Alan Bush, Modern Music, and the Cold War

Alan Bush, Modern Music, and the Cold War PDF Author: Joanna Bullivant
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108210163
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
The first major study of Alan Bush, this book provides new perspectives on twentieth-century music and communism. British communist, composer of politicised works, and friend of Soviet musicians, Bush proved to be 'a lightning rod' in the national musical culture. His radical vision for British music prompted serious reflections on aesthetics and the rights of artists to private political opinions, as well as influencing the development of state-sponsored music making in East Germany. Rejecting previous characterisations of Bush as political and musical Other, Joanna Bullivant traces his aesthetic project from its origins in the 1920s to its collapse in the 1970s, incorporating discussion of modernism, political song, music theory, opera, and Bush's response to the Soviet music crisis of 1948. Drawing on a wealth of archival sources, including recently released documents from MI5, this book constructs new perspectives on the 'cultural Cold War' through the lens of the individual artist.

Alan Bush, Modern Music, and the Cold War

Alan Bush, Modern Music, and the Cold War PDF Author: Joanna Bullivant
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108210163
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 289

Get Book Here

Book Description
The first major study of Alan Bush, this book provides new perspectives on twentieth-century music and communism. British communist, composer of politicised works, and friend of Soviet musicians, Bush proved to be 'a lightning rod' in the national musical culture. His radical vision for British music prompted serious reflections on aesthetics and the rights of artists to private political opinions, as well as influencing the development of state-sponsored music making in East Germany. Rejecting previous characterisations of Bush as political and musical Other, Joanna Bullivant traces his aesthetic project from its origins in the 1920s to its collapse in the 1970s, incorporating discussion of modernism, political song, music theory, opera, and Bush's response to the Soviet music crisis of 1948. Drawing on a wealth of archival sources, including recently released documents from MI5, this book constructs new perspectives on the 'cultural Cold War' through the lens of the individual artist.

Modern Music, Alan Bush, and the Cold War

Modern Music, Alan Bush, and the Cold War PDF Author: Joanna Louise Bullivant
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781108206112
Category : Communism and music
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
The first major study of British communist composer Alan Bush, providing new perspectives on music and politics during the Cold War.

Benjamin Britten in Context

Benjamin Britten in Context PDF 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.

The Years of Anger

The Years of Anger PDF Author: Andy Croft
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000060233
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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Book Description
Randall Swingler (1909–67) was arguably the most significant and the best-known radical English poet of his generation. A widely published poet, playwright, novelist, editor and critic, his work was set to music by almost all the major British composers of his time. This new biography draws on extensive sources, including the security services files, to present the most detailed account yet of this influential poet, lyricist and activist. A literary entrepreneur, Swingler was founder of radical paperback publishing company Fore Publications, editor of Left Review and Our Time and literary editor of the Daily Worker; later becoming a staff reporter, until the paper was banned in 1941. In the 1930s, he contributed several plays for Unity Theatre, including the Mass Declamation Spain, the Munich play Crisis and the revues Sandbag Follies and Get Cracking. In 1936, MI5 opened a 20-year-long file on him prompted by a song he co-wrote with Alan Bush for a concert organised to mark the arrival of the 1934 Hunger March into London. During the Second World War, Swingler served in North Africa and Italy and was awarded the Military Medal for his part in the battle of Lake Comacchio. His collections The Years of Anger (1946) and The God in the Cave (1950) contain arguably some of the greatest poems of the Italian campaign. After the war, Swingler was blacklisted by the BBC. Orwell attacked him in Polemic and included him in the list of names he offered the security services in 1949. Stephen Spender vilified him in The God That Failed. The book will challenge the Cold War assumptions that have excluded Swingler’s life and work from standard histories of the period and should be of great interest to activists, scholars and those with an interest in the history of the literary and radical left.

Elisabeth Lutyens and Edward Clark

Elisabeth Lutyens and Edward Clark PDF Author: Annika Forkert
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009337335
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 261

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Book Description
Combining analyses of modernist concert and stage music by Elisabeth Lutyens with those of her audio-visual scores, and contextualising Lutyens and Edward Clark's biographies within international developments in dodecaphonic music and music-making, this book will speak to a wide audience interested in British and European twentieth-century music.

Mid-Century Romance

Mid-Century Romance PDF Author: John T. Connor
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192675877
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
Mid-Century Romance chronicles a revival of the historical novel chronicles a revival of the historical novel in the middle decades of the twentieth century in the cultures of British modernism and international communism. Born of a national turn in world politics, these novels met the turbulence of mid-century history with narratives of national becoming, roadmaps to situate their readers in the pattern of social change. Their writers were often mindful of the genre's romantic-era heritage: they saw themselves as following in the footsteps of Sir Walter Scott and they drew on the same rescued remains of primitive poetry and popular antiquities that romanticism first used to construct its versions of national identity, culture, and tradition. This book shows how the impulse to salvage traces of ancestral culture and press them to new purpose links the mid-century national-historical novel to the rise of radical social history and magical realism. Post-war anticommunism shaped a tradition of the novel as a preserve of art and the individual. Mid-Century Romance counters with a different genealogy of the British and world novel, whose object is society and the future of community, the nation and its people. It situates its cast of British writers--including the modernists Hope Mirrlees and Virginia Woolf, the communists Jack Lindsay and Sylvia Townsend Warner, the eccentric modernist and sometime fellow traveller John Cowper Powys, and the New Left luminary Raymond Williams--in a transnational perspective that reaches from Bihar, India to Bahia, Brazil.

