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AGP88 is the first of four featuring works by the British composer Harrison Birtwistle. Born in 1934, he came of age with Peter Maxwell Davies and Alexander Goehr, and like them studied in Manchester. Birtwistle's music belongs to no clearly identifiable school. It is characterized by a fine ear for both harmony and orchestration, and some rather unusual approaches to musical structure. I particularly love how, in works like Nomos, he uses glissandi to draw pairs of notes away from and back towards the unison, thus exploring a range of microtonal intervals and producing an effect that crosses the line between harmony and timbre. A similar approach is used in Dieter Schnebel's In Motu Proprio (AGP15).

AGP88-90 are transcribed from a number of CDs, and are provided through the generosity of the same AGP partisan that programmed AGP87. AGP91 comprises all of the out-of-print works by Birtwistle that I could find in my stacks. The installment includes a PDF file with scans of the CD and LP booklet notes describing the works featured in all four Birtwistle installments.

To download AGP88 files, right-click on each of the following links and select SAVE LINK AS.

01 - Tragoedia, 1965 [20:41] (from ArkivMusic)

02 - Nomos, 1968 [14:13]

03 - Imaginary Landscape, 1971 [20:02]

AGP88 description

FLAC fingerprints