As a pioneer of Music Theatre in Britain, Birtwistle has been more closely involved with the genre, and indeed with the theatre in general, than any other composer since the death of Britten. Even so, he has called only Bow Down Music Theatre, this being the work he composed in 1977 for performance at the Cottesloe Theatre when he was the Music Director of the National Theatre. Earlier, Birtwistle’s term for Music Theatre had been ‘limited theatre’. He called Bow Down Music Theatre because in it he wanted to get closer to the integration of music and theatre than he had been able to do previously. He was able to do this because his work at the National Theatre had brought him into greater contact with actors and, crucially, with the poet Tony Harrison. These two had already planned to write …agm…, a choral work based on the Fayum fragments of Sappho, but their purpose in devising Bow Down was to explore the common territory between actors and musicians, to ensure that as much time was allocated to recitation as to music.

They composed the piece for five actors (two female, three male), three of whom had to dance, and four musicians playing between them bamboo flute, bamboo pipes, oboes, penny whistles and percussion. The nine sit in a circle on the floor, and in this arrangement they constitute the chorus. The actors occupy positions 2, 3, 5, 7 and 8, the musicians 1, 4, 6 and 9 (Ill. 5.1).

The work is based on the ‘Ballad of the Two Sisters’, of which there are over a hundred versions from Scandinavia, North America and throughout the British Isles. Tony Harrison draws on about twenty versions. Although the details vary, all tell the same basic story: how the dark sister’s jealousy of the fair sister (after she has been rejected by a suitor, who has had to make a choice between them) leads her to drown her sister in a river. As the body of the fair sister floats down the river, it is seen by a miller and his servant.