British Musical Criticism and Intellectual Thought, 1850-1950


Book Description

This collection provides an in-depth look at musical criticism between the mid-nineteenth and the mid-twentieth century.




The Symphonic Poem in Britain, 1850-1950


Book Description

The Symphonic Poem in Britain 1850-1950 aims to raise the status of the genre generally and in Britain specifically. The volume reaffirms British composers' confidence in dealing with literary texts and takes advantage of the contributors' interdisciplinary expertise by situating discussions of the tone poem in Britain in a variety of historical, analytical and cultural contexts. This book highlights some of the continental models that influenced British composers, and identifies a range of issues related to perceptions of the genre. Richard Strauss became an important figure in Britain during this time, not only in terms of the clear impact of his tone poems, but the debates over their value and even their ethics. A focus on French orchestral music in Britain represents a welcome addition to scholarly debate, and links to issues in several other chapters. The historical development of the genre, the impact of compositional models, issues highlighted in critical reception as well as programming strategies all contribute to a richer understanding of the symphonic poem in Britain. Works by British composers discussed in more detail include William Wallace's Villon (1909), Gustav Holst's Beni Mora(1909-10), Hubert Parry's From Death to Life (1914), John Ireland's Mai-Dun (1921), and Frank Bridge's orchestral 'poems' (1903-15).




Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain


Book Description

This volume of primary source material examine the thoughts and ideas behind music in Britian during the ninteenth century. Sources explore music critics, listening to music, music education, and philosophy. The collection of materials are accompanied by an introduction by Rosemary Golding, as well as headnotes contextualising the pieces. This collection will be of great value to students and scholars.




The Reminiscences and Selected Criticism of Herbert Thompson


Book Description

This book is a critical edition of the autobiography and selected musical criticism of Herbert Thompson (1856–1945) who was chief music critic at The Yorkshire Post from 1886 until 1936, and Yorkshire correspondent for the Musical Times.




The Cambridge Companion to Music and Romanticism


Book Description

A stimulating new approach to understanding the relationship between music and culture in the long nineteenth century.




Rethinking Mendelssohn


Book Description

""Rethinking Mendelssohn offers a new perspective on Mendelssohn's music and aesthetics, arguing for a fresh critical understanding of the composer, his music, and its central relationship to nineteenth-century culture. Building on the renaissance in Mendelssohn scholarship of the last two decades, the present book sets a new tone for research on Mendelssohn, challenging the traditional modes of discourse about this composer in moving beyond rehabilitation and source studies to engage in rigorous criticism and analysis. In a word, it seeks to rethink the issues that shaped Mendelssohn, his music and its reception from his own day down to the present. This volume includes contributions from younger, emerging scholars as well as from some of the most prominent figures outside specialist Mendelssohn circles in order to open up new ways of understanding the composer and set out future directions in Mendelssohn studies. Particular attention is given here to Mendelssohn's contested views on the relationship between art and religion, the analysis of his instrumental music in the wake of recent controversies in Formenlehre and his historical importance in this field, and the burgeoning interest in his previously neglected contribution to the German song tradition, besides offering new accounts of some of this composer's most familiar orchestral pieces. ""--




Elisabeth Lutyens and Edward Clark


Book Description

Unlocks new perspectives on twentieth-century British music, charting Lutyens and Clark's influential and controversial contributions to composition, performance, appreciation, and education.




Vaughan Williams and His World


Book Description

A biography of Ralph Vaughan Williams, published in collaboration with the Bard Music Festival. Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872–1958) was one of the most innovative and creative figures in twentieth-century music, whose symphonies stand alongside those of Sibelius, Nielsen, Shostakovich, and Roussel. After his death, shifting priorities in the music world led to a period of critical neglect. What could not have been foreseen is that by the second decade of the twenty-first century, a handful of Vaughan Williams’s scores would attain immense popularity worldwide. Yet the present renown of these pieces has led to misapprehension about the nature of Vaughan Williams’s cultural nationalism and a distorted view of his international cultural and musical significance. Vaughan Williams and His World traces the composer’s stylistic and aesthetic development in a broadly chronological fashion, reappraising Vaughan Williams’s music composed during and after the Second World War and affirming his status as an artist whose leftist political convictions pervaded his life and music. This volume reclaims Vaughan Williams’s deeply held progressive ethical and democratic convictions while celebrating his achievements as a composer.




Opera and British Print Culture in the Long Nineteenth Century


Book Description

Recently, studies of opera, of print culture, and of music in Britain in the long nineteenth century have proliferated. This essay collection explores the multiple point of interaction among these fields. Past scholarship often used print as a simple conduit for information about opera in Britain, but these essays demonstrate that print and opera existed in a more complex symbiosis. This collection embeds opera within the culture of Britain in the long nineteenth century, a culture inundated by print. The essays explore: how print culture both disseminated and shaped operatic culture; how the businesses of opera production and publishing intertwined; how performers and impresarios used print culture to cultivate their public persona; how issues of nationalism, class, and gender impacted reception in the periodical press; and how opera intertwined with literature, not only drawing source material from novels and plays, but also as a plot element in literary works or as a point of friction in literary circles. As the growth of digital humanities increases access to print sources, and as opera scholars move away from a focus on operas as isolated works, this study points the way forward to a richer understanding of the intersections between opera and print culture.




Rethinking Brahms


Book Description

As one of the most significant and widely performed composers of the nineteenth century, Brahms continues to command our attention. Rethinking Brahms counterbalances prevailing scholarly assumptions that position him as a conservative composer (whether musically or politically) with a wide-ranging exploration and re-evaluation of his significance today. Drawing on German- and English-language scholarship, it deploys original approaches to his music and pursues innovative methodologies to interrogate the historical, cultural, and artistic contexts of his creativity. Empowered by recent theoretical work on form and tonality, it offers fresh analytical insights into his music, including a number of corpus studies that interrogate the relationships between Brahms and other composers, past and present. The book brings into sharp focus the productive tension that exists between the perceived fixedness of musical texts and the ephemerality of performance by considering how historical and modern performers shape established understandings of Brahms and his music. Rethinking Brahms invites the reader to hear familiar pieces anew as they are refracted through historical, artistic, and philosophical prisms. Bringing us up to the present day, it also gives sustained attention to the resounding impact of Brahms's compositions on new music by exploring works by recent composers who have engaged deeply with his oeuvre. Combining awareness of overarching contexts with perceptive insights into Brahms's music, this book enlivens our understanding of Brahms, providing a dynamic, multifaceted, complex, and invigoratingly fresh portrait of the composer.