No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
HUMAN STRAINS: JAMES CLARKE AND THE MUTATING MUSICAL IDEA
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 June 2020
Abstract
James Clarke, successfully completing a PhD in composition as he turned 60, has never been afraid of challenging convention. A recent piece for unaccompanied violin, 2017-V, takes a typically abrasive look at a long-established instrumental genre, and relishes the obvious restrictions – four strings, two hands – in a forceful exploration of a single, multivalent musical idea. That idea evolves through febrile transformations to promote a connected yet never entirely stable music discourse. Various appropriate contexts are referenced in order to define and underline the music's distinctiveness.
- Type
- RESEARCH ARTICLES
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2020
References
1 Brodsky, Seth, From 1989, or European Music and the Modernist Unconscious (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017), p. 332CrossRefGoogle Scholar, note 106.
2 Clarke, James, The Synthesis of Diverse Musical Strands: Commentary on a Portfolio of Original Compositions (PhD portfolio, University of Leeds, 2018), p. 2Google Scholar. Further page references to this Commentary are in the text.
3 Whittall, Arnold, ‘Motives for Music: London, May 2018’. TEMPO 73/287 (2019), pp. 6–17CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
4 Britten, Benjamin, ‘On Receiving the first Aspen award (1964)’, Britten on Music, ed. Kildea, Paul (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 262Google Scholar.
5 Whittall, Arnold, ‘Affirmative Anger: James Clarke and the Music of Abstract Expressionism’, The Musical Times 152 (2011), p. 21Google Scholar.
6 Boulez, Pierre, Orientations, trans. Cooper, Martin (London: Faber & Faber, 1986), p. 32Google Scholar.
7 Cambell, Edward, Boulez, Music and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 145Google Scholar.
8 Boulez, Pierre, ‘Proposals’ (1948), in Stocktakings from an Apprenticeship, trans. Walsh, Stephen (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), p. 49Google Scholar.
9 Drew, David, ‘Modern French Music’, in European Music in the Twentieth Century, ed. Hartog, Howard, reprint (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1961), pp. 309–10Google Scholar.
10 Boulez, Orientations, pp. 417–18.
11 Heinz-Klaus Metzger, ‘Das Altern der jüngsten Musik’ (1962), cited in Iddon, Martin, New Music at Darmstadt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 293CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
12 Harley, James, Xenakis. His Life in Music (New York: Routledge, 2004), pp. 76–8Google Scholar; Montague, Eugene, ‘The Compass of Communications in Sequenza VIII for violin’, in Berio's Sequenzas: Essays on Performance, Composition and Analysis, ed. Halfyard, Janet K. (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), pp. 137–52Google Scholar.
13 Goldman, Jonathan, The Musical Language of Pierre Boulez (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 160–61Google Scholar.
14 Fitch, Lois, Brian Ferneyhough (Bristol: intellect, 2013), p. 257Google Scholar.
15 Boss, Jack, Schoenberg's Twelve-Tone Music: Symmetry and the Musical Idea (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), p. 423CrossRefGoogle Scholar.