Knussen, Oliver (1952--)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edward Venn
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Symphony Orchestra ◽  
Technical Facility ◽  
Gunther Schuller

Oliver Knussen is a British composer and conductor. The son of a double bassist in the London Symphony Orchestra, Knussen came to prominence when he conducted the London Symphony Orchestra in the premiere of his (subsequently withdrawn) first symphony, at the age of fourteen. Knussen’s background, combined with the studies he undertook with John Lambert (1963–69) and Gunther Schuller (1970–73), left him with an extensive knowledge of the repertoire. His music represents a refined synthesis of a range of sources, many of which were located in the first half of the twentieth century, as in Symphony No. 2 (1971), which is set to poems by Trakl. Knussen’s early fame came at a cost; his works were often presented as fragments and oftentimes revised thereafter; other times, commissions were left unfulfilled. Nevertheless, in works such as Ophelia Dances Book 1 (1975) and the Symphony No. 3 (1979), both of which were eventually shorter than originally planned, Knussen’s growing technical facility and propensity for the detailed and complex layering of material demonstrated his increasing confidence. The metrical schemes found in the music of Carter, along with the pitch permutations inherited from Krenek and Stravinsky, play important roles in his technical armoury.

Chávez (y Ramírez), Carlos (Antonio de Padua) (1899–1978)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christina Taylor Gibson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Classical Music ◽  
Symphony Orchestra ◽  
Musical Life ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Carlos Chavez

Composer and conductor Carlos Chávez was a dominant force in Mexican musical life during the middle of the twentieth century. His most influential post was as director of the Symphony Orchestra of Mexico [OrquestaSinfónica, OSM], which he led from 1928 to 1948. While leading the OSM, Chávez successfully broadened concepts of classical music to include symphonic, contemporary works by Mexican composers. At the same time, he began an international guest-conducting career that continued into the final years of his life. Although best known for a handful of nationalist works composed in the 1920s and 1930s, Chávez’s compositions demonstrate a diversity of esthetic interests, from avant-garde abstraction to popular genres; regardless of the approach used in a given work, Chávez’s intellectualism and care are evident.

A MUSICAL AND PERSONAL COLLABORATION: DANIEL BARENBOIM TALKS ABOUT EDWARD SAID

2004 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 91-97 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Symphony Orchestra ◽  
Edward Said ◽  
Intellectual Engagement ◽  
Chicago Symphony Orchestra ◽  
Close Friendship ◽  
Concert Pianist

Although we learn from his memoirs that Edward Said renounced his thoughts of a career as a concert pianist in his late teens, music remained a lifelong passion. For many years opera critic for The Nation and author of numerous articles on musical theory as well as a book, Musical Elaborations, he gave informal concerts until the last decade of his life and played until the very end. Said's intense intellectual engagement with music, and his particular interest in ““performance,”” laid the ground for his close friendship over more than a decade with Daniel Barenboim. Born in Argentina and raised in Israel, Barenboim is one of the leading concert pianists and conductors of the second half of the twentieth century. He is currently music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (since 1991) and of the Deutsche Staatsoper Berlin (since 1992).

scholarly journals "A Jewish Maestra and a Lady too": Reflections on Femininity in the Career of Ethel Stark

2019 ◽  
Vol 28 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria N. Rachwal
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Justice ◽  
Symphony Orchestra ◽  
Jewish Woman ◽  
Critical Dimension ◽  
Feminist Activism ◽  
Cultural Traditions ◽  
True Womanhood ◽  
Cult Of True Womanhood

Ethel Stark (1910–2012) was one of the most important conductors and concert violinists in Canada in the Twentieth century. This article highlights how an Austro-Canadian Jewish woman who lived outside the constraints of conventional domesticity, both navigated through and defied the ideals of the “Cult of True Womanhood” and spearheads a movement of feminism in music. I argue that Stark’s exposure to Jewish cultural traditions of social justice and womanhood in her childhood formed a critical dimension of her feminist activism later in her life, and in particular in the founding of The Montreal Women’s Symphony Orchestra (1940).

scholarly journals МЕТАМОРФОЗИ ОБРАЗУ ТУРАНДОТ У СИМФОНІЧНОМУ СКЕРЦО ПАУЛЯ ГІНДЕМІТА

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Admink Admink
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Fairy Tale ◽  
Semantic Analysis ◽  
Symphony Orchestra ◽  
Social Conditions ◽  
Practical Significance ◽  
Paul Hindemith ◽  
Femme Fatale ◽  
Twentieth Century Music ◽  
First Time

