creation : 10/04/1978, Tokyo
music : Harrison Birtwistle
ordered by : Les Percussions de Strasbourg
musicians : 6 percussionnists
duration : 30 mn
publisher : Universal
« Belike this show imports the argument of the play. » — Ophelia, Hamlet, III, 2
In his literally unlimited ability to repeat differently, to spin out new ways of saying from old words, Shakespeare is perhaps a kindred spirit for Harrison Birtwistle. No one’s saying they’re brothers in attitude or orientation, mind you, but both have a stunning penchant for « recursive invention, » with minds like thesauruses for their respective media. In the case of Birtwistle’s 1976 « ceremony for six percussionists, » For O, for O, the Hobby-Horse is Forgot, the composer actually meets the bard head-on, and on similar terms. The result of one of the more fascinating and ingenious examples of « musical theater » in recent times, especially because the linking metaphor is so striking: it is the « play within a play, » that archetype of recursive invention itself.
Behind this meeting of minds was the « ceremony’s » fortuitous occasion: in the year Birtwistle composed the score, he was working with the English National Theater on incidental music for a production of Hamlet. It was that famous scene in Act III, when Hamlet gets traveling players to perform a pantomime, that Birtwistle decided to use as the founding stone for an extended composition — and thus did Birtwistle take his title from Hamlet’s bitter lines « …he shall suffer not thinking on, with the hobby-horse, whose epitaph is, ’For O, for O, the hobby-horse is forgot. »
Hamlet’s vicious irony is perhaps less the subject of Birtwistle’s score than the dumb-show itself, a wordless play of antagonistic forces which symbolically enacts the murder (of Hamlet’s father by Hamlet’s uncle) around which the entire play revolves. A banal and vulgar operation in itself, the pantomime prophecies the tragedy’s ultimate trajectory whose end, yielding a poisoned queen and pierced-through king caught in the eyes of a dying, epiphany-shaken Hamlet — he’s seen the scene before. The play and the « play » are reversed, the « within » inverted, and a vicious cycle of repetition closed.
With his penchant for brilliant « dumb-shows, » in which musical performers execute a vigorous, skeletal theater of sounds and positions, Birtwistle creates in For O, for O… a gripping symbolic ritual of pulses. He mutates the self-reflective element in Shakespeare’s theatrical scenario into a purely pulse-driven world of interrelated tempi. Two of the six percussionists are labeled « king » and « queen »; their movements carefully choreographed, they control the ceremony for the « chorus » of the remaining four players; all playing on a wide range of unpitched percussion, the performers revolve cycles of simpler rhythmic cells around an elaborately embellished central pulse; developed to cacophonous heights in the work’s middle section, the pulse returns in the austere last section.
Some listeners might feel that very little of Shakespeare remains in Birtwistle’s score, and to a certain degree the composer intended this as measure of his dedication to formal musical aspects. But in its self-spiraling menace, Birtwistle’s score is perhaps a deliberately emptied and silenced tragedy, a Birtwistlian « secret theater » tacitly mirroring « the argument of the play. » All Music Guide