“No British composer today has a more distinctive voice than Harrison Birtwistle. The measured period, the blocks of sound, the processional intensity all make for instant identification, a composer who goes his own way relentlessly and in his own time. His latest work, Silbury Air, given its first performance by the London Sinfonietta under Elgar Howarth, is another is his sequence of landscape works, but it presents a striking new development.

Landscape music suggests slowness, but here Birtwistle’s imagination has used the idea of Silbury Hill and its prehistoric associations as a starting point for a vigorous and eventful fifteen minute piece, full of sharp motoric rhythms that (until the very end) tend to accelerate.

The result is dramatic and immediately exciting, contradicting in its vitality the idea of static blocks of sound on which Birtwistle has usually relied, but equally showing the firmest possible architectural sense, with each section relating naturally and satisfyingly to the rest. With so much argument crammed into so relatively short a span, it is a work that cries out for early repetition.”

(Edward Greenfield, The Guardian 10.03.1977)