British Musical Modernism: The Manchester Group and their Contemporaries (Music since 1900)
Cambridge University Press
Edition: Illustrated, 7/9/2015
EAN 9780521844482, ISBN10: 0521844487
Hardcover, 504 pages, 24.4 x 17 x 2.9 cm
Language: English
Originally published in English
British Musical Modernism explores the works of eleven key composers to reveal the rapid shifts of expression and technique that transformed British art music in the post-war period. Responding to radical avant-garde developments in post-war Europe, the Manchester Group composers - Alexander Goehr, Peter Maxwell Davies, and Harrison Birtwistle - and their contemporaries assimilated the serial-structuralist preoccupations of mid-century internationalism to an art grounded in resurgent local traditions. In close readings of some thirty-five scores, Philip Rupprecht traces a modernism suffused with the formal elegance of the 1950s, the exuberant theatricality of the 1960s, and - in the works of David Bedford and Tim Souster - the pop, minimalist, and live-electronic directions of the early 1970s. Setting music-analytic insights against a broader social-historical backdrop, Rupprecht traces a British musical modernism that was at once a collective artistic endeavor, and a sounding myth of national identity.
Introduction
1. Between nationalism and the avant garde
defining British modernism
2. Post-war motifs
3. Manchester avant-garde
Goehr, Davies and Birtwistle to 1960
4. A Manchester generation in Paris, London, and Rome
Musgrave, Maw, Crosse, and Bennett
5. Group portrait in the sixties
Davies, Birtwistle and Goehr to 1967
6. Instrumental drama
Musgrave and Birtwistle in the sixties
7. Vernaculars
Bedford and Souster as pop musicians
8. The incurably heterogeneous Tim Souster
between Elektronische Musik and pop
Epilogue.