bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Sinfonia da Requiem (1946)
Authors: Kildea Paul 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
In the early autumn of 1939 I was approached by the Japanese Government through the British Council to compose a work to commemorate the two thousandth anniversary of the Japanese dynasty. I replied that I would be willing to do so on condition that I was left free in the choice of subject and medium, and specified that I was unable and unwilling to provide any jingoism. The reply to this was definitely in agreement to my conditions, but for six months I waited for the actual contract. When this finally arrived I was working on the ‘Sinfonia da Requiem,’ which was a tribute to the memory of my parents. Owing to this delay I was left with something like six weeks in which to complete the required symphony, and I replied that the only work I could provide in the time would be the said ‘Sinfonia da Requiem.’ I discussed the suitability of the work with the local Japanese consul, indicating its nature, and telling him that each movement had a Latin title-Lachrymosa, Dies Irae, and Requiem Aeternam. He communicated, I presume, with his ambassador and I was notified that the work was considered entirely suitable. I accordingly completed the score, delivered it to the consul, and for at least six months heard no more. In the autumn of 1940 I was summoned to the consul. He then read, with gradually mounting passion, a long letter from Prince Konnoi, brother of the then Prime Minister of Japan, who was organising the festival. This letter accused me of insulting a friendly power, of providing a Christian work where Christianity was apparently unacceptable, that the work was gloomy, and so on. I replied to this letter in as dignified a manner as possible, saying that since I was a Christian and came from a Christian country, the work was (not surprisingly) Christian, denying that it was gloomy, denying the insult, and so on. This letter was sent for approval to the local British consul and other British officials, and sent off to Tokyo. I awaited the next move.
Paul Beck 1895-1958 (1959)
Authors: Kildea Paul 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
This has been a sad year for us; Erwin Stein,1 invaluable friend of the Festival, director of the English Opera Group, died in July; later in the year we lost Sir Arthur Jarratt,2 also director of the E.O.G., and for many years a warm supporter of the Festival; and then in December came the sudden death of Paul Beck.3There is an infinity of things great and small which every year must be done to keep the Festival running. These things happen behind the scenes, without even our small glare of publicity. Most people do not realise the size of such a job as keeping our keyboard instruments in tune and good order. We often have three or four pianos, large and small, usually more than one harpsichord, occasionally an eighteenth-century piano too, travelling to and from the [Aldeburgh Parish] Church, the Jubilee Hall, Framlingham, Blythburgh, each instrument with its own temperamental idiosyncracy. To see Paul Beck at work was a lesson to us all. Calm at the most tense moments, the few minutes between the last anxious rehearsal and the admittance of the audience, patiently waiting at the crack of dawn for the Church doors to be opened to prepare a harpsichord for the morning’s performance or rehearsal, putting the instruments tenderly to bed after a Late Night, soothing and helping a nervous performer before and during a performance (I speak from personal experience)-all this was the sign of the true artist. Paul Beck since the first days of the first Festival had become the warm and trusted friend of us all. He will be most sadly missed.
A New Britten Opera (1960)
Authors: Kildea Paul 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Last August it was decided that for this year’s Aldeburgh Festival I should write a full-length opera for the opening of the reconstructed Jubilee Hall. As this was a comparatively sudden decision there was no time to get a libretto written, so we took one that was ready to hand. I get a lot of letters from young people asking me how they should use their talents, and I always reply that they should try to fit them into their surroundings. This is what has happened with my new opera. It is an example of how local conditions can determine what you do. I have always loved the ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’. As I get older, I find that I increasingly prefer the work either of the very young or of the very old. I always feel the ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’ to be by a very young man, whatever Shakespeare’s actual age when he wrote it. Operatically, it is especially exciting because there are three quite separate groups-the Lovers, the Rustics, and the Fairies-which nevertheless interact. Thus in writing the opera I have used a different kind of texture and orchestral ‘colour’ for each section. For instance, the Fairies are accompanied by harps and percussion; though obviously with a tiny orchestra they can’t be kept absolutely separate. In writing opera, I have always found it very dangerous to start writing the music until the words are more or less fixed. One talks to a possible librettist, and decide together the shape of the subject and its treatment. In my case, when I worked with E. M. Forster or William Plomer, for instance, we blocked the opera out in the way that an artist might block out a picture. With the ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’, the first task was to get it into manageable shape, which basically entailed simplifying and cutting an extremely complex story-one can only hope that one hasn’t lost too much, but since the sung word takes so much longer than the spoken word, to have done the complete ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’ would have produced an opera as long as ‘The Ring’.
A Tribute to Wilfred Owen (?1963)
Authors: Kildea Paul 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
I am delighted to read that Birkenhead Institute is paying a tribute to its old pupil, Wilfred Owen. I have read with interest of his days at the Institute, and feel sure that he owed a great deal to its sympathetic encouragement. I would only like to add that Owen is to me by far our greatest war poet, and one of the most original and touching poets of this century.
