Picasso, Guernica
Endnotes: July 2018, Michael Tippett, an overlooked English composer, by Stuart Millson; Steven Osborne, Martin Kasík, recitals reviewed by Leslie Jones
Sir Michael Tippett – a greatly admired figure in the 1970s and ‘80s, especially during Proms seasons – has fallen from public view in the last 30 years. His huge choral-orchestral work, The Mask of Time, opened the 1984 Proms to great acclaim; and his post-war operatic output rivalled that of Britten. Despite his radicalism and his embracing of liberal causes, Tippett’s fundamental Englishness shone through; and perhaps it was this “cultural DNA” which partly led, in our age of increasing musical nihilism and shunning of national feeling, to his eclipse.
Like Britten, unofficially enthroned at Aldeburgh, Suffolk as the “magus” of English composers, so it was that Tippett – especially in royal tributes, such as his Suite for the Birthday of Prince Charles – became, in the eyes of an unforgiving avant-garde, an English establishment composer.
Michael Kemp Tippett, 1905 – 1998, had a mixture of West Country and Kentish ancestry – his (well-to-do) family exhibiting a strong grain of free-thinking, non-conformist idealism. Early associations with Socialism, with the workers’ educational movement, with Morley College (he was appointed its Director of Music in 1940) placed him, at first, as a figure who seemed to be against the grain of his country. But his music was championed by our conducting knights of pre- and post-war fame – the conservative Sargent and Boult – and latterly by the more progressive Colin and Andrew Davis, and Simon Rattle. Continue reading
In Memoriam, George Parkin Grant, 1918-1988
In Memoriam, George Parkin Grant,
1918-1988
By Mark Wegierski
George Parkin Grant (who usually called himself George Grant) is virtually unknown outside of Canada, and should not be confused with the American conservative writer of the same first and last name. The exploration of the combination of the four words used to describe George Grant – conservative, Canadian, nationalist, philosopher– is the backbone of this essay.
George Grant was not a narrowly partisan politician confined to the day-to-day mud-slinging and hurly-burly of “practical politics” — rather, he was a political philosopher who looked at society from a “world-historical” perspective. Although Grant wanted to be widely understood, his writing is far more abstract and abstruse, and far less crudely biased, than that found in “practical political” discourse.
George Grant was not an analytic philosopher (i.e., he loved broad vistas rather than minutiae); nor was he a political scientist in the sense of the kind of person in political studies who aspires to put on a lab coat to lend themselves prestige; nor was he a student of international relations; and certainly not an administrative or management theorist. By his preference for political philosophy, Grant set himself against the rising tide of disciplines, which are proceeding – despite some exotic postmodern fraying at the edges — in the direction of analytics, the scientific model, a mathematical modelling of international relations, and administrative and managerial approaches. Continue reading →
Share this:
Like this: