Download or read book Twentieth Century British Authors and the Rise of Opera in Britain written by Irene Morra and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-02-17 with total page 146 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is the first to examine in depth the contributions of major British authors such as W. H. Auden and E. M. Forster, as critics and librettists, to the rise of British opera in the twentieth century. The perceived literary values of British authors, as much as the musical innovations of British composers, informed the aesthetic development of British opera. Indeed, British opera emerged as a simultaneously literary and musical project. Too often, operatic adaptations are compared superficially to their original sources. This is a particular problem for British opera, which has become increasingly defined artistically by the literary sophistication of its narrative sources. The resulting collaborations between literary figures and composers have crucial implications for the development of both opera and literature. Twentieth-Century British Authors and the Rise of Opera in Britain reveals the importance of this literary involvement in operatic adaptation to literature and literary studies, to music and musicology, and to cultural and theoretical studies.

Download or read book Twentieth Century British Authors and the Rise of Opera in Britain written by Irene Morra and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-02-17 with total page 146 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is the first to examine in depth the contributions of major British authors such as W. H. Auden and E. M. Forster, as critics and librettists, to the rise of British opera in the twentieth century. The perceived literary values of British authors, as much as the musical innovations of British composers, informed the aesthetic development of British opera. Indeed, British opera emerged as a simultaneously literary and musical project. Too often, operatic adaptations are compared superficially to their original sources. This is a particular problem for British opera, which has become increasingly defined artistically by the literary sophistication of its narrative sources. The resulting collaborations between literary figures and composers have crucial implications for the development of both opera and literature. Twentieth-Century British Authors and the Rise of Opera in Britain reveals the importance of this literary involvement in operatic adaptation to literature and literary studies, to music and musicology, and to cultural and theoretical studies.

Download or read book Opera in the Jazz Age written by Alexandra Wilson and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Opera in the Jazz Age: Cultural Politics in 1920s Britain explores the interaction between opera and popular culture at a moment when there was a growing imperative to categorize art forms as "highbrow," "middlebrow," or "lowbrow." In this provocative and timely study, Alexandra Wilson considers how the opera debate of the 1920s continues to shape the ways in which we discuss the art form, and draws connections between the battle of the brows and present-day discussions about elitism.

Download or read book Verse Drama in England 1900 2015 written by Irene Morra and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2016-10-20 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Verse Drama in England, 1900-2015 provides a critical and historical exploration of a tradition of modern dramatic creativity that has received very little scholarly attention. Exploring the emergence of a distinctly modern verse drama at the turn of the century and its development into the twenty-first, it counters common assumptions that the form is a marginal, fundamentally outdated curiosity. Through an examination of the extensive and diverse engagement of literary and theatrical writers, directors and musicians, Irene Morra identifies in modern verse drama a consistent and often prominent attempt to expand upon, revitalize, and redefine the contemporary English stage. Dramatists discussed include Stephen Phillips, Gordon Bottomley, John Masefield, James Elroy Flecker, T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Ronald Duncan, Christopher Fry, John Arden, Anne Ridler, Tony Harrison, Steven Berkoff, Caryl Churchill, and Mike Bartlett. The book explores the negotiation of these dramatists with the changing position of verse drama in relation to constructions of national and communal audience, aesthetic challenge, and dramatic heritage. Key to the study is the self-conscious positioning of many of these dramatists in relation to an assumed mainstream tradition – and the various critical responses that that positioning has provoked. The study advocates for a scholarly revaluation of what must be identified as an influential and overlooked tradition of aesthetic challenge and creativity.

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.

Download or read book The Routledge Companion to Music and Modern Literature written by Rachael Durkin and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-05-26 with total page 637 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Modern literature has always been obsessed by music. It cannot seem to think about itself without obsessing about music. And music has returned the favour. The Routledge Companion to Music and Modern Literature addresses this relationship as a significant contribution to the burgeoning field of word and music studies. The 37 chapters within consider the partnership through four lenses—the universal, opera and literature, musical and literary forms, and popular music and literature—and touch upon diverse and pertinent themes for our modern times, ranging from misogyny to queerness, racial inequality to the claimed universality of whiteness. This Companion therefore offers an essential resource for all who try to decode the musico-literary exchange.

Download or read book Edinburgh Companion to Literature and Music written by Delia da Sousa Correa and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2020-06-18 with total page 720 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Provides a pioneering interdisciplinary overview of the literature and music of nine centuriesOffers research essays by literary specialists and musicologists that provides access to the best current interdisciplinary scholarship on connections between literature and musicIncludes five historical sections from the Middle Ages to the present, with editorial introductions to enhance understanding of relationships between literature and music in each periodCharts and extends work in this expanding interdisciplinary field to provide an essential resource for researchers with an interest in literature and other mediaBringing together seventy-one newly commissioned original chapters by literary specialists and musicologists, this book presents the most recent interdisciplinary research into literature and music. In five parts, the chapters cover the Middle Ages to the present. The volume introduction and methodology chapters define key concepts for investigating the interdependence of these two art forms and a concluding chapter looks to the future of this interdisciplinary field. An editorial introduction to each historical part explains the main features of the relationships between literature and music in the period and outlines recent developments in scholarship. Contributions represent a multiplicity of approaches: theoretical, contextual and close reading. Case studies reach beyond literature and music to engage with related fields including philosophy, history of science, theatre, broadcast media and popular culture.This trailblazing companion charts and extends the work in this expanding interdisciplinary field and is an essential resource for researchers with an interest in literature and other media.

