Available from Cambridge University Press |
The composer Elisabeth Lutyens and her second husband, the conductor and music programmer Edward Clark, were innovators in composition, conducting, programming, teaching, and music administration in Britain between 1918 and 1983. Controversial in their professional and personal views and tastes, their achievements obscured by layers of anecdote and some self-inflicted reputational harm, this book critically re-assesses their roles as cornerstones of structures and developments in British music that we now take for granted. Key to understanding their central roles in orchestrating musical progress is the ambiguous role of influence in their work and the intimate connections between British and European music. This study critically charts their professional lives in music, taking a holistic approach to contextualise Lutyens and Clark’s multifaceted work in music historically, music-analytically, and culturally.
“A revealing survey of one of the most fascinating (and unlikely) partnerships in twentiethcentury music: the composer Elisabeth Lutyens and the conductor/impresario Edward Clark, full of insights into both the music and the personalities of the time.”
Nicholas Kenyon, former Director of the BBC Proms and Managing Director of the Barbican Centre, London.
“In an imaginative double portrait, Elisabeth Lutyens and Edward Clark charts the social and aesthetic life of British musical modernism through interpersonal networks – of friends, colleagues, and cliques – at institutions from the BBC to the ISCM, at home and abroad. Forkert’s finely documented chapters on Clark’s 1930s radio programming, Lutyens’s craft as a concert composer, and her ‘journalistic’ radio, TV, and horror film scores of the 1950s and 60s, offer intersecting views of a complex scene. The book vividly catches the atmosphere of a whole cultural field.”
Philip Rupprecht, Duke University, author of British Musical Modernism. |