Francis Poulenc 1899-1963 (1964)
Authors: Kildea Paul 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
To the average Englishman, Francis Poulenc’s music may have appeared that of the typical French composer: witty, daring, sentimental, naughty. In fact Francis was very easily depressed, shockable, unsure, and liable to panic. No one who saw it will ever forget his agony in a boat on Thorpeness Meare, and it was really his horror of the sea which finally stopped him from coming back to Aldeburgh in 1958 to play in Tiresias.1 He was always re-writing his music and he burnt his only String Quartet.Which is not to say that he had not a strong personality. He was not ashamed to admire and to borrow-Mozart, Chabrier, Stravinsky, Mussorgsky-but the result was very definitely Poulenc. He proudly called himself Latin, yet admitted that instinct was his guide. He put a high value on Sincerity: he was himself too innocent to be insincere. The two sides of his art (as represented by the Stabat Mater2 and Les Mamelles) were supposed to be very clearly and consciously juxtaposed; on the contrary it was one of his most adorable qualities that he was incapable of being anything but himself-a delightful friend and a lovable musician.
On Receiving the First Aspen Award (1964)
Authors: Kildea Paul 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Ladies and Gentlemen, when last May your Chairman and your President told me they wished to travel the 5000 miles from Aspen to Aldeburgh to have a talk with me, they hinted that it had something to do with and Aspen Award for Services to the Humanities-an award of very considerable importance and size.1 I imagined that they felt I might advise them on a suitable recipient, and I began to consider what I should say. Who would be suitable for such an honour? What kind of person? Doctor? Priest? A social worker? A politician? Well, ... ! An artist? Yes, possibly (that, I imagined, could be the reason that Mr. Anderson and Professor Eurich thought I might be the person to help them). So I ran through the names of the great figures working in the Arts among us today. It was a fascinating problem; rather like one’s school-time game of ideal cricket elevens, or slightly more recently, ideal casts for operas-but I certainly won’t tell which of our great poets, painters, or composers came to the top of my list.Mr. Anderson and Professor Eurich paid their visit to my home in Aldeburgh. It was a charming and courteous visit, but it was also a knock-out. It had not occurred to me, frankly, that it was I who was to be the recipient of this magnificent award, and I was stunned. I am afraid my friends must have felt I was a tongue-tied host. But I simply could not imagine why I had been chosen for this very great honour. I read again the simple and moving citation.2 The key-word seemed to be ‘humanities’. I went to the dictionary to look up its meaning, I found Humanity: ‘the quality of being human’ (well, that applied to me all right). But I found that the plural had a special meaning: ‘Learning or literature concerned with human culture, as grammar, rhetoric, poetry and especially the ancient Latin and Greek Classics’. (Here I really had no claims since I cannot properly spell even in my own language, and when I set Latin I have terrible trouble over the quantities-besides you can all hear how far removed I am from rhetoric.)
Tribute to Michael Tippett (1965)
Authors: Kildea Paul 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
My dear Michael,Now it is your turn! A year ago I had one of these ‘memorial’ years and so I know what you are in for. I am sure you will be touched by the tributes, but I hope you won’t be too embarrassed by all the ‘evaluations’. You must not be made to feel-as I was-that you are already dead and that the musicologists are busy on the corpse! We both have a lot more notes to write yet!Evaluations, comparisons-the whole apparatus; does it mean anything to you? It doesn’t to me, much. Slaps or bouquets, they come too late to help, long after the work is over. What matters to us now is that people want to use our music. For that, as I see it, is our job--to be useful, and to the living. Criticism likes to separate, to dislodge, to imply rivalries, to provoke jealousies. But I don’t think I am jealous-(yes, envious, possibly of the man who can do something much better than I can), and the colleagues whom I admire, I regard as friends on the side of the angels rather than as rivals. Do you remember the story of Haydn banging the table and rushing from the room when someone poked fun at Don Giovanni (I think it was)? He knew very well the problems of finding the right notes and balancing forms. Schumann, too, who later found such difficulty in getting the courage to write at all, was the tenderest of critics. What does it matter if some of the people he admired mean little to us? His first duty was to his contemporaries, not to us. No one could have expressed the agony of composition more sympathetically than yourself, Michael, when you wrote about me last year.1 For you are a composer, living in the same environment, facing the same problems as myself. This is the natural soil for friendship, and friendship is stimulating and creative and unifying.
