Distant horizons: from Pagodaland to the Church Parables

Abstract

Writing this work [ Canticle III: 'Still Falls the Rairt' ] has helped me so much in my development as a composer. I feel with this work & the Turn of the Screw (which I am impatient for you to hear) that I am on the threshold of a new musical world (for me, I am not pretentious about it!) I am worried about the problems which arise, & that is one reason that I am taking off next winter to do some deep thinking. But your great poem has dragged something from me that was latent there, & shown me what lies before me. Britten wrote these lines to Edith Sitwell on 28 April 1955, six months before the momentous concert tour which took him halfway across the globe for five months in the winter and spring of 1955–6 and provided him with the opportunity for ‘some deep thinking’. The significance of those travels in exposing the composer to vivid firsthand experiences of various Asian musical traditions, and the surface impact these had on his own style, have long been recognized. But Britten's identification with Far Eastern music went far deeper than the obvious borrowings from the Balinese gamelan to be heard in The Prince of the Pagodas (1955–7) or the emulations of the Japanese Nō theatre in Curlew River (1956–64) would suggest. Britten's style was at a turning-point in the mid-1950s, as his remarks to Sitwell attest: the intense motivic economy and dodecaphonic techniques in Canticle III and The Turn of the Screw had clearly left him wondering in which direction his style would now develop. The Asian adventure, with perfect timing, opened his ears to other traditions of musical economy and structural clarity while his compositional thinking was clearly running along similar lines, and his travels strengthened a latent curiosity about exotic cultures that had originated many years before.