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The composer's final decade sees a new outpouring of creativity.
The sixth and final volume of the annotated selected letters of
Benjamin Britten, edited by Philip Reed and Mervyn Cooke, covers
the composer's last decade. The genesis, composition and premieres
of major stage works such as Owen Wingrave, commissioned by BBC
Television, and Death in Venice are fully documented, as are the
church parables, The Burning Fiery Furnace and The Prodigal Son.
Important concert works from this period include the powerful
Brecht setting, Children's Crusade, the Third Cello Suite (for
Rostropovich), Canticles IV and V (both settings of poetry by T. S.
Eliot), Phaedra (for Janet Baker) and the Third String Quartet,
with its haunting echoes of Death in Venice. As in previous
volumes, Britten's letters to his life partner and principal
interpreter, the tenor Peter Pears, remain central. Other
significant correspondents include theQueen and Queen Mother;
librettists William Plomer and Myfanwy Piper; artistic
collaborators Frederick Ashton, Colin Graham and John Piper;
musicians Janet Baker, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Mstislav
Rostropovich; and composers Oliver Knussen, Dmitri Shostakovich and
William Walton. The volume also traces the conversion of Snape
Maltings into the Aldeburgh Festival's principal concert venue, its
destruction by fire on the opening night of the 1969 Festival and
its miraculous rebuilding in time for the following year's
Festival, as well as major concert tours by Britten and Pears to
New York, Canada, South America, Moscow and Leningrad, Australia,
and New Zealand. Close attention is paid to Britten's final years,
when his failed heart surgery left him a near invalid. Published in
association with The Britten-Pears Foundation.
For anyone wanting to get to grips with Britten's music and his
eclectic compositional style - crucial reading. MUSIC AND LETTERS
Fascinating and persuasive blend of documentary and critical study.
MUSICAL TIMES Benjamin Britten's interest in the musical traditions
of the Far East had a far-reaching influence on his compositional
style; this book is the first to investigate the highly original
cross-cultural synthesis he was able to achieve through the use of
material borrowed from Balinese, Japanese and Indian music.
Britten's visit to Indonesia and Japan in 1955-6 is reconstructed
from archival sources, and shown to have had a profound impact on
his subsequent work: the techniques of Balinese gamelan music were
used in the ballet The Prince of the Pagodas (1957), and then
became an essential feature of Britten's compositional style, at
their most potent in Death in Venice(1973). The No drama and Gagaku
court music of Japan were the inspiration for the trilogy of church
parables Britten composed in the 1960s. The precise nature of these
influences is discussed; Britten's sporadic borrowings from Indian
music are also fully analysed. There is a survey of critical
response to Britten's cross-cultural experiments.Accompanying CD of
original Balinese, Japanese and Indian recordings used by Britten
as source material.Dr MERVYN COOKE lectures in music at the
University of Nottingham.
This wide-ranging and thought-provoking collection of
specially-commissioned essays provides a uniquely comprehensive
overview of the many and various ways in which music functions in
film soundtracks. Citing examples from a variety of historical
periods, genres and film industries - including those of the USA,
UK, France, Italy, India and Japan - the book's contributors are
all leading scholars and practitioners in the field. They engage,
sometimes provocatively, with numerous stimulating aspects of the
history, theory and practice of film music in a series of lively
discussions which will appeal as much to newcomers to this
fascinating subject as to seasoned film music aficionados.
Innovative research and fresh interpretative perspectives are
offered alongside practice-based accounts of the film composer's
distinctive art, with examples cited from genres as contrasting as
animation, the screen musical, film noir, Hollywood melodrama, the
pop music and jazz film, documentary, period drama, horror, science
fiction and the Western.
The guitarist and composer Pat Metheny ranks among the most popular
and innovative jazz musicians of all time. In Pat Metheny: The ECM
Years, 1975-1984, Mervyn Cooke offers the first in-depth account of
Metheny's early creative period, during which he recorded eleven
stunningly varied albums for the pioneering European record label
ECM (Edition of Contemporary Music). This impressive body of
recordings encompasses both straight-ahead jazz playing with
virtuosic small ensembles and the increasingly complex textures and
structures of the Pat Metheny Group, a hugely successful band also
notable for its creative exploration of advanced music technologies
which were state-of-the-art at the time. Metheny's music in all its
shapes and forms broke major new ground in its refusal to subscribe
to either of the stylistic poles of bebop and jazz-rock fusion
which prevailed in the late 1970s. Through a series of detailed
analyses based on a substantial body of new transcriptions from the
recordings, this study reveals the close interrelationship of
improvisation and pre-composition which lies at the very heart of
the music. Furthermore, these analyses vividly demonstrate how
Metheny's music is often conditioned by a strongly linear narrative
model: both its story-telling characteristics and atmospheric
suggestiveness have sometimes been compared to those of film music,
a genre in which the guitarist also became active during this early
period. The melodic memorability for which Metheny's compositions
and improvisations have long been world-renowned is shown to be
just one important element in an unusually rich and flexible
musical language that embraces influences as diverse as bebop, free
jazz, rock, pop, country & western, Brazilian music, classical
music, minimalism, and the avant-garde. These elements are melded
into a uniquely distinctive soundworld which, above all, directly
reflects Metheny's passionate belief in the need to refashion jazz
in ways which can allow it to speak powerfully to each new
generation of youthful listeners.
