The German playwright Bertolt Brecht once explained his famous "alienation effect" in a rather surprising way. Contrary to the sound of the words, he wanted to "alienate" the spectator, create a distance, but not a chasm between the spectator and the play. To alienate was an intimately double act: a disagreement which then revitalizes agreement, a shock and separation followed by an often magical reconnection.

Secret Theater (1984), one of the great works of British composer Harrison Birtwistle's maturity, is a far cry from the outrageously public plays of Brecht. But the same process seems to be at work, a process which has obsessed Birtwistle for much of his long career; and while Secret Theater is a purely musical work, it lives up to its title in executing an extraordinary stage play of sorts, a tone-play of shocks and alienations which constantly reconfigure into strange new alliances, of power bouncing, breaking, and binding to perpetually shifting sound bodies.

Birtwistle makes the theatrical allusions of this expansive work (almost a half hour's length) explicit in a tantalizing quote at the head of the score, from Robert Graves' eponymous poem: "...a flute signals / Far off; we mount the stage as though at random / Boldly ring down the curtain, then dance out our love..." Though Birtwistle's imagination is too confident and obsessive to follow an extra-musical program, he takes great inspiration from the Graves' image of characters staging a secret play. The composer calls the instrumentalists "dramatis personae," and with them (wind quartet, brass trio, string quintet, piano, percussion) he engenders perfect antagonists. The larger group he calls "Continuum"; it is the bulk of the ensemble, and constitutes its rhythmic engine, its "dance"—though the Continuum offers an extremely complex, kaleidoscopic dance, constantly tripping, tapering, even attacking its own weird revolutions, like a moody four-dimensional clock out of a Paul Klee drawing.

The smaller "Cantus" sings the work's elaborate, perpetually spinning song; consisting first of the "signaling" flute, this Cantus ebbs and flows in size and power, each member standing as they play behind the continuum. As the piece progresses, its major sections are marked by the additions to the Cantus from the Continuum, who stand up and walk over to it in strikingly ritualistic fashion. The music this evolving body generates is a glorious homophony, effortlessly shifting between unisons and octaves, and a rich, Messiaen-like organum, all the while forging the most precise, charismatic inflections. The harmonic language is technically atonal, buts holds true to Graves' "incomparable parade of colour."

The breakdown of oppositions which these two sound bodies carry out is myriad, at once extremely comprehensible and utterly mysterious. Alienation is at work, but effects a marvelous intimacy, something Brecht cherished as well. But Birtwistle's alienation maintains the rapt distance of paradox: extreme melodiousness with no actual melodies; tremendous pulse with no solid meter, a captivating cast with no actual characters, a scriptless theater.

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