Composing Australia: Nostalgia and National Identity in the Music of Malcolm Williamson
Composing Australia: Nostalgia and National Identity in the Music of Malcolm Williamson

Author: Carolyn Philpott

Publisher: Lyrebird Press lyrebirdpress.music.unimelb.edu.au

Published: 2018-11-01

Total Pages: 250

ISBN-13: 0734037899

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Brilliant, provocative, compassionate—the composer Malcolm Williamson was one of Australia’s most famous expatriates. As Carolyn Philpott explains, his nostalgia for his homeland lasted fifty years, from his emigration in 1953 until his death in 2003. In works such as the ballet The Display, Symphony no. 6 and The Dawn Is at Hand, he explored inventive ways of expressing his Australian identity, collaborating with Australian artists, paying homage to Australian musicians and exposing his sorrow for the treatment of Indigenous peoples. As the first book-length examination of Williamson’s music, Composing Australia is a portrait of an intriguing and always imaginative Australian.

The Symphony in Australia, 1960-2020
The Symphony in Australia, 1960-2020

Author: Rhoderick McNeill

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2022-08-26

Total Pages: 278

ISBN-13: 1000578623

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The Symphony remained a major orchestral form in Australia between 1960 and 2020, with a body of diverse and interesting symphonies produced during the 1960s and 1970s that defied the widespread modernist trends of serialism, electronic music and indeterminism that seemed harbingers of the symphony’s demise. From the late 1970s onwards, many Australian composers chose to work in styles that admitted modal and tonal melodic and harmonic elements with regular pulse. Major cycles of symphonies by Carl Vine, Brenton Broadstock and Ross Edwards began to appear in the late 1980s. Other prolific symphonists like Paul Paviour (10 symphonies), David Morgan (15 symphonies), Philip Bracanin (11), Peter Tahourdin (5), John Polglase (5) and many others demonstrated a revived interest in the form. This trend continued into the first two decades of the present century with symphonies by Matthew Hindson, Katy Abbott, Stuart Greenbaum, Andrew Schultz, Mark Isaacs and Gordon Kerry. This renewed interest in the symphony reflects similar trends in Britain and the United States. Rhoderick McNeill provides a comprehensive introduction to this large body of music with the aim of making the music and its composers known to concert- goers, music educators and students, conductors and music entrepreneurs.

Uses of Heritage
Uses of Heritage

Author: Laurajane Smith

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2006-11-22

Total Pages: 369

ISBN-13: 1134368038

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Examining international case studies including USA, Asia, Australia and New Zealand, this book identifies and explores the use of heritage throughout the world. Challenging the idea that heritage value is self-evident, and that things must be preserved, it demonstrates how it gives tangibility to the values that underpin different communities.

Music after the Fall
Music after the Fall

Author: Tim Rutherford-Johnson

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2017-02-01

Total Pages: 363

ISBN-13: 0520959043

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"...the best extant map of our sonic shadowlands, and it has changed how I listen."—Alex Ross, The New Yorker "...an essential survey of contemporary music."—New York Times "…sharp, provacative and always on the money. The listening list alone promises months of fresh discovery, the main text a fresh new way of navigating the world of sound."—The Wire 2017 Music Book of the Year—Alex Ross, The New Yorker Music after the Fall is the first book to survey contemporary Western art music within the transformed political, cultural, and technological environment of the post–Cold War era. In this book, Tim Rutherford-Johnson considers musical composition against this changed backdrop, placing it in the context of globalization, digitization, and new media. Drawing connections with the other arts, in particular visual art and architecture, he expands the definition of Western art music to include forms of composition, experimental music, sound art, and crossover work from across the spectrum, inside and beyond the concert hall. Each chapter is a critical consideration of a wide range of composers, performers, works, and institutions, and develops a broad and rich picture of the new music ecosystem, from North American string quartets to Lebanese improvisers, from electroacoustic music studios in South America to ruined pianos in the Australian outback. Rutherford-Johnson puts forth a new approach to the study of contemporary music that relies less on taxonomies of style and technique than on the comparison of different responses to common themes of permission, fluidity, excess, and loss.

Songs of the Finnish Migration
Songs of the Finnish Migration

Author: Thomas A. Dubois

Publisher: Languages and Folklore of Uppe

Published: 2020-03-10

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13: 9780299327149

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Songs of the Finnish Migration presents music and lyrics for more than eighty Finnish-language immigrant songs, alongside singable English translations and detailed notes on migration history and music in the New World. These songs provide a vivid and imaginative portrayal of momentous migration that forever changed Finnish and Finnish American society.

