Philip Brett

The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology

Queering the Pitch

William Byrd

The Byrd edition

Edmund Horace Fellowes

Psalms, Sonnets, and Songs (1588)

Royal Musical Association

Consort Songs

Philip Brett's writing on Benjamin Britten changed the course of music scholarship in the late 20th century. This volume gathers Brett's work on the great British composer. It develops a complex understanding of Britten's musical achievement and highlights the many ways that Brett expanded the borders of his field.

Selected Essays

Music and Sexuality in Britten

Benjamin Britten's Peter Grimes is one of the few operas of the last half-century to have gained a secure place in the repertory. Its appearance in 1945 shortly after the end of the war in Europe was a milestone in operatic history as well as in British music. But the origins of the work lie in the United States, where Britten and his friend Peter Pears (the first Grimes) spent the years 1939-42. In 1941 they read an evocative essay by the novelist E. M. Forster on the Suffolk poet George Crabbe (1754-1832); this precipitated Britten's decision to return to his native country, and sent them both to Crabbe's poem, The Borough, which gave them the idea for the plot they drafted together. This book opens with Forster's original essay and his later one on Crabbe and Peter Grimes. From there the reader can trace the history of the opera: in Donald Mitchell's annotated interview with the wife of the librettist, Montagu Slater; in Philip Brett's detailed study of the fascinating documents preserved in the Britten-Pears Library at Aldeburgh; and in his history of the work's stage presentation and critical reception. Hans Keller's remarkable synopsis, first printed in 1952, is complemented by a fine new analytical study by David Matthews of Act II scene 1, the crux of the opera.

Benjamin Britten: Peter Grimes

Joseph Kerman

Davitt Moroney

Throughout his career, Philip Brett wrote about the music of the Tudor period. He carried out pathbreaking work on the life and music of William Byrd (c1540-1628). Collecting these influential essays, this volume is a tribute to Brett's agile mind and to his skill at synthesizing history and musical analysis.

Essays and a Monograph

William Byrd and His Contemporaries

Gary Thomas

Elizabeth Wood

When the first edition of Queering the Pitch was published in early 1994, it was immediately hailed as a landmark and defining work in the new field of Gay Musicology. The first collection of its kind, its contributors covered a wide range of subjects from analysis of the work of gay composers to queer readings of Schubert's Unfinished Symphony. Among the contributors were many then-new scholars, --including the late Philip Brett (one of the editors of the first edition), Susan McClary, Jennifer Rycenga, Paul Attinello, and Martha Mockus--who have since become leaders in the field. In light of the explosion of Gay Musicology since 1994, a new edition of Queering the Pitch is timely and needed. In this new work, the editors are including a landmark essay by Philip Brett on Gay Musicology, its history and scope, which was written for Grove's Dictionary of Music-but only published in a greatly reduced version, because of its strong political approach. The essay itself has become a cause celebre, and this will be its first full appearance in print. Along with this new historical essay, the editors are contributing a new introduction that outlines the changes that have occurred over the last decade as Gay Musicology has grown.

Gary C. Thomas

A collection of gay and lesbian work in music and musicology. Musicologists, scholars, academics, critics, performers and composers examine the areas of musical education, voice and listening, history and biography, as seen through an interdisciplinary and political eye.

Gary C Thomas

When the first edition of Queering the Pitch was published in early 1994, it was immediately hailed as a landmark and defining work in the new field of Gay Musicology. In light of the explosion of Gay Musicology since 1994, a new edition of Queering the Pitch is timely and needed. In this new work, the editors are including a landmark essay by Philip Brett on Gay Musicology, its history and scope. The essay itself has become a cause celebre, and this will be its first full appearance in print. Along with this new historical essay, the editors are contributing a new introduction that outlines the changes that have occurred over the last decade as Gay Musicology has grown.

Philip Brett

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