In this classic study of Benjamin Britten and Michael Tippett, Arnold Whittall builds up a unique double portrait of the two leading composers of their generation. For this second, revised edition Whittall includes a new chapter on Tippett's major works of the 1980s: the Piano Sonata No. 4, the large-scale choral composition The Mask of Time and the most recent opera, New Year. In addition, new information on the Britten repertoire and an updated bibliography are also presented.

This wide-ranging study of Gabriel Faure and his contemporaries reclaims aesthetic categories crucial to French musical life in the early twentieth century. Its interrelated chapters treat the topics of sincerity, originality, novelty, self-renewal, homogeneity and religious belief in relation to Faure's music and ideas. Taking a broad view of cultural life during the composer's lifetime and beyond, the book moves between specific details in Faure's music and related critical, literary and philosophical issues, ranging from Gounod to Boulez and from Proust to Valery. Above all, the book...

This important new study reassesses the position of Anton Webern in twentieth-century music. The twelve-note method of composition adopted by Anton Webern had profound consequences for composers of the next generation such as Stockhausen and Boulez, who saw Webern's music as revolutionary. In her detailed analyses, however, Professor Bailey demonstrates a fundamentally traditional aspect to Webern's creativity, when describing his own music. Professor Bailey analyses all Webern's twelve-note works (from Op. 17 to Op. 31) i.e. the instrumental and vocal music written between 1924 and 1943....

This book is the first full-length analytical study of the music of Ruth Crawford Seeger. Crawford was a pivotal figure in the American avant-garde, the so-called ???ultra-modern??? movement of the 1920s and 1930s. In addition to her historical significance, as part of the first generation of American composers to step out from the shadow of European models, her music deserves attention for its original and compelling structures and its expressive power. Crawford created new ways of writing melodies, of combining them in heterogeneous juxtaposition, of projecting musical ideas over the...

This multi-faceted study looks in detail at the music and thought of Michael Tippett. David Clarke shows how Tippett has roots in the nineteenth century and also reveals his connections with larger developments in Western cultural thinking. The book is made distinctive by its strong interdisciplinary element. It relates observations on the music to ideas in literature, philosophy and literary theory and addresses issues concerned with modernity and postmodernity. Tippett's homosexuality is also considered as a factor in his makeup as a composer.

Composers of serial music in post-war Europe wrote almost as much about music as the music itself, but the relationship between theory and practice in the work of key figures like Stockhausen, Eimert, Pousseur and Schnebel has often been misrepresented. Focusing on the controversial journal Die Reihe, this book traces serialism's cultural history, its debt to the artistic theories of Klee and Mondrian, and its relationship to contemporary developments in concrete art, poetry and information aesthetics. It sketches a aesthetic theory of serialism as an experimental music.

Harrison Birtwistle (1934- ) is one of the most eminent and acclaimed of contemporary British composers. This is the first book to provide a comprehensive view of his large and varied output, containing descriptions of every published work, and also a number of withdrawn and unpublished pieces. The book is structured around a number of broad themes--theater, song, time and texture--themes of significance to Birtwistle, but also to much other music. This approach avoids in-depth technical analysis, and Dr. Adlington focuses instead on the music's wider cultural significance.

This book examines the BBC's campaign to raise the cultural awareness of British mass audiences in the early days of radio. As a specific case, it focuses on policies and plans behind transmissions of contemporary music between 1922, when the BBC was founded, and spring 1936. This reception study traces and analyzes the BBC's attempts to manipulate critical and public responses to this repertory.

The first full-length analytical study of Edward Elgar's music, this book argues that Elgar was a modernist composer, and that his music constitutes a pessimistic twentieth-century assessment of the nature of human being. Focusing on Elgar's music rather than his life, Harper-Scott blends the hermeneutic and existential philosophy of Martin Heidegger with music-analytical methods derived from Heinrich Schenker and James Hepokoski. In the course of engaging with debates centred on duotonality in musical structures, sonata deformations, meaning in music, the nature of tragedy, and the quest...

For much of his career, the internationally known and still active Dutch composer Louis Andriessen has been understood as an iconoclast who challenged and resisted the musical establishment. This book explores his compositions as a case study for exploring the social and aesthetic implications of new music. Everett chronicles the evolution of Andriessen's music over the course of five decades: the formative years in which he experimented with serialism and collage techniques; his political activism in the late 1960s; 'concept' works from the 1970s that provide musical commentary on...