Nabokov, Nicolas [Nikolay]
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- Bu səhifədəki naviqasiya:
- WORKS
- WRITINGS
- Newman, Ernest [Roberts, William]
- BIBLIOGRAPHY
Newman, Chris(topher)(b London, 1957). English composer, singer, writer and visual artist. After studying at King's College, London, he moved to Cologne in 1979 to study with Kagel. Since then he has lived in Germany. Fundamental to Newman's entire output is a refusal to acknowledge boundaries, either between life and art or between different categories of artistic production: the texts of his many songs are intimately connected with his own day-to-day preoccupations; his work with ‘Chris Newman and Janet Smith’, an ensemble he describes as a rock group, demonstrates that he sees no useful distinction between popular and serious music. As a result, his work resists easy categorization, although Newman himself acknowledges kinship with musicians as different as Sibelius, John Lydon and Christian Wolff, and in other media with artists such as Joseph Beuys and Bruce Nauman. His work in all media shares the same fascination with ‘the way things really are’ (the subtitle of his Piano Sonata no.2 for piano and offstage string quartet): the feel of words in the mouth, the sensation of colour or of instrumental sound. His musical materials are disconcertingly familiar – the melodic figures, rhythmic patterns and harmonic formulations of the Classical and Romantic musical vocabulary – but once stripped to their functional essentials and reordered within his own quirkily impulsive syntax, they become disorientatingly unfamiliar and, as Newman puts it, we are able to experience them not as ‘abstractions’ but ‘as a substance’. WORKS
WRITINGS‘Going to the station twice within 2 hours’, Contact, no.34 (1989), 17–23 ‘Klang- und Formbrocken: zur Symphonik von Jean Sibelius’, MusikTexte, no.38 (1991), 11–12 BIBLIOGRAPHYG. Gronemayer: ‘… ohne die Berührung der menschlichen Hand’, MusikTexte, no.38 (1991), 3–6 F. Spangemacher: ‘The Way Things Really Are’, ibid., 8–11 CHRISTOPHER FOX Newman, Ernest [Roberts, William](b Everton, Lancs., 30 Nov 1868; d Tadworth, Surrey, 7 July 1959). English writer on music. The most celebrated British music critic in the first half of the 20th century, he was the child of a tailor, Seth Roberts. He won a scholarship to Liverpool College from which he proceeded to Liverpool University. Intended for the Indian civil service, he was medically advised not to contemplate residence there, and in 1889 he entered the Bank of Liverpool as a clerk. He had no formal musical education but had taught himself to play the piano ‘after a fashion’ and later declared that he had been able to read music as easily as books. He spent his 14 years as a bank clerk reading and acquiring a wide knowledge of many subjects, including music, and attaining complete or partial mastery of nine foreign languages. By 1889 he was contributing articles to the National Reformer, on philosophy and literature first, then to other periodicals on these subjects and on music. His approach to the arts was intellectual rather than sensual and, as an apostle of rationalism and champion of progressive ideas, he regarded himself as ‘a new man in earnest’ and therefore adopted the pseudonym Ernest Newman. In 1894 he married. A year later he published his first book, Gluck and the Opera, which led his publisher, Bertram Dobell, to commission A Study of Wagner (1899). Granville Bantock, when appointed director to the Midland Institute School of Music in Birmingham, invited Newman, a Liverpool acquaintance, to teach singing and musical theory there; Newman moved to Birmingham in 1904. A year later he was appointed music critic of the Manchester Guardian. He was quick to alert readers to the qualities of Bruckner and Sibelius when Hans Richter introduced their music, as well as to those of Richard Strauss and Elgar. Newman wrote monographs on both these composers while their music was still new to Britain, as well as a remarkably perceptive early study of Hugo Wolf. After a year in Manchester Newman was appointed critic of the Birmingham Daily Post, a position he retained until 1918, while continuing to write many occasional articles, to teach and to write books. Much of his most brilliant and perceptive musical criticism dates from these years. Newman’s wife died in 1918. A year later he moved to London as music critic of the Sunday newspaper The Observer. In 1919 he married Vera Hands, a former music student at the Midland Institute. In 1920 Newman was persuaded to join the Sunday Times; he remained with that newspaper, apart from a five-month stint in 1923 as guest critic of the New York Evening Post, until his retirement in 1958, reviewing musical events and contributing a long, thoughtful weekly article. During these years he was also providing programme notes for Hallé concerts, adjudicating at music festivals, writing weekly music articles for the Manchester Guardian and, from 1923, the Glasgow Herald; from 1930 he made weekly broadcasts for BBC radio, as well as writing a sporting column for the Evening Standard. Despite all this journalistic activity he reserved his chief energies for his books. Newman’s philosophy of criticism is summed up in his keenly analytical yet far-sighted treatise A Musical Critic’s Holiday (1925); his method of analysis in depth is well exemplified in The Unconscious Beethoven (1927). His major work is the four-volume Life of Richard Wagner which occupied him from 1928 until 1947, and it has still not been surpassed although research has uncovered much that is new. His widely read Opera Nights (1943), Wagner Nights (1949) and More Opera Nights (1954) had their origin in a series of ‘Stories of the Great Operas’, written from 1927 for publication in fortnightly instalments; subsequently Newman expanded these into detailed analyses with historical commentary of excellent informative and entertainment value. As a critic, Newman’s objective was complete scientific precision in the act of evaluation. Copious reading, a well-ordered system of notebooks, and a forensic style of argument developed from his early training in classical literature and philosophy, carried him far in this aim. Yet what continued to win him admirers was the lively humanity of his writing, which was also reflected in his style of life as much as the well-stocked mind and penetrating judgment. His major books remain a substantial monument, but his journalistic occasional writings, as collected in A Musical Motley (1919), the volumes From the World of Music (1956–8) and Testament of Music (1962), as cogently explain his international standing for so many years.
WRITINGSGluck and the Opera (London, 1895/R) A Study of Wagner (London, 1899/R) Musical Studies (London, 1905, 3/1914) Elgar (London, 1906/R, 2/1922/R) Hugo Wolf (London, 1907; Ger. trans., 1910, incl. addl facs. and photographs) Richard Strauss (London, 1908/R, 2/1921) Wagner as Man and Artist (London, 1914, 2/1924/R) A Musical Motley (London, 1919, 2/1925/R) The Piano-Player and its Music (London, 1920) Confessions of a Musical Critic (London, 1923, repr. in Testament of Music, 1962) Solo Singing (Glasgow, 1923) A Musical Critic’s Holiday (London, 1925) The Unconscious Beethoven (London, 1927, 2/1968) Stories of the Great Operas and their composers, i: Richard Wagner; ii: Mozart (1756–1791) to Thomas (1811–1896), iii: Verdi (1830–1901) to Puccini (1858–1924) (New York, 1928–30/R) The Life of Richard Wagner (London, 1933–47/R) The Man Liszt: a Study of the Tragi-Comedy of a Soul Divided Against Itself (London, 1934/R) More Stories of Famous Operas (New York, 1943/R) Opera Nights (London, 1943/R) Wagner Nights (London, 1949/R; pubd in USA as Wagner Operas) More Opera Nights (London, 1954; pubd New York, 1955 as Seventeen Famous Operas) [essays from the Sunday Times] From the World of Music (London, 1956–8/R) ed. H. Van Thal: Testament of Music (London, 1962) ed. P. Heyworth: Berlioz, Romantic and Classic: Writings by Ernest Newman (London, 1972)
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, vn, va, vc, 1998