bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Sibelius (1965)
Authors: Kildea Paul 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
AALTONEN: Mr Britten, as a composer you are master of a variety of branches of music. Would you please tell us which one you prefer working in?BRITTEN: I think the answer to that is a very short and simple one: I prefer working in them all. There’s no kind of music that I don’t want to write. The occasion, of course, demands which kind of music I write in, but it can be any kind from opera, to songs, to instrumental music, to symphonies to quartets; it just depends what I’m asked to do and what I want to do. But I have no blinkers on, if I can put it like that.AALTONEN: You are often referred to as the national hero in the realm of music in Britain; that is exactly the title given to Jean Sibelius in Finland. What is your relationship to Sibelius’s music?BRITTEN: Well I hope I can fulfil a tenth of what Sibelius did for music in Finland. I think my own reactions to Sibelius are personal but perhaps interesting. When I was young I found Sibelius-the music of Sibelius-unsympathetic. I was interested much more in the Schoenberg-Berg-Webern school, and of course the overwhelming personality of Stravinsky. And then quite by accident, not so many years ago-perhaps ten, perhaps fewer-I heard some music of Sibelius without knowing what it was, and I was deeply interested and surprised and even bewildered by this music, which seemed to me to be so new and so personal that I was eager to find out what it was. I discovered it was the Sixth Symphony of Sibelius, which I think is a very, very fine one. After that moment I bought all the scores that I could possibly find of his music, and although I wouldn’t pretend that I know or understand or even like everything he wrote, I find it a most sympathetic, interesting phenomenon in the musical world, and a most important figure. I think it only goes to show how ludicrously unimportant fashions in music are-that for instance in the Twenties there was only Sibelius in England, which was not true, and now there is no Sibelius, which is also not true; a great man like Sibelius can weather all storms of fashion.
Tribute To Dmitry Shostakovitch (1966)
Authors: Kildea Paul 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
It must have been in 1936 or so, when I had not long since left the Royal College of Music, my mind greedy for every musical experience to come my way, that I went to the old Queen’s Hall, London, to hear a concert performance of an opera by a new, young Russian composer, not many of whose works had reached England. In my experience a concert performance of an opera does not often succeed in giving much idea of its dramatic impact. But this one, of Lady MacBeth of Mtzensk (as it was then called) was a knock-out.1 I imagine it was well done, enough anyhow to give me a sense of the violence, the irony, the tenderness, and the deep tragedy of the final Act. I was thrilled; I felt this music was new and personal, although stemming naturally from the great Russian past, and, in a wonderful way, relaxed and fluent. It used methods from all periods, and yet remained strikingly characteristic. I was furious with the attitude of the Intelligentsia [sic) sitting in the stalls, laughing and (I thought) sneering. The critics could not fit this music into any school: not that of the (then) all powerful Sibelius, nor Hindemith, nor Schonberg (gathering momentum among the young), nor Stravinsky (famous for his early masterpieces, but disapproved of for anything after I920). In fact it could not be classified at all, and that, as we know, is always disturbing.That performance of Katerina Ismailovna started a deep attachment to the works of Dmitry Shostakovitch.This close connection has never broken, and the faith in his wonderful gift has remained constant. What a pleasure, therefore, when many years later I met Dmitry Dmitriyevich, to find the man as lovable, as characteristic, as great and contemporary as his music. (This experience, like so many other happy ones, came through the good offices of our dear friend Slava Rostropovitch, who loves and honours Dmitry more even than I do-because he knows him better). And what a thrill to find that the great man admitted to receiving pleasure from my own works-so very different from his own, but conceived, many of them, in the same period, children of similar fathers, and with many of the same aims.
