The Royal College Of Music And Its Contexts

A rounded portrait of the Royal College of Music, investigating its educational and cultural impact on music and musical life.

A biography of Ralph Vaughan Williams, published in collaboration with the Bard Music Festival. Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958) was one of the most innovative and creative figures in twentieth-century music, whose symphonies stand alongside those of Sibelius, Nielsen, Shostakovich, and Roussel. After his death, shifting priorities in the music world led to a period of critical neglect. What could not have been foreseen is that by the second decade of the twenty-first century, a handful of Vaughan Williams's scores would attain immense popularity worldwide. Yet the present renown of these pieces has led to misapprehension about the nature of Vaughan Williams's cultural nationalism and a distorted view of his international cultural and musical significance. Vaughan Williams and His World traces the composer's stylistic and aesthetic development in a broadly chronological fashion, reappraising Vaughan Williams's music composed during and after the Second World War and affirming his status as an artist whose leftist political convictions pervaded his life and music. This volume reclaims Vaughan Williams's deeply held progressive ethical and democratic convictions while celebrating his achievements as a composer.

This volume of primary source material examine the thoughts and ideas behind music in Britian during the ninteenth century. Sources explore music critics, listening to music, music education, and philosophy. The collection of materials are accompanied by an introduction by Rosemary Golding, as well as headnotes contextualising the pieces. This collection will be of great value to students and scholars.

Traversing London's musical culture, this book boldly illuminates the emergence of Edwardian London as a beacon of musical innovation. The dawning of a new century saw London emerge as a hub in a fast-developing global music industry, mirroring Britain's pivotal position between the continent, the Americas and the British Empire. It was a period of expansion, experiment and entrepreneurial energy. Rather than conservative and inward-looking, London was invigorated by new ideas, from pioneering musical comedy and revue to the modernist departures of Debussy and Stravinsky. Meanwhile, Elgar, Holst, Vaughan Williams, and a host of ambitious younger composers sought to reposition British music in a rapidly evolving soundscape. Music was central to society at every level. Just as opulent theatres proliferated in the West End, concert life was revitalised by new symphony orchestras, by the Queen's Hall promenade concerts, and by Sunday concerts at the vast Albert Hall. Through innumerable band and gramophone concerts in the parks, music from Wagner to Irving Berlin became available as never before. The book envisions a burgeoning urban culture through a series of snapshots - daily musical life in all its messy diversity. While tackling themes of cosmopolitanism and nationalism, high and low brows, centres and peripheries, it evokes contemporary voices and characterful individuals to illuminate the period. Challenging issues include the barriers faced by women and people of colour, and attitudes inhibiting the new generation of British composers - not to mention embedded imperialist ideologies reflecting London's precarious position at the centre of Empire. Engagingly written, Simon McVeigh's groundbreaking book reveals the exhilarating transformation of music in Edwardian London, which laid the foundations for the century to come.

A wide ranging survey of the medieval secular college and its context.

The first in-depth historical overview of spectral music, which is widely regarded, alongside minimalism, as one of the two most influential compositional movements of the last fifty years. Charting spectral music's development in France from 1972 to 1982, this ground-breaking study establishes how spectral music's innovations combined existing techniques from post-war music with the use of information technology. The first section focuses on Gérard Grisey, showing how he creatively developed techniques from Messiaen, Xenakis, Ligeti, Stockhausen and Boulez towards a distinctive style of music based on groups of sounds mutating in time. The second section shows how a wider generation of young composers centred on the Parisian collective L'Itinéraire developed a common vision of music embracing seismic developments in in psychoacoustics and computer sound synthesis. Framed against institutional and political developments in France, spectral music is shown as at once an inventive artistic response to the information age and a continuation of the French colouristic tradition.

"Elliott Carter was born four months after Orville Wright demonstrated the Wright Brothers' Flyer to the U.S. Army, and he died two months after the Voyager 1 spacecraft left the heliosphere at the threshold of interstellar space. Carter's remarkable longevity, and the unusual trajectory of his life and work through more than a century of disruptive change, has affected the reception history of his music in ways that we are only beginning to acknowledge. Over the course of a nearly eighty-year-long career, Carter leveraged his advantages and turned obstacles into opportunities with admirable persistence. He chose projects that not only interested him but also fit into the plans for artistic and professional development that he cultivated assiduously over decades. And he paid close attention to how his artistic objectives could be presented most effectively to the performers, listeners, and patrons on whom his career depended. Together with his wife Helen Frost-Jones Carter, he skillfully steered a course through the turbulent waters of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries with steadily increasing success. The story of Carter's artistic life, as he told it and as it was promoted by several generations of advocates, is one of independence, uncompromising vision, and technical progress. It was astutely tailored to the beliefs and values of its intended audience and, as autobiography, it reports selectively and glosses over or omits events and attitudes deemed unhelpful in building Carter's reputation and authority, and promoting his music"--

An innovative contribution to music history, cultural studies, and sound studies, Avant-garde on Record revisits post-war composers and their technologically oriented brand of musical modernism. It describes how a broad range of figures (including Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Henri Pousseur, Toshirō Mayuzumi, Claire Schapira, Anthony Braxton and Gunther Schuller) engaged with avant-garde aesthetics while responding to a rapidly changing, technologically fuelled, spatialized audio culture. Jonathan Goldman focuses on how contemporary listeners understood these composers' works in the golden age of LPs and explores how this reception was mediated through consumer-oriented sound technology that formed a prism through which listeners processed the 'music of their time'. His account reveals unexpected aspects of twentieth-century audio culture: from sonic ping-pong to son et lumière shows, from Venetian choral music by Stravinsky to the soundscape of Niagara Falls, from a Buddhist Cantata to an LP box set cast as a parlour game.