Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Benjamin Britten written by Mervyn Cooke and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1999-06-28 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Cambridge Companion to Benjamin Britten is a comprehensive guide to the composer's work, aimed both at the non-specialist and 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. Topics treated here in detail for the first time include Britten's work in the cinema in the 1930s, his lifelong pacifism and his strong interest in the music of the Far East; other chapters include reassessments of his relationship with W. H. Auden and his attitude towards childhood, comprehensive analyses of major works and a concise history of the Aldeburgh Festival. 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.
Download or read book Benjamin Britten written by Neil Powell and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2013-08-06 with total page 580 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This spellbinding centenary biography by Neil Powell looks at the music, the life, and the legacy of the greatest British composer of the twentieth century Benjamin Britten was born on November 22, 1913, in the East Suffolk town of Lowestoft. Displaying a passion and proficiency for music at an early age, to the delight of his mother, Edith, a talented amateur musician herself, he began composing music when he was only five years old. After studying at the Royal College of Music, Britten went on to write documentary scores for the General Post Office Film Unit, where he met and collaborated with the poet W. H. Auden. Of more lasting importance was Britten's introduction in 1937 to the tenor Peter Pears, who was to become the inspirational center of his emotional and musical life. Their partnership lasted nearly four decades, during a dangerous time when homosexuality was illegal in England. Conscientious objectors, Britten and Pears followed Auden to America before the war began in 1939. While there, they joined the extraordinary Brooklyn ménage of George Davis, Louis MacNeice, and Paul Bowles. Eventually intense homesickness, provoked in part by George Crabbe's poem "Peter Grimes," drove the pair home to East Anglia in 1942 and gave Britten the inspiration for his finest opera. Throughout his career, Britten did not want modern music to be just for "the cultured few" and instead always composed his music to be "listenable-to." The shared quotidian lives of Britten and Pears unfold in this intimate biography and the story of two men who created a truly remarkable legacy.
Download or read book Benjamin Britten written by Peter J. Hodgson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-10-08 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work constitutes the largest and most comprehensive research guide ever published about Benjamin Britten. Entries survey the most significant published materials relating to the composer, including bibliographies, catalogs, letters and documents, conference reports, biographies, and studies of Britten's music.
Download or read book Under a Broad Sky written by Ronald Blythe and published by Canterbury Press. This book was released on 2017-06-15 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With reverence and love, Britain's most admired rural writer chronicles daily life in a Stour valley village, finding beauty and significance in its sheer ordinariness as well as its many literary, artistic and historic associations.
Download or read book Benjamin Britten in Context written by Vicki P Stroeher and published by Composers in Context. This book was released on 2022-04-21 with total page 427 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A thematically organised overview of the musical, social and cultural contexts for the multi-faceted career of this pivotal British composer.
Download or read book Benjamin Britten written by Graham Elliott and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2005-12-08 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since Britten's death in 1976, numerous articles and books have been written about his life and work. Much has been made of the strong influences of his pacifism and his homosexuality. It is often suggested that Britten felt himself to be an outsider from 'normal' society, and that this accounts for the his concern to portray the 'outsider' in his operas. There is no doubt that this is an important aspect of Britten's art, but the present work attempts to show that his music embraces much wider and more universal concerns, and in addressing those concerns there is a clearly defined pattern of spiritual influence. Part One of the book examines Britten's early life, and the strong presence which the Church had in his childhood and adolescence. It explores the way in which certain spiritual influences were first manifested, and how, like the more specifically musical 'themes' which Donald Mitchell has noted, they can be traced throughout Britten's life and work. The author was privileged to have conversations with two clergymen who were influential in Britten's life, as well as gathering valuable insights through a long series of conversations with Sir Peter Pears. Part Two examines a wide range of the composer's music in which a spiritual dimension can be traced. The specifically liturgical music has received rather less critical notice than Britten's larger works. The music is discussed here, and shown to possess musical characteristics in common with the larger works. Britten could not be described as a conventional Christian; still less is it true to describe him, as Eric Walter White has done, as 'keen, wherever possible, to work within the framework of the Church of England'. Nevertheless, his spirituality was rooted in the religious experience of his childhood. This book seeks to demonstrate that Britten retained a sense of the Christian values absorbed in childhood and adolescence, and that these - along with the specifically Christian heritage of plainsong - were strongly influential in his choice and treatment of themes.
Download or read book Dmitri Shostakovich Catalogue written by Derek C. Hulme and published by Scarecrow Press. This book was released on 2010-02-18 with total page 824 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-75) was one of the greatest composers of the 20th century, as well as the first major Soviet composer. In the fourth edition of Dmitri Shostakovich Catalogue: The First Hundred Years and Beyond, Derek C. Hulme names and describes all known musical compositions of the Russian composer. More than 175 major works are annotated and discussed, including such comprehensive details as titles and subtitles, dates of composition, instrumentation, and duration; information on dedications and premieres; arrangements by the composer and others; publication details; notes on bibliographical references and the location of the autograph score; and comprehensive chronological lists of vinyl, compact disc, and visual recordings. The entries are presented chronologically and by opus number, while indexes of names and compositions provide full accessibility. Several appendixes supplement the volume, guiding readers to further information in published sources and providing information on the composer's film, radio, television, and theatre productions; his abandoned projects and obscure works; and his recordings, including box sets and special USSR recordings. An appendix also discusses the monogram DSCH, a musical motif based on his name that permeates his compositions. This new edition also includes a comprehensive chronological chart of Shostakovich's works and historical events and several plates of memorabilia.
