Peter J Tregear

This premiere edition of the opera of Anna Amalia von Sachsen Weimar Eisenach is generated from a facsimile of the surviving manuscript score held by the Anna Amalia Bibliothek in Weimar – thankfully the original survived the catastrophic fire of 2004. The score is testament to the high level of musical attainment of the composer. Anna Amalia draws upon models from both opera seria, opera buffa, and folk song, but the result is no mere musical potpourri, but an important artistic milestone in the development of German Opera by a major historical figure in her own right, one, moreover, that remains highly attractive and accessible today. 

With introductory essays by the editor, Dr. Peter Tregear, Professor Nicholas Boyle, Dr. Lorraine Byrne Bodley. and Dr. Ettore Ghibellino.

The oldest music school in Australia, the Conservatorium at the University of Melbourne has had a highly colourful history. From the dismissal of its first professor, the controversial G.W.L. Marshall-Hall, to its dominance of the nation’s orchestral life under the influential Sir Bernard Heinze, it has always been a focus of attention. In this book, Peter Tregear salutes 1995, the Conservatorium’s centennial year, in a fascinating narrative illustrated with numerous historical sources, including many photographs, and the recollections of many former students and staff. From the events surrounding its foundation as a music school unique in the British Empire in setting practical studies in a university, Tregear focuses on the school’s leading personalities and charts its development to a modern music faculty.

This chapter explores the various influences that shaped the growth of music conservatoires and the inclusion of music in universities as a discrete branch of study. Arising foremost out of a desire to meet rising demands for professional accreditation and status both from musicians themselves and from those wishing to use their services, this growth in the institutionalization of music education was shaped in turn by tensions between idealistic and pragmatic views of the role of music in society, and by the rising significance given to music as a tool of the emergent modern nation-state, as much as it also inevitably reflects cultural prejudices of the age.

Performance as Bass soloist and artistic curator of a rare performance on historic instruments of J. S. Bach's 'St Matthew Passion'. A sold-out performance in the Melbourne Recital Hall that drew on the latest research into historic performance and temperament, and involved leading UK-based choral specialist Jeremy Summerly as conductor

founded with Asaf ’yev’s [sic] involvement’ (p. 46). But this interpretation cannot be accurate (unless Bobrik has unearthed previously unknown information), since the journal’s founder and editor was Andrey RimskyKorsakov (son of Nikolay), as acknowledged in Taruskin’s chapter (p. 96). One area that the authors have collectively neglected is the extent to which certain aspects of Lourie¤ ’s compositional development were prefigured in his Russian phase, notably the religious element and his engagement with Greek topics, which prefigured his neoclassicism. Moreover, most of the authors seem to assume that Stravinsky took more from Lourie¤ than he gave in terms of musical composition, a position that seems to be rather exaggerated. Given that this volume offers the most comprehensive presentation of Lourie¤ ’s writings to date, and that the authors took pains to find and retrieve many of them, a list of those texts as an appendix would have been valuable, as would a chronological list of Lourie¤ ’s musical works. Elegantly organized and written, and thoroughly researched, this volume is an invaluable contribution to scholarship on twentiethcentury music and twentieth-century Russian culture in general, as well as to the areas of music criticism and aesthetics. KATERINA LEVIDOU University of Athens and King’s College London

... More abstractly, the mu-sic provides an undertow of fragile serenity—in this, comparable to Agnes Varda's use of the Mozart Clarinet Quintet in Le bonheur (1965), whose lush visuals were no doubt a further precursor to Widerberg's film. ...

Music. He was made a Member and Officer of the Order of Australia, culminating in the award of Companion (AC). Roger Covell is quoted in this book as saying: ‘he is a man who has volunteered for onerous but important duty, working for excellent and difficult causes and doing kind and neighbourly things without drawing public attention to them’ (p. 218). Ken Tribe gave out so much to the performing arts world. The stories in Gwen Bennett’s book show that he had the desire and the professional ability to help arts organizations to support artists and present good repertoire to Australian audiences. This book represents excellent reading.

psychoanalytic theory, exemplified by Voyage (1953), in which, he argues, she worked through the demise of her relationship with Hawkins. Franko’s research is meticulous, and the breadth of scholarship he brings to bear on Graham’s work is impressive, going far beyond dance history to encompass Modernist literature, music history, psychoanalytic theory and American political history, as well as feminist and contemporary critical theory. He brings a new approach to Graham’s relationship with Hawkins, presenting Hawkins far more sympathetically than has hitherto been usual, and he offers a nuanced reading of the complexities of Graham’s selffashioning as a serious woman artist in the early twentieth century. His attempt to situate her work in its political, intellectual and cultural context is a worthy contribution to dance scholarship’s project of reinstating modern dance into history. However, despite the depth and breadth of his research and the original insights that it throws up, reading Martha Graham in Love and War is a hard slog. In places, this is due to inadequate contextualization: Franko assumes a level of knowledge across such diverse fields that his ideal readers are likely to be few. This study’s deployment of critical theory can also be problematic. Franko sometimes uses theoretical material productively, as in his illuminating discussion of archetypal psychoanalytic theory in relation toDark Meadow (1946) and Errand into the Maze (1947). At other times, fleeting allusions to Derrida, theories of ‘women’s film’, feminist theory and so forth, aredropped into the text in amanner that appears gratuitous simply because they are not adequately explained. The most laborious aspect of the reading process, however, is wading through Franko’s prose. Franko is a dancer, choreographer and dance academic: fleet of foot he may be, but he writes, sadly, with a dead hand. Almost impenetrably dense and compressed sentences that require multiple re-reads, and the use of jargon and unnecessarily complex language, undermine the intrinsic interest of the material. This is a shame, becauseFranko’s insights deserve awide audience.As it is, this ground-breaking analysis of a crucial period in Graham’s creative history is very much a specialist volume.

