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The Music and Thought of Michael Tippett Modern
Times and Metaphysics Music in the Twentieth Century
15 1st Edition Clarke Digital Instant Download
Author(s): Clarke, David
ISBN(s): 9780521582926, 052158292X
Edition: 1
File Details: PDF, 3.72 MB
Year: 2006
Language: english
The Music and Thought of Michael Tippett

Tippett is often cast as a composer with a strong visionary streak, but what
does that mean for a twentieth-century artist? In this multi-faceted study,
David Clarke explores Tippett’s complex creative imagination – its dialogue
between a romantic’s aspirations to the ideal and absolute, and a
modernist’s sceptical realism. He shows how the musical formations of
works such as The Midsummer Marriage, King Priam and The Vision of
Saint Augustine resonate with the aesthetic and theoretical ideas of key
figures in modern Western culture – some known to have been influential
on the composer (such as Jung, Wagner and Yeats), others not usually
associated with him (such as Kant, Nietzsche and Adorno). These
interpretations illuminate the struggle between the rational and irrational
in Tippett’s music, and suggest that this might ultimately contain an
apprehension of an emancipated future society. Analyses of late works such
as the Triple Concerto and Byzantium also speculate on Tippett’s gay
sexuality as a (literally) critical element in his creative and political
consciousness.

dav i d c l a r k e is Senior Lecturer in Music at the University of Newcastle

upon Tyne and is one of the leading commentators on the music of Tippett.
He is the author of Language, Form, and Structure in the Music of Michael
Tippett (2 vols., 1989) and the editor of Tippett Studies (Cambridge
University Press, 1999).
Music in the Twentieth Century
g e n e r a l e d i to r Arnold Whittall

This series offers a wide perspective on music and musical life in the
twentieth century. Books included range from historical and biographical
studies concentrating particularly on the context and circumstances in
which composers were writing, to analytical and critical studies concerned
with the nature of musical language and questions of compositional
process. The importance given to context will also be reflected in studies
dealing with, for example, the patronage, publishing, and promotion of
new music, and in accounts of the musical life of particular countries.

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The Music and Thought
of Michael Tippett
Modern Times and Metaphysics

David Clarke
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo

Cambridge University Press

The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK

Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York

www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521582926

© David Clarke 2001

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception

and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without
the written permission of Cambridge University Press.

First published 2001

This digitally printed first paperback version 2006

A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data

Clarke, David (David Ian)
The music and thought of Michael Tippett : modern times and metaphysics / David Clarke.
p. cm. – (Music in the 20th century)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0 521 58292 X
1. Tippett, Michael, 1905 – Criticism and interpretation. I. Title. II. Music in the
twentieth century.
ML410.T467 C62 2001
780.92–dc21 00–052994

ISBN-13 978-0-521-58292-6 hardback

ISBN-10 0-521-58292-X hardback

ISBN-13 978-0-521-02884-4 paperback

ISBN-10 0-521-02884-1 paperback
To my colleagues: Ian, Eric, Agustín, Richard and Magnus

And in memory of my late colleague, Isobel

Last, not least, to Davey

Moral and metaphysical ideas and symbols are as indispensable to Mr
Tippett as Celtic mythology or Indian theosophy was to Yeats; even
when they are obscure, they convey to the straining, often puzzled, but
always moved and at times wholly transported listener a vision of
experience about whose authenticity there can be no doubt.
(Isaiah Berlin, in Michael Tippett: A Symposium on his 60th Birthday,
ed. Ian Kemp (London: Faber and Faber, 1965), 62)

The metaphysical categories live on, secularized . . . What metaphysics

has to ponder is the extent to which [subjects] are nonetheless able to see
beyond themselves.
(Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton
(London: Routledge, 1996), 376)
 Contents

Acknowledgements x
References to Tippett’s scores and essays xii

1 Tippett and the ‘world vision’ of modernity 1

The concept of ‘world vision’ and the concept of modernity 1
Tippett as ‘post-romantic modernist’ 4
Tippett’s writings, and writing about Tippett 7
A man of whose time? 10

2 The significance of the concept ‘image’ in Tippett’s musical thought: a

perspective from Jung 13
Tippett and images 13
Images and the unconscious 14
Elaborations: interpreting with Jung 17
Images in music 20
The significance (and signification) of images 28
Conclusions 32

3 Back to Nietzsche? Transformations of the Dionysiac in The Midsummer

Marriage and King Priam 36
I
The sense of an ending 36
Nature, myth, Hellenism 38
II
Images of the Dionysiac in The Midsummer Marriage 41
Enchanted nature 44
The Apollonian and Dionysiac in music 46
Excursus: metaphysical variations 52
Madame Sosostris: voice of the noumenal 57
The will to life: optimism vs pessimism 62
III
The turn to tragedy: King Priam 66
Sex and violence 67
The sound of the Dionysiac 71
The will to power 75
Helen 80
IV
The aesthetics of violence: Nietzsche, Yeats and Tippett 85
Aesthetics and politics 87
vii On the uses and disadvantages of Nietzsche for understanding Tippett 89
viii Contents

4 Metaphysics in a cold climate: The Vision of Saint Augustine 96

Reframing the critical debate 96
I
Historicism, history and modernity 97
Time and history 100
Augustine and modernity 103
II
The aesthetics of inwardness: subjectivity, time and music 105
Tippett and the critique of unified subjectivity 108
III
The Vision of Saint Augustine: general principles of form and structure 111
Vision II 115
‘Impendente autem die . . .’ 116
‘Fenestram!’ (Strategies for the transcendent) 123
‘Quaerebamus . . .’ 127
‘Et . . . transcendimus eas’ 131
Evaluation 137
IV
Metaphysics: a perspective from Adorno 138
Time and history revisited 142
Coda 145

5 ‘Shall we . . . ? Affirm!’ The ironic and the sublime in The Mask

of Time 147
I
The sublime and the ridiculous 147
Humanity and nature 149
From Shelley’s vision . . . 151
. . . to television 154
II
‘The triumph of Life’: from Shelley to Tippett 159
Excursus: irony, dialogism and heteroglossia in Tippett 161
‘Voices’ and their deployment in Tippett’s ‘The triumph of Life’ 164
The ‘instrumental voice’ enters 167
Elaborations 170
The storm scene: the instrumental voice resumed 173
The cremation scene 179
III
Human values and the separation of spheres 182
Excursus: Kant, Tippett, and the aporia of reason 183
The sublime in Kant and Tippett 188
‘The singing will never be done’ 191
From mind to body 199
Coda 204
ix Contents

6 The meaning of ‘lateness’: mediations of work, self and society in

Tippett’s Triple Concerto 206
Prospects 206
The model of late Beethoven 209
Tippett’s Triple Concerto and its late status 211
The mediation of lyricism and fragmentation 220
After modernism 222
Musical material and its social mediation 227
Mediations of the personal: gay traces 229
Self, society and the musical work in late Tippett 231

7 The golden bird and the porcelain bowl: Byzantium and the politics of
artefacts 236
What did Tippett mean by ‘artefact’? 236
I
Tippett and Yeats: imagination and images 238
Two functions of art 240
Yeats, Stravinsky and Unity of Being 243
II
Byzantium: the golden bird 249
Structures and imagery 254
The feminine as critical locus 261
Closing statements 268

Notes 270
Bibliography 315
Index 328
 Acknowl edgements

My thanks go to the numerous individuals, institutions and organizations

who have helped in the making of this book.
Jim Samson initially spurred me to consider such a project. Arnold
Whittall, as series editor and Tippett specialist, has been magnificently
helpful at every stage; I am grateful not least for the valuable comments he
offered on draft chapters. Penny Souster of Cambridge University Press
has been supportive and patient throughout. Her contribution and the
work of the editorial and production team at Cambridge are greatly appre-
ciated. Thanks are also due to Ian Phillips-Kerr for his expert setting of the
musical examples.
The Arts and Humanities Research Board and the University of
Newcastle upon Tyne funded research leave without which this project
would have taken significantly longer to complete. Schott and Co. Ltd
kindly gave permission to quote from Tippett’s works, and also made
various scores and recordings available to me. Boosey and Hawkes Music
Publishers Ltd granted permission for the Stravinsky quotation in chapter
7. This book’s two epigraphic quotations from Isaiah Berlin and Theodor
W. Adorno are cited by permission of (respectively) Faber and Faber Ltd,
and Routledge. Chapters 2 and 6 below originally appeared as articles in the
Journal of the Royal Musical Association (vols. 121/1 and 125/1 respec-
tively), and parts of the text of my article ‘Visionary images’ published in
vol. 136, No. 1823 of The Musical Times have been recycled in chapters 1
and 5; I am grateful to the editors and publishers of both the journals con-
cerned for permission to reuse this material. The jacket photograph of
Tippett contemplating his portrait by Kokoschka was taken by David Stone
and is the property of Morley College; I am indebted to the College for its
loan, and to Jane Hartwell of Morley Gallery for her liaison in this matter.
Ron Woodley, Simon Jarvis and Edward Venn kindly let me see type-
script versions of articles of theirs prior to publication. Meirion (Bill)
Bowen provided information in response to numerous enquiries about
Tippett. Max Paddison, Richard Middleton and Ian Biddle gave of their
time to read and comment on parts of the typescript in draft (the responsi-
bility for the content of the final text is of course my own). And my
research students Rowena Harrison, Richard Pye, Paul Fleet and Iain
x Stannard have offered much mental stimulus during this book’s gestation.
xi Acknowledgements

