Tippet on Music expands essays from Michael Tippett's two previous collections, Moving into Aquarius and Music of the Angels, to make a fresh, up-to-date compilation. It also includes a substantial amount of new material. Altough its framing chapters deal with aesthetics and the role of the artist in society, the core of the book is to do with music by other twentieth-century composers, and above all Tippett's own major works, from his early popular success, the
oratorio A Child of our Time, up to the very latest, such as the opera New Year and the orchestral piece The Rose Lake. A whole section is devoted to the questions of interpretation and performance,
and as such it should be particularly useful to performers, conductors and opera directors. Tippett on Music distils the intellectual opinions and artistic experience of an internationally celebrated composer, one whose life-span has stretched through almost the whole of the twentieth century, and whose compositional output has remained consistent and challenging, right into his late eighties. The book ends with a glimpse of what Tippett thinks commposers could achieve in the next millenium.
Industry Reviews
`For one of his best 90th birthday tributes Tippett has wrapped up a book for himself. Everyone wants to know what a composer of his eminence thinks of the musical world that he has experienced and the 90-year-old Tippett, as much as anybody, has accumulated a treasury of knowledge of which to draw. This compendium is not a wholly new book ... there have already been two earlier collections of essays - Moving into Aquarius (1959) and Music
of the Angels (1980 - which Tippett has revised and updated; sundry other articles have been gathered from disparate sources and there is an amount of new material. In the case of some composers this might result in a
discordant lack of consistency, but not with Tippett. Reading the chapters as they come, one senses a man faithful to his ideals right through his 90 years ... Academics will find a lot of their work ready packaged for them here' Financial Times
`Asked to supply a final chapter on "things to come", he is characteristically open-minded'
Financial Times
'Academics will find a lot of their work ready packaged for them here. A newly-written chapter on the later operas typically abounds in information on Tippett's sources and should keep programme-note writers supplied for years.'
Richard Fairman, Financial Times, 18 March 1995
`There is plenty of new material to bring Tippett followers up to date ... The collection is expertly edited by Meirion Bowen.'
Classical Music
`Because Tippett is so important a composer, Tippett on music is an essential text ... Tippett on music is certainly less "voluminous" than the writings of Boulez, but it probably tells us more of significance about the author's compositions.'
The Musical Times
`Besides the new essays, the added value lies in the selection and arrangement of information by Tippett and his colleague and assistant, Meirion Bowen.'
Gordon Theil, University of California, Los Angeles, Notes, December 1996
