, that he’d always wanted to make pictures that were very formal and yet falling apart, in a state of disintegration.’

Much of this does indeed make Exody sound like a number of Birtwistle’s other works and invites the question of whether he has favourites among his output. ‘I don’t have favourite pieces. I have favourite moments, as I do in all music. But what I can never do is recreate a favourite bit in another piece, because the moment depends on the context. For instance, there are four bars in agm I’ve tried to emulate once or twice and not succeeded. They’re special to me because they do something in moving from a very fragmented texture, a lot of notes, to a unison. It’s like a sudden jump into focus. But you can’t take that as a technique and do it again. It’s like when a performer will show you some tricks. I can never use them. I feel threatened by them. The virtuosity has to arise out of the music.’

Right now Birtwistle is writing for a virtuoso performer, the British pianist Joanna MacGregor, for whom he is composing a set of four solo pieces to be performed in New York in April during the Philharmonic’s British Week. ‘I read that book, Longitude, which is about a clockmaker who made just four clocks and was called Harrison. So I’m writing these four pieces called Harrison’s Clocks. They’re mechanisms—rather elaborate toccatas, I suppose. At least, the two I’ve written are. I don’t know what the other two are going to be, so I can’t answer for them.’

Next on the agenda, after these final clocks, is an opera, The Last Supper, to be written for Glyndebourne. ‘I want to set it for just thirteen blokes and not a very big orchestra, ‘’with a chorus among the players. They’ll probably sing the mass, in Latin, and respond to what’s happening in the action.’ The casting of the central role is already clear. ‘He has to be a baritone. I don’t think Jesus can be a tenor. But Judas is certainly a tenor—not a countertenor, because they don’t have any dramatic qualities. I’d like him to be like Mime in Siegfried—muscular, streetwise.’

‘The form is interesting,’ he added. ‘That notion of twelve people, as a chorus but also with independent opinions. And one thing that interests me about the subject is that they go to celebrate one ritual, which is Passover, and he invents another one in the middle.’ (New York Times, December 31, 1997)

A few weeks later I was there for Exody’s first performance, again to report for the New York Times:

Birtwistle’s music, so new, seems at the same time to be coming to us from very long ago, as if it were music written in Hittite. Some of its expressions are so basic as to make an immediate effect—indeed an effect especially immediate by reason of the strangeness of the context. In his half-hour orchestral piece Exody, which gained a vivid and thoroughly prepared first performance from the Chicago Symphony under Daniel Barenboim on Thursday evening, some elements had a sudden presence: trumpet fanfares and peals of bells, massive accumulations and sudden dissolves, solo instrumental songs and percussion pulses. But the whole language of western music appears not yet to have been formed. Birtwistle, entering his fifth decade of mature creativity, has developed his own way of speaking. His rhetoric was always forceful; now he can tease out his arguments with extreme sophistication. Exody is a triumph of the self-made and, in its ignoring of customary ways, an instant relic, gigantic and magnificent.

An appropriate metaphor for it might be that of a ruined city. Birtwistle likes to speak of his works as journeys, and for Exody he has evoked the image of a labyrinth: there is one entrance point—an open doorway of orchestral space, from the lowest possible C, in double basses with electric piano, to the same note six octaves higher, in violin harmonics with glockenspiel—which has to be found again at the end. But more than a route the piece impresses as an entity—an animal entity. Imagine it as some large creature with a plated or sculptured hide: Dürer’s rhinoceros or a triceratops. And on its hide, growing out of the fleshly substance of it, are innumerable clocks. It stands. It moves. It bellows. And the voice of the work, as so often in Birtwistle’s music, is low, rooted in two tubas and several low woodwind instruments. It is seen right up close and then in long shot. And all the while there are these clockwork tickings and throbbings.

The merging of animal and machine is a merging of times, of the smooth, continuous time in which we feel ourselves to exist with the abrupt, indistinguishable instants in which time seems to issue from a clock. Our time gains its shape from memory, which allows us to reconsider stretches of passed time as if every moment in them were in the same now. In Birtwistle’s music the power of memory is the power of melody, which similarly makes us experience the past (previous notes and intervals) as belonging to the present, and Exody is full of melody, urging and exalting. But the clocks are a constant counterweight and threat. At one exemplary moment most of the orchestra falls silent, to leave just gong and drum strokes, lightly colored by tubas, harps, electric piano and basses. The scene is being set for a threnody; Mahler is close. And a slow melody duly begins, on all the violins, violas and cellos in unison. Almost at once, though, a piccolo starts rotating notes in regular rhythm, ‘like clockwork’, as the marking in the score has it. Song, striving to make meaning through time, is checked by mechanical action in which all moments are identical and nothing can be learned.