© 1993 Peter John TregearThis thesis presents a broad study of the life, times and creative output of the English born Australian composer Fritz Bennicke Hart (1874-1949) concentrating on the formative period of Australian cultural history in which he lived and contributed. It examines and evaluates Hart's particular personal achievements, relationships with his contemporaries, and his work for various Melbourne and Hawaiian musical institutions. It argues that the creative output of Hart, particularly that associated with the Celtic revival, reveals much about contemporary perceptions of Australian identity and culture. The thesis includes an introductory contextual examination of Hart's music. A comprehensive cross-referenced catalogue of all known manuscript sources of Hart's music, including a detailed description of the manuscript sources of his operas, is included as an Appendix

Tregear, Peter. Edward Said and Theodor Adorno: The Musician as Public Intellectual [online]. In: Curthoys, Ned (Editor); Ganguly, Debjani (Editor). Edward Said: The Legacy of a Public Intellectual. Carlton Vic.: Melbourne University Press, 2007: 205-220. Availability: < ...

Focusing on Krenek's compositional path from the eclectic musical language of Jonny spielt auf to the austere twelve-tone technique of Karl V, Tregear provides an historical and critical context to this most historically significant period of Krenek's creative life. His study also enriches our understanding of many of Krenek's contemporaries, such as Alban Berg and Arnold Schoenberg. This book should interest students, scholars and practitioners with an interest in modern opera, and contemporary classical music as well as early-20th-century German history more generally.

Ernest Bloch (1880^1959) is an exemplar of the twentieth-century composer for whom artistic and national identity were never fixed concepts. Best known today for a series of works based on Jewish liturgical and cultural themes, he also composed music in most of the major forms of Western art music (symphony, sonata, string quartet, etc.) but did so just as the centrality of those forms was dissolving under the pressures of post-tonal musical modernism. Bloch was also a significant teacher; pupils include Roger Sessions and Randall Thompson. Scholarly interest since his death has been intermittent, but now, as a more open and inclusive understanding of twentiethcentury music and musical identity becomes the norm, his life and music are attracting renewed attention. Alongside the revival of the International Ernest Bloch Society in London in 2009, and the formation of similar organizations in Israel and Switzerland, this book is one conspicuous, and welcome, sign of it. As the title might suggest, Ernest Bloch Studies does not try to provide a new comprehensive biography or compositional survey but rather seeks to highlight key themes of recent research, as well as provide some helpful up-to-date research tools such as a chronology and catalogue of published and unpublished works. These are, in turn, prefaced by a series of short essays that serve to supplement pre-existing biographical studies. The first, by Ernie Bloch (the composer’s grandson), offers us a view of the composer as a family man in the latter years of his life. We learn just how significant was the munificence of the Rosalie and Jacob Stern family in San Francisco that enabled the University of California at Berkeley to offer Bloch a personal chair in composition. The terms of their gift to the University allowed him not only to dedicate himself to composition for the next decade but also to live wherever he wished. Bloch had at first chosen to return to Europe but the outbreak of the Second World War forced his return to the relative safety of the west coast of the United States. In 1941, he moved to Oregon to be near his newly married son. There began a period of great compositional fertility (the Oregon years are the particular focus of David Z. Kushner’s contribution to this volume), but also self-doubt, in part caused by his considerable distress when, after the attack on Pearl Harbour, the war came to threaten his safety there too. A more fundamental source of his self-doubt lies in Bloch’s complex, and often contradictory, relationship to his Jewish heritage. In 1917, as Norman Solomon observes in his introductory essay, Bloch had ‘proclaimed his aspiration, as a Jew, to write Jewish music, because he was sure that this was the only way in which he could produce music of vitality and significance’ (p. 4). If so, it was a short-lived moment of confidence. Kla¤ ra Mo¤ ricz’s contribution to the volume, entitled ‘The ‘‘Suffering and Greatness’’ of Ernest Bloch: Concepts of the Composer as Genius’, explores his equally troublesome inheritance of nineteenth-century ideas of the composer as prophet. We learn that Bloch may well have modelled his conception of his own musical greatness on Romain Rolland’s composer novel, Jean Christophe. She compares his self-conception with that of Richard Wagner, ‘another expert in suffering’ (p. 27), noting that ‘geniuses are not alienated only because, Bloch believed, society rejects them’, but also because they ‘feel part of a highly selective, privileged few’ (p. 28). Other influences on the composer’s sense of self included the British sexologist and social reformer Havelock Ellis (1859^1939) and the pioneering sociologist of crowd behaviours, Gustave le Bon (1841^1931). Both helped nurture in Bloch an awareness of his own state of exile and exclusion, a sense that was only to be amplified by the impact of two world wars on western European culture, and of course the especially catastrophic impact of the Second World War on European Jewry. The first of Alexander Knapp’s two chapters describes in more detail aspects of Bloch’s ‘pattern of ambivalence towards the wider society around him, the pain of alienation and anti-Semitism, tensions between the internal

