| Variant title |
Exploring 20th-century music |
| Contents |
The work in the world. Western orientations ; Progressiveness and place ; City life ; Place, personality and Sibelius ; Environmental sensibilities -- Reflections, reactions. Debussy in the mirror ; Webern's tribute to perfection ; Form and content: Webern's op. 27/iii ; Canonic resonances -- Rites of renewal and remembrance. Janacek's conventions ; Janacek in context ; Bartok and tradition ; Bartok in 1939 -- Transcending the secular. From classical to neoclassical ; Dithyramb ; Here and now, there and then -- Overlapping opposites: Schoenberg observed. Character ; Models ; Meanings ; Music, religion, politics -- The subject of Britten. Fulfilment, frustration ; Masking Dionysus ; The constraints of genre -- Engagement or alienation?. Between politics and art ; Marxism and after: Kagel ; Beethoven and after: Tippett and Shostakovich ; Judging Schnittke ; Affirmation, irony -- Rites of transformation. Words about harmony ; Aspects of the requiem: Mozart, Wagner, Henze; Wagner, Britten, Henze ; The German labyrinth -- Modernism, lyricism. Shadow and symmetry ; Perspectives on Carter ; Angles on Birtwistle -- Experiment and orthodoxy. Minimalism, modernism, classicism ; The Dionysian clockwork ; Ways, means, materials ; Mechanical and spiritual -- Modernism in retreat?. What kind of century? ; Theory, science, semiotics ; Resonance in space ; Echoes of voice ; Songs of ambivalence and experience ; A final focus. |
| Abstract |
The author considers a group of important composers of the twentieth century, including Debussy, Webern, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Bartok, Janacek, Britten, Carter, Birtwistle, Andriessen and Adams. He moves skillfully 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. |
| Local note | Little-340405--3051310475860 |
| Local note | Little-340405--3051310475860 |
| Bibliography note | Includes bibliographical references (pages 223-232) and indexes. |
| LCCN | 2002073825 |
| ISBN | 0521816424 |
| ISBN | 0521016681 (pb.) |
