The Three Periods of Composer Michael Tippett (Day One)

My main goal with this blog is quite simply to inform you, the reader, about what I personally learn and personally find worthy of sharing.  Amongst other things, each day I will read Wikipedia's featured article and highlight a few striking points of interest.  Throughout this coming year, this consciously focused reading of wide-ranging articles will hopefully cultivate a habitual behavior lasting long beyond these next 365 days.  So, I hope you will join me on this daily adventure into the unexpected world of Wikipedia.

First, as a musician myself, today's featured article on Michael Tippett, "an English composer who rose to prominence during and immediately after the Second World War," presents a welcomed commencement to the new year.  Since I personally gravitate to small ensembles, I have mainly stayed within Jazz-influence music and therefore I had no familiarity with Tippett before today.

Second, Tippett apparently has three musical periods:

After the withdrawn works written in the 1920s and early 1930s, analysts generally divide Tippett's mature compositional career into three main phases, with fairly fluid boundaries and some internal subdivision in each main period. The first phase extends from the completion of the String Quartet No. 1 in 1935 to the end of the 1950s, a period in which Tippett drew on the past for his main inspiration. The 1960s marked the beginning of a new phase in which Tippett's style became more experimental, reflecting both the social and cultural changes of that era and the broadening of his own experiences. The mid-1970s produced a further stylistic change, less marked and sudden than that of the early 1960s, after which what Clarke calls the "extremes" of the experimental phase were gradually replaced by a return to the lyricism characteristic of the first period, a trend that was particularly manifested in the final works.

Of these three periods, the second actually sounds the most interesting.  Lyricism is all fine-and-dandy, yet Tippett's experimental period broaden his tonal palate.  "Tippett flirted with the 'twelve-tone' technique" and "introduced a twelve-tone theme into the 'storm' prelude that begins The Knot Garden."  Nevertheless, according to his biographer, Meirion Bowen, Tippett still "generally rejected serialism, as incompatible with his musical aims."