The Moral Responsibility Of The Artist Towards His Fellow Man (1968)
Authors: Kildea Paul 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
BRITTEN: I believe that the artist must be consciously a human being. He is part of society and he should not lock himself up in an ivory tower. I think he has a duty to play towards his-to his fellow creatures. It is not only a duty; I think it’s a pleasure too. I want to have my music used. I would much rather-this seems perhaps a silly thing to say-but I would rather have my music used than write masterpieces which were not used.COMER: Yes. Well don’t you think that some of your work[s] are masterpieces? BRITTEN: Oh that’s not for me to say at all.COMER: Why not? Why wouldn’t you have the kind of confidence to think that you’ve done-?BRITTEN: Because masterpieces-rather, the word ‘masterpiece’ has a kind of ring about it which suggests lots of dust on volumes in libraries.COMER: Well what kind of attitude do you think society should have to the artist? You seem to have a very gregarious attitude towards society itself, and to give of yourself to society. Do you think society owes anything to you?BRITTEN: Well, I hope society will keep me alive. I hope I shall be able to make enough money to live on, and live perhaps in a way which makes writing music possible, even easy. Not too easy, because we must all fight a little bit.COMER: When you were a child you were a prodigy, weren’t you? I mean you-you started to have ideas-I think you used to say ‘I have an idea’when you were, what, 5 years old?BRITTEN: Well, I came from a very ordinary middle-class family, and I started writing music certainly when I was very small, when I was about 5 or 6; but I didn’t have much musical education, and at my first school that I went to, my private school, where I went at the age of 8 to 14, there was no music at all.1 That’s not quite true. At the end of each term, on the last evening, we sang some songs.
Idomeneo in Performance (1969)
Authors: Kildea Paul 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
BRITTEN: Ah, this is not really a new version. It’s a fresh version; perhaps there’s a subtle distinction. We decided on doing Idomeneo for the Maltings because it is the kind of opera, the kind of big, classic piece which would suit the-the character of the building and the fact, of course, that there is no proscenium arch.We had certain ideas of other operas we could do, but we decided on Idomeneo partly because it’s a work that I’ve loved for many years, and it’s a work which, well, Peter Pears wanted to do the part and he felt that it would suit him, and generally, I felt that perhaps I could guide our listeners-our audience-through the very intricate problem of what movements to play when.Of course, there being the two major versions that Mozart left us, therein is the only way that one could possibly call it a new version, in that one has made a slightly different selection from the numbers in the various versions from people who’ve done it recently in the past. It is quite close to the Sadler’s Wells version, with the major change that we are getting Idamante sung by a soprano and not by a tenor-of course [the tenor version] was the way that Mozart rearranged it for the second performance in his own lifetime.AMIS: I didn’t realize-I’m very ignorant on these matters-I didn’t realize that there were two versions by Mozart. There are quite a number of different actual numbers, are there?BRITTEN: Oh yes. I’m not a historian, and I perhaps won’t get my facts absolutely right, but when it was first performed, which was, I think, when he was about 25, it was done as a full-length opera seria, with enormously elaborate arias; but he was a passionate creature, and he could not control his electric dramatic feeling for this subject.The work got more and more elaborate as he wrote it. He had an excellent producer with whom he worked a lot. He had, of course, his marvellous Mannheim Orchestra to write for, and the result was that the recitatives got more and more elaborate, and the nearer they got to the performance, they realized that the work was getting too long, and so right, I think, until a day or so before this first performance,
Radcliffe Music Award (1969)
Authors: Kildea Paul 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
For music & the University of Sussex, to-day is an important day. The first term of the Music School is only a few weeks old, and a most important & worthwhile Competition has been organised to celebrate it. Judging by the distinguished staff & the lively music students the department is going to have an exciting life, & enrich the musical life of the county & country. Our indebtness to the RADCLIFFE TRUST, which has made this possible, cannot be measured. We, the jury, assembled to judge this competition organised over a long period with great seriousness & intelligence have had a fascinating time, reading the scores & listening to the fine playing of the Allegri Quartet.2 Four important British composers have been invited to write works and have clearly taken their task very seriously. We have listened carefully & sympathetically to the rehearsals & performances these last two days, & have come to the following conclusion. In spite of, in one case, a brilliantly intelligent gill; in another, a passionate and dedicated career; in the third, a most exciting promise; and lastly a vivid and original personality. we do not feel that one work stands high above the others-a ‘flawless masterpiece’; nor do we feel that any of them lags way behind-a ‘ghastly fl.op’. We would therefore like to divide the prizes equally between the four competitors, & suggest playing one movement from each of the quartets which we have selected. We are disappointed maybe to have come to this ‘middle of the road’ conclusion; but hope that you all, like us, have had an interesting & enjoyable musical experience.
