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Benjamin Britten was one of the major twentieth-Century composers in England, wrote twelve song cycles for voice and piano or various instruments, and the most prolific composer of the genre since Gustav Mahler. On this Island written during his early period, Britten employs various Baroque musical traits and the modern music techniques, which shows his influence on the neoclassical style. The study of the lecture recital document contains four main sections: the life of the composer, the stylistic features of Britten¡¦s song compositions, the written background of the cycle, and detailed analysis of the whole cycle. On This Island was Britten¡¦s first song cycle written for solo voice and piano. The success of premiere of the cycle brought him as one of the most important composer of this genre in the history of the twentieth-century music.

Benjamin Britten’s life and music have been the subject of study from early in his musical career. Current trends in psychological analysis of Britten’s music tend to focus on common themes, such as homosexuality, pacifism, the sense of the outsider, and the loss of innocence. Similarly, theoretical analyses tend either to provide general categorizations of the technical elements in Britten’s music or to apply a singular preconceived concept as a tool for understanding his compositions. These approaches have yielded significant information but leave aspects of Britten’s personality and music unilluminated. Britten’s Op. 47, Five Flower Songs, are a collection of five part songs for a cappella chorus that are often included within the canon of 20th century choral literature. This paper examines a new perspective on Britten’s music by examining the relationship between Britten’s friendships and their influence on his compositions. Through the examination of these relationships information is revealed that allows for a new method of analysis that is particularly relevant to the Five Flower Songs. The opus was dedicated to two botanists for the occasion of their 25th wedding anniversary. Contained within specific movements are extra-musical references to scientific characteristics of the flowers that are the subjects of the texts. By examining this work and important connections between other friendships and his compositional output this paper demonstrates the validity of this perspective in analyzing Britten’s life and music.

Thesis (D.M.A.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2006. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 67-11, Section: A, page: 4035. Adviser: Fred Stoltzfus. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 191-193) Available on microfilm from Pro Quest Information and Learning.

A little-known chamber work by Benjamin Britten is the dramatic cantata Phaedra, op.93, for mezzo-soprano and small orchestra. Among his chamber works, the solo cantata was a musical form used only once by Britten, thus making Phaedra unique among Britten's oeuvre. Britten chose a genre that flourished in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the cantata - as a vehicle for the story of Phaedra. He employs clear allusions to Baroque music in Phaedra by the use of harpsichord and continuo in the recitatives, ornamentation, and word painting. The text for Britten's setting of Phaedra is a translation of Jean Racine's Phedre by the American poet Robert Lowell. From Lowell's complete play, Britten extracted Phaedra's key speeches that deal with her three confessions of incestuous love for her stepson, Hippolytus. These monologues are set in a series of recitatives and arias that make up the entirety of this chamber cantata. In order to gain complete understanding of Phaedra, this document will begin with an investigation into the historical background of Racine's Phedre and the conventions of French tragedy from which it arose. Lowell's translation method will then be explored in comparison to Racine's play. In turn, Britten's extractions from Lowell's translation will be examined. Further, the baroque elements of the cantata and the compositional ideas inherited by Britten from Henry Purcell will be included. Finally, there will be an inspection of the character of Phaedra and Britten's interpretation through orchestration and melodic choices. Investigation into the background of Phaedra's character through Racine's play and Lowell's translation along with Britten's dramatic interpretation through music is necessary for complete comprehension of her mental state and underlying thoughts in order to bring about an emotionally accurate portrayal of the role. Britten himself labeled Phaedra a "dramatic cantata." Therefore, the drama and its text-musical relationships must be uncovered.

In the western classical tradition, the violoncello has developed a reputation for its soulful, vocal qualities. Because of this distinction, many composers have written elegiac works for the cello. This document comprises studies of three twentieth-century British elegies for cello and piano, each explored against a backdrop of poetic, societal and musical influences. The results reveal several common tropes of mourning, both musical and extra-musical, which can be applied to further studies of musical works.

The music of Benjamin Britten is both inspiring and intriguing: inspiring, because his music can move the listener; intriguing, because his use of triadic harmonies and rhythmic settings seems at once free, flexible, and spontaneous yet sensible and appropriate in representing the mood of the text. Although many of Britten’s harmonies are traditional in nature, e.g. major and minor triads, it is difficult, almost impossible or cumbersome at best, to assign Roman numerals to his harmonies because his manner of chord progression does not always conform to functional theory. In my analyses, I will demonstrate that the logic behind Britten's harmonic progressions can be explained through two types of neo-Riemannian transformation theories, namely Richard Cohn's Four Hexatonic Systems and Leonhard Euler's Tonnetz. In the case of the "Spinning Scene" from The Rape of Lucretia, Hindemith’s "Table of Chord-Groups" will be used to explain the presence of harmonies that are not part of the four hexatonic systems. Throughout, Schenkerian graphs will be presented to illustrate how the underlying structure and overall harmonic design of each piece work in conjunction with the emotion of the text. In addition, I will show that his rhythmic manipulations, when coupled with the meaning behind his chord progression, vividly paint the emotion of the text, as well as the state of mind of the poet or the character in an opera.

Nocturnal op. 70 is one of the most important large-scale works written for guitar in the twentieth century. Brief biographical data and some background information on Nocturnal show how it exemplifies Britten's compositional approach. The focus of the analysis is on three structural aspects: the rhythmic, the intervallic, and the aspect of underlying pitch patterns. The rhythmic analysis discusses the distortion of rhythmic patterns by the use of compression, expansion, elisions, syncopation, and rhythmic dissonance. The pitch set analysis discusses the intervallic character of the work, identifying and correlating set types as they form networks of relationship. The reductive analysis discusses the underlying connections of focal pitches in the linear material of Nocturnal. The conclusion then correlates the results of the preceding analyses, discussing the large-scale unfolding of the form in Nocturnal.

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The twentieth century has witnessed a renaissance in the composition of choral music. Not since the Baroque, has choral writing held the prominent position with composers that it has today. At the same time, English composers have regained a stature and influence they have not held since the time of Purcell. It was not until the time of Edward Elgar, Gustave Holst, and Ralph Vaughn-Williams that English music began to recover from the decline of the nineteenth century. Benjamin Britten has played a large role in both the choral renaissance and the recovery of English music.