Throughout his life, Grainger claimed that he sought to put his music at the service of ‘the complicated facts & problems of modern life’, a task he thought required engaging his audience in a ‘pilgrimage to sorrow’. On the whole, however, audiences and critics alike have tended instead to associate Grainger with the works of his that sound anything but downbeat. Nevertheless, Grainger’s self assessment was genuine. He had a painfully ambivalent relationship to many of the emerging features of modernity, a state of mind for which he found a fellow-traveller in Rudyard Kipling. Both men found a means to express elements of this ambivalence via an unusually strong interest in both local and foreign vernacular cultures. Grainger’s original text settings and folksong arrangements alike do not merely celebrate the global reach of the British world or try to preserve the dying folk music traditions of rural England and Scandinavia, but instead are an attempt to express what he considered to be particular fissures in the modern psyche, not least his own. He believed that any lasting accommodation with the emerging features of modern life required us to confront what we had lost along the way.

Curated and conducted concert 'To Rend the Heart with Chords' (Choral Music of Percy Grainger) for the The Consort of Melbourne, with piano duo Timothy Young, and Anna Carson, Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, Melbourne Recital Centre Thursday, June 3, 2010 at 7:30 p.m

Mira Calix is not afraid to challenge musical convention or cross genre boundaries. She creates music of unconventional beauty, working with found sound, electronics, voice and classical instrumentation. Her prolific and innovative approach to composition has led to a critically-acclaimed catalogue of work. She has been commissioned to set both the words of one of Britain's most acclaimed and award winning contemporary poets, Alice Oswald and that of its most established; William Shakespeare, to music. She has released music alongside avant-garde classical composers like Sir Harrison Birtwistle and Jonathan Harvey and collaborated with indie innovators such as Malcolm Middleton (Arab Strap) and Brian McComber (Dirty Projectors). She has supported Radiohead on a leg of their Kid A tour and composed Nunu for the London Sinfonietta and a chorus of insects. She has released five albums on Warp Records. This concert surveys Mira Calix’s works for ensemble and electronics, including the wonderfully strange Nunu for musicians and a choir of insects, and works by Ades, Ligeti and Saariaho. Mira also premieres her Made of Music commission inspired by, and incorporating the music of, Elisabeth Murdoch Hall

Im Umfeld der großen Ausstellung zu Karl V. im Kunsthistorischen Museum, veranstaltete das Ernst-Krenek-Institut gemeinsam mit dem musikwissenschaftlichen Institut der Universität Wien ein Symposion (20./21.6.), das verschiedene fachlich-inhaltliche Zugänge zur „Bekenntnisoper“ eröffnete. Von den zehn Referenten zählen – in der Reihenfolge der Referate – fünf zur Musikwissenschaft: Rudolf Stephan /emer. Prof. FU Berlin, Claudia Maurer Zenck /Prof Musikuni Graz, Peter Tregear /Australien und Uni Cambridge, Matthias Schmidt /Musikuni Wien und Graz und Lothar Knessl /Wien; Rudolf Preimesberger ist Prof. f. Kunstgeschichte an der FU Berlin, Alfred Kohler Prof. und Martina Fuchs Assistentin am Institut f. Geschichte der Uni Wien, Wendelin Schmidt-Dengler Prof. f. Germanistik /Uni Wien und Karl Woschitz Prof. f. Religionswissenschaft /Uni Graz. Die Veranstaltung, die mit der Aufführung von Kreneks op. 73a, Fragmente aus Karl V. – vorgetragen von Kathryn Arthur /Sopran und Till Alexander Körber /Klavier – sowie einführenden Worten von Wilfried Seipel /Dir. des KHM und Gernot Gruber /musikwiss. Institut, Uni Wien eröffnet und von einer kulturpolitisch akzentuierten Diskussion beschlossen wurde ist im folgenden in komprimierter Form wiedergegeben. Ich danke den Referenten für die Kurzfassung ihres Vortrags, Gernot Gruber und Matthias Schmidt für gemeinsame inhaltliche Planung, Petra Preinfalk /Ernst-Krenek-Institut für organisatorische Durchführung des Symposions.