Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- 1 A debut
- 2 Berio
- 3 Paths to Montsalvat
- 4 Carter
- 5 Da lontano
- 6 Gubaidulina
- 7 A handful of pianists
- 8 Purcell 1995
- 9 Around New York
- 10 Tippett
- 11 Being in Assisi
- 12 Boulez
- 13 The composer's voice
- 14 Mozart 1991
- 15 A decade of Don Giovannis
- 16 Henze
- 17 Operatic passions
- 18 Vivier
- 19 At the movies
- 20 Schoenberg on the stage
- 21 Five British composers
- 22 Lachenmann
- 23 Mapping Mtsensk
- 24 Stockhausen
- 25 Behind the rusting Curtain
- 26 Verdi at the Met
- 27 A quintet of singers
- 28 Schnittke
- 29 How it was, maybe
- 30 Reich
- 31 Tracks in Allemonde
- 32 Birtwistle
- 33 A departure
- Further reading and listening
- Index
- Eastman Studies in Music
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- 1 A debut
- 2 Berio
- 3 Paths to Montsalvat
- 4 Carter
- 5 Da lontano
- 6 Gubaidulina
- 7 A handful of pianists
- 8 Purcell 1995
- 9 Around New York
- 10 Tippett
- 11 Being in Assisi
- 12 Boulez
- 13 The composer's voice
- 14 Mozart 1991
- 15 A decade of Don Giovannis
- 16 Henze
- 17 Operatic passions
- 18 Vivier
- 19 At the movies
- 20 Schoenberg on the stage
- 21 Five British composers
- 22 Lachenmann
- 23 Mapping Mtsensk
- 24 Stockhausen
- 25 Behind the rusting Curtain
- 26 Verdi at the Met
- 27 A quintet of singers
- 28 Schnittke
- 29 How it was, maybe
- 30 Reich
- 31 Tracks in Allemonde
- 32 Birtwistle
- 33 A departure
- Further reading and listening
- Index
- Eastman Studies in Music
Summary
The tercentenary of Purcell's death, coming as the ‘early music’ movement reached its peak, was celebrated in triumphant style, onstage and in print.
the forgèd feature
Now more than ever we are listening for what Gerard Manley Hopkins found—or, rather, for what famously found him.
It is the forgèd feature finds me; it is the rehearsal Of own, of abrupt self there so thrusts on, so throngs the ear.
‘So that’—to continue the poem in the poet's gloss—‘while he [Purcell] is aiming only at impressing me his hearer with the meaning in hand I am looking out meanwhile for his specific, his individual markings and mottlings, “the sakes of him”.’
We might think we are better placed to find these ‘markings and mottlings’, these ‘sakes of him’, now that Purcell's music is vastly more available than it was to a young priest in Oxford in April 1879, when the Purcell Society had only just set out on a complete edition, and when the ‘forgèd feature’ cannot have been finding anyone from out of its ensconcement in much more than those relatively few anthems, sonatas and songs that had been in regular performance since the composer's death.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Substance of Things HeardWritings about Music, pp. 46 - 59Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2005