<p> 1942 was a pivotal juncture in Benjamin Britten's career. Originally, he had planned to emigrate to the United States of America, but after staying a few years, he unexpectedly returned to England in 1942. Upon leaving America's shores, his compositional scores and sketches were confiscated by US Customs. This confiscation, on the one hand, disrupted a smooth transition back to the United Kingdom, but on the other, presented the opportunity for a fresh compositional start. In the years directly following his return, 1943 to 1945, Britten's vocal music is full of metric complexity, suggesting a captivation with metric experimentation. <i>The Ballad of Little Musgrave and Lady Barnard</i> (1943), <i>Festival Te Hein</i>. (1944), <i> the Holy Sonnets of John Donne</i> (1945), and <i>Peter Grimes</i> (1945), diverse in their musical construction and distinct in the types of texts set, share a central compositional concern: the employment of sustained metric conflict as a means of emphasizing structural junctures or poetic ideas. This dissertation presents an overview of metric and hypermetric displacement and grouping conflicts, demonstrating how Britten establishes, sustains, and problematizes meter for expressive and text-interpretative purposes. The methodology employed here draws upon developments in metric theory over the past thirty years, and builds upon analyses that foreground cognitive, performative, and spatial representation.</p><p>
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:PROQUEST/oai:pqdtoai.proquest.com:10633242 |
| Date | 08 September 2017 |
| Creators | Duncan, Stuart Paul |
| Publisher | Yale University |
| Source Sets | ProQuest.com |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | thesis |
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