Now to the dedicatees of this book. I am indebted to my present col-

leagues in the Music Department at Newcastle University – Ian Biddle,
Eric Cross, Agustín Fernández, Richard Middleton and Magnus
Williamson – for their convivial company, their intellectual dialogue, their
continuing interest in this project, and especially their forbearance in its
final stages when I might otherwise have spent more time working along-
side them. I hope too that my late colleague Isobel Preece might have
found some of the values I have expounded in what follows not too remote
from her own; in remembering her here I make a belated peace offering.
And lastly my thanks and love to David Robinson: the lively dialogue of
our different worldviews has, I am sure, subtly affected this book for the
better; certainly his presence has done much to assuage the loneliness of
the long-distance monograph writer.
 References to Tippett’s scores and essays

With few exceptions Tippett’s scores employ rehearsal figures rather than
bar numbers. Accordingly, score references in this volume employ the
term ‘Fig.’, with suffixes where necessary to designate points a given
number of bars before or after the rehearsal figure in question. For
example, ‘Fig. 2⫹4’ means ‘four bars after Figure 2’, or ‘the fourth bar of
Figure 2’ (taking the first bar to be that in which the figure itself appears);
conversely, ‘Fig. 7⫺1’ means ‘one bar before Figure 7’.

Most of Tippett’s essays were originally compiled in the now out-of-print

collections Moving into Aquarius and Music of the Angels: Essays and
Sketchbooks (ed. Meirion Bowen). Many, though not all, of these writings
are included alongside others (some new) in the more recent Tippett on
Music (ed. Bowen). When an essay appearing in one of the earlier antholo-
gies as well as in Tippett on Music is cited below, references are given to
both volumes, though any quoted material is from the earlier version of
the text if there is any variation.

xii
 1 Tippett and the ‘world vision’ of modernity

The concept of ‘world vision’ and the concept of modernity

On the plane of personal psychology, there are no people more different than
the poet, who creates particular beings and things, and the philosopher, who
thinks and expresses himself by means of general concepts . . . [Yet] we must
accept the existence of a reality which goes beyond them as individuals and
finds its expression in their work. It is this which I intend to call the world
vision.
At a crucial point in his career Michael Tippett (1905–98) would probably
have read these lines. The book from which they come, Lucien Goldmann’s
The Hidden God, is appropriately discussed in the Tippett literature as
being influential on the tragic conception of the composer’s second opera
King Priam (1958–62).1 But Goldmann’s text affords other possibilities
too. For one thing it offers me a way round the invidious problem of begin-
ning this book, which – because it deals with a complex of issues where
none takes priority over the others – has no natural starting point. In the
spirit of the present volume I want to use Goldmann as an interpretative
catalyst or intermediary through which to read out certain of Tippett’s
own values.
Tippett’s growth to artistic maturity is rightly correlated with the tech-
nical development of his musical language. Yet his claim to the status of
composer of stature depends on something beyond this: something which
conforms to that characteristic Goldmann terms ‘world vision’. The
notion, which he adapts from Wilhelm Dilthey, refers to ‘the whole
complex of ideas, aspirations and feelings which links together the
members of a social group’. Goldmann continues:
A philosophy or work of art can keep its value outside the time and place
where it first appeared only if, by expressing a particular human situation, it
transposes this on to the plane of the great human problems created by man’s
relationship with his fellows and with the universe.2
No doubt Tippett would have empathized with these sentiments. Indeed
the words themselves appear to find an echo many years later in his
description of The Mask of Time (1980–2) as a response to ‘the most fun-
damental matters bearing upon man, his relationship with time, his place
1 in the world as we know it and in the mysterious universe at large’.3 No one
2 The Music and Thought of Michael Tippett

could accuse Tippett of humble artistic pretensions! Whatever the hazards

of operating on ‘the plane of the great human problems’, the fact that he
risked doing so forms an irrefutable part of his chemistry and significance
as a composer. Perhaps the first work where this tendency became evident
was A Child of our Time (1931–41), and thereafter all his operas and
choral–orchestral works were in one way or another concerned with
making big statements about the human condition. But the trait is dis-
cernible – often as a preoccupation with the ‘visionary’ – in the instrumen-
tal and orchestral works too. It would be remiss, of course, to characterize
Tippett’s entire œuvre in this way, but the engagement with ‘grand narra-
tives’ (to borrow a term from Lyotard) is certainly a vital stream within it,
and it forms a key ingredient of this book’s subject matter.
What makes such impossibly grandiose aspirations potentially tractable
(for the musicologist as well as the composer) is the mediation of the uni-
versal in the particular – a point evident in the preceding quotations from
Goldmann, and also in his observation that ‘as we move away from the
abstract idea of the world vision, so we find that the individual details of
each vision are linked to historical situations localised in place and time,
and even to the individual personality of the writer or thinker in ques-
tion’.4 Concentrating for the moment on the middleground of this pan-
orama, what is the historical situation to which Tippett’s world vision
relates?
Even here, the scope is anything but modest. What Tippett engages with
in many of his major works (even though he does not quite put it this way)
is nothing less than the social, epistemological and psychological condi-
tions of Western modernity. This is modernity considered as a historical
longue durée: the period from around the time of the age of Enlightenment
(some would place it earlier) to the present day. To define its conditions in
a nutshell is a tall order. But a working basis is found among theoretical
accounts which characterize modern consciousness as divided following
reason’s rise in the Enlightenment to the West’s dominant paradigm of
knowledge. Whereas, so such narratives run, the received dogma of relig-
ion had, in pre-modern times, provided men and women with a unified
basis for their perception of the world, their moral conduct and their sen-
suous being, reason’s dominion over conceptual knowledge causes a
schism between that realm and those of ethics and other, sensory sources
of insight. As J. M. Bernstein puts it:
Modernity is the separation of spheres, the becoming autonomous of truth,
beauty and goodness from one another, and their developing into self-
sufficient forms of practice: modern science and technology, private
morality and modern legal forms, and modern art. This categorial
3 Tippett and the ‘world vision’ of modernity

separation of domains represents the dissolution of the metaphysical

totalities of the pre-modern age.5

Tippett was neither an intellectual historian nor a cultural theorist, yet

lying in the background of his œuvre are comparable perceptions.
Although he tended to fasten on to the more directly instrumental mani-
festations of a dominant rationality (science, technology and mass indus-
trialization) and the more overtly catastrophic consequences of its eclipse
of the spiritual (Auschwitz, Hiroshima and the Gulag), it is clear that he
recognized the separation of epistemology, ethics and aesthetics into dis-
crete domains as fundamental to the problematics of our contemporary
condition. (As writer, pacifist and composer Tippett engaged with each of
these spheres, and though the last role came most obviously first, his art
would be of lesser consequence had his path to individuation not also
encompassed moral action and theoretical reflection; only because of this
does the label ‘a man of our time’ not degenerate into a cliché.) One perti-
nent example of his awareness of the division of experience into autono-
mous domains comes in the postscript to his essay ‘What I believe’. Here
he posits a dualism familiar in his writings, between the ‘outer’ world of
empirical reality and the ‘inner’ world of a reality left uncharted by
rationality:
I believe in a reality of the physical world outside, experienced through the
senses and formulated generally by the scientific intelligence.
I believe also in a reality of the spiritual world within, experienced, in my
own case, by some intuitive, introspective apprehension of a kind which, in
the past, was formulated generally by dogmatic, revelatory, received
religions.6

From this follows the mandate for his own art (in which Tippett effectively
rehearses an agenda set for the domain of the aesthetic by Kant): to hold
open and make palpable the reality of the ‘inner world of the imagination’
and perhaps to envision some future situation in which the rift between
different types of knowing might be healed.
While this certainly did not mean Tippett yearned for what Bernstein
terms ‘the metaphysical totalities of the pre-modern age’ (as a composer
such as John Tavener has arguably done with his turn to the Russian Ortho-
dox church), the kinds of ‘introspective apprehension’ to which he refers
seem symptomatic of a dogged metaphysical remnant within modern
Western consciousness: a kind of metaphysics despite itself, which while
not rejecting the emancipatory moment offered by reason, suspects that the
way things really are is not reducible to scientific reasoning alone, and
which is alert to possibilities of being that transcend reason’s reductive,
4 The Music and Thought of Michael Tippett

subject-eclipsing categories. This situation can be understood dialectically.

Reason, in the very demonstration of its remarkable instrumental possibil-
ities for our lifeworld, also makes evident its non-identity with other signifi-
cant areas of human experience. Hence it becomes imaginable that the
kinds of discourse whose vocabulary includes epithets such as ‘transcen-
dent’, ‘visionary’ or ‘sublime’, are not necessarily anachronistic to modern
consciousness, but are indeed generated from it.