An Interview With Benjamin Britten (1967)
Authors: Kildea Paul 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
BRITTEN: The story of how I came to write Peter Grimes was perhaps rather interesting. I was in California at the time and happened to pick up an old copy of The Listener, a very good English journal which reports radio talks; I found in it a talk by the English novelist E. M. Forster on the works of George Crabbe. There were quite a few quotations from the poem ‘Peter Grimes’ by Crabbe and I don’t know whether it was homesickness or a sudden opening of my eyes to a new poetic style, or both, but I was amazed and thrilled by this poetry. I went into Los Angeles a few days later and, in an old second-hand shop, I found a copy of the works of Crabbe and devoured them avidly. The idea of writing an opera came almost immediately, although it would be the first full-length opera I’d ever written. I didn’t start it until I got back to England, but meantime I had talked it over with Peter Pears, who was with me, and we had planned the action very thoroughly together. But it was a chance reading of that old copy of The Listener which sent me to the poem ‘Peter Grimes’ by Crabbe.I told this story to Koussevitsky when he was performing a work of mine very soon after this chance finding and he asked me why I didn’t start writing the opera. I said, quite frankly, that one must take a long time off to write an opera and one can’t always afford to do it, but that I hoped one day to be able to. He then asked me whether if he found the money so that I could take the time off, I would write it. I said certainly I would ... and that was how I began work on Peter Grimes.
Britten And Pears (1967)
Authors: Kildea Paul 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Pears and I started working together I suppose because of similar musical interests, and being close friends because of convenience of environment: it was fun to sing and play together the music of all periods which we liked. But more fundamentally, I was attracted, even in those early days, by his voice, which seemed to me to emanate from a personality, and not, like many other voices, to be a manufactured affair, super-imposed. It has always been exciting to explore unknown music together; he is a fine musician and an excellent sightreader. Added to this his flexible voice, with from the beginnings an excellent technique, enabled us to explore music from widely different styles: from the early lutenists (which in those early days, before the advent of Julian Bream, I used to play for him on the piano) and Purcell and Bach, through 19th century Lieder, and French and Russian songs, to the moderns and including operatic arias of all epochs and countries. Above all, perhaps, Pears has always possessed the all-important gift of being able to phrase music, of singing a series of notes in such a way that they make sense, musical sense. It is this gift, shared with all my favourite artist friends, from Dennis Brain to Rostropovitch, which has excited me to write music for him-which I’ve done with the utmost pleasure for thirty years.
The Ugliness of Early Pre-Raphaelitism
Authors: Bullen J B 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
This was the first major clash in the British art world between the establishment and the avant-garde and it began with the summer exhibition of the Royal Academy in 1850.At that show the work of Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, and Charles Collins, together with pictures by Dante Gabriel Rossetti at the National Institution, triggered volley after volley of ferocious attacks on what Taylor called, these ‘deplorable examples of perverted taste ‘.2 This was not the first time that London had seen painting by these artists, and unease had been expressed about their strange pictorial mannerisms, but the growing disquiet and discomfort about their unconventionality finally burst forth in 1850. But the terms of expression read strangely to modern eyes: they seem overheated and violent, and they are couched in a language which is strained and brutal.
‘A great purifier’: The Great War in Women’s Romances and Memoirs 1914-1918
Authors: Potter Jane 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Romance and memoir are by far the most common forms used by women writers during the First World War. Most of the authors are unknown to us now. The works themselves are not ‘great literature’, but they are of literary and historical interest for what they say about the place of women in, and their attitudes towards, the Great War. The texts I shall examine in this chapter all share a common theme: that of the transformative power of war. They also share the eugenic anxieties about physical, mental, and spiritual deterioration which emerged in Britain towards the end of the nineteenth century. If society was suffering from a ‘degenerative’ disease, ‘a falling-off from original purity, a reversion to less complex forms of structure’, then war was a means of regeneration and purification. It was a eugenic good. The ‘conservative polemic of popular fiction’ had a number of ‘unfit’ targets. Among them were exotic and erotic artistic tastes such as highbrow art, aestheticism, and art nouveau. A further threat to both women and men was the suffrage movement. It was blamed for de-sexing women, encouraging them to become pseudo-men, and causing them to lose all touch with their ‘feminine’ natures. Such were the ideas that abounded in the press and in various sections of society.
HD’s War Neurotics
Authors: Tate Trudi 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
At the beginning of August 1914 the modernist writer Hilda Doolittle learned that she was pregnant. The baby was stillborn in May 1915-killed, HD believed, by the Great War. Not long before the child was born, HD had been shocked by some bad news: the sinking of the passenger ship Lusitania, in which 1,200 civilians died. Whether medically true or not, HD’s view that the war indirectly killed her child is a significant and by no means unusual response. HD proposes a direct relationship between violent public events and the private lives of civilians during wartime; she suggests that civilians, like soldiers, may have been subject to crippling war neuroses-an idea which recurs throughout her war writing.
