Harrison Birtwistles Operas And Music Theatre

Author : David Beard
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1139789082
Total Pages : 489 pages
Book Rating : 4.80/5 ( download)

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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.

Author : Jonathan Cross
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1351564137
Total Pages : 196 pages
Book Rating : 4.37/5 ( download)

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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.

Author : David Beard
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 0521895340
Total Pages : 489 pages
Book Rating : 4.47/5 ( download)

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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.

Author : David Beard
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1107093740
Total Pages : 335 pages
Book Rating : 4.44/5 ( download)

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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.

Author : Robert Adlington
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 0521027802
Total Pages : 261 pages
Book Rating : 4.09/5 ( download)

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

Author : Fiona Maddocks
Publisher : Faber & Faber
ISBN 13 : 0571308120
Total Pages : 213 pages
Book Rating : 4.25/5 ( download)

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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.

Author : Harrison Birtwistle
Publisher : Boosey & Hawkes Incorporated
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 80 pages
Book Rating : 4.49/5 ( download)

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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.

Author : Jonathan Cross
Publisher : Cornell University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780801486722
Total Pages : 314 pages
Book Rating : 4.26/5 ( download)

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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.

Author : Mervyn Cooke
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780521780094
Total Pages : 430 pages
Book Rating : 4.98/5 ( download)

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

Author : Alex Ross
Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN 13 : 1429932880
Total Pages : 640 pages
Book Rating : 4.82/5 ( download)

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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 640 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.