Maud MacCarthy: ‘The Musicking Body’

This chapter highlights the pioneering work of Maud MacCarthy and its reception. Drawing on century-old field notes, transcriptions and manuscripts, it demonstrates that MacCarthy absorbed Indian music through immersion and practice in India; upon her return to Britain in the 1910s, she initiated cross-cultural collaborations and influenced figures such as Arthur Fox-Strangways and Gustav Holst. Photographs, lecture-recital scripts and press cuttings suggest that MacCarthy became a ‘musicking body’, exemplified by the dynamic hand gestures which accompanied her singing. The chapter contextualises the dismissal of her work within the nationalist Indian and British colonial discourses which sought to proscribe gesture, the body and, by extension, women, in classical music. It was the MacCarthy-Foulds ‘Indo-European Orchestra’ which broadcast from 1930s Delhi, which Ravi Shankar took up, unacknowledged, when he became director of the station. Although erased from the history of East–West musical interactions, MacCarthy’s work has thus had an enduring effect.

Carter, Elliott (Cook Jr.) (1908–2012)

Born in 1908 into a wealthy New York City family, Elliott Carter enjoyed a cosmopolitan childhood, spending time in Europe and learning French at an early age. The composer Charles Ives mentored the young Carter, taking him to concerts in New York and encouraging his developing interest in music. Carter’s childhood, characterized by immersion in a culturally enriched environment and exposure to the modern world, provided the elements from which his artistic aesthetic and musical language would later be forged. When Carter entered Harvard College, he focused his studies on English literature, Greek, and philosophy, although musical activities continued in the form of lessons with Walter Piston and Gustav Holst, as well as singing with the Harvard Glee Club. Carter completed a master’s degree in music at Harvard in 1932, after which he moved to Paris to study composition with Nadia Boulanger for three years. He received a doctorate in music from the École Normale de Musique in Paris in 1935.

Savitri

Tradução da narrativa integrante do livro III do Mahâbhârata, adaptada e musicada como poema sinfônico / ópera de câmara por Gustav Holst (1874- 1934), opus 25, 1908-19091. Em apêndice, segue versão da mesma narrativa para teatro infantil.

English Pastoral Music

This book examines the nature and style of pastoralism, one of twentieth-century England’s most widespread and influential musical movements. Long dismissed as provincial, escapist, and reactionary, pastoral music in fact represents a distinctively English approach to modernist composition during the early twentieth century, adapting and transforming established musical and aesthetic conventions to reflect the experiences of British composers and audiences. Covering a wide expressive range—from songs of praise to symphonies of commemoration, lush Arcadian dramatic scenes to bleak neotonal landscapes—English pastoral music encompasses an array of applications, meanings, and stylistic inflections that oblige us to reassess its cultural and idiomatic significance. The book opens with a survey of pastoral music’s critical, theoretical, and stylistic foundations before moving on to examine its specific manifestations in the contexts of Arcadia, war, landscape, and the Utopian imagination. Works by well-known figures such as Edward Elgar, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Gustav Holst, and Benjamin Britten are considered, as well as pieces by lesser-known composers such as E. J. Moeran, Ivor Gurney, Constant Lambert, and John Ireland, among others. Their diverse approaches to pastoralism not only reveal the breadth of its stylistic influence, but the depth of its philosophical and aesthetic underpinnings.