This is a past event
Dr Phillip Cooke will give a presentation on the rise of the British secular requiem.
Title: 'Let us sleep now': The Rise of the British Secular Requiem
Abstract: Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem of 1962 is often considered a watershed moment in British musical life: a cathartic moment of national consolation, the coronation or Britain’s preeminent artistic talent and the culmination of the British oratorio tradition. However, it would also be a hugely significant moment in the development of a new twentieth century idiom, the secular requiem – for although the War Requiem if often held up as the pinnacle of this development it began much earlier than 1962, and its ramifications are still being felt in the compositional community today.
In this paper, I will show the developments of the British secular requiem from early works such as Henry Walford Davies’s A Short Requiem (1915) and Frederick Delius’s humanistic Requiem (1916) through works responding to the First World War such as John Foulds’s World Requiem (1921) to the two most prominent works: Britten’s War Requiem (1962) and Herbert Howells’s Hymnus Paradisi (1950). I will also show how the idiom has continued to have cultural and artistic significance post-War Requiem in a wide range of works including Geoffrey Poole’s Blackbird, A Secular Requiem (1993) and Gabriel Jackson’s Requiem of 2008. I will look at the role the two World Wars play in these developments, how the notion of the requiem fits in a perceived national psyche, the changing role of the requiem in church life and the continuing influence of the requiems by Brahms and Fauré.
- Speaker
- Dr Phillip A. Cooke
- Hosted by
- Department of Music
- Venue
- MacRobert Building, MR055
- Contact
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Free and open to the public.