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Michael Tippett : Philosophy and Music The Midsummer Marriage Michael Tippett was born in a London Nursing home on the 2nd of January 1905; but in the same year his parents moved from Eastcote to the small Suffolk village of Wethrden, not far from Stowmarket, and it was there that he spent the formative years of his boyhood. In 1922 when he was seventeen, Tippett went with a school party to his first symphony concert. It was at the De Montfort Hall in Leicester, and the conductor was an old Stamfordian, Malcom Sargent. The program included Ravel’s Mother Goose Suite, then still quite new. This concert made an overwhelming impression. It was at that point that Tippett decided that he was going to be a composer. He then ventured to teach himself until he convinced his parents to let him go to the Royal College of Music. There he studied composition, first under Charles Wood, who made a remarkable impact on him by introducing him to Bethoven. His years at College were a great period of learning; but he benifited less from the formal instruction he got from his teachers than from suddenly being exposed to so much that was new to him. Tppett was very taken with Beethoven and threw himself into studying all his works. Tippett himself commented: ‘When I was a student I submitted entirely to the music of Beethoven. I explored his music so exhausively that for a long time later On I listened to every other music but his.’ Beethoven represented for him an ideal in his attitude to life, and as a composer. All the dominant attributes of Beethoven’s music, its dynamic energy, its all-embracing humanism, its passionate spiritual questing, are those of Tippett’s also. These years at College where not only crucial in developing his musical styles but they were years where Tippett developed his love of Liturature and Philosophy. After graduating, Tippett undertook many various positions including school teaching which he quickly disguarded. However nothing really grabed him.
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