Meirion Bowen – författare

Tippet on Music expands essays from Michael Tippett's two previous collections, Moving into Aquarius and Music of the Angels, to make a fresh, up-to-date compilation. It also includes a substantial amount of new material. Altough its framing chapters deal with aesthetics and the role of the artist in society, the core of the book is to do with music by other twentieth-century composers, and above all Tippett's own major works, from his early popular success, the oratorio A Child of our Time, up to the very latest, such as the opera New Year and the orchestral piece The Rose Lake. A whole section is devoted to the questions of interpretation and performance, and as such it should be particularly useful to performers, conductors and opera directors. Tippett on Music distils the intellectual opinions and artistic experience of an internationally celebrated composer, one whose life-span has stretched through almost the whole of the twentieth century, and whose compositional output has remained consistent and challenging, right into his late eighties. The book ends with a glimpse of what Tippett thinks commposers could achieve in the next millenium.

This title was first published in 2000: Catalan-born composer Roberto Gerhard (1896-1970) left significant legacies - both musical and documentary. Exiled in Cambridge with the onset of the Spanish Civil War, he gradually achieved wide recognition by performers and conductors, in both Britain and America, as a composer whose music was essential to the modern repertoire. In this work, Meirion Bowen collects many of the composer's articles, reviews, lectures and broadcasts to demonstrate the full extent and continuity of Gerhard's artistic and creative thinking. The writings have been arranged thematically to emphasize the evolution of Gerhard's musical interests. His attachment to Spanish and Catalonian traditions broadened into a fascination with folk music of all kinds. His studies with Schoenberg in the mid 1920s gave him the key to his own creative individuality; thereafter, his imaginative vitality led him eventually to experiment with electronic and concrete music and he continued breaking new ground, even in his final years.