Frank Bridge: New Perspectives

Erscheinungsjahr 2026
ISBN: 978-1-83765-237-2
Verlag: Boydell & Brewer

Buch, Englisch, Band 38, 320 Seiten, Print PDF, Format (B × H): 156 mm x 234 mm

Reihe: Music in Britain, 1600-2000

A fresh and comprehensive study of Frank Bridge, exploring his modernism, overlooked works and transformative contributions to British music.

Frank Bridge (1879-1941), student of Stanford and famously teacher of Benjamin Britten, was arguably one of the first British composers developing a radical modern musical language for his generation. The chapters in this collection situate Bridge in a broad intellectual context. They bring together new archival evidence that challenges existing characterisations of Bridge's life and works. Other chapters dealing with modernism address conceptual difficulties in defining his art, as well as problematic concepts in British music studies. The volume also offers new readings of one of Bridge's largest works, Oration, and one of his smallest, Sunset, while chapters on 'form' reveal new understandings of structural processes. The volume also addresses areas that have received little or no scholarly attention to date: song and theatre. Altogether, its focus pays tribute to what Arnold Whittall has described as Bridge's conjunction of 'classical and modernist tendencies' and his transformations of his own compositional technique into something that 'effectively challenged traditional, diatonically rooted ideals of classical coherence and integration'.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Clinch, Jonathan

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Musikwissenschaft Musikgattungen Sinfonische Musik & Ensembles
• Geisteswissenschaften Musikwissenschaft Musikwissenschaft Allgemein Einzelne Komponisten und Musiker

Inhaltsverzeichnis

List of Illustrations
Preface

PART I Career
1 Bridge's Career in Context.
Mark Amos
2 Bridge and Britten Revisited.
Lucy Walker

PART II Modernism
3 'The English Schönberg' - Frank Bridge and British Responses to Modernism, 1914-1927.
Philip Rupprecht
4 Bridge's Four Seasons - Rural Modernism and a Redefining of 'English Pastoral Music'.
Jonathan Clinch

PART III Readings
5 Mourning and Subjectivity in Oration.
Matthew Riley
6 Topics, Tonality and the Aesthetics of Miniaturism in Bridge's musical 'poem', Sunset.
Stephen Downes

PART IV Form &Allegory
7 From Irony to Allegory: Form as Content in Frank Bridge.
Ben Earle

PART V Form & Tradition
8 Bridge, Cobbett and the Topos of 'Phantasy'.
Jeremy Dibble
9 Bridge's Phantasm - between Concerto and Symphonic Poem.
Julian Horton

PART VI New Avenues
10 Bridge's Songs.
Stephen Varcoe
11 Bridge's Theatre.
Stephen Banfield

PART VII Afterword
12 Connections.
Fiona Richards
13 A Practical Modernism.
Emily Kilpatrick

Select Bibliography

Index