Stephen Downes – författare

Gustav Mahler’s status as an icon of fin-de-siècle Viennese music is assured, with his works now staples of the concert repertoire. His life story has been told in numerous biographies, films and novels, yet he remains an ambiguous, provocative figure. Mahler was a composer who challenged musical form and style but identified with German Enlightenment and Romantic culture, disliking many contemporary artistic trends. He was a Jewish conductor who reached the pinnacle of his profession in antisemitic Vienna. He was supposedly haunted by death, embroiled in a torrid marriage, and his brief meeting with Freud has spurred posthumous psychoanalytical speculations. This book, reflecting the latest research, constructs a fresh interpretation of Mahler’s music in relation to his life.

The Polish composer Karol Szymanowski is one of the most fascinating musical figures of the early twentieth century. His works included four symphonies, two violin concertos, the operas Hagith and King Roger, the ballet-pantomime Harnasie, the oratorio Stabat Mater, as well as numerous piano, violin, vocal and choral compositions. The profile and popularity of Szymanowski's music outside Poland has never been higher and continues to grow. The Szymanowski Companion constitutes the most significant and comprehensive reference source to the composer in English. Edited by two of the leading scholars in the field, Paul Cadrin and Stephen Downes, the collection consists of over 50 contributions from an international array of contributors, including recognized Polish experts. The Companion thus provides a systematic, authoritative and up-to-date compilation of information concerning the composer's life, thought and works.

Aesthetics of Music: Musicological Approaches is an anthology of fourteen essays, each addressing a single key concept or pair of terms in the aesthetics of music, collectively serving as an authoritative work on musical aesthetics that remains as close to 'the music' as possible. Each essay includes musical examples from works in the 18th, 19th, and into the 20th century. Topics have been selected from amongst widely recognised central issues in musical aesthetics, as well as those that have been somewhat neglected, to create a collection that covers a distinctive range of ideas. All essays cover historical origins, sources, and developments of the chosen idea, survey important musicological approaches, and offer new critical angles or musical case studies in interpretation.

Decadence is a crucial yet often misunderstood aspect of European modernism. This book demonstrates how decadence as an idea, style or topic informs Central and Eastern European music of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Combining close analysis with hermeneutic interpretation and cultural critique, Stephen Downes examines works by composers including Wagner, Richard Strauss, Scriabin, Rachmaninov, Mahler and Bartók, considering structural and expressive forms of decay, deformation, mannerism, nihilism, sickness and convalescence. Drawing upon critical and cultural theory, these musical works are contextualized, relating the relationship of music and musical discourse to wider cultural discourses. The study will enhance the understanding of musical forms and aesthetics for the reader. Exploring crucial aspects of modernism and the place of music in the development and diversity of decadence, Downes refines and redefines our understanding of musical modernism.

The strange tale of America's best pianist and the Australian lipstick salesman who immortalised his genius. A compelling and surprising tale of musical passion, tragedy and revival. In his prime, William Kapell was acknowledged to be 'the greatest pianistic talent since Horowitz'. Yet his return flight from Australia - where he toured in 1953 - ploughed into a mountain south of San Francisco and all on board were killed. Kapell's promising career was brutally cut short at the premature age of thirty-one. Roy Preston was a humble cosmetics salesman at Myer with a passion for home recording. Using a Royce recorder to cut microgroove discs off radio, he recorded William Kapell's last concert in Geelong, Chopin's Funeral March sonata, which Kapell performed a week before he died. In A Lasting Record, Stephen Downes pieces together the unlikely story of how Roy's recordings were reunited with the Kapell family by way of chance, coincidence and plain good fortune. A music enthusiast himself, Stephen writes with a journalist's keen eye for detail and a nose for a good story.

The Polish composer Karol Szymanowski is one of the most fascinating musical figures of the early twentieth century. His works included four symphonies, two violin concertos, the operas Hagith and King Roger, the ballet-pantomime Harnasie, the oratorio Stabat Mater, as well as numerous piano, violin, vocal and choral compositions. The profile and popularity of Szymanowski's music outside Poland has never been higher and continues to grow. The Szymanowski Companion constitutes the most significant and comprehensive reference source to the composer in English. Edited by two of the leading scholars in the field, Paul Cadrin and Stephen Downes, the collection consists of over 50 contributions from an international array of contributors, including recognized Polish experts. The Companion thus provides a systematic, authoritative and up-to-date compilation of information concerning the composer's life, thought and works.

The desire to voice the artistic revelation of the truth of a precarious, multi-faceted, yet integrated self lies behind much of Szymanowski's work. This self is projected through the voices of deities who speak languages of love. The unifying figure is Eros, who may be embodied as Dionysus, Christ, Narcissus or Orpheus, and the gospel he proclaims tells of the resurrection and freedom of the desiring subject. This book examines Szymanowski's exploration of the relationship between the authorial voice, mythology and eroticism within the context of the crisis of the modern subject in Western culture. Stephen Downes analyses mythological and erotic aspects of selected songs from the composer's early career, moving to an interpretation of the voice of the homoerotic lover, embodied as a mad muezzin, in terms of heroic notions of Orphic elegy. Discussing the encounters of King Roger with the voices of Narcissus, the Siren and Dionysus, Downes shows how the composer uses the unifying Christ/Eros figure as a means of indicating that the King might be transformed from anguished despot to loving expressive subject. The book ends with an examination of Szymanowski's desire to fuse Slavonic and Middle-Eastern mythological inspirations in an attempt to fulfil a utopian vision of a pan-European culture bound together by the spirit of Eros.

