Download or read book Harrison Birtwistle s Operas and Music Theatre written by David Beard and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-10-25 with total page 489 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: David Beard presents the first definitive survey of Harrison Birtwistle's music for the opera house and theatre, from his smaller-scale works, such as Down by the Greenwood Side and Bow Down, to the full-length operas, such as Punch and Judy, The Mask of Orpheus and Gawain. Blending source study with both music analysis and cultural criticism, the book focuses on the sometimes tense but always revealing relationship between abstract musical processes and the practical demands of narrative drama, while touching on theories of parody, narrative, pastoral, film, the body and community. Each stage work is considered in terms of its own specific musico-dramatic themes, revealing how compositional scheme and dramatic conception are intertwined from the earliest stages of a project's genesis. The study draws on a substantial body of previously undocumented primary sources and goes beyond previous studies of the composer's output to include works unveiled from 2000 onwards.
Download or read book Harrison Birtwistle s Operas and Music Theatre written by David Beard and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-10-25 with total page 489 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A definitive source study of the stage works of Harrison Birtwistle, one of Britain's foremost living composers.
Download or read book Harrison Birtwistle Studies written by David Beard and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-04-09 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection represents current research on Birtwistle's music, reflecting the diversity of his work through a wide range of perspectives.
Download or read book Harrison Birtwistle The Mask of Orpheus written by Jonathan Cross and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hailed at its premiere at the London Coliseum in 1986 as the most important musical and theatrical event of the decade, The Mask of Orpheus is undoubtedly a key work in Harrison Birtwistle's output. His subsequent stage and concert pieces demand to be evaluated in its light. Increasingly, it is also viewed as a key work in the development of opera since the Second World War, a work that pushed at the boundaries of what was possible in lyrical theatre. In its imaginative fusion of music, song, drama, myth, mime and electronics, it has become a beacon for many younger composers, and the object of wide critical attention. Jonathan Cross begins his detailed study of this 'lyric tragedy' by placing it in the wider context of the reception of the Orpheus myth. In particular, the significance of Orpheus for the twentieth century is discussed, and this provides the backdrop for an examination of Birtwistle's preoccupation with the story in a variety of works across his creative life. The sources and genesis of The Mask of Orpheus are explored. This is followed by a close reading of the work's three acts, analysing their structure and meaning, investigating the relationship between music, text and drama, drawing on Zinovieff's textual drafts and Birtwistle's compositional sketches. The book concludes by suggesting a range of contexts within which The Mask of Orpheus might be understood. Its central themes of time, memory and identity, loss, mourning and melancholy, touch a deep sensibility in late-modern society and culture. Interviews with the librettist and composer round off this important study.
Download or read book The Music of Harrison Birtwistle written by Robert Adlington and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2006-11-02 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Harrison Birtwistle has become the most eminent and acclaimed of contemporary British composers. This book provides a comprehensive view of his large and varied output. It contains descriptions of every published work, and also of a number of withdrawn and unpublished pieces. Revealing light is often cast on the more familiar pieces by considering these lesser-known areas of Birtwistle's oeuvre. The book is structured around a number of broad themes - themes of significance to Birtwistle, but also to much other music. These include theatre, song, time and texture. This approach emphasizes the music's multifarious ways of meaning; now that even the academic world no longer takes the merits of 'difficult' contemporary music for granted, it is all the more important to assess what it represents beyond mere technical innovation. Adlington thus avoids in-depth technical analysis, focusing instead upon the music's wider cultural significance.
Download or read book The Minotaur written by Harrison Birtwistle and published by Boosey & Hawkes Incorporated. This book was released on 2008 with total page 80 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Retelling of the myth of the Cretan Minotaur, this book considers the inner world of the Minotaur himself, and suggests a dark and compelling reason for Ariadne's intense relationship with Theseus.
Download or read book Harrison Birtwistle written by Jonathan Cross and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sir Harrison Birtwistle is the most original, the most challenging, and the most controversial British composer of our time. His notoriously angular music is at once defiantly modernist and deeply indebted to the traditions, medieval and modern, of English music. Birtwistle composes for ensembles of every size and shape but is perhaps best known for his music for the opera stage. His opera Gawain, possibly his most famous work, is fully characteristic in its marriage of a modernist musical language and a mythic subject. Accessible to anyone with an interest in modern music, this book uncovers the sources of Birtwistle's art and presents a critical account of his musical, dramatic, and aesthetic preoccupations through an exploration of such topics as theater, myth, ritual, pastoral, pulse, and line. It places Birtwistle in a broad cultural context, examining the composers and painters who have influenced his work.