Tippett as ‘post-romantic modernist’

Tippett was alive not only to the problems of modernity but also to the
manner in which these had been sounded within the art of his century – in
other words to the aesthetics of modernism. Modernism itself was never a
single coherent movement; paradoxically, if it is characterized by any
single thing this might be the idea of fragmentation. Similarly, Tippett’s
œuvre might be seen as a succession of modernisms, but nowhere are the
condition of fragmentation and the knife of an inwardly directed critical
scepticism more apparent than in the period ushered in by King Priam.7
The stylistic characteristics of this second style-period are well enough
documented within the Tippett literature. As against the lyrical emphasis,
largely tonal orientation and developmental forms of his first period there
is now a shift towards the rhetorical gesture, a post-tonal – at times atonal
– soundworld, and an emphasis on musical discontinuity. On the face of it,
this new world of sound and structure might have seemed inimical to the
affirmative strain of the earlier works, to their vision of integration and
wholeness. Yet just as the music of Tippett’s post-Priam period did not so
much liquidate his earlier stylistic traits as transform them and set them in
strange new contexts, so its aesthetic relation to his first period is not one
of total repudiation. With the move to a more hard-hitting soundworld
Tippett did not abandon his previous visionary aspirations; rather he pro-
foundly problematized them. What makes the discontinuities between the
later period and the earlier one so startling is the agon with a value system
whose pertinence endures through the very critique to which it is sub-
jected.
Comments by Goldmann are again pertinent here (the ‘problems’ to
which he refers are those ‘great human problems created by man’s rela-
tionship with his fellows and with the universe’ indicated in an earlier quo-
tation):
Now since the number of coherent replies that can be given to these
problems is limited by the very structure of the human personality, each of
5 Tippett and the ‘world vision’ of modernity

the replies given may correspond to different and even contradictory

historical situations. This explains both the successive rebirths of the same
idea which we find in the world of history, art and philosophy and the fact
that, at different times, the same vision can assume different aspects.8

The works of Tippett’s second period bespeak a ‘different . . . historical sit-

uation’; they present his world vision in a ‘different aspect’. In addition to
paying recognition to a more internationalist modernism they reflect, I
would argue, the crystallization of a consciousness of the deepening Cold
War. This is a consciousness which, threatened by the ominous course of
history, is paradoxically also thrown back into its own deepest subjective
reaches for something with which to counter the mounting negative forces
of the lifeworld. But here is also the point of continuity with the past –
both Tippett’s and that of European (and Western) culture at large. For the
alienation experienced by individual subjects under the threat of the atom
bomb – a quintessential product of instrumental reason – is only(!) a more
acute version of that felt culturally under the rational paradigm of the
Enlightenment. As Julian Johnson puts it, Enlightenment thought, in ren-
dering subjects autonomous, also bequeathed ‘a model of man that was
cut off from the world around him, from “nature”’. The ‘romantic agenda’
of Kant, Hegel, Fichte, Schelling, Schlegel and Schleiermacher was ‘to
create a conceptual framework in which the unity of man and nature, shat-
tered by the mechanistic and atomistic implications of Enlightenment
theory, might be restored’.9
Within a work such as The Midsummer Marriage Tippett deploys a
similar romantic agenda – a ‘new humanism’ of ‘The Whole Man’ as he
puts it.10 The idea of oneness with nature and its appeal to the fractured
post-Enlightenment mind provide an illuminating context for the pas-
toralism of his first period, whose epitome is the magic wood of The
Midsummer Marriage. However, in King Priam and beyond, particularly in
the last three operas, the magic wood is displaced by urban townscapes – a
move consistent with an immanent critique on Tippett’s part of his ‘new
humanism’. It is not that this humanism is dispensed with or seen as bank-
rupt (the later operas also hold on to the idea of some magical ‘other’
space); but it is tested by a kind of self-inflicted scepticism which allows
other voices to speak – among them, I will argue, post-humanist ones.
What becomes acute in this period – audible in the music’s conflicted,
heterogeneous soundworld – is the friction inherent in Tippett’s applica-
tion of a twentieth-century realist and materialist consciousness to the
nineteenth century’s aspirations to the ideal and the absolute. Arnold
Whittall is right to call the composer a ‘post-romantic modernist’.11
6 The Music and Thought of Michael Tippett

Much of this book explores this characterization. Its emphasis is on

Tippett’s later works (though I do not confine myself to these exclusively),
many of which seem to me to be interesting precisely because their distinc-
tively twentieth-century soundworld brings with it a revitalization of ideas
from the nineteenth century – understood here as a ‘long’ nineteenth
century, extending back into the later eighteenth. Hence one strategy I
adopt is to interweave analysis of those works with consideration of aes-
thetic questions from the traditions of philosophical and literary romanti-
cism and idealism – especially in their Germanic incarnations – and their
late nineteenth- and twentieth-century successors.12 (This seems to me
one possibly profitable way to engage with the debate about Tippett’s later
works, and perhaps help to loosen up some of the critical rigidities that
have become established there.) And the theme of nature will surface on a
number of occasions and in various guises.
Romanticism’s attempt to articulate man’s position within a nature
from which he has become alienated is conformant, Johnson argues, with
‘an attempt to define the relation between rationality and irrationality
within the human subject, between its linguistic ordering of itself and the
world, and its non-linguistic experience’.13 Even if it is unlikely that
Tippett possessed specialist knowledge of the early romantic and idealist
philosophical tradition (bar his close acquaintance with the works of
Goethe) a form of this consciousness could have been transmitted to him
in mediated form. One of the most conspicuous conduits in this regard
would have been Jung, whose opposition of the conscious mind and the
collective unconscious expressed perfectly for Tippett the dualism
between the rational and irrational. As I argue in chapter 2 this is also con-
tained in microcosm in the concept ‘image’ which is central to Tippett’s
aesthetic thinking and musical practice, and has its most significant prov-
enance in Jung’s psychoanalytic theories. What has also become clear to
me, however, is that different incarnations of this dualism between a ‘lin-
guistic ordering’ and ‘non-linguistic experience’ surface throughout
Tippett’s œuvre. In successive chapters, I figure its several metamorphoses
in relation to ‘successive rebirths of the same idea’ (to borrow Goldmann’s
phrase) within Western modernity – or, less reductively, to different his-
torical–intellectual formations around an abiding philosophical problem:
Kant’s noumenon and phenomenon in relation to The Mask of Time
(chapter 5); Schopenhauer’s Will and Idea, and Nietzsche’s Dionysiac and
Apollonian, in relation to The Midsummer Marriage and King Priam
(chapter 3); Adorno’s materialist metaphysics in relation to The Vision of
Saint Augustine (chapter 4); and Kristeva’s semiotic and symbolic in rela-
tion to Byzantium (chapter 7).
7 Tippett and the ‘world vision’ of modernity

Tippett’s writings, and writing about Tippett

An invaluable resource in this book’s interpretative–aesthetic project – an
intermediary between Tippett’s musical works and the (linguistic) texts
alongside which I contextualize them – are the composer’s own writings.
His numerous essays and interviews suggest that in his case a considered
analysis of the relationship between the artist, the artwork and society was
far from peripheral to the activity of composing. Indeed we might con-
sider these writings, reproduced in such collections as Moving into
Aquarius, Music of the Angels and Tippett on Music, as a legitimate part of
his œuvre.14 Our opening quotation from Goldmann is again pertinent, in
its assertion that, from their different corners, poet – for which, read artist
in the general sense – and philosopher might tackle the same realities of
their age. It is less the case that Tippett belies the claim that ‘there are no
people more different than the poet . . . and the philosopher’; more that he
demonstrates that it is possible for the same individual to practise both
roles and benefit from the interplay of their different modalities of
thought.
There is, however, a wrinkle in this convergence which is of key signifi-
cance for us. While it is true that, as was once said of Tippett, ‘whatever this
man touches he philosophizes’,15 his very ‘maverick’ nature (an epithet of
which he was fond) and the sheer eclecticism of his reading habits militate
against direct alliances with any recognized philosophical corpus. Tippett
philosophized without a philosophy. Yet, for all this, I would argue that
scattered across and embedded within his writings is evidence of a coher-
ent aesthetic position, even if the vocabulary used to voice it is idiosyn-
cratic, heterogeneous, and at times obscure. For example, Tippett did not
use a word like ‘dialectic’ in any systematic way, but when he describes his
own music in terms of ‘polarities’ he means something closely cognate.
Similarly, his talk of ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ worlds concerns the philosophical
dualism of subject and object; and even his discussion of ‘moving into
Aquarius’ – to an age of ‘attempted union of the opposites’16 – alludes to a
dialectical movement of history reminiscent of Hegel, for all that it also
indicates a brush with astrology. Just as the individuality of Tippett’s music
inheres in the idiosyncratic stance it takes towards received historical
genres, structural conventions and musical styles, so his intellectual work
is distinctive in simultaneously resisting and inviting comparison with
canonic Western philosophical ideas.
I have felt this tension quite acutely in writing this book. On the one
hand I have been concerned to assemble a profile of Tippett’s aesthetic
stance (more extensively, I think, than in any previous study); and in so
8 The Music and Thought of Michael Tippett

