This Literature Review contextualises the work I undertook for 'Syd Barrett: A Very Irregular Head', a 140,000 word biography based on the life of the musician Syd Barrett, lead guitarist, vocalist, and principal songwriter in the original line up of Pink Floyd. The book is based on two and a half years of focussed research, carried out between January 1997 and August 2009. During this time I interviewed family, friends, schoolmates, fellow college students, musicians, artists, and admirers from every stage of Barrett‟s life, from his earliest days growing up in Cambridge, through his period as an active musician and pop star, to his final years as a reclusive and enigmatic figure in his home town. However, these 65 interviews comprise only one element of my research. In addition I utilised an extensive range of primary and secondary source material, and the bibliography for the book runs to some 49 texts. (See appendix.) I also drew upon significant audio and video material including rare and hard to find television transmissions, and archive and bootleg recordings, many of which are not in the public domain.

There can be little doubt that the usage of the concept of genre remains widespread in discourses around music, cinema, theatre, literature. However, for a long period of time, musicologists have paid little attention to genre which is considered to be an outdated legacy of positivism: a concept belonging to amateurish criticism or daily musical practice – and incompatible with the hegemonic ideology of ‘absolute music’. In the commentary that follows, the history of my own efforts to bring genre back to the theoretical core of musicological debate is outlined, and intertwined with the work of other scholars (sociologists, cultural theorists, anthropologists) who helped re-define genre as a useful concept in the scholarly study of music. Popular music, as a set of genres from which paramusical elements – and related social conventions – were never expelled as spurious (as formalist musicology did with respect to Western art music), was obviously my main focus, although in some writings I deal with classical music, electronic music and traditional (folk) music. After examining at some length the development of my theory of genre (definitions, ‘rules’ and conventions, inter-genre relations and intra-genre diachronic development), the commentary focuses on a number of studies of specific (mostly popular) genres, music scenes, forms, artists, where genre is an underlying concept. One of the most delicate aspects of any theory about genre, and one that has been at the centre of my investigation for so long, is that of diachronic development; as a consequence, the history of popular music became at some point a favourite subject for my study – my contributions are outlined in the commentary which can be read in conjunction with my writings on the subject. Finally, a section is dedicated to my writings on music technology, music industry, and media. In the conclusions my work on genre is contextualised nationally and internationally, with some considerations on linguistic issues; the commentary ends with a brief outline of my future research plans.

The first part of this thesis will consider how a range of eighteenth-century novels represented the relationship between non-professional musical performance and femininity. Chapter one will consider music‟s status as a female accomplishment, focussing on the debate about the value of musical accomplishment as it appeared in polemical writing and novels by Jane Austen, Frances Burney, Elizabeth Hervey and anonymous writers. It will examine how far these novelists presented music as a leisure activity that benefitted women in their daily lives and how they responded to a prevalent dichotomy of intellectual endeavour and musical accomplishment. It will trace the changing function of music throughout Jane Austen‟s fiction, placing it in the context of other novels of the time, while arguing that these women writers managed to criticise certain attitudes that motivated the pursuit of musical accomplishment without rejecting music as a creative skill. Broadly, the first chapter will investigate eighteenth-century polemical writing and novels with an eye to examining how musical accomplishment became a marker of femininity in novels. Chapter two will scrutinise the role of concerts in four eighteenth-century novels in order to consider the currency of a binary opposition between non-professional and professional spaces. It will also examine how novelists evaluated such spaces through their representations of musical performance. The second section of chapter two will explore the social and political associations given to musical instruments, examining how far the representation of musical instruments, in Frances Burney‟s Camilla and Sarah Harriet Burney‟s Geraldine Fauconberg led to a criticism of disability and foreignness. Both sections will consider how music has contributed to a debate about the rise of consumerism, the organisation of spaces, the tenuous female move into professionalism and the meaning of the term luxury. I will show that Jane Austen, Frances Burney and Ann Thicknesse responded to the premise that the professional space was an unsafe place for women by including concerts that involve both performing and non-performing heroines in various ways. Thus, they were unafraid to implicitly comment on the divides between the private and public spheres. The second half of the thesis examines responses to music in the eighteenth century by analysing the relationship between music-making, sensibility and the responsive body. The third chapter will assess how male observers and suitors responded to female musicmaking, questioning both how far this altered the way in which sensibility has been understood and the central role of the body in scenes of music making. It will traverse a wider segment of literary genres and include analysis of French and Irish, as well as English, novels to assess how far nationality affected the relationship between gender, sensibility and music. Chapter four will examine musical courtship scenes, considering how far music was used as a tool in courtship and identify it as a language specifically suited to the rules of marriage-making. It will also explore the relationship between music, femininity and courtship in novels published between 1750 and 1814.

