scholarly journals Structural Pluralism in Gerald Finzi’s Earth and Air and Rain

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Natalie Burton
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Song Cycle ◽  
Structural Pluralism ◽  
Cycle Structures

The genre of song cycle is complex and heterogeneous. As well as attracting significant contention in relation to matters of typology, the inherent aesthetic issues that arise from any intermedial union of words and music are compounded in the potential narrative consequences of the song cycle. Advocating melopoetic practices, my research seeks to examine the different cycle structures that emerge within the twentieth-century, English repertory. Gerald Finzi’s Earth and Air and Rain, composed in 1936, has a somewhat ambiguous genesis and complex history in performance and publication. This article explores the work’s potential to be characterized by structural pluralism; that is, the possibility that there may be more than one way of understanding and navigating the cycle’s structure. The genre of song cycle is complex and heterogeneous. As well as attracting significant contention in relation to matters of typology, the inherent aesthetic issues that arise from any intermedial union of words and music are compounded in the potential narrative consequences of the song cycle. Advocating melopoetic practices, my research seeks to examine the different cycle structures that emerge within the twentieth-century, English repertory. Gerald Finzi’s Earth and Air and Rain, composed in 1936, has a somewhat ambiguous genesis and complex history in performance and publication. This article explores the work’s potential to be characterized by structural pluralism; that is, the possibility that there may be more than one way of understanding and navigating the cycle’s structure.

scholarly journals Richard Steinitz, György Ligeti: Music of the Imagination (London: Faber and Faber, 2003), ISBN 0 571 17631 3 (hb)

2005 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 302-309 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amy Bauer
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Song Cycle ◽  
The State ◽  
New Music ◽  
First Century ◽  
Seventieth Birthday ◽  
Gyorgy Ligeti ◽  
Music Scene ◽  
Character Piece ◽  
Grand Opera

Hungarian composer György Ligeti has not lacked for attention since coming into contact with Europe’s new music scene in the early 1960s. In 1966 he was featured in Moderne Musik I: 1945–65, and by 1969 Erkki Salmenhaara had published a dissertation on three major works. Although periodic illness and a painstaking approach to composition slowed his progress, Ligeti continued to refine and expand his style in the 1970s, producing everything from intimate solo works for harpsichord to the suitably grand opera Le Grand Macabre (1974–7, revised 1996). His turn towards traditional orchestral forms and a quasi-diatonic language in the 1980s brought him new prominence, and the voluble composer has seemed ever ready to provide ripe commentary on his work and the state of new music. The numerous awards and publications that followed Ligeti’s seventieth birthday in 1993 support his status as probably the most widely fêted and influential composer of the latter half of the twentieth century. And if that degree of timely recognition was not enough, the composer has entered his ninth decade with no noticeable decline in compositional energy or ideas. Ligeti continues to fashion brilliant revisions of the tried but true genres of concerto, solo étude, song cycle, choral work, and character piece. His compositions bear the weight of extramusical influence as well as that from beyond the Western canon, yet each innovation affirms his inimitable voice and his singular musical journey from the mid-twentieth to the twenty-first century.

Unfolding the Fan of Memory in Arthur Lourié’s Recollection of Petersburg

2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 289-317
Author(s):  
DAVID SALKOWSKI
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Coping Strategy ◽  
Song Cycle ◽  
Profound Impact ◽  
Flow Of Time ◽  
Intertextual Connections ◽  
Difficult Subject

AbstractThis article demonstrates how migration formed a process of memory construction in the work and thought of Russian émigré composer Arthur Lourié (1891–1966). It analyses Lourié’s song cycle Recollection of Petersburg, composed over two decades and across four countries, providing close readings of music and poetry and exploring the network of intertextual connections the cycle activates. Lourié has proven a difficult subject because of the diversity of aesthetic positions he took from decade to decade. Recollection allows us to trace a line of continuity as he passed through these incarnations, revealing an aesthetics of accumulation and arrangement with origins in Acmeist poetics. This aesthetics, in turn, served as a coping strategy for Lourié’s life in emigration, as he sought to order the voices of memory and escape the flow of time. Lourié’s case will contribute to our understanding of the profound impact of migration on music in the twentieth century.