Tribute To Paul Sacher (1976)
Authors: Kildea Paul 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Our dear Paul-We want to join in the chorus of congratulation to you in reaching so triumphantly your seventieth birthday. Though we have not seen you as often as we would like to have done in these last years, whether at Schi:inenberg or Aldeburgh, we have been very clearly aware of how you (and Maja for we cannot think of one of you without the other) continue in your splendid dual capacity as performer and patron.How much do all musicians owe to your skill and your dedication and what have not composers owed to you for many many years now! You have been a model as a patron and performer and all of’Music’s Children’ are grateful to you and proud of you.
Introduction
Authors: Bullen J B 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Pre-Raphaelitism was the first avant-garde movement in British painting. Around 1848 a group of artists openly challenged the prevailing pictorial conventions in order to create a visual language for fresh and unusual ways of representing the material world. The early pictorial ideals were short-lived and the group soon broke up. What persisted was the nonconformist motive, and other groupings and combinations of artists-inspired mainly by Dante Gabriel Rossetti-continued to paint against the grain of the academic tradition well into the latter part of the nineteenth century. What was originally a movement in painting was later joined by poetry and criticism, and though the aims changed this strain in British art and literature continued to be called ‘Pre-Raphaelitism ‘ by contemporaries.
The Grotesque and the Great War in To the Lighthouse
Authors: Hargreaves Tracy 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
In Realities of War (1920) Philip Gibbs recalled Field Marshal Haig’s derision of the newly appointed war journalists: ‘I think I understand very well what you gentlemen want,’ he said. ‘You want to get hold of little stories of heroism and so forth and to write them up in a bright way to make good reading for Mary Ann in the kitchen and the man in the street.’ Gibbs was among the government-appointed journalists who from 1915 were to send to the home front, subject to censorship, ‘authentic’ records of life on the western front. Haig’s comment is, in some ways, more telling than the ‘colourless phrases of the newspapers’, as Virginia Woolf described them. Not only does his misgiving betray anxieties about protecting a form of fellowship (only ‘those who were there’ could really ‘know’ the war), it also raises questions about what constitutes authentic reportage which, in this case, threatens a specific construction of masculinity.
The Force Of Poetry
Authors: Ricks Christopher 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Christopher Ricks is one of the best-known living critics of English, and was described by W. H. Auden as `the kind of critic every poet dreams of finding'. Though published indepenently over many years, each of the essays in this collection of his writings asks how a poets words reveal the `force of poetry', that force - in Dr Johnson's words - `which calls new power into being, which embodies sentiment, and animates matter'. The poets covered range from John Gower, Marvell, and Milton to Wordsworth, Empson, Stevie Smith, Lowell, and Larkin, and the book contains four wider essays on clichés, lies, misquotations, and American English.
John Milton: Sound And Sense In Paradise Lost
Authors: Ricks Christopher 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Comparison and analysis, as T. S. Eliot said, are the chief tools of the critic; and we can gain a sense of the particular nature of Milton’s achievement by looking first of all at the relations of sound and sense in some poetry other than his. First, Dr. Johnson. How small, of all that human hearts endure, That part which laws or kings can cause or cure. Qohnson, contributed to Goldsmith’s The Traveller) The network of sounds is delicate and various. ‘Endure’ rhymes with ‘cure’, and yet their senses face in opposite directions; ‘small’ rhymes internally with ‘all’, narrowing down with ‘small’ as against widening out with ‘all’; ‘hearts’ rhymes with ‘part’, and ‘laws’ with ‘cause’; ‘or’ is repeated as ‘or’ (and rhymes with ‘laws’ and ‘cause’); ‘that’ is repeated as ‘that’, but with a different sense; the alliteration within the first line—’how’, ‘human’ —plays its story against that within the second line: ‘kings’, ‘can’, ‘cause’, ‘cure’. Ifwe set aside the three humble words ‘How’, ‘of’, and ‘which’, the only two words which do not rhyme with anything are ‘human’ in the first line and ‘kings’ in the second, and those two words present the plot of this stoical couplet. Yet the salience, the prominence, of ‘human’ and ‘kings’ does not lift them aloofly above the couplet’s auspices, since each alliterates with the word that follows it. Johnson’s achievement here is that these interlacings of sound—which create and enforce nuances of meaning and of feeling—never harden into a diagram. The suppleness of the rhythm sees to that.
