Harrison Birtwistle: The Axe Manual (Complete Piano Works) - Nicolas Hodges, Claire Edwardes - 2004

Harrison Birtwistle (*1934) ‎– The Axe Manual (Complete Piano Works)

Nicolas Hodges, Claire Edwardes

Metronome MET CD 1074 - 2004

01. The Axe Manual (2000)    [22:11]

02. Oockooing Bird (c. 1950)    [03:26]
03. Sad Song (1971)    [02:19]

04. Berceuse de Jeanne (1984)    [03:11]

05. Précis (1960)    [03:23]

06. Hector's Dawn (1987)    [01:27]

07. Ostinato with Melody (2000)    [05:07]

08. Betty Freeman: Her Tango (2000)    [02:08]

09. Saraband: The King's Farewell (2001)    [02:58]

      Harrison's Clocks (1997-8)

10. - I.    [04:47]

11. - II.    [05:09]

12. - III.    [06:30]

13. - IV.    [04:13]

14. - V.    [04:06]

Nicolas Hodges: Piano

Claire Edwardes: Percussion [01]

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"I am interested in the idea of using ostinato to make rhythmic pieces without any melodic content."

Birtwistle in conversation with Michael Hall, Harrison Birtwistle in Recent Years (1998)

    In Birtwistle’s more recent music of the 1990s and since, the concern to ‘measure’ time remains prominent. In works with piano, the measuring process has led the composer to musical ideas redolent of the mechanical – as, notably, in Harrison’s Clocks (1998). The mechanisms, even so, are inevitably frail, not least because their functioning is enacted by the physical possibilities of the player’s two hands as percussive human resource. Birtwistle speaks of ‘constant development – rhythmic development’, in the Clocks pieces, a goal achieved by a process of dialogue: ‘when one hand changes its pattern the other remains constant so that the two patterns nearly always overlap’. Harrison’s Clocks was soon followed by a work for piano and percussion, The Axe Manual (2000), a choice of resources that spurred the composer to attempt ‘a kind of compendium of rhythmic devices’. As usual, the music’s rhythmic energy is a function of ostinatos deployed in tandem, and the result is very much, to borrow the composer’s own phrase, a ‘rhythmic piece’. But the techniques are distinct from those in earlier scores, and there is, equally, an emphasis on fluency and sheer speed, taking up where larger ensemble scores such as Silbury Air (1977) leave off. [...]

    For its first two minutes, The Axe Manual builds momentum in a single wave of piano–marimba activity, decisively broken only by the entry of the log drum, a clear formal marker (at bar 73). Like some wondrous rhythmic machine slowly cranking up, the Axe begins softly, gradually building in sound and density of activity. Events unfold at one continuous tempo (♪ = 144), and within a stable notated 4/8, a metric grid that is easy to find and monitor. The fixity and audibility of the grid sets this music apart from the more fractured and contentious ensemble world of Tragoedia. Where the earlier score favoured competing ostinatos and non-interlock of parts or ‘roles’, Birtwistle’s Axe polyphony is more frequently a music of clear note-against-note activity – traditional counterpoint. A steady flow of evenly spaced pulses defines the musical surface, admitting the possibility of syncopation, as a keenly felt challenge to a prevailing tactus. Just below the surface, even so, Birtwistle’s habitual interest in ostinatos, well defined as the interplay of two instrumental agents (pianist and percussionist), is as clear as ever.

[...]

    The gestures in The Axe Manual are not new for Birtwistle, but are handled with notable elegance, delicacy and force. It is tempting to speculate, by way of conclusion, on the vividly physical quality of Birtwistle’s invention as a wordless translation of human action. The Axe Manual lacks programmatic content, of course; even so, there are precursors, within Birtwistle’s oeuvre, for its musical topic. ‘Racing’ might carry some dramatic meaning. The music of [bars 59-62] sounds like a distant cousin of the accordion’s ‘computer’ music at the end of the Act 1 of The Second Mrs Kong (1994). As Pearl hits ‘Software select’ and tries an online search for Kong himself, the machine springs into action. In the opera, this kind of scurrying figure offers comedic realism – the Vermeer girl and the Hollywood monster are united through the convenience of the Internet, and we in the audience actually hear the technology whirring (‘SYNTAX ERROR. TRY AGAIN’, Pearl’s computer remarks). Rapid scurrying figures unleashed over slower ostinatos give an image of time flowing at more than one speed. The enacted simultaneity is as apt for the plight of the postmodern lovers of the opera as it is for the two percussion instruments that share the stage in The Axe Manual. The latter work is no love story; even so, its music cannot fully escape some allegorical force – a paradoxical enactment, in the precision of rapid pulsation, of the human awareness of the mysterious, inescapable passing of time – ‘it just goes’ – or of a life, as measured by some clock. Repetitions, to the extent they can be exact, are predictable, reassuring, mechanical. But, Birtwistle insists, when something returns it will not be exact, but varied: ‘each time it occurs it must change’.

P. Rupprecht, 'Mechanical song: Birtwistle’s rhythmic imagination', 
in D. Beard, K. Gloag, N. Jones (eds.), Harrison Birtwistle Studies (2015)

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• N.B.: Also included in the RAR is a live version of 'The Axe Manual' by the same performers (from the UK premiere at the Huddersfield Festival). It is a WMA file with a bitrate of just 80 kbps, but I think it's interesting to have. I got it from Soulseek.