Harrison Birtwistle - Carmen Arcadiae Mechanicae Perpetuum

Carmen Arcadiae Mechanicae Perpetuum, for ensemble (1977)

The London Sinfonietta
Elgar Howarth

An interpretive key to Paul Klee's Twittering Machine can be found in the shifting of vocal emphasis from the described (machine) to the descriptor (twittering). The noise it makes is not peripheral to some greater purpose; twittering is, in fact, exclusively what this contraption was made to do. Four wiry birds perch on a crankshaft attached to a handle which presumably, when turned, initiates said twittering. The birds themselves are likewise devoid of supplemental utility. They are wingless and bodiless, with scrawny legs that serve only to secure their fat singing heads to the axle. The humor in all this, of course, is that Klee goes to great trouble to construct a device that produces birdsong in a much less efficient (and presumably much less harmonious) fashion than regular birds do.

It was under the inspiration of Klee's ridiculous gadgetry that Harrison Birtwistle composed Carmen Arcadiae Mechanicae Perpetuum. Dedicated to the London Sinfonietta on the occasion of their tenth anniversary, this effort seems a caricature of Birtwistle's compositional output as a whole because it often engages in acts of self-sabotage. Groups of pitches, despite their apparent administration by some sort of process, might inadvertently miss a member or admit stray tones. Elsewhere, counterpoised rhythmic systems may struggle in vain to arrive at some sort of consensus before careening into cacophony. In Carmen Arcadiae, six distinct musical mechanisms are incongruously juxtaposed and overlapped so that texture, register, dynamics, and other parameters follow (un)coordinated trajectories. The sonority produced thus reveals the sardonic nature of the self-consciously sesquipedalian and ostentatiously Latin title, which translates as "The Perpetual Song of the Mechanical Arcadia." Like Klee in 1922, Birtwistle in 1977 is skeptical of technological progress, and laments what Baudrillard described as the mass-produced desire for things mass-produced. Characteristically, however, Birtwistle's pessimism is tempered -- perhaps sabotaged -- by his sense of humor, and his mechanical Arcadia is as ecstatic as it is ironic. [allmusic.com]

Art by Paul Klee