Stained glass has been one of the chief glories of Britain’s churches – and, later, grand houses and public buildings – since Norman times. Surviving medieval windows constitute the greatest collection of pre-Tudor art to have survived the iconoclasm of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and together with the work of later glass artists, our inheritance of stained glass is one of the key features of our national heritage. In this new introduction to stained glass in Britain scholar a...

The county of Warwickshire has a rich and varied past that is reflected in its historic churches. In Churches of Warwickshire, author and stained-glass artist Aidan McRae Thomson explores a selection of the most interesting churches across the whole of the county. Coventry has been included as it was part of the historic county and the buildings featured range from churches in the county town of Warwick and major settlements such as Nuneaton, Rugby and Leamington Spa to market towns, not l...

An icon of British national identity and one of the most widely performed twentieth-century composers, Ralph Vaughan Williams has been as much misunderstood as revered; his international impact and enduring influence on areas as diverse as church music, film scores and popular music has been insufficiently appreciated. This volume brings together a team of leading scholars, examining all areas of the composer's output from new perspectives, and re-evaluating the cultural politics of his li...

For centuries, the sea and those who sail upon it have inspired the imaginations of British musicians. Generations of British artists have viewed the ocean as a metaphor for the mutable human condition - by turns calm and reflective, tempestuous and destructive - and have been influenced as much by its physical presence as by its musical potential. But just as geographical perspectives and attitudes on seascapes have evolved over time, so too have culturalassumptions about their meaning an...

Published to mark the beginning of the Britten centenary year in 2013, Paul Kildea's Benjamin Britten: A Life in the Twentieth Century is the definitive biography of Britain's greatest modern composer.In the eyes of many, Benjamin Britten was our finest composer since Purcell (a figure who often inspired him) three hundred years earlier. He broke decisively with the romantic, nationalist school of figures such as Parry, Elgar and Vaughan Williams and recre...

In Victorian times, England was famously dubbed the land without music - but one of the great musical discoveries of the early twentieth century was that England had a vital heritage of folk song and music which was easily good enough to stand comparison with those of other parts of Britain and overseas. Cecil Sharp, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Percy Grainger, and a number of other enthusiasts gathered a huge harvest of songs and tunes which we can study and enjoy at our leisure....

Ideas in Profile SeriesIs music a science or an art? It's both, as Andrew Gant reveals in this lively and accessible account of what music is and what it's for. Music has been central to life since the dawn of humankind and is intimately bound up with the origins of language.Andrew Gant introduces us to its long history and its many genres and manifestations. He explains how composers compose, players play and singers sing. He looks at how musical styles de...

Volume One of these remarkable letters and diaries opens with a letter from Britten aged nine to his formidable mother, Edith. Music is already at the centre of his life, and it accompanies him through prep and public school and then to London to the Royal College of Music, where the phenomenally gifted but inexperienced young composer is plunged into metropolitan life and makes influential new friends, among them W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood. This was a time of prodigious musical...

Britten's Children confronts the edgy subject of the composer's obsessional yet strangely innocent relationships with adolescent boys. One of the hallmarks of Benjamin Britten's music is his use of boys' voices, and John Bridcut uses this to create a fresh prism through which to view the composer's life. Interweaving discussion of the music he wrote for and about children with interviews with the boys whom Britten befriended, Bridcut explores the influence of these unique ...

Robert Simpson (1921-1997) is widely regarded as the most important British composer in the generation following Benjamin Britten. He wrote 11 symphonies, 15 string quartets, much other chamber music and works for brass band. He also wrote definitive studies of Bruckner and Nielsen. A committed socialist and pacifist, Simpson worked as a volunteer on a mobile surgical unit during the London blitz. Brought up in the Salvation Army, he later rejected religion, and never tried to ingratiate h...

The first full-length study of the English composer's complex interaction with his physical environment, and its new relevance in the 21st century.More perhaps than any other composer, Edward Elgar (1857-1934) has gained the status of an "icon of locality," his music seemingly inextricably linked to the English landscape in which he worked. This, the first full-length study of Elgar's complex interaction with his physical environment, explores how it is that such as...

The Cambridge Companion to Benjamin Britten is a comprehensive guide to the composer's work, aimed both at the non-specialist and music student. It sheds light on both the composer's stylistic and personal development, offering new interpretations of his operatic works and discussing his characteristic working methods. Topics treated here in detail for the first time include Britten's work in the cinema in the 1930s, his lifelong pacifism and his strong interest in the music of the Far Eas...