Author: Mervyn Cooke
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521574761
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 372
Get Book Here
Book Description
The Cambridge Companion to Benjamin Britten is a comprehensive guide to the composer's work, aimed both at the non-specialist and music student. It sheds light on both the composer's stylistic and personal development, offering new interpretations of his operatic works and discussing his characteristic working methods. Topics treated here in detail for the first time include Britten's work in the cinema in the 1930s, his lifelong pacifism and his strong interest in the music of the Far East; other chapters include reassessments of his relationship with W. H. Auden and his attitude towards childhood, comprehensive analyses of major works and a concise history of the Aldeburgh Festival. A distinguished team of contributors include some who worked with the composer during his lifetime, as well as leading representatives of the younger generation of Britten scholars on both sides of the Atlantic.
Author: Christopher R. Wilson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190945141
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 1289
Get Book Here
Book Description
"This compendium reflects the latest international research into the many and various uses of music in relation to Shakespeare's plays and poems, the contributors' lines of enquiry extending from the Bard's own time to the present day. The coverage is global in its scope, and includes studies of Shakespeare-related music in countries as diverse as China, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Russia, South Africa, Sweden, and the Soviet Union, as well as the more familiar Anglophone musical and theatrical traditions of the UK and USA. The range of genres surveyed by the book's team of distinguished authors embraces music for theatre, opera, ballet, musicals, the concert hall, and film, in addition to Shakespeare's ongoing afterlives in folk music, jazz, and popular music. The authors take a range of diverse approaches: some investigate the evidence for performative practices in the Early Modern and later eras, while others offer detailed analyses of representative case studies, situating these firmly in their cultural contexts, or reflecting on the political and sociological ramifications of the music. As a whole, the volume provides a wide-ranging compendium of cutting-edge scholarship engaging with an extraordinarily rich body of music without parallel in the history of the global arts"--
Author: Brad Evans
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1783602406
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 256
Get Book Here
Book Description
While there is a tacit appreciation that freedom from violence will lead to more prosperous relations among peoples, violence continues to be deployed for various political and social ends. Yet the problem of violence still defies neat description, subject to many competing interpretations. Histories of Violence offers an accessible yet compelling examination of the problem of violence as it appears in the corpus of canonical figures – from Hannah Arendt to Frantz Fanon, Michel Foucault to Slavoj Žižek – who continue to influence and inform contemporary political, philosophical, sociological, cultural, and anthropological study. Written by a team of internationally renowned experts, this is an essential interrogation of post-war critical thought as it relates to violence.
Author: Philip Brett
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520246101
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 295
Get Book Here
Book Description
Publisher description
Author: Paul Kildea
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141924306
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 870
Get Book Here
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: Benjamin Britten
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780198167143
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 480
Get Book Here
Book Description
Benjamin Britten was a most reluctant public speaker. Yet his contributions were without doubt a major factor in the transformation during his lifetime of the structure of the art-music industry. This book, by bringing together all his published articles, unpublished speeches, drafts, and transcriptions of numerous radio interviews, explores the paradox of a reluctant yet influential cultural commentator, artist, and humanist. Whether talking about his own music, about the role of the artist in society, about music criticism, or wading into a debate on Soviet ideology at the height of the cold war, Britten always gave a performance which reinforced the notion of a private man who nonetheless saw the importance of public disclosure.
Author: William H. L. Godsalve
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 248
Get Book Here
Book Description
The opinions of many critics are cited: they usually shed favorable light on Britten's "remaking." The reader is free and encouraged to indulge in the pleasure of arriving at an independent judgment.
Author: John Bridcut
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780571228409
Category : Composers
Languages : en
Pages : 334
Get Book Here
Book Description
Britten's Children confronts the edgy subject of the composer's obsessional yet strangely innocent relationships with adolescent boys. One of the hallmarks of Benjamin Britten's music is his use of boys' voices, and John Bridcut uses this to create a fresh prism through which to view the composer's life. Interweaving discussion of the music he wrote for and about children with interviews with the boys whom Britten befriended, Bridcut explores the influence of these unique friendships - notably with the late David Hemmings - and how they helped Britten maintain links with his own happy childhood. In a remarkable part of the book Bridcut tells for the first time the full story of Britten's love affair in the 1930s with the 18-year-old German Wulff Scherchen, son of the conductor Hermann Scherchen. As Paul Hoggart of The Times commented, 'this type of love belonged to an emotional landscape that has vanished for ever, and we are the poorer for it'. Since making the film, the author has extended his research to include friendships Britten had with children which have not previously been documented.The documentary Britten's Children won the Royal Philharmonic Society's 2005 Award for Creative Communication: 'this serious and beautiful film explored one aspect of a composer's life in great depth. Avoiding the temptation of sensationalism, Britten's Children was imaginatively researched and both touching and revelatory'.
Author: Claire Seymour
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781843833147
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 358
Get Book Here
Book Description
Analysis of Britten's operatic works reveals opera as the natural medium through which he explored his private concerns.
Author: Jackie Morris
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781910959091
Category : Animals
Languages : en
Pages : 40
Get Book Here
Book Description
"At last all were gathered inside the ark. It heaved with animals, large and small. Mrs Noah wore a brand-new coat, with a hood and a cape - and very deep pockets. Lots of pockets."When Mr Noah builds the ark, he makes two lists - one for all the animals who will come on board and one for those troublesome creatures he will leave behind. Meanwhile, Mrs Noah gets out her sewing machine and makes a coat with very deep pockets. Lots of pockets.
