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Much of the music of Maurice Ravel (1875-1937) is among the most accessible of any written in the last hundred years; the man, however, was notoriously difficult to get to know. In Maurice Ravel, Gerald Larner aims to trace the development of the composer's personality not only through events in his life and in the society around him but also through his music, which is more revealing in this respect than is generally believed. This beautifully crafted book offers many fresh insights into the life and work of this enigmatic composer.
Musical biography has rarely been an object of theoretical and methodological reflection. Our present-day perception of the lives of prominent composers and performers of the past has been largely formed by cultural and political assumptions of nineteenth-century biographers and their twentieth-century followers. While older biographies are being scrutinized for veracity and 'updated' with new evidence, their historiographical premisses and narrative techniques remain largely unchallenged. The epistemological upheavals in the humanities since the 1960s have generated a body of theoretical thought that has undermined many of the assumptions of traditional biography. Consequently, many of thes...
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Elisabeth Lutyens (1906-1983), Elizabeth Maconchy (1907-1994) and Grace Williams (1906-1977) were contemporaries at the Royal College of Music. The three composers' careers were launched with performances in the Macnaghten-Lemare Concerts in the 1930s - a time when, in Britain, as Williams noted, a woman composer was considered 'very odd indeed'. Even so, by the early 1940s all three had made remarkable advances in their work: Lutyens had become the first British composer to use 12-note technique, in her Chamber Concerto No. 1 (1939-40); Maconchy had composed four string quartets of outstanding quality and was busy rethinking the genre; and Williams had won recognition as a composer with gre...
Peter Sculthorpe, who died in 2014, remains Australia’s best-known composer and is widely held to be the most important creative musical spirit the country has produced. Beautifully written and fastidiously researched, this authorised biography provides an insight into Sculthorpe’s formation years: his quest for personal voice, and his arrival – through many creative friendships and collaborations – at a place in the collective heart of the nation. It charts the realisation of a youthful vocation to become not merely a composer, but an Australian composer. Graeme Skinner’s biography is also a social history, examining Sculthorpe’s unique role in the creation of Australian musical modernism in the 1960s – an important era in Australia’s cultural evolution.
Looking at the history of the North East orchestra--the Northern Sinfonia--from conception to the present day, this collection contains anecdotes about memorable players, concerts, events, and highlights.
The first full biography of John Ogdon; a tortured genius and arguably the greatest British pianist of all time. From the beginning of his professional career as a soloist John Ogdon was hailed as a musician of rare understanding and phenomenal technical gifts. Able to play and memorize just about any score at sight, tales of his impossible exploits at the keyboard are legion. Yet Ogdon was a man of extremes and it was this very extremity, while the source of much of his gift, that also led to appalling suffering. Here was a man whose feelings were inexpressibly deep and often tormenting, and Ogdon's glory days, following his coveted Tchaikovsky prize in 1962, came to a sudden end in 1973 wh...