doing I have tried to represent Tippett’s position accurately, and allowed

his own words to tell their story. On the other hand, simply to leave matters
there would also be to leave unchallenged the notion that Tippett was a
composer completely sui generis, a maverick pure and simple. While his
individuality unquestionably contributed to his significance, it only
carries weight – that is, amounts to more than mere eccentricity – because
as an individual Tippett also engaged with the wider discourses of mod-
ernity (otherwise, once again, ‘a man of our time’ is nothing more than a
publicity slogan). It is therefore incumbent on us to attempt to locate
Tippett’s thought, both musical and verbal, in the context of those dis-
courses. Accordingly I have attempted to mobilize different facets of
Tippett’s music, his writings, and the thinking of others into interpretative
constellations that I hope will offer new insights into his œuvre as well as
showing the coherence and richness of his aesthetic position.
This process, then, is a kind of dialogue, though its involvement of a
subjective, speculative element carries risks. For it is one thing to explore
Tippett’s œuvre in relation to figures he is known to have read and been
influenced by: for example Jung or Yeats (even if my concern with such
writers – as with Goldmann in this chapter – soon turns from their influ-
ence to the hermeneutic possibilities offered by their writings). But it is
arguably more contentious also to line Tippett up with figures with whom
he expressed no or little acquaintance or affinity: for example Adorno,
Nietzsche, Camille Paglia or Julia Kristeva. On whose authority can such
connections be posited?
In one way or another this question has also been addressed by
Lawrence Kramer, whose putatively postmodern musicology is centred in
a notion of music as constitutive of subjectivity. While acknowledging
composition as an aspect of ‘the process of musical subject formation’,
Kramer none the less chooses to privilege reception; his is in effect a
species of reader-orientated criticism.17 Invoking Mikhail Bakhtin, he
states that ‘in addressing us, [music] is “half-ours and half-someone else’s
. . . It is not so much interpreted by us as it is further, this is, freely devel-
oped, applied to new material, new conditions; it enters into interanimat-
ing relationships with new contexts.”’18 Some of the more speculative
relationships I have posited below are in this very interest of reinvigorated
contextualization. They allow for a ‘dissemination’ (to borrow a term
which Kramer borrows from Derrida)19 of new, I hope enriched, meanings
from the works in question – arguably paying the composer greater
homage than merely tautologically retreading known paths of influence.
However, I am less eager than Kramer to put a postmodernist spin on
this approach. I want to show where and how Tippett is situated in the
9 Tippett and the ‘world vision’ of modernity

‘web of culture’ (a metaphor which Gary Tomlinson borrows from

Clifford Geertz)20 – a web which includes such figures as Kant, Hegel,
Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Shelley, T. S. Eliot and Saint Augustine. But my
argument is that these connections – even the ones Tippett may not have
intended or recognized – are conditioned intrinsically by the sound and
formation of his music; its interpretation is not just a matter of the free
play of the signifier. This is not to discount the role of the imagination of
the listening subject, but it is also to place emphasis on the role of the
musical object – as a phenomenon that retains an autonomous substrate –
in mediating that subjectivity. Like Kramer, I have ventured to construct
an interplay of musical and linguistic meanings; indeed, for whatever
reasons, I have tended to prioritize philosophical, critical and literary
sources of contextualization over musical ones. However, while I agree
wholeheartedly with him that the differences between music and language
should not – indeed must not – inhibit the linguistic discussion of music, I
feel less easy that this opposition is as deconstructible as he claims.21 My
experience in the following essays is that the passage from formalist dis-
cussion of music to other modes of contextual discourse is one of pro-
found discontinuity. It is entirely conceivable that better equipped
intellects than mine might handle this problem more adeptly, but my own
strategy has been to accept these disjunctures as in some way essential.
While I have ventured to find points of mediation between purely musical
and conceptual structures, this does not guarantee an easy translation
from musical to linguistic signifiers.
Furthermore in pursuing homologies between Tippett’s thought and that
of other figures, I have tried to remain as sensitive to difference as to similar-
ity. Thus the ‘others’ with which I have aligned him serve as a kind of ideo-
logical litmus, rather than figures of complete identification. It is through
both drawing comparisons and locating the points at which comparisons
break down that Tippett’s individuality – what is non-identical about him –
within larger cultural formations of modernity can be established.
All this has also meant accommodating the structure of this book to
such discontinuities and disjunctures. At just about every level there is
resistance of the part to complete assimilation by the whole. Hence each
chapter is intended as a free-standing essay, notwithstanding the fact that
it also contributes to a more or less chronological analysis of selected
works22 which reveals discontinuities and discontiguities, as much as con-
tinuities, within Tippett’s œuvre. Within the longer chapters, numbered
sections might almost be read as mini-essays in their own right; and,
within these, individually titled subsections also have a measure of auton-
omy. Although I make no claims to emulate Adorno’s antinomic and
10 The Music and Thought of Michael Tippett

quasi-paratactic prose style, I have been open to the notion behind it that
the structure of writing might in some way be shaped by the contradic-
tions and problematics of its object of enquiry; and that the most appro-
priate way to treat such an object might be to build around it a
‘constellation’ of concepts which interact dialectically upon one another
rather than unfold in a logical sequence from some assumed first princi-
ple. Hence the character of the present chapter, which is to a degree
autonomous, but also functions (heuristically and synoptically) as a
simultaneously necessary and dispensable introduction and conclusion to
the book as a whole.
The resistance between part and whole is a notion also relevant to the
works on which I focus. For, with the exception of The Midsummer
Marriage (1946–52), they all purvey the fragmented world vision and pro-
blematized subjectivities of Tippett’s post-Priam period. The pieces in
question – The Midsummer Marriage as mentioned, King Priam itself, then
The Vision of Saint Augustine, The Mask of Time, the Triple Concerto and
Byzantium – individually offer particular perspectives on the general con-
stellation of issues which is the book’s concern. I have chosen them because
in one way or another they all have a visionary dimension – whether this be
metaphysical or social, affirmative or ambivalent. But there is inevitably an
element of contingency in their selection; other works – say, the Third
Symphony (1970–2), New Year (1986–8) or The Rose Lake (1991–3) –
might equally have taken the limelight (which is not to say that these and
yet other pieces are absent from discussion). The point is that the issues in
question do not determine a priori a necessary and finite set of affected
works; moreover, the works one happens to select reciprocally determine
the constellation of issues. Again, particulars resist total subsumption into
generality. The chosen works are not merely case studies – exemplars of
more universal concerns – but are also of interest in their own right, free-
standing particulars. And, since I have not ruled out the importance of
subjectivity, I may as well add that I have also picked them because they
have excited my admiration, and because they afford opportunities to
explore issues I believe to be urgent within contemporary culture. (This is
also to argue for a more interventionist musicology, not confined to pas-
sively commentating on a composer’s œuvre, but actively engaging with it
towards critical, perhaps in the broadest sense political, ends.)

A man of whose time?

I have saved until the end of this chapter a discussion of that part of
Goldmann’s description of world vision which holds the greatest potential
11 Tippett and the ‘world vision’ of modernity

for critique of Tippett (a facet of the very Marxist epistemology that he

wanted to refute with King Priam). This is a critique on an ideological
level, something which to my knowledge is barely evident in existing criti-
cal accounts of the composer. Here is a quotation in full of an excerpt from
The Hidden God only partly cited above:

What I have called a ‘world vision’ is a convenient term for the whole
complex of ideas, aspirations and feelings which links together the members
of a social group (a group which, in most cases, assumes the existence of a
social class) and which opposes them to members of other social groups.23