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 The Oxford Handbook of Adaptation Studies written by Thomas Leitch and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-03-17 with total page 785 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of forty new essays, written by the leading scholars in adaptation studies and distinguished contributors from outside the field, is the most comprehensive volume on adaptation ever published. Written to appeal alike to specialists in adaptation, scholars in allied fields, and general readers, it hearkens back to the foundations of adaptation studies a century and more ago, surveys its ferment of activity over the past twenty years, and looks forward to the future. It considers the very different problems in adapting the classics, from the Bible to Frankenstein to Philip Roth, and the commons, from online mashups and remixes to adult movies. It surveys a dizzying range of adaptations around the world, from Latin American telenovelas to Czech cinema, from Hong Kong comics to Classics Illustrated, from Bollywood to zombies, and explores the ways media as different as radio, opera, popular song, and videogames have handled adaptation. Going still further, it examines the relations between adaptation and such intertextual practices as translation, illustration, prequels, sequels, remakes, intermediality, and transmediality. The volume's contributors consider the similarities and differences between adaptation and history, adaptation and performance, adaptation and revision, and textual and biological adaptation, casting an appreciative but critical eye on the theory and practice of adaptation scholars--and, occasionally, each other. The Oxford Handbook of Adaptation Studies offers specific suggestions for how to read, teach, create, and write about adaptations in order to prepare for a world in which adaptation, already ubiquitous, is likely to become ever more important.

Download or read book The New Elizabethan Age written by Irene Morra and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2016-09-30 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the first half of the twentieth century, many writers and artists turnedto the art and received example of the Elizabethans as a means ofarticulating an emphatic (and anti-Victorian) modernity. By the middleof that century, this cultural neo-Elizabethanism had become absorbedwithin a broader mainstream discourse of national identity, heritage andcultural performance. Taking strength from the Coronation of a new, youngQueen named Elizabeth, the New Elizabethanism of the 1950s heralded anation that would now see its 'modern', televised monarch preside over animminently glorious and artistic age.This book provides the first in-depth investigation of New Elizabethanismand its legacy. With contributions from leading cultural practitioners andscholars, its essays explore New Elizabethanism as variously manifestin ballet and opera, the Coronation broadcast and festivities, nationalhistoriography and myth, the idea of the 'Young Elizabethan', celebrations ofair travel and new technologies, and the New Shakespeareanism of theatreand television. As these essays expose, New Elizabethanism was muchmore than a brief moment of optimistic hyperbole. Indeed, from moderndrama and film to the reinternment of Richard III, from the London Olympicsto the funeral of Margaret Thatcher, it continues to pervade contemporaryartistic expression, politics, and key moments of national pageantry.

Download or read book Twentieth Century Opera in England and the United States written by Cameron Northouse and published by G. K. Hall. This book was released on 1976 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

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 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 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 Tonic to the Nation Making English Music in the Festival of Britain written by Nathaniel G. Lew and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-07-01 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Long remembered chiefly for its modernist exhibitions on the South Bank in London, the 1951 Festival of Britain also showcased British artistic creativity in all its forms. In Tonic to the Nation, Nathaniel G. Lew tells the story of the English classical music and opera composed and revived for the Festival, and explores how these long-overlooked components of the Festival helped define English music in the post-war period. Drawing on a wealth of archival material, Lew looks closely at the work of the newly chartered Arts Council of Great Britain, for whom the Festival of Britain provided the first chance to assert its authority over British culture. The Arts Council devised many musical programs for the Festival, including commissions of new concert works, a vast London Season of almost 200 concerts highlighting seven centuries of English musical creativity, and several schemes to commission and perform new operas. These projects were not merely directed at bringing audiences to hear new and old national music, but to share broader goals of framing the national repertory, negotiating between the conflicting demands of conservative and progressive tastes, and using music to forge new national definitions in a changed post-war world.

Download or read book Adaptations written by Deborah Cartmell and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2022 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Adaptations: Critical and Primary Sources is a three-volume reference resource that brings together over 80 landmark texts in adaptation studies. Volume One covers the history of adaptation studies, by plotting the 'prehistory' of the field, beginning with Vachel Lindsay's classic Art of the Moving Picture (1915), through Virginia Woolf's classic essay on 'The Cinema' through to some of the most important critical and theoretical interventions up until the 1990s when the area really emerges as a critical force in the academy. Volume Two collects essays from the last 25 years, showing how the scholarly legacy laid out in Volume One still has a profound impact on adaptation studies today, while charting the process of critical and theoretical maturation. This volume shows how adaptations studies has outgrown its contested place 'in the gap' of film and literary studies and how its interventions transcend disciplinary perspectives across the arts and humanities. Volume Three covers key case studies, such as Christine Geraghty's take on adapting Westerns, Ian Inglis' understanding of the transformation of music into movies, and Eckart Voigts' concept on Jane Austen and participatory culture. With topics ranging from the limitations of the novel to adapting stage to screen, contributions from a wide range of international scholars, film critics and novelists combine to make Adaptations: Critical and Primary Sources an original overview of critical debates today. Cartmell and Whelehan introduce each excerpt and offer a critical overview of the collected work, the rationale for its inclusion and suggestions for further reading."--

Download or read book Ancient Drama in Music for the Modern Stage written by Peter Brown and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2010-09-02 with total page 1755 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Opera was invented at the end of the sixteenth century in imitation of the supposed style of delivery of ancient Greek tragedy, and, since then, operas based on Greek drama have been among the most important in the repertoire. This collection of essays by leading authorities in the fields of Classics, Musicology, Dance Studies, English Literature, Modern Languages, and Theatre Studies provides an exceptionally wide-ranging and detailed overview of the relationship between the two genres. Since tragedies have played a much larger part than comedies in this branch of operatic history, the volume mostly concentrates on the tragic repertoire, but a chapter on musical versions of Aristophanes' Lysistrata is included, as well as discussions of incidental music, a very important part of the musical reception of ancient drama, from Andrea Gabrieli in 1585 to Harrison Birtwistle and Judith Weir in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.