Harrison Birtwistle: Pulse Shadows - Claron McFadden, Arditti String Quartet, Nash Ensemble, Reinbert de Leeuw - 2001

Harrison Birtwistle (*1934) ‎– Pulse Shadows

Claron McFadden, Arditti Quartet, Nash Ensemble, Reinbert de Leeuw

Teldec 3984-26867-2 - 2001

01. Fantasia 1    [03:02]

02. Thread Suns    [02:54]
03. Frieze 1    [03:36]

04. White and Light    [06:12]

05. Fantasia 2    [03:07]

06. Psalm    [02:57]

07. Fantasia 3    [02:04]

08. With Letter and Clock    [03:18]

09. Frieze 2    [03:11]

10. An Eye, Open    [02:58]

11. Fantasia 4    [03:16]
12. Todtnauberg    [04:44]

13. Frieze 3    [04:11]

14. Tenebrae    [05:03]

15. Fantasia 5    [03:24]

16. Night    [03:36]

17. Todesfuge - Frieze 3    [04:16]

18. Give the Word    [01:42]

Claron McFadden: Soprano
Arditti String Quartet
Nash Ensemble
Reinbert de Leeuw

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 [...] [T]he work [Birtwistle] produced in response to Celan was unusual: Pulse Shadows (1989–96), a sequence of nine songs alternating with nine movements for string quartet. The long period of work, itself unusual for this composer, is explained by the gradual process of discovery. Birtwistle first set a Celan poem in 1989 to answer a commission from the Composers Ensemble, whose lineup comprised soprano with two clarinets and low string trio (viola, cello, double bass); he then added two more settings for this formation in 1992. Similarly, a single quartet movement of 1991 prompted another two in 1993. Only when these triptychs were finished did Birtwistle decide that they belonged together, and that their interaction could generate a further threefold increase.

    The bonding is no less tight for coming partly after the fact. Indeed, it is essential to the hour-long composition that incongruities exist (as well as points of relation that are sometimes even motivic), between the two sets of pieces and the two ensembles, which are alike only in having a viola —and it must be a different viola, since at times the two groups overlap. Birtwistle’s opposition of ‘cantus’ and ‘continuum’ is once more playing itself out, with the songs’ natural emphasis on melody offset by the machinery of the quartet pieces, ruled by pulse and ostinato —particularly in the four ‘frieze’ movements, where tempo is fixed almost to the end. The songs are not only more fluid, they also have a good deal of rhythmic independence among the parts. Of course, there are also places where one kind of music interferes in the other’s domain, whether songlike lines breaking through the bars in the quartet movements or pulsed patterns fixing themselves into the songs (as pulse shadows, perhaps).

    Birtwistle does not disdain using pulse as an image of clock time, notably in the song ‘With Letter and Clock’, most of which has a patter of roughly five-per-second pulsations. But there seems to be more than this to the separation and partial interpenetration of pulsed time and drift (to use a word from the beautiful song ‘White and Light’ that was the starting point). At the end of the song placed first, ‘Thread suns’ (also set by Rihm), come lines that sound like an apologia from the poet, and through him from the composer: ‘there are/still songs to be sung on the other side/of mankind’. Again not resisting the obvious but making it an achievement, Birtwistle writes a luscious melisma for the word ‘sung’, over just a low, soft fourth from the clarinets. Then he introduces a little figure repeating at intervals of almost a second, a clockwork mechanism that the soprano avoids falling in with. From the song’s point of view, pulsation seems to represent ‘the other side of mankind’; this may be, however, where the song, where the singing persona, actually is.

Paul Griffiths, Modern Music and After (2010)

pp. 389-390

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