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Covering a period from the Ancient World to the present day, the
book suggests that until very recently, falsettists and
counter-tenors have been distinct vocal genres. `The use of high
male voices in the past has long been one of the most seriously
misunderstood areas of musical scholarship and practice. In opening
up this rich subject (to readers of all sorts) with refreshingly
clear perspectives and plenty of new material, Simon Ravens'
well-researched book goes a very long way to rectifying matters.
Ravens writes damnably well, and if the story that emerges is
necessarily a complex one, his treatment of it is always engagingly
comprehensible.' ANDREW PARROTT Tracing the origins, influences and
development of falsetto singing in Western music, Simon Ravens
offers a revisionist history of high male singing from the Ancient
Greeks to Michael Jackson. This history embraces not just singers
of counter-tenor and alto parts up to and including our own time
but the castrati of the Ancient world, the male sopranists of late
Medieval and Renaissance Europe, and the dual-register tenors of
the Baroque and Classical periods. Musical aesthetics aside, to
understand the changing ways men have sung high, it is also vital
to address extra-musical factors - which are themselves in a state
of flux. Tothis end, Ravens illuminates his chronological survey by
exploring topics as diverse as human physiology, the stereotyping
of national characters, gender identity, and the changing of boys'
voices. The result is a complex and fascinating history sure to
appeal not only to music scholars but to performers and all those
with an interest particularly in early music. Simon Ravens is a
performer, writer, and director of Musica Contexta, with whom hehas
performed in Britain and Europe, regularly broadcast, and made
numerous acclaimed recordings. Ravens had previously founded and
directed Australasia's foremost early music choir, the Tudor
Consort. Between 2002 and 2007 his regular monthly column Ravens
View appeared in the Early Music Review, to which he still
regularly contributes.
'Each of the novels in Alms for Oblivion is an elegant morality
tale, beautifully composed, sparkling with appreciation of the
sheer limitless variety of human wickedness' TLS Simon Raven's
sequence of colourful and funny novels about the English
upper-class misbehaving continues against a backdrop of intrigue in
Athens, radicalism in Cambridge, turmoil in India and movie-making
in Corfu. Dazzlingly witty and thoroughly depraved, Raven's world
is also a dark mirror to our times - one that is sure to make you
blush, shriek, laugh out loud and always read on. Volume 2: The
Judas Boy, Places Where they Sing, Sound the Retreat and Come Like
Shadows 'The Alms for Oblivion series steers its way its stylish
course somewhere between Fleming and Waugh' Guardian
'Cracking entertainment... Dangerously, deliciously addictive'
Daily Telegraph '[Raven is] a freak writer, he defies
classification. In wilder moments he suggests a loose, lunatic
collaboration of Trollope, Ouida and Waugh' Observer Enter Alms for
Oblivion, Simon Raven's dazzling cycle of ten novels, all telling
separate stories but at the same time linked together by the
characters they have in common: schoolboys and businessmen, writers
and soldiers, prostitutes and patient wives, actresses and models.
In the first four novels Raven's wayward band of upper-class
anti-heroes lurch from debauched parties to rehearsals for nuclear
war; from blackmail to murder; from marriage to adultery and back
again. Volume 1: The Rich Pay Late, Friends in Low Places, The
Sabre Squadron and Fielding Gray 'There are some people who
consider the greatest cycle of twentieth-century novels to be
Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time. These people are
wrong. Widmerpool and his joyless accomplices are as nothing
compared to the characters in Simon Raven's majestic, scurrilous
and scabrous Alms for Oblivion cycle' Guardian
'Brisk, bawdy and reckless' Evening Standard 'A freak writer, he
defies classification. In wilder moments he suggests a loose,
lunatic collaboration of Trollope, Ouida and Waugh' Observer The
Alms for Oblivion sequence - an extraordinary series of murders,
suicides, affairs, fighting, fires and at least one explosion,
blackmail, gambling, illness, madness, lots of parties and plenty
of sex - draws to a close with two novels about death and
retribution. But Simon Raven's achievement and the conflicted,
colourful or uniquely vile characters he created are not easily
forgotten after the last page is turned. Volume III includes Bring
Forth the Body and The Survivors 'There are some people who
consider the greatest cycle of twentieth-century novels to be
Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time. These people are
wrong. Widmerpool and his joyless accomplices are as nothing
compared to the characters in Simon Raven's majestic, scurrilous
and scabrous Alms for Oblivion cycle' Guardian
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