The Sound’s Remains: Some Thoughts on Harrison Birtwistle’s Orpheus Elegies (2004) or: Timbre from Kant to Hegel

Abstract

Positioning at its core the category of the sublime, the modernist aesthetic famously constructs music as an autonomous, self-relating agent of nonrepresentational negativity pursuing on its own terms a powerful critique of the Western metaphysic of presence. In it timbre figures prominently as that musical parameter which most aptly conveys the sublime feeling, introducing ‘a sort of infinity, the indeterminacy of the harmonics’ within sound itself [Lyotard, J.-F. (1991). After the sublime, the state of aesthetics (G. Bennington & R. Bowlby, Trans). In J.-F. Lyotard (Ed.), The inhuman. Reflections on time (pp. 135–143). Cambridge: Polity Press, p. 140]. Nevertheless, this does not seem to happen in the music of Harrison Birtwistle. By considering a recent work by the composer, the song cycle ‘Orpheus Elegies’, the article reflects on Birtwistle’s shifting away from the established logic of the sublime and the narrative of a teleological emancipation of sound. Through a critique of Lyotard’s own reflections on timbre and by considering some recent developments in Hegel scholarship, from Rebecca Comay to Slavoj Žižek, the article ultimately proposes a way to conceptually grasp Birtwistle’s specific kind of modernist aesthetic, highlighting the new role timbre acquires in it.