Middlebrow Modernism
Middlebrow Modernism

Author: Christopher Chowrimootoo

Publisher: University of California Press

Published: 2018-11-06

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 0520298659

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At publication date, a free ebook version of this title will be available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. Situated at the intersections of twentieth-century music history, historiography, and aesthetics, Middlebrow Modernism uses Benjamin Britten’s operas to illustrate the ways in which composers, critics, and audiences mediated the “great divide” between modernism and mass culture. Reviving mid-century discussions of the middlebrow, Christopher Chowrimootoo demonstrates how Britten’s works allowed audiences to have their modernist cake and eat it: to revel in the pleasures of consonance, lyricism, and theatrical spectacle even while enjoying the prestige that came from rejecting them. By focusing on moments when reigning aesthetic oppositions and hierarchies threatened to collapse, this study offers a powerful model for recovering shades of grey in the traditionally black-and-white historiographies of twentieth-century music.

Music of a Life
Music of a Life

Author: Andreï Makine

Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.

Published: 2011-10-28

Total Pages: 75

ISBN-13: 162872210X

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A brief but extraordinarily powerful novel by the author of Dreams of My Russian Summers and Requiem for a Lost Empire, Music of a Life is set in the period just before, and two decades after, World War II. Alexeï Berg’s father is a well-known dramatist, his mother a famous opera singer. But during Stalin’s reign of terror in the 1930s they, like millions of other Russians, come under attack for their presumed lack of political purity. Harassed and proscribed, they have nonetheless, on the eve of Hitler’s war, not yet been arrested. And young Alexeï himself, a budding classical pianist, has been allowed to continue his musical studies. His first solo concert is scheduled for May 24, 1941. Two days before the concert, on his way home from his final rehearsal, he sees his parents being arrested, taken from their Moscow apartment. Knowing his own arrest will not be far behind, Alexeï flees to the country house of his fiancée, where again betrayal awaits him. He flees, one step ahead of the dreaded secret police until, taking on the identity of a dead soldier, he enlists in the Soviet army. Thus begins his seemingly endless journey, through war and peace, until he lands, two decades later, in a snowbound train station in the Urals, where he relates his harrowing saga to the novel’s narrator. An international bestseller, Music of a Life is, in the words of Le Monde, “extremely powerful . . . a gem.”

Spaces of Identity
Spaces of Identity

Author: David Morley

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2002-09-11

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13: 1134865309

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We are living through a time when old identities - nation, culture and gender are melting down. Spaces of Identity examines the ways in which collective cultural identities are being reshaped under conditions of a post-modern geography and a communications environment of cable and satellite broadcasting. To address current problems of identity, the authors look at contemporary politics between Europe and its most significant others: America; Islam and the Orient. They show that it's against these places that Europe's own identity has been and is now being defined. A stimulating account of the complex and contradictory nature of contemporary cultural identities.

The Australian Symphony from Federation to 1960
The Australian Symphony from Federation to 1960

Author: Rhoderick McNeill

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-03-23

Total Pages: 278

ISBN-13: 1317040864

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The symphony retained its primacy as the most prestigious large-scale orchestral form throughout the first half of the twentieth century, particularly in Britain, Russia and the United States. Likewise, Australian composers produced a steady stream of symphonies throughout the period from Federation (1901) through to the end of the 1950s. Stylistically, these works ranged from essays in late nineteenth-century romanticism, twentieth-century nationalism, neo-classicism and near-atonality. Australian symphonies were most prolific during the 1950s, with 36 local entries in the 1951 Commonwealth Jubilee Symphony competition. This extensive repertoire was overshadowed by the emergence of a new generation of composers and critics during the 1960s who tended to regard older Australian music as old-fashioned and derivative. The Australian Symphony from Federation to 1960 is the first study of this neglected genre and has four aims: firstly, to show the development of symphonic composition in Australia from Federation to 1960; secondly, to highlight the achievement of the main composers who wrote symphonies; thirdly, to advocate the restoration and revival of this repertory; and, lastly, to take a step towards a recasting of the narrative of Australian concert music from Federation to the present. In particular, symphonies by Marshall-Hall, Hart, Bainton, Hughes, Le Gallienne and Morgan emerge as works of particular note.