Britten's Musical Language
Nov 2006 · Music in the Twentieth Century Book 17 · Cambridge University Press
Ebook
370
Pages
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About this ebook
Blending insights from linguistic and social theories of speech, ritual and narrative with music-analytic and historical criticism, Britten's Musical Language offers interesting perspectives on the composer's fusion of verbal and musical utterance in opera and song. It provides close interpretative studies of the major scores (including Peter Grimes, Billy Budd, The Turn of the Screw, War Requiem, Curlew River and Death in Venice) and explores Britten's ability to fashion complex and mysterious symbolic dramas from the interplay of texted song and a wordless discourse of motives and themes. Focusing on the performative and social basis of language, Philip Rupprecht replaces traditional notions of textual 'expression' in opera with the interpretation of topics such as the role of naming and hate speech in Peter Grimes; the disturbance of ritual certainty in the War Requiem; and the codes by which childish 'innocence' is enacted in The Turn of the Screw.
About the author
Philip Rupprecht is Assistant Professor at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. He has written on Britten in a number of journals and is a contributor to The Cambridge Companion to Benjamin Britten (1999).
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