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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.
List of contents
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.
About the author
Philip Rupprecht is Associate Professor of Music at Duke University, North Carolina. He has published widely on twentieth-century British music and his books include Britten's Musical Language (Cambridge, 2002) and two edited volumes, Rethinking Britten (2013) and Tonality 1900¿1950: Concept and Practice (2012). He is also the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Humanities Center, and the Wolfe Institute, Brooklyn College.
Summary
This panoramic study of musical modernism synthesizes cultural, biographical, and analytic perspectives to provide a group portrait of the leading figures in post-war British art music. Philip Rupprecht explores the music of the Manchester Group and other composers in works spanning sixties theatricality through to seventies pop, electronic and post-minimalist music.
