British Musical Modernism

British Musical Modernism explores the works of eleven key composers to reveal the rapid shifts of expression and technique that transformed British art music in the post-war period. Responding to radical avant-garde developments in post-war Europe the Manchester Group composers - Alexander Goehr Peter Maxwell Davies and Harrison Birtwistle - and their contemporaries assimilated the serial-structuralist preoccupations of mid-century internationalism to an art grounded in resurgent local traditions. In close readings of some thirty-five scores Philip Rupprecht traces a modernism suffused with the formal elegance of the 1950s the exuberant theatricality of the 1960s and - in the works of David Bedford and Tim Souster - the pop minimalist and live-electronic directions of the early 1970s. Setting music-analytic insights against a broader social-historical backdrop Rupprecht traces a British musical modernism that was at once a collective artistic endeavor and a sounding myth of national identity.