Composer Sir Harrison Birtwistle has a soft-spoken, somewhat demure presence on stage. When asked about what his compositions mean or how they spring from his own life experience, he calmly explains, “I don’t think it is possible to express yourself. You express yourself in spite of yourself.” Judging from the two compositions featured on Tuesday night in the first concert of Birtwistle’s Oberlin residency, he has a lot to get off his chest, and seems to let it out with intensity, cacophony and ceremony.

To read the forces and directions required for the concert is to understand the depth of complexity and thought in the music. The first piece, For O, for O, the Hobby-Horse is Forgot, consists of six percussionists positioned in a circle who are assigned as King, Queen and Chorus. The King and Queen guide the performance along, pushing the pulse of the rhythmically driven and manic piece. Birtwistle said that the basis of the piece was, “the principle of a simple pulse,” and that he limited himself “to use skin, wood, metal and nothing else.” The piece begins and ends with the percussionists making only the motion of a drum-strike above their heads and later quite close to the surface of their instruments without actually producing a sound. Yet the “simple pulse” has already begun, and the intensity of the performers, carefully eyeing each other’s motions, fuels a sense of drama.

When the players finally begin to produce sound, the pulse is still present, and it grows and shifts as the players react to one another and adjust instrumentation. In a way, this dramatic aspect keeps the listener engaged amidst the pounding turmoil that evolves. Birtwistle asserted that theater and drama were essential to his music, and said this is a problem because you are “asking musicians to behave in a way they are not trained to do.” Yet the Oberlin Percussion Group rose to the occasion, giving life and vibrancy to the piece. The composer even said about the composition, written almost 30 years ago, that he had, “a dream of the idea of the piece that had not been realized until now.”

The second piece, Theseus Game, is written for a group of instrumentalists and two conductors. To make things more complicated, the instrumentalists must shift which conductor they follow, and there are two stands at the front of the stage at which musicians within the ensemble take turns soloing. Lastly, there are spaces to which brass players travel, bellowing out fanfare-like lines at opposite ends of the ensemble. The driving and irregular textures and sounds that streamed from the ensemble were almost secondary to the logistical set-up, in which instrumentalists interacted and conversed frenetically. It gave the impression of a noisy conversation that traveled through just about every extreme of emotion and voice, agitatedly exploring without ever giving the listener a chance to get comfortable, and at the same time keeping them absorbed in the action. The playing of the Contemporary Music Ensemble was fluid and graceful. All of the various sounds were integrated into one tight and steady unit, amazing in this remarkably difficult piece, called a “super-concerto,” by its creator.

After the concert, Birtwistle participated in a question-and-answer session facilitated by Professor of Composition Lewis Neilson, and remarked on the formal complexities and oddities of his music, ‘“I don’t want predictability.” Birtwistle’s view of his own compositional process was that, “What you accomplish in the end is not quite what you set out to do.” However, within this outlook of complexity and ordered mayhem lay an emphasis on simplicity and musicality. Birtwistle said that “the individual parts of the music are very simple,” and it is the combination of them that makes the music interesting and difficult. He said that the problem with much contemporary music is that the “players are too busy counting, instead of playing something that actually breathes.” It is this sense of life in music – energy, pulse and vitality – which for Birtwistle is crucially important. “It’s kind of a dramatic thing, you know... how you hold the moment.”