Syllogism and symbol: Britten, Tippett and English Text

Abstract

An evaluation of the validity of Arnold Whittall's division of twentieth-century composers into syllogists (my term) such as Benjamin Britten, who set up a frame and diversify within it, and symbolists such as Michael Tippett, who seek a centre among converging polarities. Four key voice-and-piano settings of English text are examined — Britten's The Holy Sonnets of John Donne (1945) and Winter Words (1953), and Tippett's Boyhood's End (1943) and The Heart's Assurance (1951) — to find what emotional and structural sensibilities attracted each composer to his text, and how far their musical structures accommodated or subverted the literary design.

KEY WORDS:

• Syllogism
• symbol
• metre
• structure
• quantity
• diction
• blank verse
• strophe
• voice- and piano-setting
• song

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Barbara Docherty

Parts I and IV of this discussion draw on my article “Sentence into Cadence: the word-setting of Tippett and Britten”, Tempo, 166, September 1988, p. 2–11; Part II is in some senses work-in-progress, Britten's debt to twentieth-century English song being as yet a largely untilled field.