A01=Mervyn Cooke
Author_Mervyn Cooke
Balinese Music
Benjamin Britten
Category=AVLA
Category=AVN
Cross-Cultural Synthesis
Death in Venice
Eastern Music
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eq_music
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Far East
Gagaku Court Music
Indian Music
Indonesia
Japan
Japanese Music
Mervyn Cooke
No Drama
Product details
- ISBN 9780851158303
- Weight: 450g
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 25 Jun 1998
- Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
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Investigation into the influence of Eastern music on Britten's composition.
Benjamin Britten's interest in the musical traditions of the Far East had a far-reaching influence on his compositional style; this book is the first to investigate the highly original cross-cultural synthesis he was able to achieve through the use of material borrowed from Balinese, Japanese and Indian music. Britten's visit to Indonesia and Japan in 1955-6 is reconstructed from archival sources, and shown to have had a profound impact on his subsequent work: the techniques of Balinese gamelan music were used in the ballet The Prince of the Pagodas (1957), and then became an essential feature of Britten's compositional style, at their most potent in Death in Venice(1973). The No drama and Gagaku court music of Japan were the inspiration for the trilogy of church parables Britten composed in the 1960s. The precise nature of these influences is discussed; Britten's sporadic borrowings from Indian music are also fully analysed. There is a survey of critical responses to Britten's cross-cultural experiments.
Dr MERVYN COOKE lectures in music at the University of Nottingham.
Dr MERVYN COOKE lectures in music at the University of Nottingham. He is the author of other works on Britten, and on the history of jazz.
