Harrison Birtwistle The Mask Of Orpheus

Author : Jonathan Cross
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 205 pages
File Size : 45,8 Mb
Release : 2017-07-05
Category : Music
ISBN : 9781351564120

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Harrison Birtwistle: The Mask of Orpheus by Jonathan Cross Pdf

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 : Jonathan Cross
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 196 pages
File Size : 46,9 Mb
Release : 2017-07-05
Category : Music
ISBN : 9781351564137

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Harrison Birtwistle: The Mask of Orpheus by Jonathan Cross Pdf

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 : Harrison Birtwistle,Peter Zinovieff
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 88 pages
File Size : 49,6 Mb
Release : 1986
Category : Drama
ISBN : STANFORD:36105042055934

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The Mask of Orpheus by Harrison Birtwistle,Peter Zinovieff Pdf

Author : David Beard,Kenneth Gloag,Nicholas Jones
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 335 pages
File Size : 55,5 Mb
Release : 2015-04-09
Category : Music
ISBN : 9781107093744

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Harrison Birtwistle Studies by David Beard,Kenneth Gloag,Nicholas Jones Pdf

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

Author : David Beard
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 489 pages
File Size : 46,7 Mb
Release : 2012-10-25
Category : Music
ISBN : 9780521895347

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Harrison Birtwistle's Operas and Music Theatre by David Beard Pdf

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

Author : Fiona Maddocks,Sir Harrison Birtwistle
Publisher : Faber & Faber
Page : 213 pages
File Size : 42,8 Mb
Release : 2014-05-13
Category : Music
ISBN : 9780571308125

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Harrison Birtwistle by Fiona Maddocks,Sir Harrison Birtwistle Pdf

'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 : Robert Adlington
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 261 pages
File Size : 49,9 Mb
Release : 2006-11-02
Category : Music
ISBN : 9780521027809

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The Music of Harrison Birtwistle by Robert Adlington Pdf

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

Author : Jonathan Cross
Publisher : Faber & Faber
Page : 264 pages
File Size : 55,5 Mb
Release : 2014-10-16
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9780571317806

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Harrison Birtwistle by Jonathan Cross Pdf

Love it or loathe it, few would disagree that the music of Harrison Birtwistle stands amongst the most assured, original and challenging music ever to have been produced by a British composer. While for some the uncompromisingly modernist surface of his music can be an obstacle to closer acquaintance, for others, it is Birtwistle's articulation of deep aspects of the human psyche that continues to excite and fascinate. In this book, Jonathan Cross - a leading commentator on contemporary music - aims to uncover the sources of Birtwistle's thinking, and to present a critical account of his musical, dramatic and aesthetic preoccupations through an examination of such topics as theatre, myth, ritual, pastoral, pulse and line. He offers a range of contexts within which the music can be understood so that the curious and the initiated alike may be drawn towards new and enriching experiences of the extraordinarily powerful music of Harrison Birtwistle.

Author : David Beard
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 128 pages
File Size : 46,6 Mb
Release : 2012-10-25
Category : Music
ISBN : 9781139789080

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Harrison Birtwistle's Operas and Music Theatre by David Beard Pdf

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 : Paul Giles
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
Page : 435 pages
File Size : 52,8 Mb
Release : 2021-02-23
Category : Electronic
ISBN : 9780198857723

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The Planetary Clock by Paul Giles Pdf

Ranging over various aesthetic forms (literature, film, music) in the period since 1960, this volume brings an antipodean perspective into conversation with the art and culture of the Northern Hemisphere, to reformulate postmodernism as a properly global phenomenon.

Author : Matthew Aucoin
Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Page : 232 pages
File Size : 50,8 Mb
Release : 2021-12-07
Category : Music
ISBN : 9780374721589

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The Impossible Art by Matthew Aucoin Pdf

A user's guide to opera—Matthew Aucoin, "the most promising operatic talent in a generation" (The New York Times Magazine), describes the creation of his groundbreaking new work, Eurydice, and shares his reflections on the past, present, and future of opera From its beginning, opera has been an impossible art. Its first practitioners, in seventeenth-century Florence, set themselves the unreachable goal of reproducing the wonders of ancient Greek drama, which no one can be sure was sung in the first place. Opera’s greatest artists have striven to fuse multiple art forms—music, drama, poetry, dance—into a unified synesthetic experience. The composer Matthew Aucoin, a rising star of the opera world, posits that it is this impossibility that gives opera its exceptional power and serves as its lifeblood. The virtuosity required of its performers, the bizarre and often spectacular nature of its stage productions, the creation of a whole world whose basic fabric is music—opera assumes its true form when it pursues impossible goals. The Impossible Art is a passionate defense of what is best about opera, a love letter to the form, written in the midst of a global pandemic during which operatic performance was (literally) impossible. Aucoin writes of the rare works—ranging from classics by Mozart and Verdi to contemporary offerings of Thomas Adès and Chaya Czernowin—that capture something essential about human experience. He illuminates the symbiotic relationship between composers and librettists, between opera’s greatest figures and those of literature. Aucoin also tells the story of his new opera, Eurydice, from its inception to its production on the Metropolitan Opera’s iconic stage. The Impossible Art opens the theater door and invites the reader into this extraordinary world.

