British Musical Modernism
The Manchester Group and their Contemporaries

The first in-depth historical analysis of British art music post-1945, providing a group-portrait of eleven composers ranging from avant-garde to pop.

Philip Rupprecht (Author)

9780521844482, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 9 July 2015

504 pages, 13 b/w illus. 93 music examples
25.3 x 18.1 x 2.9 cm, 1.17 kg

'The book is an indispensable record of British postwar music history, its challenges, key moments, canons, composers, and contexts. Written for academic as well as popular readers, it propels the field of British twentieth-century music miles ahead.' Annika Forkert, CHOMBEC Newsletter

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.

Introduction
1. Between nationalism and the avant garde: defining British modernism
2. Post-war motifs
3. Manchester avant-garde: Goehr, Davies and Birtwistle to 1960
4. A Manchester generation in Paris, London, and Rome: Musgrave, Maw, Crosse, and Bennett
5. Group portrait in the sixties: Davies, Birtwistle and Goehr to 1967
6. Instrumental drama: Musgrave and Birtwistle in the sixties
7. Vernaculars: Bedford and Souster as pop musicians
8. The incurably heterogeneous Tim Souster: between Elektronische Musik and pop
Epilogue.

Subject Areas: Creative therapy [eg art, music, drama MQTC], Cultural studies [JFC], Postwar 20th century history, from c 1945 to c 2000 [HBLW3], Individual composers & musicians, specific bands & groups [AVH], Rock & Pop music [AVGP], 20th century & contemporary classical music [AVGC6], Theory of music & musicology [AVA], Music [AV], History of art & design styles: from c 1900 - [ACX], History of art & design styles: c 1800 to c 1900 [ACV]