Many aspects of Ignaz Jan Paderewski’s life and career have been the subject of previous research, but some important areas remain uninvestigated. Moreover, many biographies, especially those written in English, have hitherto rarely adopted a critical stance. My aim here is to examine those elements of Paderewski’s performance style that have not hitherto been fully studied. Unique Polish sources include unpublished letters written to his father and Helena Górska, his secretaries’ letters written in 1935 and between 1938-39, and of course his correspondence with his pupils, which sheds considerable new light on his views on, and success in, piano teaching. This dissertation discusses in detail his stylistic approach, attitude towards piano playing, preparation for performance and methods of interpretation. Unpublished letters between Paderewski and his pupils deal with such issues as: choosing concert programmes, techniques of pedalling and advanced interpretational issues. To further evaluate changes in Paderewski’s playing style over his career I have analysed a representative selection of his recordings made over the course of his career. Although Paderewski’s style did not change radically, some of the recorded pieces do demonstrate significant differences in interpretation, and his experiments in phrasing, dynamics, tempo and pedaling. I additionally compare some of the recordings of the same pieces by Paderewski and his contemporaries. For instance, Arthur Friedheim’s recording of Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 in C sharp minor. An approach such as this will illuminate, for example, some differences in style between representatives of the ‘Liszt School’ (of which Friedheim was one of the most celebrated exponents) and that of Leschetizky (as represented by Paderewski). This documentation and evaluation of Paderewski’s performance style has naturally influenced my own performances of his works. The accompanying recital therefore includes one of Paderewski’s most substantial piano pieces, the Sonata in E flat minor, contrasted by a Sonata by Paderewski’s contemporary, Sergei Rachmaninov, and completed by works of Chopin in Paderewski’s repertoire, and a piece by his pupil, Ernest Schelling, also recorded by Paderewski. The recital therefore constitutes a practical application of Paderewski’s performance and programming styles as discussed in the dissertation.

This thesis is an interdisciplinary examination of the role religious music played in the formation of Protestant religious identities during the Elizabethan phase of the English Reformation. It is allied with current post-revisionist trends in seeking to explain how the population of sixteenth-century England adjusted to the huge doctrinal upheaval of the Reformation. It also seeks to move post-revisionism onwards, by suggesting that the synthetic patchwork of beliefs which emerged during the English Reformation was nonetheless distinctively Protestant, and that we must redefine our notion of what it actually meant to be Protestant in the context of post-Reformation England. The first of three sections, ‘Discourses’, explores the classical and religious discourses which underpinned sixteenth-century understandings of music, and its use in religious worship. Chapter one investigates the strengthening and importance of neo-classical notions of speculative music during the Renaissance, while chapter two explores how these notions affected the way Protestant reformers thought about, wrote about, and used music in public worship. Section two, ‘Sites’, looks at the practice of Church music in the parish and the cathedral church. Chapter three uses qualitative and quantitative data from churchwardens’ accounts to document changing patterns of musical expenditure in the Elizabethan parish, while chapter four focuses on the cathedral, and challenges received notions about the supposed dichotomy between parish and cathedral worship practices. The third and final section, ‘Identities’, shifts its attention to the people of Elizabethan England, and the ways in which music both served and shaped the processes of religious identity formation. Chapter five looks at music as a tool of pedagogy, propaganda and devotional piety, in church, schoolroom and home, while chapter six concentrates on the ways in which Church music both reinforced and complicated notions of communal and individual identity, acting as a source of both harmony and discord.

This study focuses on P.I. Tchaikovsky's last completed work, the richly symbolic Six Songs, Opus 73. It demonstrates for the first time how Tchaikovsky's significant literary talents impacted on his song output in general, and on this cycle of songs in particular, providing us also with new insights into his personality. The composer selected and sequenced the poems used for the Opus 73 set to form the cycle of texts himself. The resulting songs are underpinned by a network of internal connections, which parallel the techniques used in the original poems in remarkable ways and link subtly with coded fate messages found elsewhere in the composer's output. The study presents evidence which enhances Pyotr Il'ich's reputation as a skilled manipulator of words, ideas and music.