William Wordsworth 1: ‘a pure organic pleasure from the lines’
Authors: Ricks Christopher 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
There is reason to think that Wordsworth was aware of a discussion about the difference between poetry and prose in Erasmus Darwin’s Loves of the Plants; aware, too, ‘almost certainly’, of an article in The Monthly Magazine for July 1796 on ‘Is Verse Essential to Poetry?’ Such arguments are ancient, and usually yield only to fatigue. Robert Lowell said, ‘I no longer know the difference between prose and verse’.2 T. S. Eliot towards the end of his life declared: ‘the moment the inter mediate term verse is suppressed, I do not believe that any distinction between prose and poetry is meaningful’. That was in 1958; but thirty years earlier, when the usual arguments were being rehearsed in The Times Literary Supplement, Eliot had come up with a very suggestive formulation: ‘Verse, whatever else it may or may not be, is itself a system of punctuation; the usual marks of punctuation themselves are differently employed’ (TLS, 27 September 1928).
Robert Lowell: ‘The War Of Words’
Authors: Ricks Christopher 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Robert Lowell died at sixty. Ten years earlier, his autumnal fame at fifty had been itchy on his shoulders: I, fifty, humbled with the years’ gold garbage, dead laurel grizzling my back like spines of hay. (‘Mexico’) That was prickly; ‘humbled’ was proud, and ‘gold garbage’ and ‘dead laurel’ impatiently writhed at the poetical trappings, the laurels and gold garb. ‘Grizzling’ was not a snivel but the threat of an ageing bear—hug. Nothing violent happens in the lines, but you feel the pressure of the possibility. The poem’s first line, leading into those two, was ‘The difficulties, the impossibilities ... ‘; the sonnet went on to imagine the Aztecs and human sacrifice; and its last line saw a clock with ‘the hand a knife—edge pressed against the future’. Violence, yet not quite or not yet.
Geoffrey Hill 1: ‘The Tongue’s Atrocities’
Authors: Ricks Christopher 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
A principled distrust of the imagination is nothing new. One triumph of the imagination is that it can be aware of the perils of the imagination, the aggrandisements, covert indulgences, and specious claims which it may incite. Great art is often about the limits of what we should hope for even from the greatest of art, and among the many things which the imagination can realize on our behalf, one such is the limits of the sympathetic imagination. A poem by Geoffrey Hill speaks of ‘The tongue’s atrocities’ (‘History as Poetry’), compacting or colluding the atrocities of which the tongue must speak, with the atrocities which—unless it is graced with unusually creative vigilance—it is all too likely to commit when it speaks of atrocities.
Clich é s
Authors: Ricks Christopher 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
The only way to speak of a clichê is with a cliché. So even the best writers against clichês are awkwardly placed. When Eric Partridge amassed his Dictionary of Clichês in 1940 (1978 saw its fifth edition), his introduction had no choice but to use the usual clichês for clichés. Yet what, as a metaphor, could be more hackneyed than hackneyed, more outworn than outworn, more tattered than tattered? Is there any point left to—or in or on—saying of a clichê that its ‘original point has been blunted’? Hasn’t this too become blunted? A clichê is ‘a phrase “on tap” as it were’—but, as it is, is Partridge’s ‘as it were’ anything more than a cool pretence that when, for his purposes, he uses the clichê on tap it’s oh so different from the usual bad habit of having those two words on tap? His indictment of ‘fly—blown phrases’ has no buzz of insect wings, no weight of carrion.
