"I wrote it completely off the top of my head. I can't justify a single note. I didn't know what I was doing or why it is like it is."—Harrison Birtwistle on Refrains and Choruses (1957)

Ah, the brazen ignorance of youth, and the crooked hindsight of age! Many an artist looks back on an early period and, like Birtwistle, throws up the hands with a mixture of surface embarrassment ("I didn't know what I was doing") and subtextual confidence ("I'm so good, it doesn't matter what I know"). And it's another thing altogether for Birtwistle to confess his spontaneity/ineptitude as a composer in 1950s Europe—that was the decade of Stockhausen's Gruppen and Boulez's Structures, that age whose proud crest was the surest technical mastery, the need "to know everything before stepping off the carpet."

What was the brash Birtwistle thinking? Was he a mature iconoclast already, sprung fully-formed from Zeus' head? Was he prematurely in touch with his Yeatsian daemon, unconcerned with present currents because of his own timeless source of inspiration?

No, not quite: as scholar Jonathon Cross pointed out recently, Birtwistle was—well, in effect, lying; he was lying the way the best artists often lie, not to refute the former self, but to remake it, to self-mythologize (something Yeats was even more expert at than demonizing). The Birtwistle of the 1980s had become supremely sure of his artistic methods, having achieved an inimitable balance between mastery, systematization, and self-imposed obscurity; he curved his speech about his own work, and began to cut the rumpled, obsessive Beethovenian image of the interior creator, dedicated not to theory and aesthetic, but only to hardcore Promethean production.

But Refrains and Choruses, the first work in Birtwistle's published catalog, is a brilliantly thought-out work; if anything, it actually exhibits less inspired ignorance than many of the composer's later works. And in that sense, this slender chamber work (less than ten minutes long) reveals by antagonism certain essential polarities in Birtwistle's artistic nature. On the one hand, Refrains and Choruses displays all the basic, most atavistic necessities of the composer: his compulsion to fuse both the continual and the interruptive, the flow and the fold, the repetitive and the discontinuous, the circle and the line (hence the title); his fascination with archaic gestures, with rough sounds and meticulous musical "de-civilization"; and his innate penchant for theater, for making living characters from sounding objects.

Birtwistle fuses all these elements into a pitch structure which follows basic, quasi-serialist laws of symmetry, vital germs in the air of post-World War II European music. And since the "temporal" arts never reveal symmetry as an immediate action, Refrains and Choruses displays what would become a most Birtwistlian technique, the drama of symmetry seeking to complete itself—symmetry not as an event, but as a sequence.

So perhaps Birtwistle wasn't lying per se; he wasn't so much an apostle of Yeats' demon as of Nietzsche's "active forgetter," misremembering in order to foster creative recollection.

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