Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gbm5v Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T08:40:21.011Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

HUMAN STRAINS: JAMES CLARKE AND THE MUTATING MUSICAL IDEA

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 June 2020

Arnold Whittall
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

James Clarke, successfully completing a PhD in composition as he turned 60, has never been afraid of challenging convention. A recent piece for unaccompanied violin, 2017-V, takes a typically abrasive look at a long-established instrumental genre, and relishes the obvious restrictions – four strings, two hands – in a forceful exploration of a single, multivalent musical idea. That idea evolves through febrile transformations to promote a connected yet never entirely stable music discourse. Various appropriate contexts are referenced in order to define and underline the music's distinctiveness.

Type
RESEARCH ARTICLES
Information
Tempo , Volume 74 , Issue 293 , July 2020 , pp. 19 - 31
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2020

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Brodsky, Seth, From 1989, or European Music and the Modernist Unconscious (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017), p. 332CrossRefGoogle Scholar, note 106.

2 Clarke, James, The Synthesis of Diverse Musical Strands: Commentary on a Portfolio of Original Compositions (PhD portfolio, University of Leeds, 2018), p. 2Google Scholar. Further page references to this Commentary are in the text.

3 Whittall, Arnold, ‘Motives for Music: London, May 2018’. TEMPO 73/287 (2019), pp. 6–17CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Britten, Benjamin, ‘On Receiving the first Aspen award (1964)’, Britten on Music, ed. Kildea, Paul (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 262Google Scholar.

5 Whittall, Arnold, ‘Affirmative Anger: James Clarke and the Music of Abstract Expressionism’, The Musical Times 152 (2011), p. 21Google Scholar.

6 Boulez, Pierre, Orientations, trans. Cooper, Martin (London: Faber & Faber, 1986), p. 32Google Scholar.

7 Cambell, Edward, Boulez, Music and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 145Google Scholar.

8 Boulez, Pierre, ‘Proposals’ (1948), in Stocktakings from an Apprenticeship, trans. Walsh, Stephen (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), p. 49Google Scholar.

9 Drew, David, ‘Modern French Music’, in European Music in the Twentieth Century, ed. Hartog, Howard, reprint (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1961), pp. 309–10Google Scholar.

10 Boulez, Orientations, pp. 417–18.

11 Heinz-Klaus Metzger, ‘Das Altern der jüngsten Musik’ (1962), cited in Iddon, Martin, New Music at Darmstadt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 293CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 Harley, James, Xenakis. His Life in Music (New York: Routledge, 2004), pp. 76–8Google Scholar; Montague, Eugene, ‘The Compass of Communications in Sequenza VIII for violin’, in Berio's Sequenzas: Essays on Performance, Composition and Analysis, ed. Halfyard, Janet K. (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), pp. 137–52Google Scholar.

13 Goldman, Jonathan, The Musical Language of Pierre Boulez (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 160–61Google Scholar.

14 Fitch, Lois, Brian Ferneyhough (Bristol: intellect, 2013), p. 257Google Scholar.

15 Boss, Jack, Schoenberg's Twelve-Tone Music: Symmetry and the Musical Idea (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), p. 423CrossRefGoogle Scholar.