Shadows of the Past: Akhmatova’s Poem Without a Hero and Lourié’s Incantations

2008 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 79-108 ◽  
Author(s):  
KLÁRA MÓRICZ
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Song Cycle ◽  
Role Playing ◽  
Close Friend ◽  
Personal History ◽  
Silver Age ◽  
Intimate Friend ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Past ◽  
Gradual Disappearance

AbstractArthur Vincent Lourié (1891–1966), futurist, communist commissar of music, and close friend of Stravinsky in Paris in the 1920s, was an important member of avant-garde Russian artistic circles in the first three decades of the twentieth century. Yet by the 1950s he seems to have faded into obscurity. This article attempts to fill the gap left by the lack of discussion of the strange permutations of Lourié’s career after his emigration in 1922 by way of an analysis of his miniature 1961 song cycle Zaklinaniya (‘Incantations’). The cycle consists of five settings of lines from Anna Ahkmatova’s Poema bez geroya (‘Poem Without a Hero’), whose first part recalls Lourié and Akhmatova’s shared past in Russia’s Silver Age. Akhmatova (1889–1966), an intimate friend of the dandyish Lourié and at the centre of avant-garde artistic circles in pre-Revolutionary St Petersburg, describes the early 1910s as a Meyerholdian nightmarish masquerade in which the protagonists were constantly in danger of losing their identity through nihilistic role playing. Lourié’s elusive figure can be seen as the embodiment in the Poema of the frightening, superfluous shadow with ‘neither face nor name’. Rather than any unfortunate turn of political or personal history, it was Lourié’s affection for masks – for taking up exaggerated poses and concealing his real face – that provides the most compelling reason for his gradual disappearance from view in the chaos of the first half of the twentieth century.

Britten's use of the Passacaglia

Tempo ◽  
1970 ◽  
pp. 2-6
Author(s):  
Darrell Handel
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Instrumental Music ◽  
Song Cycle ◽  
The Other ◽  
High Point ◽  
Impending Death ◽  
Peter Grimes ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Vocal Works

Among twentieth-century composers Britten and Hindemith are those who have made perhaps the most notable use of the passacaglia—one of the few points of affinity between them. To Hindemith, predominantly a composer of instrumental music of sonata or symphonic proportions, the passacaglia is a confirming movement. It confirms a tonal centre, recalls earlier thematic material, and in general gives a sense of finality through its systematic progress and growth. Britten too has used the passacaglia as a confirming finale, but he also employs it to create a point of stability around which other movements can gravitate. More important, he has found its tension-building qualities a good means for expressing and intensifying certain moods in his operas and vocal works, where the passacaglia's persistent ground becomes a kind of animated pedal-point that supports the unfolding of the dramatic situation. The contrapuntal polarity between the ground and the expressive flow of the vocal line is one that is carefully controlled to convey the text's innermost expression. He often elevates the passacaglia to some crucial dramatic high point of an opera or song-cycle to reflect on a tragedy or intensify a dialogue. Several examples immediately come to mind associated with the subject of death. The well-known passacaglia in Peter Grimes, an instrumental interlude between scenes, depicts the derangement of Grimes and is, as it were, oppressed with the sense of his impending death. In The Rape of Lucretia there is a dramatic passacaglia after Lucretia's suicide, in which the other characters express their feelings on the finality of death.

Some Polish Composers of To-Day

Tempo ◽  
1948 ◽  
pp. 25-28
Author(s):  
Andrzej Panufnik
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Fertile Soil ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Progressive Group ◽  
Karol Szymanowski

It is ten years since KAROL SZYMANOWSKI died at fifty-four. He was the most prominent representative of the “radical progressive” group of early twentieth century composers, which we call “Young Poland.” In their manysided and pioneering efforts they prepared the fertile soil on which Poland's present day's music thrives.

V1214: Edward Loughborough Keyes: An Early Twentieth Century Leader In Urology

2004 ◽  
Vol 171 (4S) ◽  
pp. 320-320
Author(s):  
Peter J. Stahl ◽  
E. Darracott Vaughan ◽  
Edward S. Belt ◽  
David A. Bloom ◽  
Ann Arbor
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Early Twentieth Century

Twentieth Century Classics

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rajiva Wijesinha
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century
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