| Contents |
The problem of communication, two solutions: Thea Musgrave and Gordon Crosse / Leslie East -- Ronald Stevenson / Colin Scott-Sutherland -- Alexander Goehr / Guy Protheroe -- Hugh Wood / Leo Black -- Harrison Birtwistle / Meirion Bowen -- Peter Maxwell Davies / Stephen Arnold -- Two Welsh composers: Alun Hoddinott and William Mathias / Michael Oliver -- Nicholas Maw / Arnold Whittall -- Richard Rodney Bennett / Christopher Palmer and Lewis Foreman -- David Blake / Malcolm MacDonald -- David Bedford / Carolyn Stokoe -- Two traditionalists: Kenneth Leighton and John McCabe / Harold Truscott -- John Tavener / Trevor Bray -- Miscellany: Justin Connolly, Jonathan Harvey, Roger Smalley, Anthony Payne, Tristram Cary, Anthony Milner, Christopher Headington, Robin Holloway, David Ellis / Michael Oliver -- Postlude: a note on Christopher Shaw / Malcolm MacDonald -- Other composers. |
| Abstract |
The last decade and a half has seen the emergence of more composers of real and demonstrable talent in Britain than almost any previous period. Their work is reaching an increasingly wide and keen audience in concert hall and opera house, through national and local radio, festivals amateur and professional, and even children's performing groups. In this timely book a team of experts provides a much-needed survey and assessment of these new composers--all of them under fifty at the time of writing. The sheer abundance and variety of music composed in Britain in the 1960s and '70s is astonishing. The operas and theatre pieces of Nicholas Maw, Gordon Crosse and Alexander Goehr; the orchestral and chamber music of Thea Musgrave, Hugh Wood and Alun Hoddinott; the experimentalism, in a number of different forms, of Peter Maxwell Davies, Harrison Birtwistle, Roger Smalley and John Tavener; the more traditional idiom of John McCabe, William Mathias and Anthony Milner; Richard Rodney Bennett's film scores and David Bedford's rapprochement with pop forms; the electronic wizardry of Tristram Cary--here is the work of a generation of composers, more than one of international stature, who have responded to the impact of Serialism and of a previous generation that includes Britten and Messiaen, and succeeded in expressing themselves in truly personal styles. A chapter is devoted to each major composer, and others are covered at lesser length in further chapters and a ready-reference section. The style and development of each is analyzed and his oeuvre outlined. There is an extensive and up-to-date bibliography and discography. |
