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‘INTO THE BREACH’: OLIVER KNUSSEN IN HIS TIME
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 July 2013
Abstract
In 2002 Elliott Carter marked Oliver Knussen's fiftieth birthday with a short piece – Au Quai – for viola and bassoon, accompanied by the following comments: ‘As modernism seemed headed for shipwreck, Olly Knussen, treasuring the wonderful works that that movement produced and still does, stepped into the breach and … not only brought these works to a vivid enthusiastic life which has long been concealed, but also added significant works of his own’. Knussen's time has clearly been Carter's time too. Yet placing aspects of Knussen's compositional thinking into an American context can highlight the kind of distinctive qualities that, while leading less sympathetic British critics to write of an ‘aesthetic of avoidance’, might be more usefully interpreted as an intensely personal response to European as well as American modernism in all their various phases.
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References
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