The bits of text over which one might feel uneasy here are terms such as
‘social group’, ‘social class’, ‘oppos[ition] . . . to members of other social
groups’. What’s discomfiting is that such phrases do not fit too well with
the supposed universality of the issues we have been discussing, and espe-
cially of Tippett’s humanism. They remind us that humanism, philosophy,
autonomous art and indeed the Enlightenment itself are all discourses
and/or signifying practices whose roots are bourgeois. The notion of ‘a
man of our time’ begins to look less absolute when we realize that the con-
sciousness of the kinds of people likely to speak the phrase (the subjects
behind the ‘our’) is that of a social group, not that of society as a whole; it is
the consciousness of a socially, culturally and historically specific class
which by definition excludes others. To polemicize a little: what are the
social demographics of those who attend the venues dictated by Tippett’s
choice of genres – concert hall, opera house, recital room? (Admittedly, the
specific demographics in the case of Tippett’s own music may not be
entirely typical – an important matter for any future reception history of
his music.) The critical concern here is not the bourgeois delineation of
these venues and practices per se, but the fact that within the particular
cultural situation of high art Tippett braves statements of would-be uni-
versal import.
But now we need to add some nuances. Tippett is unlikely to have been
oblivious to such concerns, especially given his earlier left-wing political
commitment, and his involvement during the war years with institutions
such as Morley College. It would seem that while the materials of high-art
music offered him the expressive resources for what he needed to say, he
was not unaware of those ‘others’ who would not be there to hear it. Indeed
his œuvre shows an increasing responsiveness to the possibilities of stylistic
and generic pluralism (a point I develop in chapter 6, below), and even
though the bulwarks of a classical practice are never burst, Tippett does
much to destabilize its social delineations. The line ‘You mother-fucking
bastard’ from The Ice Break may, on the face of it, represent one of those
12 The Music and Thought of Michael Tippett

supposed lapses of taste for which Tippett’s librettos are notorious. But I
would argue that it could be more profitably seen as an extreme example of
a broader strategy of dialogization in his thinking (to borrow a term from
Bakhtin24): in other words, the articulation of a social polyphony of voices.
I argue in the last two chapters of this book that one of the distinctive fea-
tures of Tippett’s late works is that their structural formations can be read
as mediated visions of a pluralist society, one indeed in which high art
itself may no longer have – or need – its current privileged status. I also
argue that such resistance to aesthetic and cultural totality may inhere in
insights gained from his own gay sexuality – a level of argument congruent
with Goldmann’s view that world vision at its least abstract may be linked
‘to the individual personality of the writer or thinker in question’. It is
perhaps at this level that Tippett comes closest to envisaging a humanism
compatible with his democratic sentiments. Certainly such a hope seems
to sing out loud and clear in his last major work, The Rose Lake, where the
image of an enchanted nature retakes centre stage in his repertoire of
expressive possibilities.
Even though the technical basis of Tippett’s creativity was the recycling,
the making new, of materials from the past, he never stopped looking
towards the future – from which I take my cue for a little concluding rhet-
oric. As we enter our new millennium the dialectic of Enlightenment
seems only to intensify. In the same week as I write these words the com-
pletion of the first draft of the human genome project has been
announced; and it seems inevitable that it will only be a short time before
we need to face up to the complete demystification of the nature of human
consciousness. It may be that our concept of the human will not survive
these paradigm shifts. Conversely, such a concept – or some transformed
version of it – may become all the more urgent as we search for a basis on
which to construct our values in this disenchanted landscape. Following
the same logic, we may find that the world vision of Tippett’s œuvre
becomes of historical interest only, no longer of currency in changed
times. Conversely we may find it holds in trust an image of values and sen-
sibilities – a ‘whole complex of ideas, aspirations and feelings’ – which we
are not yet ready to lose.
 2 The significance of the concept ‘image’ in Tippett’s
musical thought: a perspective from Jung

Tippett and images

I know that my true function within a society which embraces all of us, is to
continue an age-old tradition . . . This tradition is to create images from the
depths of the imagination and to give them form whether visual, intellectual
or musical. For it is only through images that the inner world communicates
at all . . . Images of vigour for a decadent period, images of calm for one too
violent. Images of reconciliation for worlds torn by division. And in an age of
mediocrity and shattered dreams, images of abounding, generous,
exuberant beauty.1

For anyone seeking a statement epitomizing Tippett’s stance as a composer

(one only regrets that the promotional copy-writers got there first) the elo-
quent conclusion to the composer’s essay ‘Poets in a barren age’ could
hardly be bettered. It encapsulates his beliefs as to the essence of art and
creativity, the role of the artist in society, and, implicitly, the nature of
artistic material. The key term, repeated in nearly every sentence and
worked into a compelling rhetoric, is ‘image’. For Tippett this seemed to be
the essential vehicle of artistic communication, mediating between the
inscrutable processes of the imagination and an all-too imperfect empiri-
cal reality. I propose in the present enquiry to examine this hitherto
unscrutinized concept further in relation to two particular aims: first to
develop a fuller picture of the aesthetic context of Tippett’s compositional
practice; second to consider what bearing the concept might throw on the
music itself and the way we construe it.
Tippett’s extensive writings represent an important – and largely
unmined – resource in relation to the first of these aims. However, while
his essays display many signs of a cogently formulated aesthetic, they are
not theoretical texts in the formal sense: ‘image’ is just one example of a
concept which crops up on numerous occasions but which is not systemat-
ically elaborated. To some extent the situation can be ameliorated by
tracing ideas across various essays to piece together a larger account. A
further strategy is to examine these ideas in the light of particular influ-
ences which may have been pertinent. The adoption of such an approach
here is intended not as a search for specific origins, but rather as the basis
13 for a hermeneutic framework (implying that the significance of influence
14 The Music and Thought of Michael Tippett

lies beyond a positivistic record of historical facts, albeit grounded in

them). ‘Image’ is certainly a term open to lax application, as Philip N.
Furbank demonstrates for literary criticism;2 but in Tippett’s case the
usage is self-consistent and has specific resonances with Blake, Yeats and
Jung. If in what follows I focus predominantly on the last-mentioned as a
significant influence, this is not to belittle the importance of Blake or Yeats
(whose voices are discernible in the language of our opening quotation).3
On this occasion Jung receives the apple, so to speak, because, for all
Tippett’s literary inclinations, his view of art – at least as it is expressed in
certain key writings of the 1950s and 1960s – was a strongly psychoanalytic
one. Moreover, Jung offers an extended theoretical system (a quasi-
philosophical world view, one might even say) within which Tippett’s
usage of the term ‘image’ may be contextualized alongside his own – a
practice allowable because of affinities between composer and psycholo-
gist, amounting in certain respects to a shared ideology.
The importance of Jung’s analytical psychology for Tippett has long
been recognized and is well enough documented. His first exposure to
Jungian thought came when he was given a copy of Psychology of the
Unconscious by Evelyn Maude (probably in the late 1920s or early 1930s).
He tells of subsequently reading ‘more and more Jung’, including espe-
cially Psychological Types. During this same period he was introduced by
David Ayerst to the ‘maverick’ Jungian analyst John Layard,4 and in the late
1930s Jungian psychology acquired a practical value for Tippett in dealing
with his crisis over his sexual orientation. Thereafter, the impact of
Jungian ideas on his artistic output is first evidenced in A Child of our Time
(1939–41) and The Midsummer Marriage (1946–52), and in one way or
another the Jungian themes of self-knowledge, rebirth and the reconcilia-
tion of opposites pervade his later œuvre with varying degrees of emphasis.
Much of the existing commentary on Jung’s influence has tended to con-
centrate on these aspects, or on identifying archetypal symbols within the
works which employ texts. However, as stated above, the intention here is
to chart some of the broader philosophical affinities between the two
figures, and ultimately to show how these might permeate the immanent
substance of Tippett’s music.

Images and the unconscious

Unquestionably one of Jung’s main attractions for Tippett is the place
accorded in the former’s theories to the non-rational. This is an issue
because of what Tippett saw as the excessive value placed upon the mani-
festations of rationality – specifically science and technology – in modern
15 The significance of the concept ‘image’ in Tippett’s musical thought

culture. Indeed a recurring theme throughout many of the essays in

Moving into Aquarius is that of ‘the challenge of a world divided unnatu-
rally between technics and the imagination’.5 For Tippett the value of art is
precisely that it offers a corrective to this spiritually injurious imbalance,
positing a domain of experience other than that of empirical reality. Art’s
role is to effect ‘a re-animation of the world of the imagination’;6 but more
than this, music is in certain cases ‘a favoured art for expressing particular
intuitions of transcendence’7 (in referring to a historical tradition includ-
ing works such as Bach’s St Matthew Passion and Beethoven’s Ninth
Symphony Tippett is also implicitly aligning himself with it). And in a
further allusion to his concern with the transcendental he mentions ‘the
possibly strange fact that I have affirmations, though not theologically
Christian, which set me in some other place than optimistically or pessi-
mistically bounded by our immanentist world of technics’.8
In his perception of modern man as alienated from a world dominated
by instrumental reason, and his search for some form of God-term with
which to fill the spiritual vacuum (impelled rather than inhibited by his
agnosticism), Tippett expressed an outlook uncannily reminiscent of
romanticism. Had he been an early nineteenth-century figure, one might
conjecture, he would perhaps have attributed his ‘intuitions of the tran-
scendent’ to the Absolute, the Ideal, or, as in the case of Shelley or
Wordsworth, to some hidden Power within the landscape. However, as a
modernist (‘a man of our time’, as we are repeatedly told) Tippett was
intuitively aware of the hazards of anachronism which such a metaphysical
stance would have entailed. For all his objections to scientific empiricism,
he seemed to be implicitly aware that his affirmations of the ineffable must
be seen to have some material basis if they were to be perceived as authen-
tic to his times, and not as a retreat into esotericism or mysticism. And here
the psychoanalytic movement – and Jung in particular – comes to the
rescue, offering the possibility of an epistemological shift from the meta-
physical to the psychological. As Jung puts it, in an essay Tippett is known
to have read:

