Benjamin Britten

by Andy Vores

Benjamin Britten’s music speaks to an unusually wide range of listeners—musicians and music lovers, the adventurous and the guarded, and the intellectual and the emotional. Before Britten, there had been little in English music of such scope and breadth, and he is often credited with revitalizing his nation’s music with a language that is distinctive, yet oddly familiar. Drawing upon the English pastoral tradition, folksong,Verdi, Anglican hymns, Purcell, gamelan, Noh theater, and a wealth of contemporary techniques, Britten always strived to compose music that was crystal clear in its ideas and its sound. Equally clear, too, is a powerful emotional and psychological viewpoint. Britten’s music often faces us with polarities: innocence and experience, frailty and ruggedness, good and evil, the spiritual and the humanist—all in response to the vicissitudes of life.

During Britten’s lifetime, some thought his musical language rather backward looking. But the same clarifying force of time and distance that lets us now hear the adventure and freshness of a Sibelius, Shostakovich, or even Rachmaninoff—even though their music may have eluded many of their contemporaries—has allowed Britten’s influence to expand greatly over the last few decades. Increasingly, his richly communicative and refreshingly original use of traditional means touches musicians, performers and composers alike.

Few composers have written so much, or so successfully, for children. Britten included children in almost all of his operas, often giving them significant dramatic and musical roles. And, many of his choral works include children, either as soloists or as the entire performing ensemble. In all of these, his music for children captures their world without a hint of condescension.

For fifteen years, Cantata Singers has been working with Boston school children in a marvelous outreach program called Classroom Cantatas, a teaching program that guides the children in the creation of their own musical composition for voices and piano. In celebration of this program’s anniversary, and happily coincident with this season’s focus on a composer whose music so often included young people, one of these new cantatas will receive a performance in the season’s final Jordan Hall concert. Indeed, we’ll also hear—and see—children in performances of Britten’s Psalm 150 and Noye’s Fludde as well as in my own contribution to the season’s offerings.

Britten wrote in most genres—orchestra, chamber music, solo works—but it is in his vocal music that his remarkably fecund gifts are often most arrestingly revealed. His gift for word setting and his sensitivity to choice of text is unparalleled. Much of that moving and beautiful music for voice fills this Cantata Singers season—unusual and more familiar works, music from the teenage to the mature Britten, bright to dark, intense to joyful. Here, in one musician’s deeply communicative voice, is the full complement of human experience.

Andy Vores is the Chair of Composition,Theory, and Music History at Boston Conservatory, and composer of Natural Selection, Cantata Singers’ latest commission to be premiered in May 2009.