COMPOSER TIPPETT IS HONORED AT 80

He has lived in poverty and obscurity. He has seen his music ridiculed and rejected by every publisher and conductor in his own country. He has even served time in jail (as a conscientious objector during World War II).

But Sir Michael Tippett, who turned 80 on Jan. 2, also has lived to see himself become Britain’s foremost living composer, be hailed as one of the most original figures in 20th-Century music and even be knighted.

Appropriately enough, Tippett’s 80th birthday is being celebrated with Tippett concerts here in Houston, in Los Angeles (where his Fourth Piano Sonata will have its world premiere on Monday, in Dallas and in his native London, with the composer joining in the festivities as conductor of some of his most famous works. Tributes are also planned in Ireland, Italy, France, Finland, Brazil and Luxembourg.

A late starter and a fastidious creator, Tippett didn’t begin serious musical study until he was 18, and didn’t produce his first acknowledged work until he was 30.

His music--which can be likened to that of Benjamin Britten, Ralph Vaughan Williams and Igor Stravinsky in its combination of complexity, harmonic and rhythmic richness and accessible lyricism--went virtually unnoticed until he was nearly 40 and was not widely known until he was almost 70, when Tippett champion Sir Colin Davis’ recording of the opera “The Midsummer Marriage” made the composer something of a cult figure with British listeners, especially those decades his junior.

But, like Mahler before him, Tippett always knew his time would come.

“I’m a curious blend of arrogance and patience,” the composer said in a lilting baritone that served him well during a brief career as a BBC broadcaster. “Years ago, certain composers were considered the thing, but I knew perfectly well they weren’t--and wouldn’t be.”

In recent years, Tippett has enjoyed the freedom that comes with being able to live off his royalties. But he doesn’t enjoy the lionization that has been lavished on him during his 80th birthday-celebration tour. A lot in his life, especially his role as a bemedaled musical figurehead, has given him “a lot of nausea. I have to be careful when dealing with myself. I have to get to ground level, to put the pin in the balloon. I have to be on ground level in order to write.”

Having “Sir” in front of his name makes zero altitude hard to maintain, and goes against his grain too.

“I wanted out of that world more than I ever wanted in it,” he said. “I’m a natural republican. I much prefer the American system, where there ain’t no honors. I live in a country with a monarchy, but it’s a picture monarchy. I might be troubled if it were a real one.”

After two years of comparatively little composing, Tippett is itching to get back to the desk and its now-welcome rigors.

His last large work, considered by many his career-crowning achievement, was “The Mask of Time,” an evening-long oratorio commissioned by the Boston Symphony to mark its centennial and given its premiere there last April. His next big work will be another opera, and he is almost finished with the scenario (like Wagner, he writes his own librettos).

“I am going back into the theater,” he said eagerly. “I don’t use the word opera because it has odd, old-fashioned connotations.”

A self-confessed “very young 80,” Tippett expects his next opera to take three or more years to finish, just like his previous four operas and “The Mask of Time.”

“Any considerable (symphonic) work, or one with a text, requires a long period of cogitation and digestion” before the composer actually sits down and puts notes on paper.

“Composing is rather like the poet’s work--you force it bit by bit until it has a kind of bone structure.” Only after a piece is “written” in his head (shades of Mozart) does Tippett take pen in hand. He works on full-score paper, composing a complete orchestral score from the start rather than making a “short” score first and writing out the various instrumental parts later.

“I like to have the notes in my head as I write,” he explained. “I like to hear the absolute sound in my head”--and can do so just by looking at the notes on the page. “I have an acute sense of timbre. It’s a gift--and perhaps the only gift. I never go to rehearsals. That doesn’t interest me. I know what it will sound like.”

Tippett is perhaps best known for his four operas (“The Midsummer Marriage,” “King Priam,” “The Knot Garden” and “The Ice Break”), which are landmarks in the development of his musical personality. But his varied output includes 4 symphonies, 4 string quartets, 4 piano sonatas, 17 choral works, a piano concerto, many articles and 2 books of essays.

Tippett’s newest work, the Piano Sonata No. 4, was completed in early December, just before he left England for his birthday tour.

Commissioned by the L.A. Philharmonic Assn., it will have its world premiere Monday in Japan America Theatre. (The program will also include his String Quartet No. 1, the Sonata for four horns and “Songs for Dov,” with the composer conducting the Philharmonic New Music Group and tenor Thomas Randle.) Tippett describes the new Sonata as a five-movement, 35-minute work that was “conceived years ago as probably a set of five bagatelle-like pieces connected in one musical sequence.”

Tippett has without question been Britain’s premier composer since the death of Sir Benjamin Britten in 1976 (and for some listeners, before). In Britten’s shadow for most of his long career, Tippett says he and his younger compatriot were “rivals but not competitors. We had different gifts.”

And different temperaments. A basically solitary and unassuming man, Tippett “never wanted the shrine” that was built up around Britten long before he died, at age 63.

“I need friends, but I have never wanted to be surrounded by a cocoon of admirers. I have to be in the open.

“But to do it . . . ,” he added with a sigh.

“I have to build my own fortress. When I get back to England, nobody will get hold of me for three or four weeks. Nobody has my phone number but my agent, and I change it the moment the wrong person gets hold of it. I live an austere life in the countryside outside London. People think I live there for inspiration. Not at all. I do it for the quiet.”