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Coming to terms with Britten's music is no easy task. The complex, often contradictory language associated with Britten's style likely stems from his double interest in progressive composition and immediate connection with a broad, popular audience - an apparent paradox in the splintered musical culture of the 20th century - as well as from complicated truths in his own life, such as his love for a country that accepted neither his sexuality nor his politics. As a result, the attempt to describe his music can tell us as much about our own biases and the inadequacies of our analytic tools as it does about the music itself. Such audits of our scholarly language and strategies are vital in light of the still-murky view we have of twentieth century music. This opportunity for academic self-reflection is the reason Britten studies such as this book are so important. The essays included here challenge assumptions about musical constructs, relationships between text and music, and the influences of age, spirituality, and personal relationships on compositional technique. Part One offers nine essays originally compiled for a symposium designed to recognize the composer's unique and varied contributions to music. The authors include performers, musicologists, and music theorists, and their work will appeal to a wide diversity of readers. The topics and methodologies range from archival research and analysis of text and music to theoretical modelling using techniques such as set theory, metric theory, and prolongation. While the papers were initially conceived in isolation from one another, the collaborative focus of the symposium created opportunities for authors to expose points of intersection. This deliberate reconciliation of lines of inquiry has yielded a more balanced and unified collection of essays than typically found in a simple record of proceedings. Furthermore, the chapters presented here benefit from the wealth of Britten research produced since the 2013 centenary. Part Two provides an account of the symposium performances and lecture recitals that accompanied and enriched the academic presentations. The reader will encounter fully the journey taken by symposium presenters, participants, and attendees by reviewing the concerts, lecture recitals, and papers in the context of the full symposium program.

Britten, Benjamin, --- Britten, Edward Benjamin --- Britten, Benjamin --- Britten, Benjamin E.

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Graham Elliot examines the importance of 'the things spiritual' in Benjamin Britten's work. He analyses the composer's choice and treatment of subjects and his use of musical influences, especially plainsong, which have a direct association with spirituality.

Church music --- Pastoral music (Sacred) --- Religious music --- Sacred vocal music --- Devotional exercises --- Liturgics --- Music --- Music in churches --- Psalmody --- History and criticism --- Religious aspects --- Christianity --- Britten, Benjamin, --- Analysis, appreciation. --- Religion. --- 78 BRITTEN, BENJAMIN --- 78 BRITTEN, BENJAMIN Muziek--BRITTEN, BENJAMIN --- Muziek--BRITTEN, BENJAMIN --- Britten, Benjamin --- Criticism and interpretation. --- Britten, Edward Benjamin --- Britten, Benjamin E.

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Examining the intersections between musical culture and a British project of reconstruction from the 1940s to the early 1960s, this study asks how gestures toward the past negotiated issues of recovery and renewal. In the wake of the Second World War, music became a privileged site for re-enchanting notions of history and community, but musical recourse to the past also raised issues of mourning and loss. How was sound figured as a historical object and as a locus of memory and magic? Wiebe addresses this question using a wide range of sources, from planning documents to journalism, public ceremonial and literature. Its central focus, however, is a set of works by Benjamin Britten that engaged both with the distant musical past and with key episodes of postwar reconstruction, including the Festival of Britain, the Coronation of Elizabeth II and the rebuilding of Coventry Cathedral.

Music --- Reconstruction (1939-1951) --- World War, 1939-1945 --- History and criticism. --- Music and the war. --- Britten, Benjamin, --- Criticism and interpretation. --- Songs and music --- History and criticism --- Britten, Edward Benjamin --- Britten, Benjamin --- Britten, Benjamin E.

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The music of Gustav Mahler repeatedly engages with Romantic notions of redemption. This is expressed in a range of gestures and procedures, shifting between affirmative fulfilment and pessimistic negation. In this groundbreaking study, Stephen Downes explores the relationship of this aspect of Mahler's music to the output of Benjamin Britten, Kurt Weill and Hans Werner Henze. Their initial admiration was notably dissonant with the prevailing Zeitgeist - Britten in 1930s England, Weill in 1920s Germany and Henze in 1950s Germany and Italy. Downes argues that Mahler's music struck a profound chord with them because of the powerful manner in which it raises and intensifies dystopian and utopian complexes and probes the question of fulfilment or redemption, an ambition manifest in ambiguous tonal, temporal and formal processes. Comparisons of the ways in which this topic is evoked facilitate new interpretative insights into the music of these four major composers.

Music --- History and criticism --- Britten, Benjamin --- Henze, Hans Werner, --- Mahler, Gustav, --- Weill, Kurt, --- Ṿail, Ḳurṭ, --- Weil, Kurt, --- Weill, Kurt --- וייל, קורט --- Mahler, Gustav --- Maler, Gustav, --- Maler, G. --- Mārā, Gusutafu, --- Henze, Heinz-Werner --- Henze, H. W. --- Criticism and interpretation. --- Influence. --- History and criticism. --- Britten, Benjamin, --- Britten, Edward Benjamin --- Britten, Benjamin E.

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Philip Brett's groundbreaking writing on Benjamin Britten altered the course of music scholarship in the later twentieth century. This volume is the first to gather in one collection Brett's searching and provocative work on the great British composer. Some of the early essays opened the door to gay studies in music, while the discussions that Brett initiated reinvigorated the study of Britten's work and inspired a generation of scholars to imagine "the new musicology." Addressing urgent questions of how an artist's sexual, cultural, and personal identity feeds into specific musical texts, Brett examines most of Britten's operas as well as his role in the British cultural establishment of the mid-twentieth century. With some of the essays appearing here for the first time, this volume develops a complex understanding of Britten's musical achievement and highlights the many ways that Brett expanded the borders of his field.

Gender identity in music. --- Sex in music. --- Composers --- Britten, Benjamin, --- 20th century. --- benjamin britten. --- british composers. --- british culture. --- cultural history. --- cultural identity. --- essay collection. --- europe. --- famous composers. --- gay studies. --- gender studies. --- lgbtq. --- music and culture. --- music historians. --- music history. --- music scholars. --- music scholarship. --- musical texts. --- musicians. --- musicology. --- nonfiction essays. --- nonfiction. --- operas. --- personal identity. --- queer studies nonfiction. --- queer studies. --- sexual identity. --- sexuality.