McGregor, Richard
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6685-2589
(2021)
‘Benvenuto alla Resurrezione: or … multiple threads interweaving in Max’s music dramas’.
In: Unmasking Max: Peter Maxwell Davies Study Day, 4 December 2021, Cardiff University, UK.
(Unpublished)
Full text not available from this repository.
Abstract
An exploration of recurring ideas in the music theatre works of prolific composer Peter Maxwell Davies.
The problem, if one could describe it thus, with Peter Maxwell Davies’s music theatre works, taking the broadest definition of that term, is that they do not stand alone in his output. Each work he wrote refers back (and sometimes also forward!) to interlinking ideas that dominated his thinking from at least 1957 onwards. His works relating musical content to a theatrical element may appear to sit in different sub-genre areas but the connections between works are many and diverse. Davies was quite happy to engage in a degree of myth making in relation to his compositional processes and the origins of his material, but his private diaries and letters reveal that details and facts might not always be as portrayed in public. Piecing it all together is sometimes rather like a jigsaw where one is not quite sure where to find all the pieces. In this keynote lecture I will attempt to put some of these pieces back together and hopefully shed some new light on his thinking, even obsessions, over a thirty-year span. For various reasons, unpicking Davies’s dramatic works is made easier by the fact that musical ideas are expressed through words, usually Davies’s own, but they also give clues as to interpretation of related ideas within the abstract works: in this talk I hope to indicate where further research might profitably lie as well as offering new perspectives and insights on some well-known works.
| Item Type: | Conference or Workshop Item (Keynote) |
|---|---|
| Departments: | Institute of Arts > Performing Arts |
| Additional Information: | Richard McGregor, Royal Conservatoire Scotland and University of Cumbria, UK. |
| Depositing User: | Richard McGregor |
| Date Deposited: | 10 Jul 2024 15:14 |
| Last Modified: | 10 Jul 2024 15:19 |
| URI: | https://insight.cumbria.ac.uk/id/eprint/7795 |
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