Harrison Birtwistle in Recent Years
Author: Michael Hall
Publisher: Robson Books Limited
Published: 1998
Total Pages: 240
ISBN-13:
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Harrison Birtwistle
Author: Jonathan Cross
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2000
Total Pages: 314
ISBN-13: 9780801486722
DOWNLOAD EBOOKSir 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.
The Minotaur
Author: Harrison Birtwistle
Publisher: Boosey & Hawkes Incorporated
Published: 2008
Total Pages: 80
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKRetelling 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.
Harrison Birtwistle Studies
Author: David Beard
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2015-04-09
Total Pages: 335
ISBN-13: 1107093740
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis collection represents current research on Birtwistle's music, reflecting the diversity of his work through a wide range of perspectives.
Harrison Birtwistle Studies
Author: David Beard
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2015-04-09
Total Pages: 335
ISBN-13: 1316300390
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis collection of essays celebrates the work of Sir Harrison Birtwistle, one of the key figures in European contemporary music. Representing current research on Birtwistle's music, this book reflects the diversity of his work in terms of periods, genres, forms, techniques and related issues through a wide range of critical, theoretical and analytical interpretations and perspectives. Written by a team of international scholars, all of whom bring a deep research-based knowledge and insight to their chosen study, this collection extends the scholarly understanding of Birtwistle through new engagements with the man and the music. The contributors provide detailed studies of Birtwistle's engagement with electronic music in the 1960s and 1970s, and develop theoretical explanations of his fascination with pulse, rhythm and time. They also explore in detail Birtwistle's interest in poetry, instrumental drama, gesture, procession and landscape, and consider the compositional processes that underpin these issues.
Harrison Birtwistle
Author: Fiona Maddocks
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2014-05-13
Total Pages: 213
ISBN-13: 0571308120
DOWNLOAD EBOOK'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.
The Music of Harrison Birtwistle
Author: Robert Adlington
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2006-11-02
Total Pages: 261
ISBN-13: 0521027802
DOWNLOAD EBOOKHarrison Birtwistle has become the most eminent and acclaimed of contemporary British composers. This book provides a comprehensive view of his large and varied output. It contains descriptions of every published work, and also of a number of withdrawn and unpublished pieces. Revealing light is often cast on the more familiar pieces by considering these lesser-known areas of Birtwistle's oeuvre. The book is structured around a number of broad themes - themes of significance to Birtwistle, but also to much other music. These include theatre, song, time and texture. This approach emphasizes the music's multifarious ways of meaning; now that even the academic world no longer takes the merits of 'difficult' contemporary music for granted, it is all the more important to assess what it represents beyond mere technical innovation. Adlington thus avoids in-depth technical analysis, focusing instead upon the music's wider cultural significance.
Harrison Birtwistle: The Mask of Orpheus
Author: Jonathan Cross
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-07-05
Total Pages: 196
ISBN-13: 1351564137
DOWNLOAD EBOOKHailed 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.
Opera after 1900
Author: Margaret Notley
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-07-05
Total Pages: 538
ISBN-13: 1351555790
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe 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.
Exploring Twentieth-Century Music
Author: Arnold Whittall
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2003-02-27
Total Pages: 258
ISBN-13: 9780521016681
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn this wide-ranging book, Arnold Whittall considers a group of important composers of the twentieth century, including Debussy, Webern, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Bartók, Janácek, Britten, Carter, Birtwistle, Andriessen and Adams. He moves skilfully between the cultural and the technical, the general and the particular, to explore the various contexts and critical perspectives which illuminate certain works by these composers. Considering the extent to which place and nationality contribute to the definition of musical character, he investigates the relevance of such images as mirroring and symmetry, the function of genre and the way types of identity may be suggested by such labels as classical, modernist, secular, sacred radical, traditional. These categories are considered as flexible and interactive and they generate a wide-ranging series of narratives delineating some of the most fundamental forces which affected composers and their works within the complex and challenging world of the twentieth century.
