Melbourne Conservatorium of Music - Research Publications
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ItemHeroines and their ‘moments of folly’: Reflections on writing the biography of a woman composer(ANU Press, 2020-04-08)
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Item‘Life’s Major Crossroads’: Study and Career Paths of Four Australian Women Composers at the Royal College of Music in the 1930s(Taylor & Francis (Routledge): SSH Titles, 2015)
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ItemWhen Grainger was ultra-modernist: A study of the American reception of in a nutshell (1916)(Routledge, 2015-01-01)
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ItemPassions of a Mighty Heart: Selected Letters of G.W.L. Marshall-Hall(Lyrebird Press, 2015)Spanning two decades of the cultural life of Melbourne, from 1891 until the start of World War I, this collection of the letters of the composer, conductor and critic G.W.L. Marshall-Hall samples the scandal, disappointments, achievements and camaraderie of those years. Sometimes caustic and often opinionated, the letters expose their author’s infectious enthusiasm for Art as well as his tendency to rile his enemies. Gathered here from public and private archives in Australia and Britain are 249 of the extant letters, each of which offers a vivid portrait of a man many described as a musical genius.
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ItemGrainger the Modernist(Ashgate Publishing, 2015-01-01)Unaccountably, Percy Grainger has remained on the margins of both American music history and twentieth-century modernism. This volume reveals the well-known composer of popular gems to be a self-described ‘hyper-modernist’ who composed works of uncompromising dissonance, challenged the conventions of folk song collection and adaptation, re-visioned the modern orchestra, experimented with ‘ego-less’ composition and designed electronic machines intended to supersede human application. Grainger was far from being a self-sufficient maverick working in isolation. Through contact with innovators such as Ferrucio Busoni, Léon Theremin and Henry Cowell; promotion of the music of modern French and Spanish schools; appreciation of vernacular, jazz and folk musics; as well as with the study and transcription of non-Western music; he contested received ideas and proposed many radical new approaches. By reappraising Grainger's social and historical connectedness and exploring the variety of aspects of modernity seen in his activities in the British, American and Australian contexts, the authors create a profile of a composer, propagandist and visionary whose modernist aesthetic paralleled that of the most advanced composers of his day, and, in some cases, anticipated their practical experiments.
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Item"A Ping, Qualified by a Thud": Music Criticism in Manhattan and the Case of Cage (1943-58)(CAMBRIDGE UNIV PRESS, 2007-02)This article surveys the reception of concert performances in Manhattan of music by John Cage, from his arrival in 1942 until his gala retrospective held in Town Hall in 1958, in particular comparing responses from composer-critics such as Virgil Thomson, stabled at theNew YorkHeraldTribune, with that of music journalists based at theNew York Timesand other local dailies. Close reading of reviews and of an array of archival sources suggests that Cage's personal and professional relationships with composer-critics ensured that the reception of his music was uniquely well informed, and that his prepared piano works and early experiments with chance were treated with a remarkable degree of affirmation. Much of Cage's critical identity can be attributed to the aegis of Thomson, who, if he denied acting as “hired plugger” for Cage, nonetheless sympathetically construed him as Americanist, Francophile, post-Schoenbergian, and ultramodernist. Thomson's resignation from theTribunein 1954 coincided with a pronounced deterioration in Manhattan critics' appreciation of Cage. I argue that the reasons for this lie as much with the demise of the composer-critic—and a reversal of Cage's own attitude to criticism—as with conservative disaffection with new forms of experimentalism.
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ItemSmyth the anarchist: fin-de-siecle radicalism in The Wreckers(CAMBRIDGE UNIV PRESS, 2008-07)Abstract This essay explores the roots of Ethel Smyth's opera The Wreckers (1903–04), composed to a libretto by H. B. Brewster, in fin-de-siècle debates on the legal and religious regulation of morality. Taking into account Smyth's jaundiced use of Cornish history, the contribution of Brewster's professed individual anarchism and sexual libertarianism, and Smyth's willingness to parody and manipulate musical conventions in order to reinforce radical ideals, it views the work both as a reflection of its authors' engagement with modernism and as a herald of Smyth's subsequent contribution to militant feminism.
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ItemIntroduction(WILEY-BLACKWELL, 2013-08)
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ItemFrom Agitrop to Parable: A Prolegomenon to "A Child of Our time"(Ashgate, 2002)
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