Today and Tomorrow Volume 24 Music and Drama

Terpander

Or Music and the Future

E J Dent

Originally published in 1927

"Remarkably able and stimulating." Times Literary Supplement

"…a skilful review of the development of music." Musical News

With reference to the works of Bach, Beethoven, Byrd, Cimarosa, Elgar, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Purcell, Rameau, Scriabin, Strauss and Tchaikovsky this volume examines the challenges facing the appreciation of music in the early twentieth century. Discussing emotional and psychological analysis of music, the author argues that modern music should be taken as music and nothing else, intelligible as music alone. He argues that music must be recognized as an art and intellectual faculties must be applied to understand it, much as one would apply oneself to learning a foreign language.

126pp

Timotheus

The Future of the Theatre

Bonamy Dobrée

Originally published in 1925.

"A witty, mischievous book to be read with delight." Times Literary Supplement

"In a subtly satirical vein he visualizes kinds of theatres in two hundred years time." Nation

This volume traces the possible developments of the theatre, not only along mechanical lines, but upon those which playwrights, actors and psychologists might achieve given the scope.

72p

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Iconoclastes

Or

The Future of Shakespeare

Hubert Griffith

Originally published in 1927.

"To my disappointment I found myself in complete agreement with nearly all its author’s arguments. There is much that is vital and arresting in what he has to say." Nigel Playfair, in the Evening Standard.

Taking as the text recent productions of classical plays in modern dress, the author suggests that this is the proper way of reviving Shakespeare and other great dramatists of the past and that their successful revival in modern dress may perhaps be taken as an indication of their value.

90pp

Eurydice

Or

The Nature of Opera

Dyneley Hussey

Originally published in 1929

"He is to be congratulated." Saturday Review

"Shows immense skill…" Everyman

Surveying the practice of operatic composers from the sixteenth century down to the early twentieth century the author combats the accepted notion that opera is a hybrid form of art, an unsatisfactory combination of music and drama. He argues that on the contrary, opera is an independent form, subject to its own peculiar laws.

86pp

Orpheus

Or

The Music of the Future

W J Turner

Originally published in 1926

"A book on music that we can read not merely once, but two or three times. Mr Turner has given us some of the finest thinking upon Beethoven that I have ever met with." Sunday Times

Contents include:

1. Definition of Music
2. The General Idea of Progress
3. The Idea of Progress in Music
4. Emotional Significance

90pp