Tippett, Concerto for Double String Orchestra

Michael Tippett was a student at the other royal institution from 1923-28, studying with Charles Wood and not Vaughan Williams. He wrote in his autobiography that ‘at the RCM and subsequently, in English musical life in general, I found an anti-intellectualism which disturbed and irritated me. The Vaughan Williams School was a part of this.’ Despite sharing with Vaughan Williams an interest in folk music, Tippett sought an alternative to the easy-going pastoralism as a way of incorporating folk music into the “high arts”. This commitment is evident from his decision to re-enter the RCM in 1930 to further his study of counterpoint, and the Concerto for Double String Orchestra (1938-39) demonstrates his yearning for music that is intellectual and has a solid technical grounding.

However, the fact that he made such extensive use of contrapuntal techniques will inevitably invite stereotypical comments that attempt to brush the music aside as being academic and overtly Germanic. In effect, Tippett had set himself a rather challenging task to find a meeting point between the laxity of the English and the doggedness of the Germans. The very first phrase of the concerto is a typical example of this conflict: on the one hand we have the melody and the countermelody (played by the 1^st and 2^nd orchestras respectively) interacting in invertible counterpoint on the 10^th, and on the other hand the constitution of these melodies undermine the craft of the counterpoint by being decidedly angular, pentatonic and primitive. There are other dichotomies that drive the music, and one that comes to the surface in the 2^nd movement is its contrasting character in relation to the 1^st movement, one displaying a rural laid-back kind of attitude and the other depicting the bustling urban life. Yet even in this lyrical movement, Tippett didn’t allow himself to slack off and we find at the centre, a fugato with melodic inversions of its subject. The 3^rd movement deals with the competing harmonic systems of the pentatonic scale (1^st subject) and its diatonic counterpart (2^nd subject, played by the cellos), the prize of the competition being the privilege to have the last word in the musical discourse.

October 2012