Harrison Birtwistle: shedworker

Composer Harrison Birtwistle - featured in The Guardian's Composers'/Wrtiers' Rooms series - is a serial shedworker. He has worked in garden offices in Twickenham, an island in Scotland, France, and now in his current home in Dorset. As he says:

"From it I look down the garden to the house, a converted silk factory. The shed is wonderfully insulated and easy to heat; it's a proper office and very, very private. I work here for about seven hours a day and I'm now dependent on it as a place to retreat to."

Well worth a browse. 

RIP Harrison Birtwistle, shedworker

Composer Harrison Birtwistle, who died yesterday aged 88, was one of the most famous and longstanding shedworkers. We've covered him before several times on Shedworking, but there is also a very good piece in The Guardian focusing exclusively on his garden office and the particularly fine 10 minute video below which includes the cooking of sausages. It was made for his 80th birthday by his godson, the wildlife filmmaker Tom Mustill. 

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Sir Harrison Birtwistle: Shedworker (video)

We've mentioned Sir Harrison Birtwistle's garden office before but here's a marvellous short video by Gripping Films showing him at work in it. Here's what they say about it:

"To coincide with my godfather Harry’s 80th birthday, the website Sinfini commissioned Gripping Films to produce a ten minute film about him composing a piano concerto, at home in his shed in Wiltshire. Shot over a few days last summer before I set off for Mexico and edited a month ago after we finished editing bats with my long-time collaborator editor Sabrina Burnard, we’re thrilled with the film. It premiered at the Barbican Centre in London as part of a festival of Harry’s work. It was a great thrill to see so many people who love Harry’s music, and watch them gripped by this new window into his creative process and life."

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Composers' rooms

Composers' rooms is a great series on BBC Radio 3 which interviews composers about the rooms in which they work (Mozart, Mahler, Britten, and Grieg are among the many other bighitters already featured on Shedworking). Naturally, some of them do this in garden offices such as Sir Harrison Birtwistle, Roxanna Panufnik, Rolf Wallin and Robin Holloway (a snippet of which is below). There are other soundclouds from the show here --------------------------------------------------------------------
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Joseph Haydn: shedworker

The list of composers who were shedworkers is a long one (Grieg, Mahler, Birtwistle, etc) and last week's Name That Shed celebrated another in that list, Joseph Haydn. In his composing hut  he wrote several of his great creations on Bürgerspitalgasse, Eisenstadt. It is surrounded by his well-kept (and now recreated) herb garden. Haydn and his wife Maria Anna Aloisia bought the house in 1766 and the wooden hut was already on site, though Mrs Haydn did a lot of work in the garden, especially the vegetable patch. The hut is open to visitors on a guided tour of the house. More details from the Haydn Museum and an excellent book Das Haydn-Kräutergärtlein by Sigrid Weiß.
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