Majestic and angry, light and obscure, Exody keeps its clocks and its melodies going right to the end, where, now outside the rediscovered doorway, the melody finally falls a tone in the romantic sound of a solo horn, magically perpetuated by muted cellos playing harmonics. The song here is again elegiacal, and the recurrence of lament in the piece enforces in a passionately human way the leavetaking implied by the title. But there is also here the clock’s unnoticing second in which a death or a departure happens. (New York Times, February 7, 1998)

It’s a stunning piece, not to be forgotten. ■

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Music) Festival in London in return for free tickets. He also co-opted me on to the committee of the Park Lane Group, through which he produced many necessary and some spectacular events to further new and unusual music in London. Committee meetings were short. He would go round the table (Susan Bradshaw sat on my right, ashtray filling) soliciting opinions on whatever matter (I never spoke), then, with an unforgettable and irrefutable smile curling into a snarl, he would pronounce the decision, which was his and would most likely have no relation to anything the others might have said. Never was this decision challenged.

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Hans Abrahamsen was lucky.enough to bave his Winternacht played by the Sinfonietta, but it was not just their prowess that made it so successful, so authentic and haunting in feeling though puzzlingly casual in form. Along with its heterogeneous images, which might include at one moment a trumpet call and at another a renaissance dance tune, went passages of progressive metamorphosis suggested by the graphic works of Escher, and quite unexpectedly ideas would crop up from one movement to another. (Times, September 20, 1980)

Leaving the church, which is hewn out of the rose granite that supports the city, I

found myself in step with Michael Vyner, the Sinfonietta’s artistic director. I asked him when they’d be bringing this Abrahamsen piece to London. His answer: there were no plans. They did, however, play Winternacht in London, and they recorded it, and they commissioned its composer to write his Märchenbilder in 1984.

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At festivals of contemporary music in the early 1970s, a young Romanian composer was regularly in evidence. He had large features, which drew attention to him even

when he was not saying anything—as was commonly the case. When this young man did speak, he would often denounce what had just been performed. More rarely he praised, but his comments always came with a humour just touching self-mockery. The ambition was evident: also the strength of mind and intelligence. It seemed clear to those near him he would make something of himself. Horatiu Radulescu did.

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‘I had an important lesson with Pousseur, you know, Henri Pousseur’, he said, but all this is paraphrase, because I can’t remember his words exactly, though it was earlier today, three or four hours ago, so this will be roughly what he said. ‘It was in Cologne. And he asked me: “ Tell me a sound!” I hesitated, and he said: “No, too long! Without thinking! Tell me a sound!” I had been to see a film the night before—it was a Western—so I made the sound of a horse running. Then he went to the next person, who gave him Schumann’s “Träumerei”, and he said: “Right, now everyone must compose a series that goes from the sound of a horse running to Schumann’s ‘Träumerei’.” And we all did it, and this was a very important lesson for me, because the results were all different and depended on the student’s particular imagination, so you see that serialism is not about numbers but about imagination, and also because it taught me that you can make a series out of anything. In my Pression, for instance, I worked with a series of degrees of aggressivity with which the performer attacks the cello, from very gentle to strong and hard. And I am still a serial composer, only not with pitches.

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This may be orchestrally the most fully living embodiment the work has so far received. That it is being conducted for the first time by a musician sharing the composer’s background—Gábor Káli, trained at the Liszt Academy in Budapest—might not be insignificant, for though the libretto is in French, the score is in Kurtágian, which is a particularly vivid kind of musical-Hungarian. From the first bars, this is theatre music, erupting with a vocal rhythm and energy: You want to know what’s going on? You want to know what the world is like? Listen up. Solos—cor anglais, tuba, accordion—sing. The whole orchestral sound seems to be happening onstage, peopling the decor. Kurtág may double or echo the vocal line instrumentally, but the orchestra is thoroughly part of the action. And fullness of expression in so many passing moments creates robust continuity.

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tactile as well as visual satisfaction of these ivory covers and matt white pages but may show the trouble taken with illustrations. The text, of course, must speak for itself.

This is the script I wrote in April 2020, for the performance that was to have been given soon after but fell victim to lockdown. By the time the event was rescheduled, this version had been judiciously edited and also augmented by me with material supplied by Christopher Otto:

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says, the music. There are …

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That had its first performance at Müpa on the night after the birthday concert there, on which I reported before. András Keller was on the podium this time, with his Concerto Budapest making tangy Hungarian sounds. Once more Kurtág came on to the platform at the end of the concert, here seen with Keller behind him.

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