British Musical Modernism

British Musical Modernism explores the works of eleven key composers to reveal the rapid shifts of expression and technique that transformed British art music in the post-war period. Responding to radical avant-garde developments in post-war Europe, the Manchester Group composers - Alexander Goehr, Peter Maxwell Davies, and Harrison Birtwistle - and their contemporaries assimilated the serial-structuralist preoccupations of mid-century internationalism to an art grounded in resurgent local traditions. In close readings of some thirty-five scores, Philip Rupprecht traces a modernism suffused with the formal elegance of the 1950s, the exuberant theatricality of the 1960s, and - in the works of David Bedford and Tim Souster - the pop, minimalist, and live-electronic directions of the early 1970s. Setting music-analytic insights against a broader social-historical backdrop, Rupprecht traces a British musical modernism that was at once a collective artistic endeavor, and a sounding myth of national identity.

• Provides the first historical and analytic account of a major period in post-war British music, giving detailed readings of 1960s composers who are little discussed in previous scholarship
• Dismantles a monolithic distinction between high and popular art in the 1960s, showing that 1960s pop music and art music have much more in common than is usually thought
• Offers a richly documented view of musical reception, drawing on a broad range of press and media sources from critics of the period