Since the stars have fallen from heaven and our highest symbols have paled, a
secret life holds sway in the unconscious. That is why we have a psychology
today, and why we speak of the unconscious.9

At the root of this outlook, then, is the conception of modern man as

psychological man: depth psychology offers an epistemology through
which man’s relation to the world may be meaningfully articulated and
potentially altered; and, crucially for Tippett, art is efficacious because it
has an integral place within this scheme.
16 The Music and Thought of Michael Tippett

Attributing the source of the numinous and other non-rational experi-

ences to the unconscious might imply a retreat into a world of profound
subjectivity which only sharpens the schism of the individual from the
empirical objective world. Yet for Jung the subjectivity of ‘inner’ experi-
ence is commuted back into objectivity in the deeper reaches of the more
‘primordial’ collective unconscious. This concept is the foundation of his
model of the psyche, but also his most ideological construct: ideological
because it is presented as a domain in which alienation is assuaged, while
making no reference to the associated social and economic conditions
which a more politically engaged commentator might see as its ultimate
cause. Jung writes for example of ‘the healing and redeeming depths of the
collective psyche, where man is not lost in the isolation of consciousness
and its errors and sufferings, but where all men are caught in a common
rhythm’.10 It would seem that Tippett adopts this ideology when he talks of
‘the depths of the imagination’ as a source of ‘images of reconciliation for
worlds torn by division’, though the implications of his doing so are
complex, requiring an appropriately nuanced critique. Consideration of
this will be deferred, however, until the concluding stages of this essay. For
the present it will suffice to note that, if for no other reason, the notion of
the collective unconscious cannot be dismissed out of hand because it is
integral to Tippett’s understanding of his own creative processes. He takes
from Jung the idea of the collective unconscious as the wellspring of crea-
tive activity, a spontaneous drive, an autonomous complex which is liable
to exercise an imperious command over the artist.11 Thus Jung:
Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its
instrument . . . As an artist he is ‘man’ in a higher sense – he is ‘collective
man,’ a vehicle and moulder of the unconscious psychic life of mankind . . .
As K. G. Carus says: ‘. . . he is everywhere hemmed round and prevailed upon
by the Unconscious, the mysterious god within him. . . .’12

While Tippett writes:

The drive to create . . . is so intense in its operation that it is difficult for those
submitting to it not to feel it as evidence of things beyond the individually
personal . . . I believe that the faculty the artist may sometimes have to create
images through which these mysterious depths of our being speak to us, is a
true fundamental. I believe it is part of what we mean by having knowledge
of God.13

With this last quotation we have reached the moment where the concept
‘image’ can be seen to take its place within the larger framework so far out-
lined. As is clear from the above, images are inextricably bound up with
some unfathomable domain (in essence the unconscious) characterized by
17 The significance of the concept ‘image’ in Tippett’s musical thought

depth or inwardness. Indeed, Tippett’s writings repeatedly present images

as vehicles which make available the otherwise unknowable contents of the
‘inner world’ – as when the composer states: ‘it is only through images that
the inner world communicates at all’; and, ‘the images which are works of
art, are our sole means of expressing the inner world of feelings objectively
and immediately’.14 There are strong resonances here with Jung, who rein-
forces his definition of image with the epithet ‘inner’ in order simultane-
ously to distinguish it from ‘sensuous reality’ and to underline its true
value which is psychological: the image represents ‘an inner reality which
often far outweighs the importance of external reality’.15
Jung also makes a connection with the term’s usage in poetry to mean ‘a
figure of fancy, or fantasy image’.16 And fantasy in turn receives formal
definition as an element in his theoretical model; in particular, as ‘imagi-
native activity’ it is ‘simply the direct expression of psychic life . . . which
cannot appear in consciousness except in the form of images or contents
. . . Fantasy as imaginative activity is identical with the flow of psychic
energy.’17 Echoes of these remarks would seem to be found in Tippett’s
description of his personal imaginative activity: ‘I feel a need to give an
image to an ineffable experience of my inner life. I feel the inner life as
something that is essentially fluid in consistency.’18
Jung further defines image as a ‘constellation’ which is ‘the result of the
spontaneous activity of the unconscious on the one hand and of the
momentary conscious situation on the other, which always stimulates the
activity of the relevant subliminal material’. The ‘inner image’, he says, is ‘a
condensed expression of the psychic situation as a whole’.19 A fusion of ele-
ments, a response to a particular moment in consciousness, a resulting
interplay between conscious and unconscious domains: these, then, are
the image’s essential features, and – taking ‘outer’ and ‘inner’ to be broadly
synonymous with ‘conscious’ and ‘unconscious’ respectively – they also
resemble the conditions described by Tippett in the following scenario:
It may only be for a moment, when some quality in the night and the sound
of the bird-song combine to make a specially intense image. At such time we
respond. It is as though another world had spoken by some trick of
correspondence between the outside and the inside. For the ‘thing’ inside
only works if the proper image is offered from outside.20

Elaborations: interpreting with Jung

Much of this account of Jung’s formulation of image and its related con-
cepts (fantasy, imaginative activity) is drawn from his Psychological Types,
which we know Tippett to have read in considerable detail in the 1930s21
18 The Music and Thought of Michael Tippett

(probably in the English translation by H. G. Baynes, published in 1923).

The composer’s reading was probably motivated as much by personal need
as pure theoretical curiosity, and we can only speculate as to how rigor-
ously he evaluated its content; it is none the less conceivable that the
notion of image presented in his own writings reflects an absorption of the
spirit if not the precise detail of Jung’s work. Thus, although we cannot be
sure how fully Tippett studied in particular the eleventh chapter of
Psychological Types, devoted to definitions, there is some validity in
amplifying our understanding of image by relating it to other terms within
Jung’s system as defined in that chapter. In so doing we move more expli-
citly from tracing signs of Jungian influence to a reading of Tippett’s pro-
duction through a Jungian hermeneutic framework.
In Jung’s scheme image belongs to a network of related concepts, in par-
ticular ‘primordial image’, ‘idea’ and ‘symbol’. Primordial image would
seem to be a sub-category of image, and is favoured by Jung, perhaps
because its source is the collective unconscious (as opposed to ‘personal’
image which is relevant only to the personal unconscious). An image is
primordial – or ‘archetypal’ (the term Jung eventually comes to prefer) –
‘when it possesses an archaic character . . . when the image is in striking
accord with familiar mythological motifs’.22 Given that he attributes a par-
ticularly visual character to such an image23 the possibilities for transfer-
ring this notion to music might at first blush appear limited. Nevertheless,
it would seem that when Tippett refers to (musical) images he is associat-
ing them with a quality which, if not mythological, is in a certain sense pri-
mordial or trans-personal – as when he attributes the source of the images
described in our opening quotation to a kind of Yeatsian Great Memory:
‘that immense reservoir of the human psyche where images age-old and
new boil together in some demoniac cauldron’.24 Just what this sense of
‘primordiality’ might mean musically is a point to which we shall later
return.
It must be admitted that the semantic slippage which Jung sometimes
allows between primordial image, idea and symbol can be a cause of
obfuscation. Nevertheless it is possible to read his account of the relation-
ship between them as implicitly dialectical, each term representing a stage
in a process which brings the various strata of the psyche into meaningful
interaction. Thus while the primordial image might be seen as the gener-
ating thesis, its antithetical counterpart is the idea. The former is charac-
terized by its ‘concretism’ – a fusion of ‘thinking’, ‘feeling’ and ‘sensation’
(all formally defined concepts within Jung’s system). The latter is arrived
at through ‘differentiation’, specifically the differentiation of thought
from the other psychological functions, which coalesce within the image
19 The significance of the concept ‘image’ in Tippett’s musical thought

in its primordial form. The idea ‘is nothing other than the primordial
image intellectually formulated’; subjecting the primordial image to ‘a
particularly intense development of thought’ brings it ‘to the surface’25 –
presumably implying a passage from the (collective) unconscious to
consciousness.
Jung then describes a further stage in which the psychological function,
feeling, is reinvoked giving rise to the ‘symbol’, a manifestation of the pri-
mordial image which ‘embraces the undifferentiated, concretized feeling’
and the intellectually abstracted idea. With some justification this could be
viewed as a moment of synthesis, in which the final term mediates the first
two terms such that they partake of one another. As such the symbol repre-
sents for Jung a means of giving form to the unknowable. In his writings he
repeatedly stresses (partly in order to distinguish his use of the term from
Freud’s) a definition of symbol as ‘the best possible formulation of an
unknown thing’.26 Significantly this notion also features strongly in his
psychoanalytic investigations of art. For example he makes the following
reference to the products of a particular creative temperament which seeks
to transcend normal limits of comprehension (note too the characteristic
semantic osmosis between ‘image’ and ‘symbol’ in this passage):

We would expect a strangeness of form and content, thoughts that can only
be apprehended intuitively, a language pregnant with meanings, and images
that are true symbols because they are the best possible expressions for
something unknown – bridges thrown out towards an unseen shore.27

