The death of Harrison Birtwistle feels like the passing of an era. He was our very own modernist, the last living link back to that heady post-war era when it seemed possible to reinvent music from first principles.

Except that Birtwistle never quite fitted the mould of the diehard modernist. Yes, he had a determination to strip away “style” and culture from music, and return the art to its most primitive building-blocks: a ticking pulse, a single note which burgeons out to complexity, things which evolve slowly set against sudden violent explosions. But Birtwistle was never a systematiser like the great European modernists who were just a bit older than him, such as Boulez and Stockhausen. 

He worked by instinct, and in many ways was a primitive, close to other instinctive “primitive” composers like Mussorgsky. He loved atavistic things: ancient Greek myths (which he helped to recreate with stark, elemental strength while director of music at the National Theatre), and English legends like the Green Man and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. 

And in contrast to the modernists’ gimlet-eyed optimism, Birtwistle was essentially melancholic. He loved the doleful lute-songs of John Dowland, the gauzy half-lights of the classical Underworld, and that etching by Dürer which shows the figure of Melancholy brooding over symbols of the arts and sciences.

The result was a music which at its best seemed unreachably ancient, darkly fatalistic and bracingly modernist all at once. I first encountered it as a student, when I and a bunch of like-minded people performed his breakthrough piece Tragoedia from 1965. I was fascinated by the way piece unfolded like an inscrutable ritual, or a series of sharp-edged blocks balanced against each other, like an Alexander Calder mobile. The mystery was how this essentially static technique developed a thrilling tension, so the final hammered chords and plunging deep harp notes felt as fateful and inevitable as the end of a Beethoven symphony.