Program Note

Harrison Birtwistle (b.1934)
Crescent Moon over the Irrational (2010)

“I’m concerned with going over and over the same event from different angles, so that a multidimensional musical object is created which contains a number of perspectives. I don’t create linear music … I move in concentric circles. The events I create move as the planets move in the solar system.”

—Harrison Birtwistle

Birtwistle’s desire to view “the same event from different angles” reflects the ideas of Paul Klee—the Swiss-born artist whose style evades categorization through its association with movements ranging from German Expressionism to Dada.  Known as unworldly and mysterious, Klee was a painter who aimed to expand the boundaries of the rational in his art, a reaction to the increasingly technologized world in which he found himself.  A proponent of the idea of the “construction of mystery,” he was fascinated by the unknowns of outer space; his paintings often focusing on geometric forms that float as if free of gravity.  Klee frequently made the moon a subject of his works, such as in his Crescent Moon over the Rational, the title of which gave birth to Birtwistle’s composition.

—Anna Whistler