Thesis (M.M.)--University of Michigan, 1965.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of North Texas, 2005. / System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Includes bibliographical references (p. 240-246).

Treatise (D.M.A.) Florida State University, 2005. / Advisor: Eric Ohlsson, Florida State University, College of Music. Title and description from dissertation home page (viewed 6-21-07). Document formatted into pages; contains 70 pages. Includes biographical sketch. Includes bibliographical references.

abstract: In the triumvirate of composer-performer-listener, while the listener always wins, the performer is the interpreter through which the listener experiences the writings of the composer. When the composer and performer are combined, however, a unique situation arises: the link from the composer to the listener becomes a direct line and the composer becomes his/her own interpreter. Such is the case with Benjamin Britten. Britten conducted almost his entire repertoire in recordings for Decca (the exceptions being Paul Bunyan, Owen Wingrave, and Death in Venice). A comparative analysis of the recordings of four of Britten's works, the Serenade for Tenor, Horn, and Strings, Op. 31; Albert Herring, Op. 39; Spring Symphony, Op. 44; and the Nocturne, Op. 60, shows that despite his complaints about performers not following his tempo markings, Britten often deviated from them himself, tending slower. Britten also occasionally added additional rubato, ritardandi, and accelerandi to his works. Additionally, a discrepancy regarding a pitch in the "Prelude" of the Serenade comes to light. Video of Britten conducting the Nocturne in rehearsal with the Canadian Broadcasting Company (CBC) Vancouver provides additional insight into his methodology. Benjamin Britten succeeded as a composer-conductor, and his catalogue of recordings provides essential primary reference material when studying his works. / Dissertation/Thesis / D.M.A. Music 2014

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.

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 was commissioned by the BBC to write music for a radio broadcast on Michaelmas (September 29) in 1937. This was to be Britten's second work in the field of radio incidental music and in contrast to many earlier BBC radio programs he was the only composer for the Michaelmas broadcast. The document concentrates on the musical content of the eleven movements of The Company of Heaven, the source of the spoken and sung texts assembled by Richard Ellis Roberts, the compositional techniques found in select works written by Britten from 1930-1937 that influenced the content of The Company of Heaven, and the influence that The Company of Heaven had on subsequent select composition during the next ten years.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of the Witwatersrand, Faculty of Arts (Music), 1985.

This study examines the way Britten's operas and their audiences muddied the waters of the so-called "great divide" between modernism and mass culture, mediating between the aesthetics of difficulty and distinction on the one hand, and the pleasures and conventions associated with popular opera on the other. Using the fraught responses of early critics as a way in, I examine the precise musical and critical strategies through which the operas confounded a range of marked modernist binaries - between innovation and tradition, difficulty and sentimentality, modernism and mass culture. One of the main appeals of Britten's operas, I argue, lay in providing mid-century audiences with the chance to have their modernist cake and eat it, to revel in the putatively "cheap" pleasures of consonance, lyricism and theatrical spectacle even while enjoying the prestige that flows from rejecting them. / Music