DESCRIPTION:
Earth Dances, for orchestra (1986)

Ensemble Modern Orchestra
Pierre Boulez

"Maybe the universal history is the history of a handful of metaphors." -- Jorge Luis Borges

If we go with Aristotle's definition of genius -- as the ability to perceive and create metaphors -- then composer Harrison Birtwistle is most certainly a titan of the mind, and Earth Dances may be his Olympus. Throughout his long career, Birtwistle has created almost as many metaphors as musical works; his titles, his schemes, the imaginary networks of means and ends which his art erects -- these metaphor-webs yield an oeuvre in their own right. And in Earth Dances, Birtwistle's nearly forty-minute work for huge orchestra from 1986, these metaphors collect and converge, lie upon one another as a lifetime's accumulated strata. All Birtwistle's best allegories and tropes are here: the line, the labyrinth, the town and landscape, the globe's surface and the Deist machine, the music of a new mythology. It should therefore be no surprise that Earth Dances is one of Birtwistle's most demanding scores, both for orchestra (occasionally divided into 100 independent parts) and listener (who strains to hear those parts); as an unfolding fulcrum of currents, coursing and cresting in unrelieved waves of musical energy, the score might only be compared to Stravinsky's own "earth dance," the ballet The Rite of Spring.

But riding the waves of Earth Dances might be easier with a crash-genealogy of Birtwistle's metaphors, so many of which come from the physical and spatial world. Certainly Birtwistle's long-cherished notion of line is here ubiquitous, as is the influence of artist Paul Klee; Klee's famous description of his art as an "active line on a walk, moving freely, without goal . . . a walk for a walk's sake" is taken to extremes in Earth Dances. Here Birtwistle expands line into cable, into musical bundles of melodies which form elaborately bound layers. However, in Birtwistle there is never the line only: it is always and always the line that traces the perimeters of a hard object, a thing with sides and scopes, a mass clamoring for perspectives. Hence the notion of the labyrinth could be said to constitute the second metaphor-layer in Earth Dances: each line or bundle of lines winds through the score in rigorous process of disengagement from the larger matrix; occasional lines escape their registral path and subversively transfer to another line's passage. The labyrinth's "formal units appear nearly identical, but wherever you are inside it . . . there is some new aspect or perspective."

And yet the labyrinth itself eventually yields to a larger site: initially Birtwistle compared the score to city through which a traveler journeys, at once planned and utterly new. But the larger scope suggested by the title also holds: that the piece is a temporal evocation of the Earth's surfaces, a moving map, a Copernican orb turned time-wards. Hence the score's six independent layers, each spinning and proliferating on its own axis, become geological plates, and Earth Dances' universal history of metaphors passes from Klee's two-dimensional canvas into a spheroid cosmos of musical magma. [allmusic.com]

Art by Chris Billington