Michael Tippett

Michael Tippett PDF Author: Oliver Soden
Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson
ISBN: 1474606040
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 781

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Book Description
'A delight to read' Philip Pullman 'Essential reading ... a genuine landmark publication' Tom Service A BBC Radio 4 'Book of the Week' The music of the British composer Michael Tippett - including the oratorio A Child of Our Time, five operas, and four symphonies - is among the most visionary of the twentieth century. But little has been written about his extraordinary life. In this long-awaited first biography, Oliver Soden weaves a century-spanning narrative of epic scope and penetrating insight. His achievement is to have enriched our understanding not only of Tippett but of the twentieth century. Figures such as T.S. Eliot, E.M. Forster, Barbara Hepworth, and W.H. Auden jostle in the cast list. An Edwardian world of gaslight and empire cedes to turmoil and warfare and his operas' game-changing attitudes to gay and civil rights, against a backdrop of the Cold War and the Space Race. The result is a landmark in the study of twentieth-century culture, simultaneously an astonishing feat of scholarship and a story as enthralling as in any great novel.

Fury of Past Time

Fury of Past Time PDF Author: Daryl Leeworthy
Publisher: Parthian Books
ISBN: 1914595203
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 430

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Book Description
'Leeworthy set out to write a biography which fully reflects the complexity of Thomas' life, especially foregrounding 'the political character of Gwyn's character and creative output' but he does so much more, expanding the reader's knowledge by giving us not just the life but also the times... This punchy portrait of a real Welsh literary heavyweight hits home with the brutal realism of Thomas' jabbing prose and mordant wit.' – Jon Gower, Nation.Cymru 'Fury of Past Time is a model of its kind. An immense amount of research has gone into this biography, which will be the standard work on Gwyn Thomas for many years to come. It deserves to be read by those who already admire the fiction and will be an invaluable introduction for anyone coming to his writing for the first time.' – John Barnie (A review from www.gwales.com, with the permission of the Books Council of Wales) 'Leeworthy knows his subject intimately, sympathises with him entirely, and locates him globally in such a way as to leave the reader with no doubt as to his importance as a writer... Fury of Past Time is destined to be the definitive work on 'the Rhondda Runyon' for many years to come.' – Bethan Jenkins, Wales Arts Review Gwyn Thomas was born, the last of twelve children, into a Rhondda mining family in 1913. After a childhood marked by the strikes of the 1920s, he went off to study Spanish at Oxford University and in Madrid, where he met the poet Federico García Lorca and witnessed the turmoil which would lead to the Spanish Civil War. On his return, amidst the economic mire of the 1930s and his own burgeoning teaching career in Barry in the 1940s, he picked up his pen and began to write. For more than forty years, until his death in 1981, as novelist, screenwriter, master of the short story, and prizewinning playwright, Gwyn Thomas delivered compelling and comedic portraits of his world of South Wales. His creative genius earned enduring fame on both sides of the Atlantic and on both sides of the European Cold War divide. As a provocative and insightful broadcaster, he embraced the possibilities of radio and television, whilst leaving his hosts and guests alike in fits of knowing laughter. This landmark biography, enriched with unrivalled access to private papers and international archives, tells the remarkable story of one of modern Wales's greatest literary voices.

The Cambridge Companion to Michael Tippett

The Cambridge Companion to Michael Tippett PDF Author: Kenneth Gloag
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107021979
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 335

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Book Description
This Companion provides a wide ranging and accessible study of one of the most individual composers of the twentieth century. A team of international scholars shed new light on Tippett's major works and draw attention to those that have not yet received the attention they deserve.

Spain in Our Ears

Spain in Our Ears PDF Author: Igor Contreras Zubillaga
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000930122
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 144

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Book Description
This book intends to reflect the variety and diversity of the musical responses that arose in favour of the Republic and against fascism during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), encompassing a wide range of music (classical music, film music, popular music), geographies (the US, the URSS, Britain, Germany) and individuals (from well-known figures such as Paul Robeson and Dimitri Shostakovich, to unknown men and women). In doing so, the book expands upon existing bibliography on the Spanish Civil War, which has enjoyed significant advances in the last fifteen years but has paid limited attention to the international dimensions of such musical activity. In particular, the six chapters of this book together bring in pioneering perspectives to the study of music and the Spanish Civil War (e.g., race issues), while at the same time calling for an increased transnational approach to the study of music and war more generally. Spain in our Ears will be of great value to students and researchers interested in Spanish politics and history, as well as the relationship between music and politics. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Journal of War and Cultural Studies.