Tippett - Concerto for Double String Orchestra: movement I

- One of Tippett's early works

- Reflects his social concerns

- First performed by the South London Orchestra at Morley College, 1940

• Provided performance opportunities for unemployed musicians
• Tippett was musical director

- Reflects Tippett's interests in English Madrigals

• Freely combining independent rhythmic patterns
• Neoclassicism - associated with Stravinski

- Notated in 8/8

• Occasional changes to 6/8 and 4/8 

- Quavers are the basic unit = additive rhythms

- Frequent syncopation

• Rhythmic patterns extending over the barline

- Bar 95 - Music settles into a regular crotchet pulse

- Rhythmic augmentation

• Bar 99
• Bar 103 - Doubled again

- Opening motif characterised by repeated step movement

• Then broadens out by leaps of 4ths and 3rds

- Melody extended by sequence (bar 8)

• This melody is inverted in lower parts

- Transition material has

• longer note lengths
• Appearance of trills

- Prominent broken chord motif in bass (bar 112)

- Non-functional

- Harmonic progressions are difficult to hear due to the contrapuntal textures

- Counterpoint leads to dissonant collisions

- Harmonic events:

• Phrygian cadence (bars 20-21)
• Common chord progression (bars 39-40)
• Ambigious progression from bar 119 with augmented/whole tone structures
• Final modal cadence of G to A, or tonic preceded by flattened 7th

- On A

- Non-functional with modal elements

- Use of pentatonic scale bars 1-4

• Accidentals in other parts make it more difficult to see which mode dominates
• 

- Tippett shifts the music to various tonal areas:

• G (bars 39-67)
• E (bar 68)
• C# (bar 86)
• Ab (bar 107)
• A (bar 129)

- The opening motif keeps coming back - the ritornello of Baroque concerto grosso

- Sonata form

- 2 clear subjects (bar 1, bar 39) linked by a transition (bar 21)

- Development (bar 68) passes through more remote tonal areas

- The opening material reappears in a recapitulation (bar 129), with the 2nd subject in the home key of A as opposed to the original key of G

- Extended coda (bar 194)

- The concerto plays 2 equal forces off against each other instead of a single soloist/group of soloists against a larger accompanying group

- Tippett frequently uses 2-part counterpoint, as in the main theme but each part is doubled at 3 octaves

- He also uses occasional homophony and monophony as well as antiphony

- In the more lyrical sections the accompaniment is sometimes in the form of broken chords

- There are no unconventional playing techniques but there is 'sul tasto' (bow over the fingerboard) in bar 107