Author : Serena Facci,Michela Garda
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 157 pages
File Size : 55,9 Mb
Release : 2021-03-01
Category : Music
ISBN : 9781000352658

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The Female Voice in the Twentieth Century by Serena Facci,Michela Garda Pdf

By integrating theoretical approaches to the female voice with the musicological investigation of female singers’ practices, the contributors to this volume offer fresh viewpoints on the material, symbolic and cultural aspects of the female voice in the twentieth century. Various styles and genres are covered, including Western art music, experimental composition, popular music, urban folk and jazz. The volume offers a substantial and innovative appraisal of the role of the female voice from the perspective of twentieth-century performance practices, the centrality of female singers’ experimentations and extended vocal techniques along with the process of the ‘subjectivisation’ of the voice.

Author : Jeongwon Joe
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 224 pages
File Size : 42,9 Mb
Release : 2016-05-13
Category : Music
ISBN : 9781317085485

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Opera as Soundtrack by Jeongwon Joe Pdf

Filmmakers' fascination with opera dates back to the silent era but it was not until the late 1980s that critical enquiries into the intersection of opera and cinema began to emerge. Jeongwon Joe focusses primarily on the role of opera as soundtrack by exploring the distinct effects opera produces in film, effects which differ from other types of soundtrack music, such as jazz or symphony. These effects are examined from three perspectives: peculiar qualities of the operatic voice; various properties commonly associated with opera, such as excess, otherness or death; and multifaceted tensions between opera and cinema - for instance, opera as live, embodied, high art and cinema as technologically mediated, popular entertainment. Joe argues that when opera excerpts are employed on soundtracks they tend to appear at critical moments of the film, usually associated with the protagonists, and the author explores why it is opera, not symphony or jazz, that accompanies poignant scenes like these. Joe's film analysis focuses on the time period of the post-1970s, which is distinguished by an increase of opera excerpts on soundtracks to blockbuster titles, the commercial recognition of which promoted the production of numerous opera soundtrack CDs in the following years. Joe incorporates an empirical methodology by examining primary sources such as production files, cue-sheets and unpublished interviews with film directors and composers to enhance the traditional hermeneutic approach. The films analysed in her book include Woody Allen’s Match Point, David Cronenberg’s M. Butterfly, and Wong Kar-wai’s 2046.

Author : David Lawton
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 256 pages
File Size : 41,7 Mb
Release : 2017
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780198792406

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Voice in Later Medieval English Literature by David Lawton Pdf

David Lawton approaches later medieval English vernacular culture in terms of voice. As texts and discourses shift in translation and in use from one language to another, antecedent texts are revoiced in ways that recreate them (as public interiorities) without effacing their history or future. The approach yields important insights into the voice work of late medieval poets, especially Langland and Chaucer, and also their fifteenth-century successors, who treat their work as they have treated their precursors. It also helps illuminate vernacular religious writing and its aspirations, and it addresses literary and cultural change, such as the effect of censorship and increasing political instability in and beyond the fifteenth century. Lawton also proposes his emphasis on voice as a literary tool of broad application, and his book has a bold and comparative sweep that encompasses the Pauline letters, Augustine's Confessions, the classical precedents of Virgil and Ovid, medieval contemporaries like Machaut and Petrarch, extra-literary artists like Monteverdi, later poets such as Wordsworth, Heaney, and Paul Valery, and moderns such as Jarry and Proust. What justifies such parallels, the author claims, is that late medieval texts constitute the foundation of a literary history of voice that extends to modernity. The book's energy is therefore devoted to the transformative reading of later medieval texts, in order to show their original and ongoing importance as voice work.

Author : Harrison Birtwistle
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 128 pages
File Size : 47,6 Mb
Release : 1997
Category : Electronic
ISBN : OCLC:1263586955

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The Mask of Orpheus by Harrison Birtwistle Pdf