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Shakespeare and Music
Shakespeare and Music I ran this course jointly with Rudy Sabor. Taking a different play each week with students giving an outline of the plot, examining the contemporary music and music inspired by it by later composers for tone poems, operas, songs and other works. I covered Anthony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, Hamlet, Julius Caesar, King…
Music composition
I wrote my first work when I was five. It was for chime bars and Mrs Distin called it “William’s Tune”. This was 1963 and I think she was very surprised that a five year old would be able to come up with an original tune. I had played all the ones she had given…
Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas
Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas – The First English Opera This study was part of a longer course studying the history and culture of the seventeenth century. After studying how Purcell came to write his only true opera and how it fitted in with his other stage works such as King Arthur, and The Fairy Queen…
Amy Beach
Sadly not enough people signed up for this course to run at the City Lit on Saturday 11th October 2014 but here is one of the handouts I was planning to give out. Timeline Amy Beach Timeline
Anton Bruckner
Bruckner – his life and works This course set out to try and raise the profile of a much underrated composer. An unassuming church organist, in many ways a most unlikely romantic hero, Bruckner did for the symphony and church music what Wagner did for opera and led the way to the revolutionary works of…
Carl Nielsen
Nielsen and Sibelius This course involved comparing and contrasting the careers and music of two great Scandinavian contemporaries. Both were born in 1865, Sibelius gave up composing in 1931, the year of Nielsen’s death. The course was based round their magnificent symphonies but explored their whole contribution to C20th music. I ran this course at Crayford…