Even in the States, where there's more of a tradition of user friendly classical music, writing such a defiantly tonal piece in 1980 required some courage; in Britain it would have been an act of profound radicalism; at that time only John Tavener, with whom I was shortly to begin studying, was doing anything remotely similar. I wished I had heard it as a student: my own path back to tonality would have been so much easier to tread.
Someone involved with writing music inevitably finds responding to an unfamiliar work more problematic than a lay listener: you always bring a critical ear. Like many pieces written for a big orchestra, Harmonium does not (for me) let enough silence in; silence is like the white paper a watercolourist leaves blank to let the light shine through. Composers with a lot of instruments on the page are very reluctant to have them doing nothing. You generally couldn't hear the words; and although that might have been the Halle choir's fault, I think it was probably Adams'. The piece was perhaps a bit more boring than it needed to be. I went to sleep twice in it, woken each time by the music - which tended to linger on a pedal point for long periods - shifting to a new plane.
The other piece in the concert was the Eroica. I found it striking that Beethoven's harmonic language - an almost childishly simple conflation of triads and diminished sevenths - nevertheless enabled him to create a structure that was not only engaging, dramatic and touching (all things true of Adams's piece too) but also of granitic strength and cohesiveness. The ideas were worked through; when they were exhausted the piece finished and it felt right that it was doing so. The movements of Harmonium, by contrast, rather petered out. Like a badly performed Bruckner symphony, you didn't feel it ended because it had to; the movements could have been shorter or longer without the listener feeling particularly surprised. Whatever else he had done - and how the original audience must have been relieved to find a piece of contemporary music so ravishingly beautiful - Adams certainly hadn't found a way of making his tonal language an instrument of structure. Does it matter? Maybe not. My tastes lie in that direction though, and I think it can be done, even on the langourously slow-developing harmonic steppes of American minimalism.
But back to Harrison Birtwhistle. I thought of him because it struck me that our most celebrated composer is one whose music is broadly disliked by the public, to the exent that venues secretly give tickets away to make attendance figures look better, whereas the American way (without public subsidy) has produced a composer like Adams, who fills concert halls and whose music is broadly loved. What an indictment of the British way of art.
