The only one in this genre in the creation of the English composer E. Elgar, the E-minor String Quartet op.83 contains three parts, revealing a less traditional treatment of the sonata cycle used in ...the quartet genre. The fitting in the patterns of the sonata form in all the three parts (I — traditional sonata form, II — sonata without treatment, III — sonata with inverted reprise) allows a masterful and varied elaboration of the musical material. In this way, for the exposition of the three sonata forms, are characteristic the plurithematism of the elements of the main groups and the monothematism of the secondary groups. Another peculiarity that refers to the stylistic features and genre of the Quartet consists in the presence of different sources that have their origin in: the musical-rhetorical figures of the Baroque; arioso vocal singing; dance music both academic and ambient; music of different epochs (Baroque, Romanticism); traditional English music. In all the three movements of the cycle, the ideas and feelings, the emotions provoked by certain events are embellished in the structure made at the level of the orchestral one.
This article explores the ubiquity of popular songs across print traditions, performance venues, and social classes in England during the late Georgian era. It examines the formatting and ...presentation of an eighteenth-century chapbook, contextualizing it within contemporaneous print cultures before exploring how the songs in this item of cheap literature relate to music from English comic operas, pleasure garden entertainments, and domestic spaces. Through this case study, the article aims to illuminate a compelling era of English song before the "elite" became exclusive of the "popular," when songs moved fluidly between social contexts and print traditions and were heard, known, and performed by multiple classes of English society.
This essay analyses the functions and forms of the pastoral masques in two musical works celebrating England and its monarchs: Purcell’s semi-opera King Arthur (1691) and Britten’s coronation opera ...Gloriana (1953). The conventions of the masque and the pastoral combine in performances involving singing and dancing by rustics and shepherds. In both works, the pastoral masques or moments are spectacles within the spectacle, offered as gifts to the character(s) on stage. The masques thus foreground the artificiality of pastoral by this mise-en-abyme of the pageantry attending royal occasions. They invite reflection on the relation between the pastoral texts and their musical settings, and raise the question of what constitutes “pastoral” music. Given the themes and original functions of the two works and the national status of their composers, the essay also examines the nature of the “Englishness” of the pastoral masques in King Arthur and Gloriana.
Charles Maland focuses on the cultural sources of the
on-and-off, love-hate affair between Chaplin and the American
public that was perhaps the stormiest in American stardom.
The first comprehensive biography of an extraordinary English poet and composer whose life was haunted by fighting in the First World War and, later, confinement in a mental asylum Ivor Gurney ...(1890–1937) wrote some of the most anthologized poems of the First World War and composed some of the greatest works in the English song repertoire, such as "Sleep." Yet his life was shadowed by the trauma of the war and mental illness, and he spent his last fifteen years confined to a mental asylum. In Dweller in Shadows, Kate Kennedy presents the first comprehensive biography of this extraordinary and misunderstood artist.A promising student at the Royal College of Music, Gurney enlisted as a private with the Gloucestershire regiment in 1915 and spent two years in the trenches of the Western Front. Wounded in the arm and subsequently gassed during the Battle of Passchendaele, Gurney was recovering in hospital when his first collection of poems, Severn and Somme, was published. Despite episodes of depression, he resumed his music studies after the war until he was committed to an asylum in 1922. At times believing he was Shakespeare and that the "machines under the floor" were torturing him, he nevertheless continued to write and compose, leaving behind a vast body of unpublished work when he died of tuberculosis. Drawing on extensive archival research and spanning literary criticism, history, psychiatry and musicology, this compelling narrative sets Gurney's life and work against the backdrop of the war and his institutionalisation, probing the links between madness, suffering and creativity.Facing death in the trenches, Gurney hoped that history might not "forget me quite." This definitive account of his life and work helps ensure that he will indeed be remembered.
The influence of auditory stimuli and their transmission mode on food intake and meal duration was assessed in healthy adults (73 male, 74 female) under laboratory conditions. The participants (18–30 ...years old) were randomized to one of five lunch groups. Five conditions were compared: eating in silence (control condition), eating while listening to background music via loudspeakers, eating while listening to background music via headphones, eating while listening to pop songs with English vocals and eating while listening to pop songs with German vocals. Results showed no association between listening to songs with different emotion-arousing potential and the amount of food consumed. Within-group comparisons revealed longer meal durations while listening to English music and unfamiliar background music via headphones than while listening to familiar German pop songs. The difference with the control condition just failed to reach significance. No differences were found for transmission mode. Further studies to examine the influence of music on food intake and eating behaviour, especially under controlled conditions, are needed.
Charles Maland focuses on the cultural sources of the on-and-off, love-hate affair between Chaplin and the American public that was perhaps the stormiest in American stardom.
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