Sir Harrison Birtwistle (born 1934) is one of the most challenging, original, and controversial musicians of his generation. Though angular and modern, his work nevertheless is indebted to tradition. Birtwistle composes music for a variety of...

SIR HARRISON BIRTWISTLE'S new opera The minotaur, which will be premiered at Covent Garden on 15 April 2008, explores a familiar narrative from Greek mythology, the historical origins of which can be summarised as follows. When King Minos besieged Athens, Neptune sent a bull...

The Music of Harrison Birtwistle. By Robert Adlington. (Music in the Twentieth Century.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. [xiv, 242 p. ISBN 0-521-63082-7. [pounds sterling]42.50.] The sixty-fifth birthday of Harrison Birtwistle in 1999 prompted a rush of scholarly assessment which in addition...

Musicologist Richard Taruskin, in his brilliant new Oxford History of Western Music, observes that the notion of "great music" is a relatively recent one, dating from the end of the 18th century, when Mozart began aiming his sights toward a realm of human contemplation that...