British Musical Modernism: The Manchester Group and Their Contemporaries

Philip Rupprecht

2015

Cambridge University Press, Music Since 1900 series

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 35 scores, Rupprecht, associate professor of music, 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, the author traces a British musical modernism that was at once a collective artistic endeavor, and a sounding myth of national identity.