Who writes the books we read about music that excites us, and why? Is ‘classical music’ all about class? Related questions underpin this partly polemical study, written by an academic who believes that the Humanities, to be really humane, must confront their methods and aims. Two recent studies of Benjamin Britten have specifically interested the author, who was educated in a world where the composer was a living subject of criticism and praise, his works reflecting values, worries and dramas that were not just about ‘music’. Franklin’s response is to question the recent writers, proposing that, like theirs, his own story conditioned when and how he experienced Britten. This he unfolds autobiographically in and around the discussion of specific works. Recalling his encounters with the composer as a schoolboy, as a student and opera-goer, and then as a teacher, he challenges recent assertions about Britten and modernism in the period.
Britten Experienced is a response to two recent studies of the composer, and offers alternative critical readings of some of his major works. The author frames his proposals with episodes of musicological autobiography that attempt to illustrate how artistic taste and values may be formed against stereotypes of ‘brow’.
Title and Foreword (concluding with A note on the text).
List of Figures
1. Introduction; the roots of my musical taste and Chowrimootoos worry -00
Noyes Fludde from the pews -00
2. Secondary-school Britten; The Turn of the Screw-00
Music A-level and War Requiem -00
3. Encountering Britten as a music student at York in the late 1960s -00
Essay: Grimes and the Sentimental -00
4. Graduation; Britten and Pears return to York -00
Essay: Billy Budd. Confronting the Highbrow Critique of Opera -00
5. Singing at Aldeburgh; musical scholarship -00
Opera in the 70s, and Death in Venice -00
6. A trip to East Berlin and the start of a career -00
Teaching opera. Brittens Death. Mahler and Donald Mitchell -00
7. Essay: Travels. Towards Musical Meaning (The Serenade for Tenor, Horn and
Strings). -00
Leeds. The open secret. Philip Brett and A Midsummer Nights Dream. -00
8. Essay: Modernism and Musicology -00
Select Bibliography -00
Index
Acknowledgements
Peter Franklin, a professor of music at the University of Oxford until 2014, is an Emeritus Fellow of St Catherines College. He has taught on both sides of the Atlantic and has written a number of books and articles on Mahler, Schreker and other composers of the period c. 18801933.
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