Cover; Halftitle; Series information; Title page; Copyright information; Dedication; Table of contents; List of figures; Acknowledgments; Introduction; 1Between nationalism and the avant-garde: defining British modernism; Time lags; Technique as social disgrace: Lutyens´s Wittgenstein Motet; Some versions of modern; Being British: national tradition as performance and pedagogy; The return of the folk: Birtwistle´s Down by the Greenwood Side; 2 Post-war motifs; Cold-War internationalism and the British; Abstraction: the meaning of a style

``To Scottish ears´´: the Edinburgh premiere of Hamilton´s Sinfonia (1959)Self and other: from stereotype to ``group self-contempt´´; The state as patron: BBC music culture; 3 Manchester avant-garde: Goehr, Davies, and Birtwistle to 1960; Alexander Goehr: the question of technique; Peter Maxwell Davies: internationalism and thematic rhetoric; International serialism: Five Pieces for Piano, Op. 2; Thematic process from Alma Redemptoris Mater to Prolation; Film form: Goehr, The Deluge; Harrison Birtwistle: form and drama; Form and pattern in Refrains and Choruses

1958-1959: serialism as fashion and problemIncantation: Monody for Corpus Christi; 4 A Manchester generation in Paris, London, and Rome:Musgrave, Maw, Crosse, and Bennett; Thea Musgrave: poetic and serial patterning in Triptych (1959); Avant-garde and beyond: Nicholas Maw´s Scenes and Arias (1962); Operatic rhetoric; Voices and arias; Orchestral scenes; Lyricism and rigor: Gordon Crosse; In the serial workshop: Elegy, Op. 1; Concertante: being Gordon Crosse; Richard Rodney Bennett: respectability and the avant-garde; 5 Group portrait in the Sixties:Davies, Birtwistle, and Goehr to 1967

Davies at Cirencester, 1961-62Lyric subjectivity in the Leopardi Fragments; National polyphony: First Fantasia on an In Nomine of John Taverner; Between serialism and tonality: Goehr´s Little Symphony; Variation, transformation, distortion; Modal serialism: bloc sonore technique; Sliding past: Birtwistle´s rhythmic repetitions; Ostinato and change: Tragoedia (1965), Prologue and Parodos; Ostinato as action: Tragoedia, Stasimon - Episodion - Exodos; Davies, Revelation and Fall (1966): a fierce complexity; 6 Instrumental drama: Musgrave and Birtwistle in the late Sixties

On the scene: musical performance as theater, circa 1960Dramatic-abstract form: Musgrave´s Chamber Concerto No. 2 (1966); Action as social ritual: Birtwistle´s Verses for Ensembles (1968); Agency as presentation of self: an everyday perspective from Goffman; 7 Vernaculars: Bedford and Souster as pop musicians; Lapsing into triviality: Malcolm Arnold and Peter Maxwell Davies; The uninhibited David Bedford; Soft machines: simplicity and structure in Two Choruses (1963); Astronomic sublime: from The Tentacles of the Dark Nebula (1969) to Twelve Hours of Sunset (1973)

The eclectic Tim Souster: between elektronische Musik and pop

The first in-depth historical analysis of British art music post-1945. A group-portrait of eleven composers ranging from avant-garde to pop.

Description based upon print version of record.