Author: Dez Wright
Publisher: Independently Published
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Get Book Here
Book Description
This third volume of seven in the series covers the evolution of British music and the music industry over the first eighty years of the nineteenth century. At the end of the previous century musical life in London consisted of concerts (often funded by subscribers who paid a certain amount per season for a seat), vernacular and Italian opera, and, in summer, the pleasure gardens. Other major cities in the islands, such as Dublin and Edinburgh, offered a similar range of entertainments. Popular ballads and airs were sold as broadsheets, and could increasingly be heard in urban streets blaring out from barrel organs, a relatively new invention. Employment prospects for a musician were largely confined to the theatre, the church and, possibly, as a musician/tutor in a private household. Home music making was largely a pursuit of the wealthy. Fast-forward eighty years and the musical landscape of the British Isles had changed completely. In 1880 concerts were still largely the preserve of the moneyed elites, but the emerging middle classes and the new generations of factory workers now had the music halls and the new kind of musical theatre provided by the likes of Gilbert and Sullivan. Performers could become household names, and musicians and jobbing composers could make a decent living. Music education had been restricted to private lessons and on-the-job-training in 1800, but in 1880 there were internationally known schools such as the Royal Academy of Music and the Royal College of Music in London. Music in the home, too, had changed radically. The new Victorian middle classes in their suburban villas inevitably owned a piano, and a piano required sheet music to play. Undemanding instrumental music, and sentimental and moralistic ballads were the order of the day. Many of the great European composers spent time in Britain in the eighteenth century, and this is something that continued during the nineteenth. Mendelssohn, Weber, Berlioz, Liszt and others all spent very profitable periods in the country. There had been no one at home of a comparable stature, if one discounts foreign-born, but adopted sons like Handel and Johann Christian Bach, since the days of Purcell. William Sterndale Bennett was the most important figure furing the first half of the century, not so much for his compositions, but for the high standards he brought to music teaching, and for the invigorating influence he had on concert life. His pupils included Sullivan and Hubert Parry, and these two, along with Charles Villiers Stanford and Alexander Mackenzie, were responsible to a large degree for the renaissance of musical life that began in the last quarter of the century.
Author: Dez Wright
Publisher: Independently Published
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Get Book Here
Book Description
The eighteenth century may have been a period when the only truly world figures in British music - Handel and J. C. Bach - were Germans, but what is fascinating about the century is how the music industry became increasingly sophisticated. Career opportunities for musicians now existed outside the traditions of court and church. Patronage was still vital in other parts of Europe, and most composers were employed as court or church Kapellmeisters or, if they were lucky, had private support. The opportunities to make a living composing to commission and performing in concert simply didn't exist in Vienna or Paris. And it was in its infrastructure and opportunities that Britain led the world during the eighteenth century, even if its legacy on a purely musical level was a little thin. This chronology is the second part of the story of the music of these islands arranged strictly on a month-by-month, year-by-year basis. Each year is prefaced by a brief overview of historical events in the British Isles, followed by important contemporary events in music elsewhere, and finally a list of major works of art and literature that appeared here. There then follows a chronological account of musical events. Volume one covers the period up to the end of the seventeenth century, and a further five are planned which will take the story up to the twenty-first century.
Author: Dez Wright
Publisher:
ISBN: 9789798835247
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Get Book Here
Book Description
Author: Dez Wright
Publisher: Independently Published
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Get Book Here
Book Description
This voulme in the series A Musical Chronology of the British Isles covers a period of less than forty years, but during this period Britain and its music industry changed completely. In 1880 there was a healthy concert life in the capital and elsewhere, but few composers or musicians who could claim to be world figures. By 1918 the operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan were performed throughout the English speaking world, and composers such as Elgar, Parry and, to a lesser degree, Stanford, Vaughan Williams, Coleridge-Taylor, Holst, Bax, Smyth and others had international reputations. Choral music had always cut across class boundaries, particularly in Wales and the north of England, but now the Proms and the Saturday concerts at Crystal Palace reached out to all. Music hall peaked during this period as the new cinema industry began to offer an increasingly sophisticated alternative. The biggest change in music in the home, however, was the introduction of the phonograph and the gramophone. Before the twentieth century music at home meant playing or singing it yourself, or, for the wealthy, hiring others to play. Now there was the possibility of music on demand. Radio, just around the corner in 1918, changed habits even further. This fourth book of seven takes up the story in the year when The Pirates of Penzance opened in London, and Benjamin Disraeli's Conservatives lost the election to William Gladstone's Liberals. It ends just seven weeks after the armistice that ended the First World War in a year when women over thirty had the vote for the first time, and four months before the Original Dixieland Jazz Band brought the jazz age to London. As with previous volumes, brief passages on events in the islands, events in the world of music away from these shores, and significant achievements in other art forms are followed by a chronological journey through the main musical events of each year, including important recordings. At the end of this are listed key publications of books, scores and songs.
Author: Laurence Bristow-Smith
Publisher:
ISBN: 9782970065463
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :
Get Book Here
Book Description
Volume One begins with a set of pipes from 2000 BC discovered in an Irish bog and follows the story of British music through invasions and religious and political upheavals up to the end of the eighteenth century. It shows the dominance of the Church and the monarchy giving way to promoters and managers whose motives were much more commercial.
Author: Laurence Bristow-Smith
Publisher:
ISBN: 9782970065470
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 522
Get Book Here
Book Description
Volume Two begins with Queen Victoria and the Empire. It charts the story of British music through its Renaissance period at the end of the 19th century, through the rise of the music halls and folksong, the arrival of radio, cinema, and recorded music, through the great upheavals of two World Wars, right up to the Beatles, hifi and symphonic rock.
Author: Paul Rodmell
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317085450
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 380
Get Book Here
Book Description
While the musical culture of the British Isles in the 'long nineteenth century' has been reclaimed from obscurity by musicologists in the last thirty years, appraisal of operatic culture in the latter part of this period has remained largely elusive. Paul Rodmell argues that there were far more opportunities for composers, performers and audiences than one might expect, an assertion demonstrated by the fact that over one hundred serious operas by British composers were premiered between 1875 and 1918. Rodmell examines the nature of operatic culture in the British Isles during this period, looking at the way in which opera was produced and 'consumed' by companies and audiences, the repertory performed, social attitudes to opera, the dominance of London's West End and the activities of touring companies in the provinces, and the position of British composers within this realm of activity. In doing so, he uncovers the undoubted challenges faced by opera in Britain in this period, and delves further into why it was especially difficult to make a breakthrough in this particular genre when other fields of compositional endeavour were enjoying a period of sustained growth. Whilst contemporaneous composers and commentators and later advocates of British music may have felt that the country's operatic life did not measure up to their aspirations or ambitions, there was still a great deal of activity and, even if this was not necessarily that which was always desired, it had a significant and lasting impact on musical culture in Britain.
Author: Benjamin Britten
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Folk songs
Languages : en
Pages : 34
Get Book Here
Book Description
Author: Richard S. Tompson
Publisher: Infobase Publishing
ISBN: 0816074720
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 561
Get Book Here
Book Description
An A-Z reference guide to significant people, ideas, places, and events in British history.
Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : English literature
Languages : en
Pages : 290
Get Book Here
Book Description
