Culmination

This chapter focuses on Marga Richter's compositions during the 1990s. In the 1990s, the compositional world was still fragmented as composers focused on serial and electronic music, performance art, and numerous other styles. Richter continued to created choral music as well as music for opera, which she combined with vocal and orchestral works. Her compositions were fewer in number during this decade, but large in scale for the most part. This chapter first considers Richter's works after the death of her husband Alan Skelly, beginning with the seven-poem cycle, Into My Heart, which she dedicated to him. It then examines Richter's Quantum Quirks of a Quick Quaint Quar, along with two large-scale works from the 1990s that mark the apex of her output to date: the triple concerto, Variations and Interludes on Themes from Monteverdi and Bach for violin, cello, piano, and orchestra (1992); and the chamber opera, Riders to the Sea. It also discusses Sarah do not mourn me dead, which has hints of transcendentalism and love.

The Meaning of ‘Lateness’: Mediations of Work, Self and Society in Tippett's Triple Concerto

‘Lateness’ is a musicological concept relevant to Tippett's oeuvre – if applied dialectically. His Triple Concerto (1978–9) is arguably the first work to reveal the ‘late’ trait of renewed lyricism and tonal transparency which together serve as an immanent critique of the fragmentation and dissonance of his second period (which began with King Priam). The co-presence of both sets of characteristics, whose synthesis is only partial, issues in a heterogeneity suggestive of a future social order in which the particular is not subsumed into the totality. This world-view sedimented in the musical structure constitutes a pluralism which invites comparison with, but may not be identical to, notions within postmodernism. Its paradigm may also have been distilled from the (problematic) social mediation of self which Tippett would have experienced as a gay person.