Download or read book Benjamin Britten written by Paul Kildea and published by Penguin Classics. This book was released on 2014-02-27 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Paul Kildea's Benjamin Britten: A Life in the Twentieth Century is the definitive biography of Britain's greatest modern composer - now in paperback Benjamin Britten was Britain's greatest twentieth-century composer, who broke decisively with figures such as Elgar and Vaughan Williams and recreated English music in a fresh, modern, European form. Paul Kildea's biography has been acclaimed as the definitive account of Britten's extraordinary life, exploring his deeply held and controversial pacifism; his complex forty-year relationship with Peter Pears; and his creation of an artistic community in Aldeburgh. Above all, however, this book helps us understand the relationship of Britten's music to his life, and takes us as far into its unique alchemy as we are ever likely to go. PAUL KILDEA is a writer and conductor who has performed many of the Britten works he writes about, in opera houses and concert halls from Sydney to Hamburg. His previous books include Selling Britten (2002) and (as editor) Britten on Music (2003). He was Head of Music at the Aldeburgh Festival between 1999 and 2002 and subsequently Artistic Director of the Wigmore Hall in London, and lives in Berlin. 'Must now rank as the standard work' Financial Times 'Indispensable ... This is a masterly, highly readable account and the most comprehensive to date of the life and work of one of the 20th century's great musical figures' Barry Millington, Evening Standard ' A] wise, cautious, challenging book ... Kildea's verbal explorations of the music are done with level-headed sensitivity leavened by a quirky lightness of touch' Alexandra Harris, New Statesman

Download or read book Britten s Century written by Mark Bostridge and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2013-01-01 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: November 2013 marks the centenary of the birth of Benjamin Britten. Here is an outstanding collection of essays to mark the event.

Download or read book Benjamin Britten written by Michael Oliver and published by Phaidon Press. This book was released on 2008-04-23 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A portrait of the life and work of Benjamin Britten.

Download or read book Britten s Century written by Mark Bostridge and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2013-06-20 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 2013 marks the centenary of the birth of Benjamin Britten. Here is an outstanding collection of essays to mark the event. Britten's Century considers various aspects of Britten's life and work. The book is written by biographers, performers and music critics. Here is a wealth of subject matter - Britten's operatic output, his orchestral works, his contribution to the revival of English song. Biographically, this book moves on beyond the relationship with Peter Pears and the salacious speculation about his infatuation with various boys, to a consideration of Britten's experience as a homosexual man living in a largely homophobic society. Another area here which is often overlooked is the view of Britten from outside the British Isles - the USA and Italy, where his operas have long been extremely popular.

Download or read book Britten s Musical Language written by Philip Rupprecht and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2006-11-23 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Blending insights from linguistic and social theories of speech, ritual and narrative with music-analytic and historical criticism, Britten's Musical Language offers interesting perspectives on the composer's fusion of verbal and musical utterance in opera and song and provides close interpretative studies of the major scores.

Download or read book Benjamin Britten written by Paul Kildea and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2013-01-28 with total page 688 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Published to mark the beginning of the Britten centenary year in 2013, Paul Kildea's Benjamin Britten: A Life in the Twentieth Century is the definitive biography of Britain's greatest modern composer. In the eyes of many, Benjamin Britten was our finest composer since Purcell (a figure who often inspired him) three hundred years earlier. He broke decisively with the romantic, nationalist school of figures such as Parry, Elgar and Vaughan Williams and recreated English music in a fresh, modern, European form. With Peter Grimes (1945), Billy Budd (1951) and The Turn of the Screw (1954), he arguably composed the last operas - from any composer in any country - which have entered both the popular consciousness and the musical canon. He did all this while carrying two disadvantages to worldly success - his passionately held pacifism, which made him suspect to the authorities during and immediately after the Second World War - and his homosexuality, specifically his forty-year relationship with Peter Pears, for whom many of his greatest operatic roles and vocal works were created. The atmosphere and personalities of Aldeburgh in his native Suffolk also form another wonderful dimension to the book. Kildea shows clearly how Britten made this creative community, notably with the foundation of the Aldeburgh Festival and the building of Snape Maltings, but also how costly the determination that this required was. Above all, this book helps us understand the relationship of Britten's music to his life, and takes us as far into his creative process as we are ever likely to go. Kildea reads dozens of Britten's works with enormous intelligence and sensitivity, in a way which those without formal musical training can understand. It is one of the most moving and enjoyable biographies of a creative artist of any kind to have appeared for years. Paul Kildea is a writer and conductor who has performed many of the Britten works he writes about, in opera houses and concert halls from Sydney to Hamburg. His previous books include Selling Britten (2002) and (as editor) Britten on Music (2003). He was Head of Music at the Aldeburgh Festival between 1999 and 2002 and subsequently Artistic Director of the Wigmore Hall in London.