The Great War
Authors: Baldick Chris 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
The Great War of 1914–18 had a greater impact upon the English imagination and its written forms than any other war in history, or than any other definable event in the twentieth century, and few significant literary works of this period can safely be said to have escaped its shadow. T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’ (1922), for example, is an oblique war elegy, Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians (1918) a satire on militarism, D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatter- ley’s Lover (1928) more directly a fable of the War’s consequences, and Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927) wears the great historical scar of the War years across its divided structure, as if cut in half by a massacre. The novels and plays of the inter-war years are variously peopled by war widows, war veterans, and war refugees: the shell-shocked Septimus Warren Smith in Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925), the bereaved Sarah Burton in Winifred Holtby’s South Riding (1936), and the Belgian exile Hercule Poirot in Agatha Christie’s numerous detective tales are only three among a multitude.
Sex and Sexualities
Authors: Baldick Chris 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Sex was invented in 1929. At least, the first use of the word ‘sex’ to mean copulation rather than the sphere of differences and attractions between male and female is recorded by OED2 as appearing in D. H. Lawrence’s poem ‘Sex and Trust’, from his Pansies collection of that year. Before then, a couple could have enjoyed a sex-union (from 1898) or sex-relations (from 1911), or the sex act (from 1918), but only now would they be ‘having sex’. They might even have regarded themselves as homosexuals (since 1912), as heterosexuals (since 1920), as bisexuals (since 1922), or as Lesbians (since 1925), these nouns having arrived later than their adjectives. Whether or not they kept up with the arcane terminologies of sexologists (1914), they would soon find it hard to escape the omnipresent sex-interest (1911), sex-awareness (1925), and sex-talk (1931) of their times. This period witnessed an extraordinary dissemination of sexual discourses—medical, legal, popular, and literary—to the point of becoming sex-obsessed (1914).
Coleridge’s ‘Eolian Harp’ and the Motion of Thought
Authors: Mcgann Jerome 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
No one grasped the issues more clearly than Coleridge. His earliest cultural sympathies drew him to the Socinians, to radically sensationalist philosophers like Hartley, to Della Cruscan poetry.1 His career would shape itself and evolve as a complex reaction against those early attachments, which he came to regard as a network of materialist errors he would call, broadly and politically, ‘jacobin’. We want to consider Coleridge here in order to complete the context within which the poetry of sensibility and sentiment emerged. To the extent that Coleridge’s ideas about poetry became the norm of romantic thinking in England, his critique of sensibility supplies a nice differential for marking what distinguishes the various poetries of sensibility.
Ann Yearsley’s ‘Remonstrance in the Platonic Shade, Flourishing on an Height’
Authors: Mcgann Jerome 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Among eighteenth-century poets, Yearsley carried out the most extensive exploration of the discourse of sensibility. She was doubly prepared for her task by being doubly deprived: a woman, and without privilege or formal education. Yearsley thinks about sensibility repeatedly, as if an effort of self-education—an experience she well understands—could reveal its full meaning. In her work sensibility appears as an endless struggle of suffering thought. As a result (and somewhat paradoxically) her writing is strongest when it appears most contorted. Yearsley’s style then becomes an elaborate index for the torturous intensities of her mental affect.
Wilfred Owen’s Juvenilia
Authors: Fenton James 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
A thousand suppliants stand around thy throne, Stricken with love for thee,0 Poesy. I stand among them, and with them I groan, And stretch my arms for help. Oh, pity me! No man (save them thou gav’st the right to ascend And sit with thee, ‘nointing with unction fine, -Excuse me: ‘‘nointing with unction fine’-what’s this ‘nointing business? What is this ‘nointing with unction fine? Oh, this is what we permit ourselves, or what we used to permit ourselves, in our juvenilia. This is the stuff we pray desperately wm not be found. This is what we later burn.
Co-emergent Spaces: From Wastelands to Plantation Forests
Authors: Tsouvalis Judith 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Knowledge-Cultures, defined in the previous chapter, are embodied, and the socially constructed visions of the world they adhere to are expressed through the bodies of their members. In that sense, knowledge-cultures pro duce bodies, and in this chapter processes of how this is achieved are explored. The way in which the vision of a strategic reserve of timber came to be manifested in plantation forests will also be discussed, and the role played by human and non-human beings in their achievement described.
Moments of Crisis I: Upheavals in the Scottish Uplands
Authors: Tsouvalis Judith 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
One characteristic of forest policy since the passing of the Forestry Act of 1919 has been the setting of a target area of land which had to be afforested within a year (for example, for 1995 the target area was 33,000ha.). This coupling of a socially constructed notion of space-hectares, with a socially constructed notion of time-a year, together with the FC’s successful attempts to conquer time-space (body-movements, tree growth, and so forth discussed in the previous chapter) have led to the quadrupling of land transformed into forests from 200,000ha. in 1945 to over 900,000ha. in 1988 (Tompkins 1989). By 1949, the FC had become the largest landowner in the country, owning some 1,500,000 acres of land.