Avant-Garde Nation: British Musical Modernism, 1956-1979

FAIN: FA-57279-13

Philip Rupprecht
Duke University (Durham, NC 27705-4677)

The book is a cultural and critical history of the first generation of British composers to be publicly identified as a musical avant garde in the 1950s and after. Interweaving close readings of some 50 works by 17 composers, the book traces shifts of expression and technique--from 1950s structural rigor through more dramatic 1960s works to the improvisatory tone of the 1970s. I situate this music within a post-1945 European scene, poised between ideals of international exchange and the re-building of local cultures. Audiences recognized progressive British composers as creators of a national art form in dialogue with European innovators. Tracing a public discourse around art, I stress the role of stereotype in defining a myth of collective identity. British culture, in the post-Empire moment, encompasses both subtle evocations of Tudor church music and the escapism of Fleming's "Bond" novels. Orchestral and literary codes may differ, but both display images of the modern nation.

Associated Products

British Musical Modernism (Book)
Title: British Musical Modernism
Author: Philip Rupprecht
Editor: Arnold Whittall
Abstract: "British Musical Modernism explores the works of eleven key composers to reveal the rapid shifts of expression and technique that transformed British art music in the post-war period. Responding to radical avant-garde developments in post-war Europe, the Manchester Group composers - Alexander Goehr, Peter Maxwell Davies, and Harrison Birtwistle - and their contemporaries assimilated the serial-structuralist preoccupations of mid-century internationalism to an art grounded in resurgent local traditions. In close readings of some thirty-five scores, Philip Rupprecht traces a modernism suffused with the formal elegance of the 1950s, the exuberant theatricality of the 1960s, and - in the works of David Bedford and Tim Souster - the pop, minimalist, and live-electronic directions of the early 1970s. Setting music-analytic insights against a broader social-historical backdrop, Rupprecht traces a British musical modernism that was at once a collective artistic endeavor, and a sounding myth of national identity."
Year: 2015
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 978052184442
Copy sent to NEH?: Yes

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