Author: Benjamin Britten
Publisher: Faber & Faber
ISBN: 0571279937
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 781
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Book Description
The third volume of the annotated selected letters of composer Benjamin Britten covers the years 1946-51, during which he wrote many of his best-known works, founded and developed the English Opera Group and the Aldeburgh Festival, and toured widely in Europe and the United States as a pianist and conductor.Correspondents include librettists Ronald Duncan (The Rape of Lucretia), Eric Crozier (Albert Herring, Saint Nicolas, The Little Sweep) and E. M. Forster (Billy Budd); conductor Ernest Ansermet and composer Lennox Berkeley; publishers Ralph Hawkes and Erwin Stein of Boosey & Hawkes; and the celebrated tenor Peter Pears, Britten's partner. Among friends in the United States are Christopher Isherwood, Elizabeth Mayer and Aaron Copland, and there is a significant meeting with Igor Stravinsky.This often startling and innovative period is vividly evoked by the comprehensive and scholarly annotations, which offer a wide range of detailed information fascinating for both the Britten specialist and the general reader.Donald Mitchell contributes a challenging introduction exploring the interaction of life and work in Britten's creativity, and an essay examining for the first time, through their correspondence, the complex relationship between the composer and the writer Edward Sackville-West.
Author: Paul Kildea
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141924306
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 688
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Book Description
Published to mark the beginning of the Britten centenary year in 2013, Paul Kildea's Benjamin Britten: A Life in the Twentieth Century is the definitive biography of Britain's greatest modern composer. In the eyes of many, Benjamin Britten was our finest composer since Purcell (a figure who often inspired him) three hundred years earlier. He broke decisively with the romantic, nationalist school of figures such as Parry, Elgar and Vaughan Williams and recreated English music in a fresh, modern, European form. With Peter Grimes (1945), Billy Budd (1951) and The Turn of the Screw (1954), he arguably composed the last operas - from any composer in any country - which have entered both the popular consciousness and the musical canon. He did all this while carrying two disadvantages to worldly success - his passionately held pacifism, which made him suspect to the authorities during and immediately after the Second World War - and his homosexuality, specifically his forty-year relationship with Peter Pears, for whom many of his greatest operatic roles and vocal works were created. The atmosphere and personalities of Aldeburgh in his native Suffolk also form another wonderful dimension to the book. Kildea shows clearly how Britten made this creative community, notably with the foundation of the Aldeburgh Festival and the building of Snape Maltings, but also how costly the determination that this required was. Above all, this book helps us understand the relationship of Britten's music to his life, and takes us as far into his creative process as we are ever likely to go. Kildea reads dozens of Britten's works with enormous intelligence and sensitivity, in a way which those without formal musical training can understand. It is one of the most moving and enjoyable biographies of a creative artist of any kind to have appeared for years. Paul Kildea is a writer and conductor who has performed many of the Britten works he writes about, in opera houses and concert halls from Sydney to Hamburg. His previous books include Selling Britten (2002) and (as editor) Britten on Music (2003). He was Head of Music at the Aldeburgh Festival between 1999 and 2002 and subsequently Artistic Director of the Wigmore Hall in London.
Author: David M. Bynog
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190916133
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 433
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Book Description
Notes for Violists: A Guide to the Repertoire offers historical and analytical information about thirty-five of the best-known pieces for the instrument, making it an essential resource for professional, amateur, and student violists alike. With engaging prose supported by fact-filled analytical charts, the book offers rich biographical information and insightful analyses that help violists gain a more complete understanding of pieces like Béla Bartók's Concerto for Viola and Orchestra, Rebecca Clarke's Sonata for Viola and Piano, Robert Schumann's Märchenbilder for Viola and Piano, op. 113, Carl Stamitz's Concerto for Viola and Orchestra in D Major, Igor Stravinsky's Élégie for Viola or Violin Unaccompanied, and thirty other masterpieces. This comprehensive guide to key pieces from the viola repertoire from the eighteenth through the twentieth century covers concertos, chamber pieces, and works for solo viola by a wide range of composers, including Bach, Telemann, Mozart, Hoffmeister, Walton, and Hindemith. Author David M. Bynog not only offers clear structural analyses of these compositions but also situates them in their historical contexts as he highlights crucial biographical information on composers and explores the circumstances of the development and performance of each work. By connecting performance studies with scholarship, this indispensable handbook for students and professionals allows readers to gain a more complete picture of each work and encourages them to approach other compositions in a similarly analytical manner.
Author: Vicki P Stroeher
Publisher: Composers in Context
ISBN: 1108496695
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 427
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Book Description
A thematically organised overview of the musical, social and cultural contexts for the multi-faceted career of this pivotal British composer.
Author: Kate Guthrie
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520351673
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 306
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Book Description
From the BBC Proms to Bernstein's Young People's Concerts, initiatives to promote classical music have been a pervasive feature of twentieth-century musical life. The goal of these initiatives was rarely just to reach a larger and more diverse audience but to teach a particular way of listening that would help the public "appreciate" music. This book examines for the first time how and why music appreciation has had such a defining and long-lasting impact—well beyond its roots in late-Victorian liberalism. It traces the networks of music educators, philanthropists, policy makers, critics, composers, and musicians who, rather than resisting new mass media, sought to harness their pedagogic potential. The book explores how listening became embroiled in a nexus of modern problems around citizenship, leisure, and education. In so doing, it ultimately reveals how a new cultural milieu—the middlebrow—emerged at the heart of Britain's experience of modernity.
