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Arvo Pärt’s Music and its reception in the Soviet State 1960-1976
Estonian born Arvo Pärt (b. 1935) spent the majority of his life, through his early years to his working life as a composer and musician, under Soviet rule. Estonia was part of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) when it was occupied in 1940, when Pärt was only 5, until the state collapsed in…
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Wagner’s use of Leitmotif in Tristan und Isolde
Despite having only learnt the skills of harmony at the age of 15, having been discouraged from studying music by his mother, Richard Wagner (1813-1883) was perhaps the greatest exponent of both mid-nineteenth-century German romanticism and mid-nineteenth-century opera. In his operas, or ‘musical drama’, as Wagner referred to it, the music was only merely secondary…
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Ralph Vaughan Williams use of Folk tunes
Herbert Howells, the English composer most noted for his choral works, and friend of Ralph Vaughan Williams once described him as an ‘original who liked to think of himself a kleptomaniac’, due to his use of melodies and themes from the renaissance and folk tunes from around the country (Sadie, 1998: 98). It is perhaps…