Reorchestrating the Past

Taking its title from Australian novelist Alexis Wright’s description of her novel Carpentaria as a ‘long song, following ancient tradition’, this chapter considers how antipodean relations of place interrupt abstract notions of globalization as a financial system. The first section exemplifies this by focusing on Australian/American director Baz Luhrmann, whose version of The Great Gatsby (2013), filmed in Sydney, resituates Fitzgerald’s classic novel within an antipodean context. The second section develops this through consideration of Wright’s fiction, along with that of New Zealand/Maori author Keri Hulme, so as to illuminate ways in which spiral conceptions of time, where ends merge into beginnings, contest Western epistemological frames. In the final section, this ‘long song’ is related to the musical aesthetics of Australian composer Peter Sculthorpe and English composers George Benjamin and Harrison Birtwistle. The chapter concludes by arguing that musical modes are an overlooked dimension of postmodernist culture more generally.

Von der Fuge in Rot bis zur Zwitschermaschine - Paul Klee und die Musik.

Paul Klee gehört nicht nur zu den prägendsten Malerpersönlichkeiten des 20. Jahrhunderts, sondern hatte auch eine starke Affinität zur Musik. So schrieb er unter anderem Musikkritiken, spielte als Amateur hervorragend Geige und verkehrte mit vielen Komponisten. Mit seinen Werken und seinen theoretischen Schriften wie den Unterrichtsmaterialien am Bauhaus inspiriert er bis heute zahlreiche Komponistinnen und Komponisten. Dieser Band präsentiert Texte über musikalisch beeinflusste und die Musik beeinflussende Werke Klees, insbesondere seine Beschäftigung mit Johann Sebastian Bach sowie die Rezeption seines gestalterischen Denkens im aktuellen Musikschaffen von Pierre Boulez bis Harrison Birtwistle. Bisher unbekannte Quellen, zahlreiche Abbildungen und Neuinterpretationen verhelfen dabei zu neuen Sichtweisen.

Reception

In surveying the reception of the nouveau roman in Britain from its initial emergence in the late 1950s, this chapter begins by looking at the various names given to the phenomenon of the nouveau roman, and their significations. The predominance of Alain Robbe-Grillet and his notion of chosisme is considered. Then a number of vituperative conservative critiques are discussed. Existentialism, the nouvelle vague, and modernism are shown to be major points of reference in the reception of the nouveau roman. The chapter concludes with two codas. The first considers the edges of a reception history of the nouveau roman in Britain by looking to creative responses from the cinema (Tony Richardson, Peter Brook), visual media (Martin Vaughn-James, Ian Hamilton Finlay), life-writing (W. G. Sebald), and music (Harrison Birtwistle). The second looks at the adoption of the nouveau roman in British academe, and the rise of Theory.

Panic at the proms (perhaps the explanation lies in his background)

This paper has been written as both a celebration of the music of Harrison Birtwistle-"the most forceful and uncompromisingly original British composer of his generation" according to the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians - and as a response, at once playful and polemic, to the critics and commentators who struggle to name, claim, frame and contain it within the familiar categories and tropes of contemporary music interpretation. My particular focus is Panic which is exemplary in this respect and what Birtwistle cognoscendi have a habit of referring to as 'his background to 'explain' the idiosyncratic difficulty and difference of his work, as in the quotation cited as my subtitle.

EVEN ORPHEUS NEEDS A SYNTHI

In recent years there has been an increase in the quantity, if not necessarily the quality, of scholarly and popular writing on the histories of electronic music in Britain. In this literature, the contributions of Peter Zinovieff (b. 1933) and his computer-equipped electronic music studio to those histories have been variously exaggerated, underestimated and misreported. This article attempts to correct this misinformation, investigating Zinovieff's solo work and his collaborations with Harrison Birtwistle, Hans Werner Henze and others, through a critical discussion of two recent contributions to the discourse surrounding the compositions realised at Zinovieff's EMS studio in the 1960s and 70s.