Harrison Birtwistle's Operas and Music Theatre PDF Download

Author: David Beard
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521895340
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 489

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Book Description
A definitive source study of the stage works of Harrison Birtwistle, one of Britain's foremost living composers.

Author: Jonathan Cross
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351564137
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
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.

Author: David Beard
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107093740
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 335

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Book Description
This collection represents current research on Birtwistle's music, reflecting the diversity of his work through a wide range of perspectives.

Author: Robert Adlington
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521027802
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 261

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Book Description
This book gives a comprehensive view of Harrison Birtwistle's music, considering its wider cultural significance.

Author: Fiona Maddocks
Publisher: Faber & Faber
ISBN: 0571308120
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 213

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Book Description
'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.

Author: Harrison Birtwistle
Publisher: Boosey & Hawkes Incorporated
ISBN:
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 80

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Book Description
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.

Author: Jonathan Cross
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801486722
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 314

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Book Description
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.

Author: Mervyn Cooke
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521780094
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 430

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Book Description
A collection of specially commissioned essays investigating the extraordinary diversity of twentieth-century opera.

Author: Alex Ross
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1429932880
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 640

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Book Description
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.

Author: Michael Hall
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd
ISBN: 1783270128
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 327

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Book Description
The author, a former BBC radio producer, conducted interviews with many leading British composers of the day, and his account provides for a unique insight into this often overlooked genre.