American English And The Inherently Transitory
Authors: Ricks Christopher 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
American English is often disparaged, not least by Anglophile Americans. But disapproval of how people use language—as of everything that people do—ought at least to ask whether there is anything which a particular suspected act may be able to effect which a more proper one might miss. Not that it need then be six of one and half a dozen of the other; simply that it may be salutary to grant that, with these choices of language as with other choices, it will not very often turn out to be none of one and a dozen of the other. The greatest novelist who was both American and English (and both nineteenth and twentieth century), Henry James—’Novelist. Citizen of two countries. Interpreter of his generation on both sides of the sea’, in the per fect words of his gravestone, in Cambridge, Massachusetts: even James did not always ask himself whether there was any thing that demotic American speech could honourably effect which was not possible to the proprieties. Addressing the graduating class at Bryn Mawr College in 1905 on ‘The Question of Our Speech’, James was right to insist that even the most minute decisions about pronunciation, for instance, are up to something; but he was narrow in supposing that the something up to which they were must be no good.
Hoccleve and the Middle French Poets
Authors: Burrow John 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Consideration of Thomas Hoccleve’s relationships with the vernacular poetry of his time has concerned itself largely with Geoffrey Chaucer-understandably so, given his allusions to his ‘maister deere and fadir reverent’. There has accordingly been little study of Hoccleve’s relationship to the French poetry current when he wrote, especially the writings of such Middle French poets as Guillaume de Machaut, Jean Froissart, Oton de Granson, Eustache Deschamps, Christine de Pizan, and Alain Chartier. Although the circulation of manuscripts of these poets in England remains to be studied, several English writers in the time of Chaucer and beyond show knowledge of them, Hoccleve included. I hope at least to suggest some lines of enquiry which may profitably be pursued further in his case.
The Ballad and the Middle Ages
Authors: Green Richard Firth 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
In the mid-I98os, when John Fyler undertook to update the explanatory notes to the House of Fame for the new Riverside Chaucer, not only could he find nothing new to add to Robinson’s forty-year-old comments on ‘The Bret Glascurion’ (III. I208)-a figure usually identified with the traditional ballad hero Glasgerion (Child 67)-but he even felt it necessary to abridge them slightly. This recent example of a prominent medievalist’s indifference to earlier ballad scholarship is a sign of the times.
Other World
Authors: Easting Robert 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
In 1492 Columbus found another world if not the other world. He had sailed partly in the wake of St Brendan’s search for the ‘Land of Promise’, and on his third voyage, in May 1498, he believed that the waters flowing from the mouths of the Orinoco descended from the Earthly Paradise. With God’s grace, the Earthly Paradise was still potentially accessible in the flesh, as it had been for Alexander, who had supposedly approached its mossy walls.
Sentimental Grounds: Schiller, Wordsworth, Bernardin, Shelley, Keats
Authors: Mcgann Jerome 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
‘Rosebud’ —the characters ignite and shrivel in the last fiery frames of Citizen Kane. A child’s sled holds a key for understanding the history of a Great Man, and of the King’s Treasury he accumulated. The film tells the story of the search for that key, of the failure to find it, and—not least of all—the irony in the final revelation of its loss.
Revolution, Television, Subsidy
Authors: Stevenson Randall 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
‘Art never expresses anything but itself’ (I), a playwright—clearly modelled on Tom Stoppard—suggests in Peter Nichols’s A Piece of My Mind (1987). Theatrical art, at any rate, has always been interested in itself, plays-within-plays and other forms of metatheatre appearing regularly on English stages ever since Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, or indeed much earlier. Yet in the later twentieth century—consistently with some of the postmodernist influences of the time—drama was more widely and diversely self- interested than in most earlier ages. Relations between theatre, art, and life were explored extensively by Tom Stoppard, Michael Frayn, and David Pownall, as well as by Peter Nichols himself.