Порушується питання втілення образу Турандот у жанрах симфонічної музики, зокрема, у «Метаморфозах» П. Гіндеміта. Докладний структурно-семантичний аналіз дозволяє визначити рівень кореспонденції з темами К.-М. Вебера, які лягли в основу твору Гіндеміта як вияв неокласичних тенденцій, а також прослідкувати музичні маркери, застосовані композитором щодо цього образу, відтвореного засобами сучасної музики в іронічно-пародійному плані. Контекстуальне поле прочитань образу китайської принцеси у музиці ХХ століття збагачується за рахунок «Турандот» П. Гіндеміта симфонічною та балетною версіями, рівночасно демонструючи специфічний аспект орієнтальної тематики.Ключові слова: Турандот, орієнталізм, Пауль Гіндеміт, Скерцо, Метаморфози, пародія, балетні втілення, імагологія, імагосемантика. The aim of this paper is to determine the peculiarities of reading Turandot's image by Paul Hindemith in «Metamorphoses» for symphony orchestra. The methodology of the research is based on the application of the structural-semantic analysis of Scherzo's «Turandot» by P. Hindemit, which is considered using the principles of imagological research in the contextual field of reading the image of a Chinese princess in musical art.Results. In P. Scerzo's P. Hindemith, Turandot's brazen takes on a new meaning: in response to contemporary to the composer political and social conditions through the prism of parody, and extends the boundaries of traditional «Chinese», which is characterized by a vibrant jazz component and a neoclassical dimension, transporting the idea of a Chinese princess through reading an early romantic overture by K. M. von Weber from music to F. Schiller's drama «Turandot». Such specific «polystylistics» in the embodiment of this theme by expanding the intercontinental sound space reveals globalist tendencies and perpetuates humanistic ideals in a kind of grotesque form. The imagosemantics of Turandot's image in P. Hindnmith also contains stable musical markers (toy-puppet theme as a fairy-tale imaginary princess, chromatic-tortuous theme as an imago femme fatale, state imago – fanfare motif as a symbol of imperial-empathetic, motif drums in the spirit of «Chinozerii»). However, a parody-ironic approach to the solution of the image, the genre of eccentric, overflowing with total shock exaltation and warlike scherzo, in which the composer etymologically rethinks the serious challenges of the plot and the image of the heroine itself (the metamorphosis of the delicate «air China» theme into a distorted chromatized dissonance-false fanfare) – appears for the first time. Turandot in the music of the second half of the twentieth century will act more as a representative of totalitarian political structures, nominally representing ChineseOrientalism of the postmodernist type.Novelty. For the first time in national musicology, Turandot's embodiment in the music of the twentieth century was demonstrated, in particular, in the Scherzo of P. Hindemith's Metamorphosis for symphony orchestra, and the features of reading this image in the dimension of oriental imagosemantics were determined.The practical significance. In this article, Ukrainian and foreign musicologists may find information useful for exploring Turandot's image in twentieth-century music, particularly in Paul Hindemith's work in symphonic and ballet incarnations.Key words: Turandot, Orientalism, Paul Hindemith, Scherzo, Metamorphoses, Рarody, Ballet Еmbodiments, Imagology, Іmagosemantics.

The Cypriotization of Beethoven or Beethoven’s Cypriotization: The Composer’s Traces Throughout the Foundation of the “Westernized” Cypriot Music Scene

2021 ◽  
Vol 61 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 149-159
Author(s):  
Georgia Petroudi
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Chamber Music ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
Symphony Orchestra ◽  
Cultural Institutions ◽  
Symphony Orchestras ◽  
Music Festivals ◽  
Music Scene ◽  
Concert Programming ◽  
Concert Programs

The focus of this paper is the reception of Ludwig van Beethoven’s works at the turn of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, from the establishment of symphony orchestras and other cultural institutions. These works include symphonic and chamber music, performed in the framework of symphonic concerts as presented by the Cyprus Symphony Orchestra and chamber music as presented by chamber music festivals. This paper will shine a light onto the preserved concert programs of the orchestras, as well as other concerts that can be traced in newspapers and other printed magazines, in order to demonstrate how Beethoven’s compositions became part of the concert programming. The rapid but simultaneously abrupt growth of the cultural scene in the twentieth century, was interweaved with what kind of compositions and what composers could be included in concert programs, taking into consideration the restrictions that governed large performances such as performers’ numbers and the diversity of instrumental players, who would support the staging of certain works. The reception of Beethoven’s works is studied in the changing local political, historical, social and cultural context.

Proms 2004: Zhou, Casken, Hillborg, Vine, Talbot

Tempo ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 59 (231) ◽  
pp. 49-51
Author(s):  
Martin Anderson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
Personal Experience ◽  
Symphony Orchestra ◽  
Chinese American ◽  
Back Injury ◽  
Western Instruments ◽  
The Cultural Revolution

The Immortal by the Chinese-American Zhou Long (b. 1953) – commissioned by the BBC World Service (apparently its first-even Proms commission) and premièred by the BBC Symphony Orchestra under its out-going chief conductor, Leonard Slatkin, on 20 July – is a tribute ‘to the influence of Chinese artists and intellectuals in the twentieth century’, as the composer notes in the score. He adds: ‘Having grown up in an artistic family during the time of the Cultural Revolution, I know from personal experience the struggles and hardships that past generations have endured to remain true to these eternal ideals’. Past generations? Zhou himself was sent to labour in the fields; a back injury had him re-allocated to a song-and-dance troupe, where he encountered notionally prohibited western instruments among the Chinese ones – a stylistic integration he maintains even when writing exclusively for the modern symphony orchestra.

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

Gunther Schuller

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gunther Schuller
Keyword(s):  
Gunther Schuller
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