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Author: Jonathan Cross
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801486722
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 314
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Book Description
Sir Harrison Birtwistle is the most original, the most challenging, and the most controversial British composer of our time. His notoriously angular music is at once defiantly modernist and deeply indebted to the traditions, medieval and modern, of English music. Birtwistle composes for ensembles of every size and shape but is perhaps best known for his music for the opera stage. His opera Gawain, possibly his most famous work, is fully characteristic in its marriage of a modernist musical language and a mythic subject. Accessible to anyone with an interest in modern music, this book uncovers the sources of Birtwistle's art and presents a critical account of his musical, dramatic, and aesthetic preoccupations through an exploration of such topics as theater, myth, ritual, pastoral, pulse, and line. It places Birtwistle in a broad cultural context, examining the composers and painters who have influenced his work.
Author: Jonathan Cross
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801486722
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 314
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Book Description
Sir Harrison Birtwistle is the most original, the most challenging, and the most controversial British composer of our time. His notoriously angular music is at once defiantly modernist and deeply indebted to the traditions, medieval and modern, of English music. Birtwistle composes for ensembles of every size and shape but is perhaps best known for his music for the opera stage. His opera Gawain, possibly his most famous work, is fully characteristic in its marriage of a modernist musical language and a mythic subject. Accessible to anyone with an interest in modern music, this book uncovers the sources of Birtwistle's art and presents a critical account of his musical, dramatic, and aesthetic preoccupations through an exploration of such topics as theater, myth, ritual, pastoral, pulse, and line. It places Birtwistle in a broad cultural context, examining the composers and painters who have influenced his work.
Author: Robert Adlington
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521027802
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 261
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Book Description
Harrison Birtwistle has become the most eminent and acclaimed of contemporary British composers. This book provides a comprehensive view of his large and varied output. It contains descriptions of every published work, and also of a number of withdrawn and unpublished pieces. Revealing light is often cast on the more familiar pieces by considering these lesser-known areas of Birtwistle's oeuvre. The book is structured around a number of broad themes - themes of significance to Birtwistle, but also to much other music. These include theatre, song, time and texture. This approach emphasizes the music's multifarious ways of meaning; now that even the academic world no longer takes the merits of 'difficult' contemporary music for granted, it is all the more important to assess what it represents beyond mere technical innovation. Adlington thus avoids in-depth technical analysis, focusing instead upon the music's wider cultural significance.
Author: Harrison Birtwistle
Publisher: Boosey & Hawkes Incorporated
ISBN:
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 80
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Book Description
Retelling of the myth of the Cretan Minotaur, this book considers the inner world of the Minotaur himself, and suggests a dark and compelling reason for Ariadne's intense relationship with Theseus.
Author: Jonathan Cross
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351564137
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 196
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Book Description
Hailed at its premiere at the London Coliseum in 1986 as the most important musical and theatrical event of the decade, The Mask of Orpheus is undoubtedly a key work in Harrison Birtwistle's output. His subsequent stage and concert pieces demand to be evaluated in its light. Increasingly, it is also viewed as a key work in the development of opera since the Second World War, a work that pushed at the boundaries of what was possible in lyrical theatre. In its imaginative fusion of music, song, drama, myth, mime and electronics, it has become a beacon for many younger composers, and the object of wide critical attention. Jonathan Cross begins his detailed study of this 'lyric tragedy' by placing it in the wider context of the reception of the Orpheus myth. In particular, the significance of Orpheus for the twentieth century is discussed, and this provides the backdrop for an examination of Birtwistle's preoccupation with the story in a variety of works across his creative life. The sources and genesis of The Mask of Orpheus are explored. This is followed by a close reading of the work's three acts, analysing their structure and meaning, investigating the relationship between music, text and drama, drawing on Zinovieff's textual drafts and Birtwistle's compositional sketches. The book concludes by suggesting a range of contexts within which The Mask of Orpheus might be understood. Its central themes of time, memory and identity, loss, mourning and melancholy, touch a deep sensibility in late-modern society and culture. Interviews with the librettist and composer round off this important study.
Author: David Beard
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139789082
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 489
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Book Description
David Beard presents the first definitive survey of Harrison Birtwistle's music for the opera house and theatre, from his smaller-scale works, such as Down by the Greenwood Side and Bow Down, to the full-length operas, such as Punch and Judy, The Mask of Orpheus and Gawain. Blending source study with both music analysis and cultural criticism, the book focuses on the sometimes tense but always revealing relationship between abstract musical processes and the practical demands of narrative drama, while touching on theories of parody, narrative, pastoral, film, the body and community. Each stage work is considered in terms of its own specific musico-dramatic themes, revealing how compositional scheme and dramatic conception are intertwined from the earliest stages of a project's genesis. The study draws on a substantial body of previously undocumented primary sources and goes beyond previous studies of the composer's output to include works unveiled from 2000 onwards.