Author: Peter Webster
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137369108
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 256
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Book Description
This book is the first full-length treatment of Walter Hussey's work as a patron between 1943 and 1978, first for the Anglican parish church of St Matthew in Northampton, and then at Chichester Cathedral. He was responsible for the most significant sequence of works of art commissioned for the British churches in the twentieth century. They included music by Benjamin Britten, Leonard Bernstein and William Walton, visual art by Henry Moore, Graham Sutherland and Marc Chagall, and poetry by W. H. Auden. Placing Hussey in theological context and in a period of rapid cultural change, it explores the making and reception of the commissions, and the longer-term influence of his work, still felt today. As well as contributing to the religious and cultural history of Britain, and of Anglo-Catholicism and the cathedrals in particular, the book will be of interest to all those concerned with the relationship between theology and the arts, and to historians of music and the visual arts.
Author: Michelle Fillion
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252035658
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 226
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Book Description
Difficult Rhythm examines E. M. Forster's irrepressible interest in music, providing plentiful examples of how the eminent British author's fiction resonates with music. Musicologist Michelle Fillion analyzes his critical writings, short stories, and novels, including A Room with a View, which alludes to Beethoven, Wagner, and Schumann, and Howards End, which explicitly alerts readers how fiction can adopt musical forms and ideas. This volume also includes, for the first time in print, Forster's notes on Beethoven's piano sonatas. Documenting his knowledge of music, his musical favorites and friends, and his attitudes toward various composers, performances, and competing musical theories, this engaging book traces the musical influences of luminaries such as Wagner, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, and Britten on Forster's life and work.
Author: Benjamin Britten
Publisher: Faber & Faber
ISBN: 9780571299300
Category : Composers
Languages : en
Pages : 784
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Book Description
The third volume of the annotated selected letters of composer Benjamin Britten covers the years 1946-51, during which he wrote many of his best-known works, founded and developed the English Opera Group and the Aldeburgh Festival, and toured widely in Europe and the United States as a pianist and conductor. Correspondents include librettists Ronald Duncan (The Rape of Lucretia), Eric Crozier (Albert Herring, Saint Nicolas, The Little Sweep) and E. M. Forster (Billy Budd); conductor Ernest Ansermet and composer Lennox Berkeley; publishers Ralph Hawkes and Erwin Stein of Boosey & Hawkes; and the celebrated tenor Peter Pears, Britten's partner. Among friends in the United States are Christopher Isherwood, Elizabeth Mayer and Aaron Copland, and there is a significant meeting with Igor Stravinsky. This often startling and innovative period is vividly evoked by the comprehensive and scholarly annotations, which offer a wide range of detailed information fascinating for both the Britten specialist and the general reader. Donald Mitchell contributes a challenging introduction exploring the interaction of life and work in Britten's creativity, and an essay examining for the first time, through their correspondence, the complex relationship between the composer and the writer Edward Sackville-West.
Author: Chester L. Alwes
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199377014
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 576
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Book Description
A History of Western Choral Music explores the various genres, key composers, and influential works essential to the development of the western choral tradition. Author Chester L. Alwes divides this exploration into two volumes which move from Medieval music and the Renaissance era up to the 21st century. Volume II begins at the transition from the Classical era to the Romantic, with an examination of the major genres common to both periods. Exploring the oratorio, part song, and dramatic music, it also offers a thorough discussion of the choral symphony from Beethoven to Mahler, through to the present day. It then delves into the choral music of the twentieth century through discussions of the major compositional approaches and philosophies that proliferated over the course of the century, from impressionism to serialism, neo-classicism to modernism, minimalism, and the avant-garde. It also considers the emerging tendency towards nationalistic composition amongst composers such as Bartók and Stravinsky, and discusses in great detail the contemporary music of the United States, and Great Britain. Framing discussion within the political, religious, cultural, philosophical, aesthetic, and technological contexts of each era, A History of Western Choral Music offers readers specialized insight into major composers and works while providing a cohesive understanding of choral music's place in Western history.
Author: Martin Sheppard
Publisher: Pen and Sword Military
ISBN: 1399090011
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 353
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Book Description
The morning of the Battle of Balaklava, on 25 October 1854, saw a desperate charge against a greatly superior Russian force. Epitomised by the reckless courage of the British cavalry in the face of heavy odds, the charge was a complete success, putting the Russians to flight. This charge was not that of the Light Brigade, which took place later the same day, but that of the Heavy Brigade, under the command of General James Scarlett. Caught by surprise, Scarlett dressed the three hundred men nearest to him, placed himself well ahead of them and charged uphill to an extraordinary and unlikely victory. The Charge of the Heavy Brigade, a resounding success, has unjustly been overshadowed by the blunders that led to the heroic defeat of the Charge of the Light Brigade. James Scarlett himself has also been unfairly ignored due the focus on the enmity between the Earls of Cardigan and Lucan. The strategic significance of the Heavy Brigade’s victory, preventing the Russians capturing the key British base, the port of Balaklava, has been overlooked, as has General Scarlett’s decisive part in thwarting Russia’s best chance of winning the Crimean War. Although his heroic leadership at Balaklava was undoubtedly the most important event in James Scarlett’s life, he had a long and distinguished military career before and after the Crimean War. Based on his own previously unpublished letters, including a long description of his day at Balaklava, General Sir James Scarlett is the first book focused on a remarkable soldier.