It would perhaps be a little too easy here to suggest parallels with

Tippett’s musical language (its characteristic tendency to push beyond
what the material can apparently accommodate, its strain against accepted
categories of musical meaning). What reinforces the argument, however, is
that over and above the possible correspondence between the end-product
described by Jung and that actually created by Tippett, are also similarities
in the accounts of the material’s psychological genesis. Tippett portrays
musical composition as a staged process, essentially a passage from the
inchoate to the articulate – ‘the process . . . is one of giving articulation to
this fluid experience, and appears in successive stages’.28 Other statements
of his reinforce the notion of his material beginning life in some intuitively
apprehended, unformed state – perhaps conceived in terms of its tempo,
general shape or timbre – and then being subjected to a process of con-
scious scrutiny and progressive refinement until, as a final stage, specific
notes are articulated.29 This parallels Jung’s depiction of an image first
generated from the unconscious – while perhaps not ‘primordial’ in
Tippett’s case, nevertheless in a state of undifferentiation – then subjected
20 The Music and Thought of Michael Tippett

to ‘a particularly intense development of thought’, giving rise to an articu-

late (musical) ‘idea’. The final material construed as a ‘symbol’ embraces
both thought and feeling, capturing both the abstract, intellectually for-
mulated idea and the undifferentiated contents of the unconscious. It is
this particularly Jungian conception of the symbol, then, with its quasi-
dialectical implications, which Tippett probably has in mind (whether
consciously or not) when he speaks of images. The question now arises as
to just how this conception affects the material itself; in other words, in
what ways does the final product bear traces of its genesis?

Images in music
Passing from a generalized theoretical discussion to one involving specific
technicalities of musical language necessitates an inevitable clunking of
discursive gears. At least a partial transition between discourses might be
suggested by occasional moments in Tippett’s writings where he himself
talks of images directly in relation to music. Seen in total, however, these
remarks also imply an ambiguity as to whether ‘image’ pertains to the
whole work or its individual parts. On the one hand for example Tippett
states that the ‘pleasure and enrichment’ of symphonic music

arise from the fact that the flow is not merely the flow of the music itself, but
a significant image of the inner flow of life. Artifice of all kinds is necessary to
the musical composition in order that it shall become such an image.30

As important as the further stress on the fluidity of psychic life (a Jungian

conceit) is the idea that the musical composition is an image – singular – of
this flow: indeed of the flow itself, rather than of particular contents that
are subject to it.31 On the other hand, in the same essay Tippett also talks of
images – plural – as if they represented specific resources of musical
material: ‘Music of course has a tremendous range of images, from the gay
(and, if perhaps rarely, the comic) to the serious and the tragic’.32 And else-
where he describes the composing subconscious as containing a ‘store of
images of all kinds, from tiny sounds to enormous sounds’.33 While in
neither of these last quotations does Tippett mention how these materials
might be implemented within a specific piece, it seems unlikely that he is
assuming a movement or work to consist of only one such image. Image in
this context, then, would seem to be synonymous with an element of
musical form, rather than an entire form per se.
The terminological ambiguity may only be apparent. As individual
images presented by the musical parts succeed one another they could be
perceived as generating the larger image which is the flow of the musical
21 The significance of the concept ‘image’ in Tippett’s musical thought

whole. But there is perhaps another way of reading this dichotomy, namely
in the shift in Tippett’s stance towards musical form manifested between
his earlier and later works. (It may not be coincidental that a number of
essays in which Tippett dwells on the concept image are roughly contem-
poraneous – dating from the 1950s and early 1960s34 – with a period of
gradual and then abrupt stylistic change within his œuvre: as if a concern
for the nature and meaning of his musical materials had been driven to the
conscious surface of his writings.) For example, an early work such as the
Concerto for Double String Orchestra (1938–9) which aspires to an ideal
of Beethovenian symphonic continuity could well be said to offer an image
‘of the otherwise unperceived unsavoured inner flow of life’35 – in the
energy and organically unfolding structures of the outer movements in
particular. By contrast, in certain works post-dating The Midsummer
Marriage there is a tendency for the constituent parts to become increas-
ingly strongly differentiated – as for example in the Fantasia Concertante
on a Theme of Corelli (1953) or the Second Symphony (1957–8) – until in
King Priam (1958–62) the principle of formal progression by immediate
succession rather than mediated flow becomes the norm (and continues to
be so for much of Tippett’s later œuvre). Individual sections now take on
an increased autonomy in relation to the whole through their distinctive
characterization; each is defined by the particular image it projects. Indeed
it would not be going too far to conjecture that the image becomes the
principal constitutive element of form.
But this is to anticipate a little, since a more concrete examination of how
images translate into musical material has still to be offered. This calls for a
case study and, given the above comments, an extract from King Priam itself
would be fitting. Helen of Troy’s third-act aria is particularly appropriate
since it deals with that most quintessential of fusions between the material
and ineffable: sex. The aria follows Andromache’s diatribe at Helen’s adul-
terous liaison with Paris.36 ‘Let her rave’, replies Helen, indifferent to
Andromache’s bitter invective, ‘she cannot know what I am’. And she then
proceeds to tell us, in a striking hymn to sexual love. The dramatic charac-
terization is an excellent example of Tippett’s reproduction of an ideology of
the ‘eternal feminine’, probably informed by a reading of Jung’s ‘Archetypes
of the collective unconscious’.37 But of more immediate concern is the way
the music furnishes an image of Helen’s apprehension of her transcendent
carnality, her semi-divine state of Being, in Eros rather than Logos. This
image is manifest from the very opening of the aria (see Ex. 2.1).
To what extent can the musical conditions exemplified here be under-
stood as congruent with the notion ‘image’ as presented in Jung’s analyti-
cal psychology? Let us recall that this is a case of the Jungian symbolic
22 The Music and Thought of Michael Tippett

Example 2.1. King Priam, Helen’s aria (opening), Act III scene 1.
23 The significance of the concept ‘image’ in Tippett’s musical thought

image: a synthesis of feeling and thought; of the undifferentiated contents

of the unconscious with the more abstract idea which has sprung from it.
The intention is to give articulate form to an ‘ineffable’ apprehension – ‘an
expression of an intuitive idea that cannot . . . be formulated in any other
or better way’, as Jung puts it.38 In other words, while striving to create an
utterance coherent in its own (musical) terms, Tippett is also attempting
to evince from his materials a stratum of meaning beyond that of imma-
nent musical signification itself: the musical image, or symbol, contains
the musical idea, yet exceeds it. A strategy for understanding the material’s
properties as a symbolic image might therefore be to isolate the ways in
which it functions as an idea, and then look for elements which extend
beyond that function.
A brief digression may be fruitfully made at this point to note that the
dualism between image and idea is explored by Tippett in his essay ‘Air
from another planet’. While he attributes the dichotomy to Plato rather
than Jung,39 the terms of his argument would seem to be broader than any
particular Platonic debate (that the composer elsewhere interprets a
Platonic construct as anticipating notions in Jungian depth psychology is
also suggestive40). Analogously, while the ostensible subject is Schoenberg’s
opera Moses und Aron, it is soon evident that Tippett has his own artistic
concerns at heart:
Schönberg . . . clearly takes energy from the Image and gives it to the Idea . . .
‘Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any
thing that is in heaven above, or in the earth beneath.’ Such is the second
commandment. Naturally, if this commandment is kept literally then art
ceases. Where an artist gets fascinated by this commandment, then the
psychological struggle is terrible. Such I believe to have been Schönberg’s.
And when I have clarified things to this temporary abruptness, I feel myself a
Greek to Schönberg’s Jew. Damned by Jehovah though I may be, rejected
even by Plato, on more occasions than I propose to tell you, the Image has
been for me divine. Not of course, I hasten to add, an Image of God Himself,
but often of his breath.41