Author: Jonathan Cross
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351564129
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 292
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Book Description
Hailed at its premiere at the London Coliseum in 1986 as the most important musical and theatrical event of the decade, The Mask of Orpheus is undoubtedly a key work in Harrison Birtwistle's output. His subsequent stage and concert pieces demand to be evaluated in its light. Increasingly, it is also viewed as a key work in the development of opera since the Second World War, a work that pushed at the boundaries of what was possible in lyrical theatre. In its imaginative fusion of music, song, drama, myth, mime and electronics, it has become a beacon for many younger composers, and the object of wide critical attention. Jonathan Cross begins his detailed study of this 'lyric tragedy' by placing it in the wider context of the reception of the Orpheus myth. In particular, the significance of Orpheus for the twentieth century is discussed, and this provides the backdrop for an examination of Birtwistle's preoccupation with the story in a variety of works across his creative life. The sources and genesis of The Mask of Orpheus are explored. This is followed by a close reading of the work's three acts, analysing their structure and meaning, investigating the relationship between music, text and drama, drawing on Zinovieff's textual drafts and Birtwistle's compositional sketches. The book concludes by suggesting a range of contexts within which The Mask of Orpheus might be understood. Its central themes of time, memory and identity, loss, mourning and melancholy, touch a deep sensibility in late-modern society and culture. Interviews with the librettist and composer round off this important study.
Author: David Beard
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107093740
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 335
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Book Description
This collection represents current research on Birtwistle's music, reflecting the diversity of his work through a wide range of perspectives.
Author: Fiona Maddocks
Publisher: Faber & Faber
ISBN: 0571308120
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 213
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Book Description
'Anyone with the smallest interest in composition - not just concertos but novels, buildings, lives, you name it, should read this absorbing, spiky, dazzling book.' Adam Thirwell, TLS Books of the Year Harrison Birtwistle is recognised worldwide as one of the greatest of living composers, behind such works of trail-blazingly modern classical music as The Shadow of Night and The Mask of Orpheus, famously staged at the English National Opera in 1986, and winner of the Grawemeyer Award. His music is both deeply original and highly personal, yet he has always been notoriously reticent about explaining either his music or himself. In this 'conversation diary', spanning six months, he talks openly to the distinguished writer and critic Fiona Maddocks (author of the acclaimed Hildegard of Bingen: The Woman of her Age), offering rare insights into the challenges, uncertainties and rewards which have shaped his life and work since childhood, and which remain with him today as he enters his ninth decade. We see the composer in the privacy of his Wiltshire studio and garden, and in the public glare of the elite Salzburg and Aldeburgh Festivals. But mostly he is at his kitchen table, talking about the essential aspects of his life - family, cooking, cricket, landscape, pruning trees - and reflecting on the never easy-process of composition. What distinguishes him and his remarkable music is an ability to see the extraordinary in the everyday, giving rise to work that is both elemental and profound. For anyone concerned with the future of music this book is essential reading.
Author: Chris Woodstra
Publisher: Hal Leonard Corporation
ISBN: 9780879308650
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 1620
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Book Description
Offering comprehensive coverage of classical music, this guide surveys more than eleven thousand albums and presents biographies of five hundred composers and eight hundred performers, as well as twenty-three essays on forms, eras, and genres of classical music. Original.
Author: Paul Morley
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1635570255
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 625
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Book Description
For readers of Mozart in the Jungle and Year of Wonder, a new history of and guide to classical music. Paul Morley made his name as a journalist covering the rock and pop of the 1970s and 1980s. But as his career progressed, he found himself drawn toward developing technologies, streaming platforms, and, increasingly, the music from the past that streaming services now made available. Suddenly able to access every piece Mozart or Bach had ever written and to curate playlists that worked with these musicians' themes across different performers, composers, and eras, he began to understand classical music in a whole new way and to believe that it was music at its most dramatic and revealing. In A Sound Mind, Morley takes readers along on his journey into the history and future of classical music. His descriptions, explanations, and guidance make this seemingly arcane genre more friendly to listeners and show the music's power, depth, and timeless beauty. In Morley's capable hands, the history of the classical genre is shown to be the history of all music, with these long-ago pieces influencing everyone from jazz greats to punk rockers and the pop musicians of today.