Download or read book The Bookman s Tale written by Ronald Blythe and published by Canterbury Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ronald Blythe has spent his life among the artists and writers of his native Suffolk. His books, especially the bestselling "Akenfield", have given East Anglia a distinctive literary voice. This book accompanies Ronald through the lanes of Constable country, and observe him in his study following his early morning writing routine.
Download or read book Britten s Gloriana written by Paul Banks and published by Boydell & Brewer Ltd. This book was released on 1993 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume is based on a selection of papers presented during a study course devoted to Gloriana held at the Britten-Pears School for Advanced Musical Studies in 1991. Glorianahas been a source of controversy since its premire as part of the Coronation celebrations in 1953. It was planned as a national opera of broad appeal by its authors, Benjamin Britten and William Plomer, but, despite wide coverage in the media, the opera failed to establish itself in the repertoire until a new production in 1966 revealed it to be a powerful and stageworthy work. In recent years it has attracted an increasing amount of scholarly attention. This volume offers essays by ROBERT HEWISON, PHILIP REED, ANTONIA MALLOY, DONALD MITCHELL and PETER EVANS which explore the opera's cultural background, the early stages of its creative evolution, the first critical responses, and various aspects of the work itself: these are supplemented by a list of source materials for the opera and the works derived from it, and an extensive bibliography.
Download or read book Britten and the Far East written by Mervyn Cooke and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 1998 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Investigation into the influence of Eastern music on Britten's composition. 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 responses to Britten's cross-cultural experiments. Dr MERVYN COOKE lectures in music at the University of Nottingham.
Download or read book Talking to the Neighbours written by Ronald Blythe and published by Hymns Ancient and Modern Ltd. This book was released on 2003 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Timeless reflections on local life, farming, literature, the churchs year, the seasons, that transcend boundaries of place and time.
Download or read book The Sea in the British Musical Imagination written by Eric Saylor and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2015 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 10 Political Visions, National Identities, and the Sea Itself: Stanford and Vaughan Williams in 1910 -- 11 Bax's 'Sea Symphony' -- 12 'Close your eyes and listen to it': Special Sound and the Sea in BBC Radio Drama, 1957-59 -- Afterword : Channelling the Swaying Sound of the Sea -- Index
Download or read book Music and Theatre written by Nigel Fortune and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2005-02-17 with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume of eleven essays, compiled as a tribute to Winton Dean on his seventieth birthday, focuses on that area which has absorbed Winton Dean's interest throughout his distinguished career: opera and other theatre music. The first half of the book covers the period from the late seventeenth century to the mid-eighteenth. The second half of the book ranges over later opera: operacomique; Mendelssohn's operas; the influence of Wagner; the finales of Janácek's operas; and Britten's first two major operas, Peter Grimes and The Rape of Lucretia.
Download or read book Forever Wormingford written by Ronald Blythe and published by Canterbury Press. This book was released on 2017-09-30 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Long recognised as Britain’s greatest living rural writer, Ronald Blythe draws together literature, poetry, spirituality and memory which all merge to create an exquisite commentary on our times that is at once celebratory and elegiac. In this eleventh and final collection of his beloved 'Word from Wormingford', Ronald Blythe opens us our eyes to the small miracles that happen everywhere in ordinary life. With a poet’s deftness he gives us language with which to speak about the experiences that touch every life, but so often leave us speechless – life’s great joys and its incomprehensible sorrows. His writing awakens us to the colours and scents of the seasons and the weather, lets us listen to the myriad remembered conversations stored in his attic mind, evokes the smell of old books and all the memories they conjure up, and shows us how to be thankful for the inestimable blessing of simple routine.
Download or read book Benjamin Britten written by Donald Mitchell and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1987-06-18 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a source of first-hand information on Britten's final operatic achievement.
Download or read book A Time and a Place written by Frances Gibb and published by BoD – Books on Demand. This book was released on 2022-01-01 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There anchoring, Peter chose from Man to hide, There hang his Head, and view the lazy Tide In its hot slimy Channel slowly glide. . . George Crabbe, eighteenth-century poet, clergyman and surgeon-apothecary, is best known for ‘Peter Grimes’, the tale of a sadistic fisherman that inspired Benjamin Britten’s opera of the same name. The brutal crimes and ‘tortur’d guilt’ of Grimes play out within the bleak, improbably beautiful setting of Aldeburgh. While Crabbe has fallen in and out of fashion, the Suffolk town and its landscape have continued to captivate writers and artists, including Britten, Ronald Blythe, Susan Hill and Maggi Hambling – all drawn to the stark coastline, eerie mudflats and open skies. In A Time and a Place, Frances Gibb engages afresh with Crabbe’s writing – tracing, for the first time, the resonance of this place in his life and work. She delves into his creative struggles, religious faith, romantic loves and opium addiction. Above all, she explores the continual lure – for Crabbe and those who have followed – of the ‘little venal borough’, and the land and sea beyond.
Download or read book Imogen Holst written by Christopher Grogan and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2010 with total page 544 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Extensively revised with new material, the book also includes a study of Imogen Hoist'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.
