Author: Sarah Kirby
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1783276738
Category : Exhibitions
Languages : en
Pages : 264
Get Book Here
Book Description
"International exhibitions were among the most significant cultural phenomena of the late nineteenth century. These vast events aimed to illustrate, through displays of physical objects, the full spectrum of the world's achievements, from industry and manufacturing, to art and design. But exhibitions were not just visual spaces. Music was ever present, as a fundamental part of these events' sonic landscape, and integral to the visitor experience. This book explores music at international exhibitions held in Australia, India, and the United Kingdom during the 1880s. At these exhibitions, music was codified, ordered, and all-round 'exhibited' in manifold ways. Displays of physical instruments from the past and present were accompanied by performances intended to educate or to entertain, while music was heard at exhibitors' stands, in concert halls, and in the pleasure gardens that surrounded the exhibition buildings. Music was depicted as a symbol of human artistic achievement, or employed for commercial ends. At times it was presented in nationalist terms, at others as a marker of universalism. This book argues, by interrogating the multiple ways that music was used, experienced, and represented, that exhibitions can demonstrate in microcosm many of the broader musical traditions, purposes, arguments, and anxieties of the day. Its nine chapters focus on sociocultural themes, covering issues of race, class, public education, economics, and entertainment in the context of music, trading these through the networks of communication that existed within the British Empire at the time. Combining approaches from reception studies and historical musicology, this book demonstrates how the representation of music at exhibitions drew the press and public into broader debates about music's role in society"--Page 4 of cover.
Author: Jeffrey Richards
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526121379
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 545
Get Book Here
Book Description
Author: Peter H. Hoffenberg
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520218914
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 467
Get Book Here
Book Description
An examination of world's fairs in Britain and its two most important 19th-century colonies, Australia and India; arguing that the fairs provided a forum for shaping both national and imperial identities.
Author: Sadiah Qureshi
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226700968
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 391
Get Book Here
Book Description
Examines the phenomenon of human exhibitions in nineteenth-century Britain and considers how this legacy informs understandings of race and empire today.
Author: Simon McVeigh
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1837651345
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 345
Get Book Here
Book Description
Traversing London's musical culture, this book boldly illuminates the emergence of Edwardian London as a beacon of musical innovation. The dawning of a new century saw London emerge as a hub in a fast-developing global music industry, mirroring Britain's pivotal position between the continent, the Americas and the British Empire. It was a period of expansion, experiment and entrepreneurial energy. Rather than conservative and inward-looking, London was invigorated by new ideas, from pioneering musical comedy and revue to the modernist departures of Debussy and Stravinsky. Meanwhile, Elgar, Holst, Vaughan Williams, and a host of ambitious younger composers sought to reposition British music in a rapidly evolving soundscape. Music was central to society at every level. Just as opulent theatres proliferated in the West End, concert life was revitalised by new symphony orchestras, by the Queen's Hall promenade concerts, and by Sunday concerts at the vast Albert Hall. Through innumerable band and gramophone concerts in the parks, music from Wagner to Irving Berlin became available as never before. The book envisions a burgeoning urban culture through a series of snapshots - daily musical life in all its messy diversity. While tackling themes of cosmopolitanism and nationalism, high and low brows, centres and peripheries, it evokes contemporary voices and characterful individuals to illuminate the period. Challenging issues include the barriers faced by women and people of colour, and attitudes inhibiting the new generation of British composers - not to mention embedded imperialist ideologies reflecting London's precarious position at the centre of Empire. Engagingly written, Simon McVeigh's groundbreaking book reveals the exhilarating transformation of music in Edwardian London, which laid the foundations for the century to come.
Author: John McAleer
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526118343
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 304
Get Book Here
Book Description
Exhibiting the empire considers how a whole range of cultural products – from paintings, prints, photographs, panoramas and ‘popular’ texts to ephemera, newspapers and the press, theatre and music, exhibitions, institutions and architecture – were used to record, celebrate and question the development of the British Empire. It represents a significant and original contribution to our understanding of the relationship between culture and empire. Written by leading scholars from a range of disciplinary backgrounds, individual chapters bring fresh perspectives to the interpretation of media, material culture and display, and their interaction with history. Taken together, this collection suggests that the history of empire needs to be, in part at least, a history of display and of reception. This book will be essential reading for scholars and students interested in British history, the history of empire, art history and the history of museums and collecting.
Author: Nathaniel G. Lew
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317009886
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 261
Get Book Here
Book Description
Long remembered chiefly for its modernist exhibitions on the South Bank in London, the 1951 Festival of Britain also showcased British artistic creativity in all its forms. In Tonic to the Nation, Nathaniel G. Lew tells the story of the English classical music and opera composed and revived for the Festival, and explores how these long-overlooked components of the Festival helped define English music in the post-war period. Drawing on a wealth of archival material, Lew looks closely at the work of the newly chartered Arts Council of Great Britain, for whom the Festival of Britain provided the first chance to assert its authority over British culture. The Arts Council devised many musical programs for the Festival, including commissions of new concert works, a vast London Season of almost 200 concerts highlighting seven centuries of English musical creativity, and several schemes to commission and perform new operas. These projects were not merely directed at bringing audiences to hear new and old national music, but to share broader goals of framing the national repertory, negotiating between the conflicting demands of conservative and progressive tastes, and using music to forge new national definitions in a changed post-war world.
Author: Erica Siegel
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1837650519
Category : Composers
Languages : en
Pages : 353
Get Book Here
Book Description
The first full-length biographical study of Elizabeth Maconchy (1907-1994). The British-born Irish composer (Dame) Elizabeth Maconchy (1907-1994) is best known today for her cycle of thirteen string quartets, composed over five decades. And yet, her oeuvre ranges from large scale choral works, to ballets, operas, and symphonic scores. Having studied with Charles Wood and Ralph Vaughan Williams at the Royal College of Music, many of her compositions also garnered accolades from peers and established musical figures such as Gustav Holst, Donald Francis Tovey, and Henry Wood, among others. With access to a wealth of documentation previously unavailable, this book explores Maconchy's life and music within a greater consideration of the social and political context of the world in which she lived. While the influence of Bartók has been well documented, this book reveals the equally potent influence of Vaughan Williams on Maconchy's musical idiom. This book also discusses Maconchy's foray into administration and her advocacy of young composers through her work as the first woman to be elected Chairman of the Composers' Guild of Great Britain in 1959 and President of the Society for the Promotion of New Music following the death of Benjamin Britten in 1976. It will be required reading for those interested in the lives of women composers, twentieth-century British music, and musical modernism.
Author: Thomas McGeary
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1783277157
Category : Great Britain
Languages : en
Pages : 445
Get Book Here
Book Description
Explores the political meanings that Italian opera - its composers, agents and institutions - had for audiences in eighteenth-century Britain.
Author: Paul Rodmell
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317092473
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 308
Get Book Here
Book Description
In nineteenth-century British society music and musicians were organized as they had never been before. This organization was manifested, in part, by the introduction of music into powerful institutions, both out of belief in music's inherently beneficial properties, and also to promote music occupations and professions in society at large. This book provides a representative and varied sample of the interactions between music and organizations in various locations in the nineteenth-century British Empire, exploring not only how and why music was institutionalized, but also how and why institutions became 'musicalized'. Individual essays explore amateur societies that promoted music-making; institutions that played host to music-making groups, both amateur and professional; music in diverse educational institutions; and the relationships between music and what might be referred to as the 'institutions of state'. Through all of the essays runs the theme of the various ways in which institutions of varying formality and rigidity interacted with music and musicians, and the mutual benefit and exploitation that resulted from that interaction.
