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This paperback edition is updated to include new insights into
Holst's life and work resulting from the discovery of important
unseen archival materials. Imogen Holst was one of the most
wide-ranging and highly regarded of musicians. Popular with all who
knew her, she was intensively protective of her inner life,
reminding one friend of a 'locked door of which she had thrown away
the key'. Imogen Holst: A Life in Music uses a wealth of newly
discovered material to explore the complexities and contradictions
of her life and career, drawing on her own writings - ranging from
heartfelt early poetry, through correspondence, to a series of
journals that maintain a colourful record of her travels and
achievements. Most revealing of these is the daily journal that she
kept at the start of her working association with Britten,
adocument that provides a unique insight both into her own
thoughts, and into the professional and domestic life of a major
composer. Extensively revised with new material, the book also
includes a study of Imogen Holst's music and a chronological list
of her works, revealing her as a composer of tremendous talent,
whose music deserves to be much more familiar. CHRISTOPHER GROGAN
is Director of Collections and Heritage at the Britten-Pears
Foundation.
More perhaps than any other composer, Edward Elgar (1857-1934) has
gained the status of an 'icon of locality', his music seemingly
inextricably linked to the English landscape in which he worked.
This, the first full-length study of Elgar's complex interaction
with his physical environment, explores how it is that such
associations are formed and whether it is any sense true that Elgar
alchemized landscape into music. It argues that Elgar stands at the
apex of an English tradition, going back to Blake, in which
creative artists in all media have identified and warned against
the self-harm of environmental degradation and that, following a
period in which these ideas were swept away by the swift but
shallow tide of Modernism in the decades after the First World War,
they have since resurfaced with a new relevance and urgency for
twenty-first century society. Written with the non-specialist in
mind, yet drawing on the rich resources of post-millennial
scholarship on Elgar, as well as geographical studies of place, the
book also includes many new insights relating to such aspects of
Elgar's output as his use of landscape typology in The Apostles,
and his encounter with Modernism in the late chamber music. It also
calls on the resources of contemporary social commentary, poetry
and, especially, English landscape art to place Elgar and his
thought in the broader cultural milieu of his time. A survey of
recent recordings is included, in the hope that listeners, both
familiar and unfamiliar with Elgar's music, will feel inspired to
embark on a voyage of (re)discovery of its endlessly rewarding
treasures.
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