Bruno Maderna

Bruno Maderna was one of the most influential composers in the twentieth century. He was the eldest of the group of Italian composers born in the 1920s (along with Berio, Nono, Donatoni, and others) who began their career shortly before the second World War and were able to exploit the opportunities offered by the new world that emerged in the post-war years. Maderna’s story is quite unique. He rose to fame early in life as a child prodigy and his exceptional talent was soon noticed by Gian Francesco Malipiero, who stimulated his interest in ancient music, a passion that remained constant even when the European avant-garde insisted that new music should start from year zero. After first approaching “classic” dodecaphony, his musical style then tended toward total serialism and “open form.” In his last years he developed a particular interest for the theater. Satyricon was born in Tanglewood in a short version and later achieved notable success worldwide. His work as a conductor made him particularly sensitive to the reaction of the public, leading him to carefully calibrate his approach to composition without being swayed by fashionable ideals or philosophies. Despite his warm and outgoing nature, Maderna rarely expressed his personal views in writing or in interviews. Many of the biographical details given here are taken from his correspondence and from reports of his travels and engagements across the world, which took him as far as the United States, Iran South America, and Japan.

"Italian music of the 1960s is one of the most unjustly neglected areas in the arena of twentieth-century classical music. This volume pays tribute to the astounding complexity of the music and libretti of five vocal compositions by leading experimental composers of the decade: Luigi Dallapiccola, Bruno Maderna, Luciano Berio, Giacomo Manzoni, and Armando Gentilucci. It highlights how the 'difficult' and unconventional methods of composition employed by these artists - dodecaphony, total serialism, Webernian minimalist techniques, aleatory and electronic music - displayed a refusal to compete with the market-place values of Italy's new capitalist society. At the same time, the libretti's collage arrangement of a plethora of European and Oriental literary sources dating from the sixteenth century BC onwards, reflected the contemporary Neo-avant-garde rejection of conventional literary practice, and their preference for 'organised disorder', in Umberto Eco's phrase."

Showcases the energy and diversity of the young field of music semiology, appealing to readers who want to explore the meaning of music in our lives.

First published in 1988. Italy, the birthplace of opera in the late sixteenth century, has in recent decades seen remarkable and vital musical growth, with composers as diverse as Luciano Berio and Nino Rota, Luigi Nono and Sylvano Bussotti, Giacomo Manzoni, Bruno Maderna and Salvatore Sciarrino. The musical theatre has figured prominently in the work of Italian composers during this period, ranging from operas conceived in a traditional mode to works of a Music Theatre variety, and in style from popular to avant-garde. In this book Raymond Fearn surveys this Italian musico-theatrical phenomenon in the period since the Second World War, examining a wide range of works such as Nono's Intolleranza and Al Gran Sole Carico d'Amore, Berio's Passaggio and Un re in ascolto, Manzoni's Atomtod and La Sentenza and Castiglioni's Oberon and The King's Masque, and places these developments within a cultural and theatrical context

This new volume incorporates all entries from the previous editions by Arthur Wenk, expanding to cover writings drawn from periodicals, theses, dissertations, books, and Festschriften from 1940 to 2000. Over 9,000 references to analyses of works by over 1,000 composers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are included.

"This volume presents a series of papers which cover the general theme of the reception of antiquity, a topic which has in recent years become a discipline in itself, or what some might call a 'cross-discipline'. Indeed the Nachleben of the (culture of) classical antiquity, and of antiquity as a whole, manifests in a number of diverse domains, opening up the field of reception studies to scholars from disciplines other than Classics. This collection of papers illustrates this diversity, uniting as it does original research by scholars from a variety of disciplines: classicists, historians, theatre historians, architectural historians, psychologists, archaeologists, artists, and more, all of whom have treated some aspect of the so-called 'classical tradition' by means of their own individual approaches, leading to a volume rich and dense in themes and methodologies. 'Receptions of antiquity' has been written by friends of Freddy Decreus, in honour of his career, and in celebration of his thought."--

This richly illustrated anthology (containing more than 120 photographs and images) heralds the 25th anniversary of the demise of Cathy Berberian. The celebrated mezzo-soprano, composer, polyhistor and artistic non-conformist died in March 1983 at the age of 57. Jennifer Paull paints her close friend's portrait with perceptive detail and personal reminiscences analysing Berberian's unique standpoint. Paull applies Berberian's comparativist perspective to exploring a miscellany of Music's fascinating facts, stimulating surprises and other musicians who are quintessentially 'different'. The role of the woman, the lack of division between the Arts; dance, design, fashion, imagination, humour, languages, theatre and wit: these, her eclectic components, shaped the borderless artistic landscape of Cathy Berberian into an ingenious philosophy herein elucidated, illustrated and applied. Cathy Berberian's due stature in the History of Music has yet to be fully recognised and sufficiently appreciated.

The first full-length English-language discussion of the Darmstadt New Music Courses, showing the rise and fall of the 'Darmstadt School'.