This wide-ranging and thought-provoking collection of
specially-commissioned essays provides a uniquely comprehensive
overview of the many and various ways in which music functions in
film soundtracks. Citing examples from a variety of historical
periods, genres and film industries - including those of the USA,
UK, France, Italy, India and Japan - the book's contributors are
all leading scholars and practitioners in the field. They engage,
sometimes provocatively, with numerous stimulating aspects of the
history, theory and practice of film music in a series of lively
discussions which will appeal as much to newcomers to this
fascinating subject as to seasoned film music aficionados.
Innovative research and fresh interpretative perspectives are
offered alongside practice-based accounts of the film composer's
distinctive art, with examples cited from genres as contrasting as
animation, the screen musical, film noir, Hollywood melodrama, the
pop music and jazz film, documentary, period drama, horror, science
fiction and the Western.
A rich and informative look at the experiences of composers working
under high pressure in the US film industry, The Hollywood Film
Music Reader brings readers from film's earliest days to the modern
blockbuster era. Beginning with the origins of movie music in the
heyday of silent film, the book traces film music's progress
through Hollywood's so-called Golden Age to changes in musical
styles and working practices from the 1960s to the present. Also
included are vivid first-hand accounts from composers such as
George Antheil, Elmer Bernstein, Aaron Copland, Adolph Deutsch,
Jerry Goldsmith, Bernard Herrmann, Henry Mancini, Thomas Newman,
Andr Previn, David Raksin, Mikl?'s R zsa, Max Steiner, Dimitri
Tiomkin, Franz Waxman, and John Williams, along with testimonies
from composers working in animation and documentary film. The book
concludes with a section of criticism and commentary, including an
essay on film music by Sidney Lumet and Igor Stravinsky's
provocative views on the subject.
A rich and informative look at the experiences of composers working
under high pressure in the US film industry, The Hollywood Film
Music Reader brings readers from film's earliest days to the modern
blockbuster era. Beginning with the origins of movie music in the
heyday of silent film, the book traces film music's progress
through Hollywood's so-called Golden Age to changes in musical
styles and working practices from the 1960s to the present. Also
included are vivid first-hand accounts from composers such as
George Antheil, Elmer Bernstein, Aaron Copland, Adolph Deutsch,
Jerry Goldsmith, Bernard Herrmann, Henry Mancini, Thomas Newman,
Andr Previn, David Raksin, Mikl?'s R zsa, Max Steiner, Dimitri
Tiomkin, Franz Waxman, and John Williams, along with testimonies
from composers working in animation and documentary film. The book
concludes with a section of criticism and commentary, including an
essay on film music by Sidney Lumet and Igor Stravinsky's
provocative views on the subject.
This Companion celebrates the extraordinary riches of the
twentieth-century operatic repertoire in a collection of specially
commissioned essays written by a distinguished team of academics,
critics and practitioners. Beginning with a discussion of the
century's vital inheritance from late-romantic operatic traditions
in Germany and Italy, the text embraces fresh investigations into
various aspects of the genre in the modern age, with a
comprehensive coverage of the work of individual composers from
Debussy and Schoenberg to John Adams and Harrison Birtwistle.
Traditional stylistic categorizations (including symbolism,
expressionism, neo-classicism and minimalism) are reassessed from
new critical perspectives, and the distinctive operatic traditions
of Continental and Eastern Europe, Russia and the Soviet Union, the
United Kingdom and United States are subjected to fresh scrutiny.
The volume includes essays devoted to avant-garde music theatre,
operettas and musicals, filmed opera, and ends with a discussion of
the position of the genre in today's cultural marketplace.
The vibrant world of jazz may be viewed from many angles, from social and cultural history to music analysis, from economics to ethnography. It is challenging and exciting territory. This volume of nineteen specially commissioned essays offers informed and accessible guidance to the challenge, taking the reader through a series of five basic subject areas--locating jazz historically and geographically; defining jazz as musical and cultural practice; jazz in performance; the uses of jazz for audiences, markets, education and for other art forms; and the study of jazz.
