Michael Tippett was never satisfied with one kind of musical form. Operas, symphonies, concertos, sonatas, choral works, string quartets -- he dabbled in them all. Even within a single work, he was fond of combining numerous influences, from Beethoven to English...
[more]Michael Tippett was never satisfied with one kind of musical form. Operas, symphonies, concertos, sonatas, choral works, string quartets -- he dabbled in them all. Even within a single work, he was fond of combining numerous influences, from Beethoven to English folk music to reggae to rap. Tippett's career is a series of appropriations and experimentations; he's never ceased seeking his own individual form of expression through his investigations of other forms.
Eclectic, hybridic, and multifarious, the music that results from Tippett's voracious musical appetite presses the limits of compositional unity. But his work nevertheless manifests a distinct sense for structure and technique that holds the disjunct components together. Like his friend T.S. Eliot, for whom the words came last, Tippett composed structurally before setting down individual notes. Beneath his compositions lies a meticulously constructed architecture, a foundation that supports his prolific and divergent ornamentation.
It was Beethoven who provided Tippett with this musical architecture. From the early days of his career, Tippett looked to Beethoven's archetypal forms as bases for his compositions. But Tippett wasn't content to merely repeat what Beethoven had already articulated. His first masterpiece, the "Concerto for Double String Orchestra" (1939), blends Beethoven with a folk sensibility, creating a natural, spontaneous elegance.
But after he established himself with the 1939 concerto, Tippett wasn't content to settle into a single genre. His entire career is characterized by distinct phases, each differing significantly from the others. One can identify a Beethoven phase, a Handel phase, a Vivaldi phase. In addition, each of these phases was informed by non-musical sources: Jung and Freud, Darwin and Solzhenitsyn. Tippett's artistic sensibility moved in fits and starts, in series of obsessions and fascinations. He moved through politically active phases, overtly homoerotic phases, and deeply intellectual phases. His identity constantly recreated itself through abrupt, productive encounters with an entire range of influences.
By the 1960s, Tippett's style included electric guitars, references to television soap operas and extra-terrestrials, hints of reggae and rap, and a dark, psychedelic undercurrent -- all within the context of opera. Although considered by most to be less successful than his earlier work, these experiments manifest a tendency that permeates all his work: a capacity to appropriate and integrate an enormous variety of influences in an incessant search for a unique mode of expression.
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