Harrison Birtwistle was born in 1934 in Accrington, an industrial city in the North of England. He began playing clarinet with the local marching band. His early experiences with the instrument can be felt in the strong presence of wind instruments in his work and was likely the inspiration for pieces for brass band such as Grimethorpe Aria (1973) or Salford Toccata (1989).

Birtwistle entered the Royal College of Music of Manchester on a clarinet scholarship in 1952, where he studied composition with Richard Hall. He then attended the Royal Academy of Music in London, where he studied clarinet with Reginald Kell. He went on to play the clarinet with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic for a brief time. In 1953, he founded the New Music Manchester Group with fellow students Peter Maxwell Davies, Alexander Goehr, pianist John Ogdon, and trumpet player Elgar Howarth.

His first known composition dates from 1957, Refrains and Choruses for wind quintet. In 1959, it was selected by the Society for the Promotion of New Music to be performed at the Cheltenham festival. Supposedly, upon hearing the news, he sold his clarinets to devote himself entirely to composition.

From 1962-1965, Birtwistle taught music at Cranborne Chase School in Dorset (1962-1965), where, along with Goehr and Maxwell Davies, he created a summer music school, with Michael Tippett as president. His Tragœdia for ensemble premiered there in 1965. The piece is emblematic of the composer’s fascination with ancient Greek tragedy, in particular with the formal structures and ritual cycles of Greek odes. The piece laid the groundwork for his first opera, Punch and Judy (1966-1967), composed in the United States while on a Harkness Fellowship at Princeton University, which he won in 1966. In it, Birtwistle distanced himself from operatic tradition, creating a work steeped in non-narrative temporality. It premiered in 1968 at the Aldeburgh Festival.

Upon returning to England, along with Peter Maxwell Davies, Stephen Pruslin – who wrote the libretto for Punch and Judy – and clarinettist Alan Hacker, he founded The Pierrot Players with whom he premiered Monodrama (1967), where, in the style of Greek tragedy, a single actor plays several roles. Birtwistle broadened the horizons of musical theatre to instrumental works as well, in which the instruments themselves become characters: Verses for Ensembles (1968-1969), For O, for O, the Hobby-Horse is Forgot (for percussions, based on Hamlet, 1976). In later works, such as Secret Theatre for ensemble (1984) and Verses for Ensembles, one can observe the maturation of his spirited and dramatic compositional style, as well as the influence of a few predecessors: the formal considerations of Stravinsky, the extreme sonorities of Varèse, and the ritual structures of Messiaen.

In addition to Greek tragedy, Birtwistle was fascinated by medieval music, particularly that of Guillaume de Machaut, whose compositions he adapted on several occasions – for example, Machaut à ma manière for orchestra (1988). Medieval myth, pastorals, and folklore are tangible throughout his work, for example in pieces such as Down by the Greenwood Side (1968-1969), Yan Tan Tethera (1984), The Triumph of Time (1971-1972), based on an engraving of the same name by Brueghel the Elder, Silbury Air (1977), or The Mask of Orpheus (1983-1986). Preliminary work on the latter opera began in the United States when he was a guest professor at Swarthmore College, in Pennsylvania (1973-1974) and then, on invitation from Feldman, at the State University of New York, Buffalo (1975-1976).

Returning once again to England, Birtwistle was appointed music director and then associate director of the National Theater of London (1975 – 1982), where he produced music for numerous performances, perhaps most notably Peter Hall’s production of Oresteia (1981), declaimed by choirs in the Greek style. Birtwistle focused tightly on scansion and pulse for this, right down to the titles: Pulse Field (1977), Carmen Arcadiae Mechanicae Perpetuum (1977), Pulse Sampler (1981), Pulse Shadows (1989-1996).

The Mask of Orpheusmarks the zenith of Birtwistle’s career. This work, which fuses music, drama, mythology, mime, and electronics, received the Evening Standard Opera Award in 1986 and the Grawemeyer Award in 1987. Birtwistle was knighted in 1988 and received the Siemens Music Prize in 1995. From 1994 to 2001, he taught composition at King’s College, London. During this period he was also director of contemporary music at the Royal Academy of Music and a composer-in-residence for the London Philharmonic Orchestra. This was also a prolific time for him creatively; during these years he composedGawain(1990-1991),The Second Mrs Kong(1993-1994), and*The Last Supper* (1998-1999).

His most notable orchestral works include Endless Parade (1986-1987) and Nine Settings of Celan (1989-1996), as well as Nine Movements for String Quartet (1991-1996), two cycles he then brought together under the title Pulse Shadows - the Teldec recording of which won a Gramophone Classical Music Award in 2002 – The Minotaur (2005-2007), and the cycle Bogenstrich (2006-2009). Two new theatre pieces were premiered at the Southbank Centre for the Aldeburgh Festival and at the Bregenz Festspiele in 2009: The Corridor (2008) and Semper Dowland, semper dolens (2009).

Even in his eighties, Birtwistle continues to compose, producing several commissions including his Concerto pour violon for Christian Tetzlaff and the Boston Symphony Orchestra in March 2011; The Cure, for two vocalists and ensemble for the London Sinfonietta, which premiered it in 2014; and Deep Time for the Staatskapelle Berlin, whose premiere was conducted by Daniel Barenboim in 2016.