Harrison Birtwistle: The Mask of Orpheus

Harrison Birtwistle: The Mask of Orpheus PDF Author: Jonathan Cross
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351564129
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 205

Get Book

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.

Harrison Birtwistle: The Mask of Orpheus

Harrison Birtwistle: The Mask of Orpheus PDF Author: Jonathan Cross
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351564129
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 205

Get Book

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.

The Mask of Orpheus

The Mask of Orpheus PDF Author: Harrison Birtwistle
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Operas
Languages : en
Pages : 136

Get Book

Book Description


The Mask of Orpheus

The Mask of Orpheus PDF Author: Harrison Birtwistle
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 88

Get Book

Book Description


The Mask of Orpheus

The Mask of Orpheus PDF Author: Harrison Birtwistle
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

Get Book

Book Description


The Planetary Clock

The Planetary Clock PDF Author: Paul Giles
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0198857721
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 435

Get Book

Book Description
Ranging over various aesthetic forms (literature, film, music) in the period since 1960, this volume brings an antipodean perspective into conversation with the art and culture of the Northern Hemisphere, to reformulate postmodernism as a properly global phenomenon.

The Music of Harrison Birtwistle

The Music of Harrison Birtwistle PDF Author: Robert Adlington
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521027802
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 261

Get Book

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.

Harrison Birtwistle Studies

Harrison Birtwistle Studies PDF Author: David Beard
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107093740
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 335

Get Book

Book Description
This collection represents current research on Birtwistle's music, reflecting the diversity of his work through a wide range of perspectives.

Harrison Birtwistle's Operas and Music Theatre

Harrison Birtwistle's Operas and Music Theatre PDF Author: David Beard
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139789082
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 489

Get Book

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.

Analytical Strategies and Musical Interpretation

Analytical Strategies and Musical Interpretation PDF Author: Craig Ayrey
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521543972
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 340

Get Book

Book Description
Interpretation is often considered only in theory, or as a philosophical problem, but this book demonstrates and reflects on the interpretive results of analysis.

The Impossible Art

The Impossible Art PDF Author: Matthew Aucoin
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374721580
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 232

Get Book

Book Description
A user's guide to opera—Matthew Aucoin, "the most promising operatic talent in a generation" (The New York Times Magazine), describes the creation of his groundbreaking new work, Eurydice, and shares his reflections on the past, present, and future of opera From its beginning, opera has been an impossible art. Its first practitioners, in seventeenth-century Florence, set themselves the unreachable goal of reproducing the wonders of ancient Greek drama, which no one can be sure was sung in the first place. Opera’s greatest artists have striven to fuse multiple art forms—music, drama, poetry, dance—into a unified synesthetic experience. The composer Matthew Aucoin, a rising star of the opera world, posits that it is this impossibility that gives opera its exceptional power and serves as its lifeblood. The virtuosity required of its performers, the bizarre and often spectacular nature of its stage productions, the creation of a whole world whose basic fabric is music—opera assumes its true form when it pursues impossible goals. The Impossible Art is a passionate defense of what is best about opera, a love letter to the form, written in the midst of a global pandemic during which operatic performance was (literally) impossible. Aucoin writes of the rare works—ranging from classics by Mozart and Verdi to contemporary offerings of Thomas Adès and Chaya Czernowin—that capture something essential about human experience. He illuminates the symbiotic relationship between composers and librettists, between opera’s greatest figures and those of literature. Aucoin also tells the story of his new opera, Eurydice, from its inception to its production on the Metropolitan Opera’s iconic stage. The Impossible Art opens the theater door and invites the reader into this extraordinary world.