DESCRIPTION:
Silbury Air, for chamber orchestra (1977)

The London Sinfonietta
Elgar Howarth

"Music...want[s] to tell us something, or told us something we should not have missed, or [is] about to tell us something. This immanence of a revelation that does not take place is, perhaps, the aesthetic fact." -- Jorge Luis Borges

Something is on its way in Harrison Birtwistle's 1977 work Silbury Air: something dire is on its way, is racing to relay a splendid or terrible knowledge -- but it doesn't come to pass. Everything is in place: the sharp shine of ritual, the cycle of hush and outburst, the ceremonial straightjackets and incantational repetitions, the formal violence of a supreme order unfolding. To paraphrase Artaud, Birtwistle's 16-minute score for 15 players is a remarkable "music of cruelty," submitting to a preeminent determination, bound fiercely, rapt in tensions. Which makes it all the more extraordinary that Silbury Air smothers its epiphany, and keeps its secret. Birtwistle has been linked with many artists in many disciplines -- from playwright Aeschylus to painter Paul Klee -- but perhaps it is Borges' "aesthetic fact" which best serves as Silbury Air's epigraph-epitaph: it is music whose immanence of a revelation, amidst an incredibly immediate pressure, does not take place.

Something of this quality Birtwistle explains through his choice of title. "Do you know what Silbury [in the English countryside] is?," he once asked an interviewer. "It's a prehistoric mound, and it's a complete mystery...the whole geographic formation is like a hidden formality, an arcane place...It's like seeing a game board where you don't know what the rules are." Birtwistle also added the Borgesian trope that "when Silbury was excavated, it was found to have a labyrinth of hides or animal skins that created a sort of three-dimensional spider's web. They used to think that there was some sort of god or burial tomb in the middle. But there was nothing."

A maze of flayed skins with an empty center is certainly an appropriate metaphor for Silbury Air, whose entire trajectory takes place within an elaborate "pulse labyrinth" as Birtwistle calls it: an intricate series of subtly mutating rhythms, combining metric changes with tempo changes, form a kind of temporal vessel for an often deeply intuitive melodic, harmonic, and gestural activity. This stress engenders a gloriously kinetic anxiety; as material proliferates in ardent waves, it perpetually strains against the labyrinth's walls; slender, long-spun melodies are torn and clipped by constant jerks into new tempos and meters. The brilliance of Birtwistle's music here comes from a rigorous and mutual antagonism, and from its vicious ambidexterity: one hand binds the other to the work's very end in an astounding feat of unease, a simultaneous weighing of fragility and force parallel with the tragic method itself.

While this well-honed friction would grow to become one of Birtwistle's best formulae, it holds Silbury Air in a particularly thrilling vise-grip, so taut is the nature of conflict. Its Perseus is by Birtwistle doubly bound -- to the brutish Minotaur and the wise Daedalus, to beast and architect. [allmusic.com]

Art by David Inshaw