Download or read book Harrison Birtwistle written by Fiona Maddocks and published by Faber & Faber. This book was released on 2014-05-13 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Anyone with the smallest interest in composition - not just concertos but novels, buildings, lives, you name it, should read this absorbing, spiky, dazzling book.' Adam Thirwell, TLS Books of the Year Harrison Birtwistle is recognised worldwide as one of the greatest of living composers, behind such works of trail-blazingly modern classical music as The Shadow of Night and The Mask of Orpheus, famously staged at the English National Opera in 1986, and winner of the Grawemeyer Award. His music is both deeply original and highly personal, yet he has always been notoriously reticent about explaining either his music or himself. In this 'conversation diary', spanning six months, he talks openly to the distinguished writer and critic Fiona Maddocks (author of the acclaimed Hildegard of Bingen: The Woman of her Age), offering rare insights into the challenges, uncertainties and rewards which have shaped his life and work since childhood, and which remain with him today as he enters his ninth decade. We see the composer in the privacy of his Wiltshire studio and garden, and in the public glare of the elite Salzburg and Aldeburgh Festivals. But mostly he is at his kitchen table, talking about the essential aspects of his life - family, cooking, cricket, landscape, pruning trees - and reflecting on the never easy-process of composition. What distinguishes him and his remarkable music is an ability to see the extraordinary in the everyday, giving rise to work that is both elemental and profound. For anyone concerned with the future of music this book is essential reading.
Download or read book Harrison Birtwistle Studies written by David Beard and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-04-09 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays celebrates the work of Sir Harrison Birtwistle, one of the key figures in European contemporary music. Representing current research on Birtwistle's music, this book reflects the diversity of his work in terms of periods, genres, forms, techniques and related issues through a wide range of critical, theoretical and analytical interpretations and perspectives. Written by a team of international scholars, all of whom bring a deep research-based knowledge and insight to their chosen study, this collection extends the scholarly understanding of Birtwistle through new engagements with the man and the music. The contributors provide detailed studies of Birtwistle's engagement with electronic music in the 1960s and 1970s, and develop theoretical explanations of his fascination with pulse, rhythm and time. They also explore in detail Birtwistle's interest in poetry, instrumental drama, gesture, procession and landscape, and consider the compositional processes that underpin these issues.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth Century Opera written by Mervyn Cooke and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2005-12-08 with total page 430 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Opera after 1900 written by Margaret Notley and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 538 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The articles reprinted in this volume treat operas as opera and from some sort of critical angle; none of the articles uses methodology appropriate for another kind of musical work. Additional criteria used in selecting the articles were that they should not have been reprinted widely before and that taken together they should cover an extended array of significant operas and critical questions about them. Trends in Anglophone scholarship on post-1900 opera then determined the structure of the volume. The anthologized articles are organized according to the place of origin of the opera discussed in each of them; the introduction, however, follows a thematic approach. Themes considered in the introduction include questions of genre and reception; perspectives on librettos and librettists; words, lyricism, and roles of the orchestra; and modernism and other political contexts.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth Century Opera written by Mervyn Cooke and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2005-12-08 with total page 430 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Penguin Companion to Classical Music written by Paul Griffiths and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2004-10-07 with total page 1400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This superbly authoratitive new work provides a comprehensive A-Z guide to some 1000 years of Western music. It explores in detail the lives and achievements of a vast range of composers, as well as looking at such key topics as music history (from medieval plainchant to contemporary minimalism), performers, theory and jargon. Throught Griffiths skilfully blends lightly worn scholarship with personal insight, whether examining the emotional colouring that different musical keys achieve or charting the rise and development of the symphony.
Download or read book The Oxford Illustrated History of Opera written by Roger Parker and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2001 with total page 618 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A historical survey of opera, from its beginnings in Florence 400 years ago, up to opera in the 1990s.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Opera written by Helen M. Greenwald and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2014-10-03 with total page 1217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What IS opera? Contributors to The Oxford Handbook of Opera respond to this deceptively simple question with a rich and compelling exploration of opera's adaption to changing artistic and political currents. Fifty of the world's most respected scholars cast opera as a fluid entity that continuously reinvents itself in a reflection of its patrons, audience, and creators. The synergy of power, performance, and identity recurs thematically throughout the volume's major topics: Words, Music, and Meaning; Performance and Production; Opera and Society; and Transmission and Reception. Individual essays engage with repertoire from Monteverdi, Mozart, and Meyerbeer to Strauss, Henze, and Adams in studies of composition, national identity, transmission, reception, sources, media, iconography, humanism, the art of collecting, theory, analysis, commerce, singers, directors, criticism, editions, politics, staging, race, and gender. The title of the penultimate section, Opera on the Edge, suggests the uncertainty of opera's future: is opera headed toward catastrophe or have social and musical developments of the last hundred years stimulated something new and exciting, and, well, operatic? In an epilogue to the volume, a contemporary opera composer speaks candidly about opera composition today. The Oxford Handbook of Opera is an essential companion to scholars, educators, advanced students, performers, and knowledgeable listeners: those who simply love opera.
Download or read book Musicology The Key Concepts written by David Beard and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-01-22 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now in an updated 2nd edition, Musicology: The Key Concepts is a handy A-Z reference guide to the terms and concepts associated with contemporary musicology. Drawing on critical theory with a focus on new musicology, this updated edition contains over 35 new entries including: Autobiography Music and Conflict Deconstruction Postcolonialism Disability Music after 9/11 Masculinity Gay Musicology Aesthetics Ethnicity Interpretation Subjectivity With all entries updated, and suggestions for further reading throughout, this text is an essential resource for all students of music, musicology, and wider performance related humanities disciplines.
Download or read book The Rough Guide to Opera written by Matthew Boyden and published by Rough Guides. This book was released on 2002 with total page 756 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sketches of opera composers, opera synopses, and CD reviews.
