"I'm interested in where people play..."—Harrison Birtwistle

Modernism, that ten-letter four-letter word so excruciating to define, has at least a few marks of character. Perhaps nothing is as dependable as modernism's steadfast obsession with perspectives—with lots of perspectives, accumulated and overlapped, fragmented, rebound, exponentially multiplied or amplified. The cubism of Picasso, the pastiche of Schwitters, the Joycean novel of many eyes and pens, Schoenberg's "musical idea seen from all sides" and Stravinsky's "unified fragmentation"—all projects multiply the view beyond previous imagination.

So when people call Harrison Birtwistle a musical "modernist," you know they're thinking of perspective-play—the ability to increase and subvert a listener's view. Birtwistle's relatively late work for wind quintet, Five Distances, is an excellent introduction to the composer's idiosyncratic fascination with multiple perspectives. Written for the Ensemble Intercontemporain in 1992, the score asks the players to "sit as far apart as is practically possible." Already the view is radically shifted, both for the players—who now have to bind together as ensemble from afar—and for the spectator, who begins to witness the performance less as pure music, and more as a scriptless musical theater, teeming with individual sonic characters.

As if this were not challenge enough for the performers, Birtwistle exploits their "five distances" to the utmost in the music itself, which shifts both locally and globally in tempo and gesture; often the drama of the piece becomes one of gradual, rhetoricized consolidation, where the players begin freely of one another, and come eventually together in an intricate polyphonic web of great rhythmic vibrancy. This virtuosic interdependency is perhaps best heard at the work's ending, where the ensemble disperses into its five separate lines, each accelerating and decelerating at its own rate; of course, this independence is a "false freedom," in that each instrument must wait for another instrument, and cue yet another, until the entire group winds its cycle of expansion and contraction to a stop.

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