This thesis considers the pervasive and multifaceted influence of Richard Wagner’s music, aesthetics, and politics on British composers during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Drawing on music analysis, hermeneutics, and various archival sources (composers’ writings, contemporary reviews, and unpublished music), each chapter of the thesis focusses on case studies that bring British musical Wagnerism into dialogue with a number of other prominent artistic and cultural currents during the period under consideration: notably, Celticism, Pre-Raphaelitism, Arthurianism, nationalisms, mysticism, pantheism, eroticism, and ideas relating to the integration of or translatability of the arts. Despite the sometimes widely divergent aesthetic, political, and social ends for which these composers called on Wagnerian ideas and techniques, this thesis argues that all these manifestations of Wagnerism were united by their composers’ desire to regenerate or re-enchant a world that was perceived to be in a state of crisis or decay. Ultimately, by viewing these composers and works through the lens of British Wagnerism, this study enriches our understanding of British music of the period and situates it the context of a wider European phenomenon.

Samuel Beckett’s skepticism regarding language’s ability to communicate effectively drives his dramas’ use of formal and stylistic gestures that emphasize the musical potential of words. In this report, I analyze Beckett’s play Endgame (1958) in light of its musical elements and their implications for performance. Critics have debated the putative presence of sonata form, a type of musical structure prevalent among classical pieces from the eighteenth century, in Endgame. Emmanuel Jacquart proposes that the play follows such a form, while Thomas Mansell and Catherine Laws doubt the possibility of such interdisciplinarity. Mansell wonders whether the ascription of sonata form to Endgame’s structure merely couches dramatic fundamentals in musical terms, while Laws argues that the lack of harmonic structure in human speech prevents a spoken medium like drama from fully absorbing the formal conventions of classical music. I explore the uncharted territory between these two critical camps, linking the implications of Jacquart’s position for the performance of Endgame, as well as Mansell’s and Laws’s reiterations of the fundamental separation of language and music, to Beckett’s own preoccupation with the inability of language to express thought and emotion adequately. Ultimately, I contend that Endgame functions not simply as a sonata, but as a frustrated sonata; that is, it approximates sonata form but can never fully replicate it. As such, Endgame becomes a point of origin for Beckett’s more experimental later plays, a concept I illustrate by demonstrating how Play (1963), the work commonly regarded as the turning point between Beckett’s early and late dramatic styles, essentially revisits and refines the frustrated sonata. / text

Thesis (M.A.)--Western Washington University, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 67-70). Also available in electronic format.

This thesis explores the impact of Mercadante’s operas in France during the 1820s and 1830s. The study covers a period from the French premiere of Elisa e Claudio in Paris (1823) up to the period immediately preceding the worldpremiere of Il giuramento (Milan, La Scala, 11 March 1837), which is traditionally regarded as the first of Mercadante’s ‘reform’ operas and the watershed of his mature style. Modern music historians and early biographers have suggested that Mercadante’s encounter with French operatic conventions was the trigger for his ‘reform’ impulse, which the composer himself acknowledged in one of his most famous letters. As a contribution to discussion of Mercadante’s stylistic developments, I examine a number of case studies which probe the French reception of his early output. Chapter 1 provides a historical survey of French critical assessments of Mercadante in the nineteenth century, revealed in the ongoing discourse of the time regarding Italian opera in France. Chapter 2 explores the critical reception of Elisa e Claudio, staged at the Théâtre Italien in 1823. Chapter 3 studies the process of transfer that brought about the transformation of Elisa e Claudio into the pasticcio Les Noces de Gamache, produced for the Théâtre de l’Odéon by the composer Luc Guénée in 1825. Chapter 4 reconstructs Mercadante’s sojourn in Paris and the genesis of I briganti during the 1835-36 season at the Théâtre Italien. Chapter 5 frames the Italian performances of I briganti and the related revision process in the context of Mercadante’s French experience. In focusing on the intertwined responses of Franco-Italian music criticism, this study of Mercadante’s early operas shows the value of the study of pan-European criticism and of cultural transfer as a larger framework within which to locate studies of Mercadante’s developments in style and aesthetics.