In a wide-ranging study of sentimentalism’s significance for styles, practices and meanings of music in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a series of interpretations scrutinizes musical expressions of sympathetic responses to suffering and the longing to belong. The book challenges hierarchies of artistic value and the associated denigration of sentimental feeling in gendered discourses. Fresh insights are thereby developed into sentimentalism’s place in musical constructions of emotion, taste, genre, gender, desire, and authenticity.The contexts encompass diverse musical communities, performing spaces, and listening practices, including the nineteenth-century salon and concert hall, the cinema, the intimate stage persona of the singer-songwriter, and the homely ambiguities of ‘easy’ listening. Interdisciplinary insights inform discussions of musical form, affect, appropriation, nationalisms, psychologies, eco-sentimentalism, humanitarianism, consumerism, and subject positions, with a particular emphasis on masculine sentimentalities. Music is drawn from violin repertory associated with Joseph Joachim, the piano music of Chopin, Schumann, and Liszt, sentimental waltzes from Schubert to Ravel, concert music by Bartók, Szymanowski and Górecki, the Merchant-Ivory adaptation of The Remains of the Day, Antônio Carlos Jobim’s bossa nova, and songs by Duke Ellington, Burt Bacharach, Carole King, Barry Manilow and Jimmy Webb. The book will attract readers interested in both the role of music in the history of emotion and the persistence and diversity of sentimental arts after their flowering in the eighteenth-century age of sensibility.

Aesthetics of Music: Musicological Approaches is an anthology of fourteen essays, each addressing a single key concept or pair of terms in the aesthetics of music, collectively serving as an authoritative work on musical aesthetics that remains as close to 'the music' as possible. Each essay includes musical examples from works in the 18th, 19th, and into the 20th century. Topics have been selected from amongst widely recognised central issues in musical aesthetics, as well as those that have been somewhat neglected, to create a collection that covers a distinctive range of ideas. All essays cover historical origins, sources, and developments of the chosen idea, survey important musicological approaches, and offer new critical angles or musical case studies in interpretation.

The Muse has long been figured as a divine or erotically alluring consort to the virile male artist, who may inspire him or lead him to the edge of madness. This book explores the changing cultural expressions of the relationship between the male artist with a beloved, imagined or desired Muse, to offer new and penetrating perspectives on musical representations and transformations of creative masculine subjectivity, and important aspects of the shift from the styles and aesthetics of Romantic Idealism to Modernist Anxiety in music of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Each of the chapters begins with explorations into male artists' relationships with their Muse, and moves to analysis and interpretation which uncovers cultural constructions of masculine artistic inspiration and production, and their association with creatively inspiring and erotically charged relationships with a Muse. New insights are offered into the musical meaning and cultural significance of selected works by Rossini, Beethoven, Chopin, Liszt, Schumann, Wagner, Sibelius, Mahler, Bartók, Scriabin, Szymanowski, Debussy, Berg, Poulenc and Weill.

In a wide-ranging study of sentimentalism’s significance for styles, practices and meanings of music in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a series of interpretations scrutinizes musical expressions of sympathetic responses to suffering and the longing to belong. The book challenges hierarchies of artistic value and the associated denigration of sentimental feeling in gendered discourses. Fresh insights are thereby developed into sentimentalism’s place in musical constructions of emotion, taste, genre, gender, desire, and authenticity.The contexts encompass diverse musical communities, performing spaces, and listening practices, including the nineteenth-century salon and concert hall, the cinema, the intimate stage persona of the singer-songwriter, and the homely ambiguities of ‘easy’ listening. Interdisciplinary insights inform discussions of musical form, affect, appropriation, nationalisms, psychologies, eco-sentimentalism, humanitarianism, consumerism, and subject positions, with a particular emphasis on masculine sentimentalities. Music is drawn from violin repertory associated with Joseph Joachim, the piano music of Chopin, Schumann, and Liszt, sentimental waltzes from Schubert to Ravel, concert music by Bartók, Szymanowski and Górecki, the Merchant-Ivory adaptation of The Remains of the Day, Antônio Carlos Jobim’s bossa nova, and songs by Duke Ellington, Burt Bacharach, Carole King, Barry Manilow and Jimmy Webb. The book will attract readers interested in both the role of music in the history of emotion and the persistence and diversity of sentimental arts after their flowering in the eighteenth-century age of sensibility.

Examines music's role in political and cultural images of Poland during a period in which Poland regained independence, suffered cruelly in warfare, was a member of the Soviet bloc, then overthrew communism and joined the European Union.This collection analyses the function of music in twentieth and twenty-first century constructions of 'Polishness' by non-Polish, or Polish emigré, musicians, writers, critics, film and TV makers. Musicological studies are interleaved with collaborations from scholars in related disciplines (literature and film studies) to generate new understandings of music's role in political and cultural images of Poland during a period in which Poland regained independence, suffered cruelly in warfare, was a member of the Soviet bloc, then overthrew communism and joined the European Union. During this eventful period the musical images of 'Poland' made beyond its boundaries have taken fascinating turns. Music has played a key function in how constructions of 'Polishness' in artistic work, media and critical discourse made outside Poland have inflected Poland's international image and standing. Essays examine diverse musical styles and sources and their roles in composition, performance, cinema, television, literature, poetry, politics, the writings of history, and constructions of biography. Together, they contribute significantly to furthering the broader debates on ideas of Polishness. Contributors have diverse relationships with Poland. This diversity complements the disciplinary range represented. Musical figurations of 'Polishness' are therefore illuminated from multiple angles.