20th century music
A01=Christopher Chowrimootoo
aesthetic oppositions
aesthetics
Age Group_Uncategorized
Age Group_Uncategorized
audiences
Author_Christopher Chowrimootoo
automatic-update
benjamin britten
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=AVC
Category=AVGC9
Category=AVH
Category=AVLF
Category=AVN
Category=AVP
composers
consonance
COP=United States
critics
cultural hierarchies
Delivery_Delivery within 10-20 working days
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_music
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
great divide
historiography
Language_English
lyricism
mass culture
mid century discussions
modernism
music
music history
music history and criticism
opera
opera music
PA=Available
prestige
Price_€20 to €50
PS=Active
shades of grey
softlaunch
theatrical spectacle
Product details
- ISBN 9780520298651
- Weight: 363g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 09 Oct 2018
- Publisher: University of California Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
- Language: English
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.
Situated at the intersections of twentieth-century music history, historiography, and aesthetics, Middlebrow Modernism uses Benjamin Britten’s operas to illustrate the ways in which composers, critics, and audiences mediated the “great divide” between modernism and mass culture. Reviving mid-century discussions of the middlebrow, Christopher Chowrimootoo demonstrates how Britten’s works allowed audiences to have their modernist cake and eat it: to revel in the pleasures of consonance, lyricism, and theatrical spectacle even while enjoying the prestige that came from rejecting them. By focusing on moments when reigning aesthetic oppositions and hierarchies threatened to collapse, this study offers a powerful model for recovering shades of grey in the traditionally black-and-white historiographies of twentieth-century music.
Situated at the intersections of twentieth-century music history, historiography, and aesthetics, Middlebrow Modernism uses Benjamin Britten’s operas to illustrate the ways in which composers, critics, and audiences mediated the “great divide” between modernism and mass culture. Reviving mid-century discussions of the middlebrow, Christopher Chowrimootoo demonstrates how Britten’s works allowed audiences to have their modernist cake and eat it: to revel in the pleasures of consonance, lyricism, and theatrical spectacle even while enjoying the prestige that came from rejecting them. By focusing on moments when reigning aesthetic oppositions and hierarchies threatened to collapse, this study offers a powerful model for recovering shades of grey in the traditionally black-and-white historiographies of twentieth-century music.
Christopher Chowrimootoo is Assistant Professor in the Program of Liberal Studies and in the Department of Music at the University of Notre Dame.