Tippett’s comparison of himself with Schoenberg is illuminating, and may

be read as a contrast between the latter’s pursuit of (an essentially cerebral)
musical logic in the face of a disintegrating tonal language, and Tippett’s
greater willingness to embrace the irrational and unaccountable, the physi-
cal and the exuberantly beautiful.42 This is far from saying that Tippett
abandons the musical idea, but rather points to its occupying a different
place in his priorities. That he mentions Schoenberg as one of mod-
ernism’s key exponents of the idea is apposite for our purposes, since it
would in any case be difficult to discuss the term’s application to music
24 The Music and Thought of Michael Tippett

without making reference to him (though as we return to a discussion of

Helen’s aria we should maintain an awareness of some of the ambiguities
inherent in Schoenberg’s application of the notion).43
Pragmatically speaking, the musical idea which underpins Helen’s aria
in its entirety is first presented in the opening bars. Its salient characteris-
tics are labelled a, b and c in Example 2.1: respectively the oscillating
inverted mordent figure of the vocal line, the unmediated descent which
follows it, and the quartally based chord elicited in response. Of these it is
perhaps the plummet from the top to the bottom of the mezzo-soprano
register which remains most strongly characteristic, and indeed reaches an
extreme in the aria’s final stages, where its compass extends from top Ab to
bottom B – at which point the text reveals the metaphorical meaning of the
musical gesture: ‘Love such as this stretches up to heaven, / for it reaches
down to hell’.44 This transformation makes it clear that while the idea is
initially presented by the opening material it is not identical with it: rather,
the idea is synonymous with its evolution – an evolution which generates
in particular the primary elements of the formal scheme (the A sections of
a design shaped A–B–A1–B–transition–A2).
Aspects of this process are shown for section A in Example 2.2. In part I
of the analysis the three phrases of the section – the initial presentation of
the idea and its two variants – are aligned paradigmatically so as to high-
light similarities of shape and rhythmic profile, as well as to show up the
differences. Particularly evident is the further development in the second
variant (stave iii) of the thematic extension begun in the first (stave ii). As
the motivic annotations show, this is engineered through modifications to
motif b. That these are related by more than a vaguely defined shape is
demonstrated in part II of the analysis which abstracts pitch and interval
content from b and represents them in cellular guise as unordered pitch-
class sets (these are described in prime form, but shown in descending
order on the stave since this is the motif ’s typical trajectory). Here we see
the subtlety of the transformations. Behind the changes in direction, b1 is
effectively an exact transposition of b; while b⬘ and b2 gradually expand the
intervals of the original set: [0,1,4] becomes [0,2,5] then [0,2,6]. The latter
process is effected by the semitonal ‘modulation’ of pitches between suc-
cessive variants, shown with broken lines in Example 2.2: D and B in motif
b become Db and Bb in motif b⬘; Ab in motif b1 becomes An in b2.
The features outlined here by no means constitute an exhaustive
account of the metamorphosis of the aria’s musical idea. One might, for
example, have included an analysis of harmony and voice leading (traces
of the idea’s passage through time). Nevertheless this brief discussion
allows us to draw certain conclusions and to consider parallels with Jung.
Example 2.2. Helen’s aria: the musical idea and its evolution.

' '

'
26 The Music and Thought of Michael Tippett

As with the latter’s formulation for conceptual activity, the musical idea as
considered here is characterized by abstraction: it arises (or is cognized)
through differentiation from the concrete corpus of the musical material.
Detached from the materiality of sound – a form and not a substance, to
borrow Saussure’s phrase – the idea reflects the action of musical thought.
As such it is a facet of consciousness, and available to analysis (whose key
metaphor, structure, is likewise an abstraction, emulating that of the idea).
If the above dwells at some length on the idea – relatively familiar terri-
tory to music theory – this is partly to establish a basis against which to con-
trast that aspect of the image which extends beyond it. For the musical
image, let us recall, embraces the idea yet exceeds it: while the idea achieves
its identity through abstraction from the musical material, the essence of
the image resides in the material’s very materiality. That material substrate
is not itself the image, even though the image is ontologically determined by
it. Rather, the image is a synthesis of the abstract idea and its material
‘other’, in which both domains are emancipated from one another while at
the same time being mutually conditioned. That is, the idea’s formal config-
uration may bear traces of an orientation towards sensuous ends, while the
material stratum may absorb qualities of the idea and thereby enter into sig-
nification. In one sense, of course, all music manifests just such a dichotomy
between the formal and the sensuous (suggesting far wider implications to
the present discussion than the immediate terms of reference). However, for
music to become imagistic as such requires, I would argue, an interactive
disposition of these separate elements towards each other, as here described.
Tippett achieves such conditions through various means. One notable
channel for imagistic expression is opened by his inclination to push
materials to extremes. For example, the extremes of compass in Helen’s
aria noted earlier are developed further by the instrumental writing. Her
prolonged occupation of the upper vocal tessitura in section A1 sends the
violas to the top of their register (Figs. 381–3); while at the opening of the
aria (see Ex. 2.1) part of the function of the accompanying chords is to
amplify the voice’s repeated plunges to the bottom of the mezzo range; the
vocal depths are echoed at a register three octaves lower. Thus register
ceases to be merely a medium, in which musical material is presented; it
itself becomes material – palpable and significant.45
A similar transformation is enacted upon timbre. Indeed, Tippett’s
Second Symphony already marked the completion of a development within
his earlier œuvre in which the distinction between a musical idea and the
instrumental colour which transmits it is progressively blurred (epitomized
by the second group of the opening movement). The corollary of this muta-
tion of priorities – whereby the configuration of a musical idea might serve
27 The significance of the concept ‘image’ in Tippett’s musical thought

as much to project a sonority as vice versa – is the potential osmosis between

the mental and the sensuous, again suggestive of the fusion between thought
and feeling characteristic of Jung’s symbolic image. These conditions also
obtain for many of the chordal components of Helen’s aria, which on the
one hand invoke the category of musical syntax known as harmony, and on
the other make a claim to be heard as sonorities in their own right – neither
position being entirely assimilable to the other. To elaborate: these features
are based predominantly on vertical accumulations of fourths or fifths, rep-
resenting a kind of intensified triad (or ‘higher consonance’ as Whittall
terms it46); they aggregate into progressions, governed by a flux between flat
and sharp tonal fields and between relative degrees of consonance and disso-
nance. However, unlike the conventionally functional triadic progression
which is their historical prototype, it is not possible here to identify any
single higher level governing harmony into which these elements could be
subsumed. Each chord contains a degree of resistance to such abstraction – a
counter-tendency which demands it be heard concretely in its own terms.
Thus, as is also the case with Messiaen, the vertical interval structure of a
chord and the instrumental colour with which it is voiced coalesce into an
irreducible timbral identity. The in-built resonance – or ‘grain’, as Barthes
might have put it – of these colour-harmonies becomes the source of a sub-
liminal level of apprehension beyond that of their syntactic signification.
Integral to Tippett’s imagistic practice is his vivid characterization of
material. If this is bound up with the tendency noted above to push
materials to extremes, it also relates to his deployment of instrumental
resources – King Priam is the benchmark in this respect – in which the
orchestra is fragmented into a multiplicity of ensembles. (Helen’s aria, for
example, with only fleeting exceptions expunges all instruments other
than violas, piano and harp.47) Such a reconsideration of the orchestra
amounts to more than an instrumental parallel to the characterization of
the opera’s dramatis personae. It is a means of characterizing the dramatic
moment – and indeed moment per se. In a condition approaching, though
not identical to, that of moment form, time becomes sedimented within
the distinctive soundworld of each section; the unique qualitative features
of each image mark out an autonomous, unified enclave within the tem-
poral continuum. Certain parallels here are to be found in the Imagist
poets of the early twentieth century (although direct influence seems
unlikely). Pound, for example, defines an image as that which ‘presents an
intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time’.48 To collapse the
temporal sequence which is of the essence of a poem or a piece of music
into the appearance of an instant requires no little artifice. These condi-
tions arise in Tippett’s music when the features which make for temporal
28 The Music and Thought of Michael Tippett

progression are equalled or even exceeded in importance by other charac-

teristics of the musical material (such as timbre) not ontologically bound
to teleological evolution.
The importance of characterization in Tippett’s musical images is expli-
citly acknowledged when in his later scores conventional expression marks
are supplemented by a sprinkling of epithets or their nominal equivalents –
for example ‘singing, rich and golden’ (Triple Concerto), ‘crystalline’,
‘ringing’ (String Quartet No. 5), ‘power’, ‘lyric grace’ (Symphony No. 4).
(The relationship between images and qualities is also implicit when he
writes of ‘images of vigour . . . of calm . . . of abounding generous exuberant
beauty’.) These score indications have in at least one case drawn criticism,49
and the propriety of Tippett’s related tendency to add onomatopoeic anno-
tations to percussive sounds (e.g. ‘boom’, ‘pip, pip, pip’, ‘clang’, ‘plop’) is
certainly open to question. However, if these practices have about them a
literalness bordering at times on banality, they also point more seriously to
an aspect of the material as symbolic image. In a sense they underline the
way in which the image through its excessive materiality strains away from
a state of musical immanence towards the objective world; the image thus
attracts the epithet, as if drawing it from the empirical world towards itself.
That the epithet is in fact always inadequate to the material highlights the
extent to which the image’s mimetic elements are reassumed into the ‘inner
world’ of subjectivity. But if the epithet itself does not represent a genuine
source of mediation between inner and outer worlds, perhaps this role falls
to the body – a point to which I shall return below.

The significance (and signification) of images

Many analytical observations about music assume a kind of formalism.
Musical signifiers are understood to acquire signifieds from within the
work itself through relationships between their formal properties. To the
extent that Tippett’s images encompass a musical idea, they too participate
in such a process. Yet, as we have seen, as symbolic images they also strive
beyond – or even against – a formalist conception of this kind, towards a
different semiotic order.50 Comprising elements tractable in concepts of
musical structure plus an uncodable (but signifying) residue, these images
simultaneously engage the mind’s cognitive faculties and refer it to some-
thing beyond conscious cognition. They suggest themselves as a kind of
hyper-sign, whose excessively material signifier would evoke a commen-
surably unfathomable signified. All this has important implications for
our understanding of Tippett’s music, and compels us to return to larger
questions relating to the significance of symbolic images.
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