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 Britten s Children written by John Bridcut and published by . This book was released on 2007-06 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Britten's Children confronts the edgy subject of the composer's obsessional yet strangely innocent relationships with adolescent boys. One of the hallmarks of Benjamin Britten's music is his use of boys' voices, and John Bridcut uses this to create a fresh prism through which to view the composer's life. Interweaving discussion of the music he wrote for and about children with interviews with the boys whom Britten befriended, Bridcut explores the influence of these unique friendships - notably with the late David Hemmings - and how they helped Britten maintain links with his own happy childhood. In a remarkable part of the book Bridcut tells for the first time the full story of Britten's love affair in the 1930s with the 18-year-old German Wulff Scherchen, son of the conductor Hermann Scherchen. As Paul Hoggart of The Times commented, 'this type of love belonged to an emotional landscape that has vanished for ever, and we are the poorer for it'. Since making the film, the author has extended his research to include friendships Britten had with children which have not previously been documented.The documentary Britten's Children won the Royal Philharmonic Society's 2005 Award for Creative Communication: 'this serious and beautiful film explored one aspect of a composer's life in great depth. Avoiding the temptation of sensationalism, Britten's Children was imaginatively researched and both touching and revelatory'.

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 Music and Sexuality in Britten written by Philip Brett and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2006-11-17 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Publisher description

Download or read book Essays on Benjamin Britten from a Centenary Symposium written by Quinn Patrick Ankrum and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2017-06-20 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Coming to terms with Britten’s music is no easy task. The complex, often contradictory language associated with Britten’s style likely stems from his double interest in progressive composition and immediate connection with a broad, popular audience – an apparent paradox in the splintered musical culture of the 20th century – as well as from complicated truths in his own life, such as his love for a country that accepted neither his sexuality nor his politics. As a result, the attempt to describe his music can tell us as much about our own biases and the inadequacies of our analytic tools as it does about the music itself. Such audits of our scholarly language and strategies are vital in light of the still-murky view we have of twentieth century music. This opportunity for academic self-reflection is the reason Britten studies such as this book are so important. The essays included here challenge assumptions about musical constructs, relationships between text and music, and the influences of age, spirituality, and personal relationships on compositional technique. Part One offers nine essays originally compiled for a symposium designed to recognize the composer’s unique and varied contributions to music. The authors include performers, musicologists, and music theorists, and their work will appeal to a wide diversity of readers. The topics and methodologies range from archival research and analysis of text and music to theoretical modelling using techniques such as set theory, metric theory, and prolongation. While the papers were initially conceived in isolation from one another, the collaborative focus of the symposium created opportunities for authors to expose points of intersection. This deliberate reconciliation of lines of inquiry has yielded a more balanced and unified collection of essays than typically found in a simple record of proceedings. Furthermore, the chapters presented here benefit from the wealth of Britten research produced since the 2013 centenary. Part Two provides an account of the symposium performances and lecture recitals that accompanied and enriched the academic presentations. The reader will encounter fully the journey taken by symposium presenters, participants, and attendees by reviewing the concerts, lecture recitals, and papers in the context of the full symposium program.

Download or read book Benjamin Britten written by Peter John Hodgson and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 268 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 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 20th century Composers written by Michael Oliver and published by Phaidon. This book was released on 1996-09-25 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A portrait of the life and work of Benjamin Britten.

Download or read book Benjamin Britten Studies written by Vicki P. Stroeher and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2017 with total page 556 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The shock of exile / Paul Kildea -- Britten, Paul Bunyan, and American-ness / Vicki P. Stroeher -- Collaborating with Corwin, CBS, and the BBC / Jenny Doctor -- An empire built on shingle / Justin Vickers -- Save me from those suffering boys / Byron Adams -- Britten's (and Pears's) Beloved / Louis Niebur -- Notes of unbelonging / Lloyd Whitesell -- Take these tokens that you may feel us near / Colleen Renihan -- Traces of Nō / Kevin Salfen -- Britten and the augmented sixth / Christopher Mark -- Quickenings of the heart / Philip Rupprecht -- Reviving Paul Bunyan / Danielle Ward-Griffin -- Striking a compromise / Thornton Miller -- From Boosey & Hawkes to Faber Music / Nicholas Clark -- The man himself / Lucy Walker -- Epilogue / Vicki P. Stroeher and Justin Vickers

Download or read book The Rest Is Noise written by Alex Ross and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2007-10-16 with total page 706 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism A New York Times Book Review Top Ten Book of the Year Time magazine Top Ten Nonfiction Book of 2007 Newsweek Favorite Books of 2007 A Washington Post Book World Best Book of 2007 In this sweeping and dramatic narrative, Alex Ross, music critic for The New Yorker, weaves together the histories of the twentieth century and its music, from Vienna before the First World War to Paris in the twenties; from Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia to downtown New York in the sixties and seventies up to the present. Taking readers into the labyrinth of modern style, Ross draws revelatory connections between the century's most influential composers and the wider culture. The Rest Is Noise is an astonishing history of the twentieth century as told through its music.

Download or read book Britten s Unquiet Pasts written by Heather Wiebe and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-10-04 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Heather Wiebe's book looks to the music of Benjamin Britten to elucidate a British postwar vision of cultural renewal.