The book examines from various viewpoints Britten's War Requiem, written in 1962 to celebrate the consecration of the new Coventry Cathedral and uniting the famous anti-war poetry of Wilfred Owen with the Latin Requiem Mass. Britten's and Owen's pacifist beliefs are compared, and the chronology of the compositional process unraveled from documentary and manuscript sources. The musical language is analyzed in detail, and the fluctuating critical responses to the score are assessed.
Billy Budd, based on Herman Melville's nautical allegory, is one of Britten's most challenging operas. This comprehensive guide considers the work from both literary and musical viewpoints. Melville's novella is discussed, as is the interpretation given to the novella by the librettists E. M. Forster and Eric Crozier. A detailed synopsis guides the reader through the musical and dramatic action of the opera and in a chapter devoted to the music, Britten's distinctive technique of tonal symbolism is analyzed to demonstrate the effectiveness of his musical response to the dramatic suggestions of Melville's story. The most important critical writings on Billy Budd are represented by an expanded version of Donald Mitchell's 1979 notebook on the opera. A final chapter charts the opera's stage history and fluctuating critical reception.
This book provides a comprehensive and lively introduction to the
major trends in film scoring from the silent era to the present
day, focussing not only on dominant Hollywood practices but also
offering an international perspective by including case studies of
the national cinemas of the UK, France, India, Italy, Japan and the
early Soviet Union. The book balances wide-ranging overviews of
film genres, modes of production and critical reception with
detailed non-technical descriptions of the interaction between
image track and soundtrack in representative individual films. In
addition to the central focus on narrative cinema, separate
sections are also devoted to music in documentary and animated
films, film musicals and the uses of popular and classical music in
the cinema. The author analyses the varying technological and
aesthetic issues that have shaped the history of film music, and
concludes with an account of the modern film composer's working
practices.
This book provides a comprehensive and lively introduction to the
major trends in film scoring from the silent era to the present
day, focussing not only on dominant Hollywood practices but also
offering an international perspective by including case studies of
the national cinemas of the UK, France, India, Italy, Japan and the
early Soviet Union. The book balances wide-ranging overviews of
film genres, modes of production and critical reception with
detailed non-technical descriptions of the interaction between
image track and soundtrack in representative individual films. In
addition to the central focus on narrative cinema, separate
sections are also devoted to music in documentary and animated
films, film musicals and the uses of popular and classical music in
the cinema. The author analyses the varying technological and
aesthetic issues that have shaped the history of film music, and
concludes with an account of the modern film composer's working
practices.
This Companion celebrates the extraordinary riches of the
twentieth-century operatic repertoire in a collection of specially
commissioned essays written by a distinguished team of academics,
critics and practitioners. Beginning with a discussion of the
century's vital inheritance from late-romantic operatic traditions
in Germany and Italy, the text embraces fresh investigations into
various aspects of the genre in the modern age, with a
comprehensive coverage of the work of individual composers from
Debussy and Schoenberg to John Adams and Harrison Birtwistle.
Traditional stylistic categorizations (including symbolism,
expressionism, neo-classicism and minimalism) are reassessed from
new critical perspectives, and the distinctive operatic traditions
of Continental and Eastern Europe, Russia and the Soviet Union, the
United Kingdom and United States are subjected to fresh scrutiny.
The volume includes essays devoted to avant-garde music theatre,
operettas and musicals, filmed opera, and ends with a discussion of
the position of the genre in today's cultural marketplace.
The vibrant world of jazz may be viewed from many angles, from social and cultural history to music analysis, from economics to ethnography. It is challenging and exciting territory. This volume of nineteen specially commissioned essays offers informed and accessible guidance to the challenge, taking the reader through a series of five basic subject areas--locating jazz historically and geographically; defining jazz as musical and cultural practice; jazz in performance; the uses of jazz for audiences, markets, education and for other art forms; and the study of jazz.
The book examines from various viewpoints Britten's War Requiem, written in 1962 to celebrate the consecration of the new Coventry Cathedral and uniting the famous anti-war poetry of Wilfred Owen with the Latin Requiem Mass. Britten's and Owen's pacifist beliefs are compared, and the chronology of the compositional process unraveled from documentary and manuscript sources. The musical language is analyzed in detail, and the fluctuating critical responses to the score are assessed.
This is a comprehensive guide to Britten's work, aimed both at the nonspecialist and the music student. It sheds light on both the composer's stylistic and personal development, offering new interpretations of his operatic works and discussing his characteristic working methods. A distinguished team of contributors include some who worked with the composer during his lifetime, as well as leading representatives of the younger generation of Britten scholars on both sides of the Atlantic.
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