Stephen Downes

"Deeply moving...an honest and courageous book filled with love for a very special little cat - I cried. I hope everybody reads it who has ever lost a beloved cat. It is so rare to see a man let down his guard and talk about love with such depth and sentiment". Jeffrey Masson (author of THE NINE EMOTIONAL LIVES OF CATS and DOGS NEVER LIE ABOUT LOVE) Stephen Downes never much liked cats. But one day, his sons Patrick and Ben find three kittens at the bottom of the garden. The strays soon become part of the family. Stephen falls in love with Blackie, a confident, friendly cat who keeps him company while he eats his lunch and takes naps on his study floor.But one day Blackie's tail begins to droop and he seems listless and despondent. Stephen is alarmed and wonders what could be ailing his usually robust pet.From the family vet to an eye specialist and eventually to the vet hospital in Werribee, Stephen pursues every avenue to cure Blackie's illness and keep his beloved cat alive...Deeply moving yet unsentimental, BLACKIE is a beautifully written tale about love and loss. In describing the life and death of Blackie, Stephen expresses the intense experience of loving another living thing.

Blackie

Gustav Mahler is often thought of as one of the last of the Romantic composers and, as a result his influence on the development of twentieth-century music has been little explored. In this ground-breaking study, Stephen Downes shows that Mahler's music was in fact greatly admired by major composers Benjamin Britten, Kurt Weill and Hans Werner Henze. Despite their initial admiration being notably dissonant with the prevailing Zeitgeist - Britten in 1930s England, Weill in 1920s Germany and Henze in 1950s Germany and Italy - Downes argues that Mahler's music struck a profound chord with them because of the powerful way in which it raised and intensified dystopian and utopian complexes and probed the possibility of fulfilment or redemption, an ambition manifest in ambiguous tonal, temporal and formal processes.

After Mahler

The Polish composer Karol Szymanowski is one of the most fascinating musical figures of the early twentieth century. His works included four symphonies, two violin concertos, the operas Hagith and King Roger, the ballet-pantomime Harnasie, the oratorio Stabat Mater, as well as numerous piano, violin, vocal and choral compositions. The profile and popularity of Szymanowski's music outside Poland has never been higher and continues to grow. The Szymanowski Companion constitutes the most significant and comprehensive reference source to the composer in English. Edited by two of the leading scholars in the field, Paul Cadrin and Stephen Downes, the collection consists of over 50 contributions from an international array of contributors, including recognized Polish experts. The Companion thus provides a systematic, authoritative and up-to-date compilation of information concerning the composer's life, thought and works.

The Szymanowski Companion

Debbie Johnson

Rick Eddy

Andrew Darlington

Akash Sagar

Kyle Flak

Ekta Rawat

Amy Pacini

Kamalendu Nath

Linda Jenkinson

Cecilia Doldan

Ilsa Gonzalez

Celine Leduc

Kally Surbeck

Read some of the most wonderfully unique poetry by some fantastic up-and-coming wordsmiths. A diverse, exciting collection of works by Akash Sagar, Rick Eddy, Kyle Flak, Ekta Rawat, Amy S Pacini, Andrew Darlington, Debbie Johnson, Kamalendu Nath, Stephen Downes, Linda Jenkinson, Cecilia Hernando Doldan, Ilsa E. Garcia Gonzalez, Celine Leduc, and Kally Surbeck.

A Collection of Diverse Poems from Around the World

Wordplay

The music of Gustav Mahler repeatedly engages with Romantic notions of redemption. This is expressed in a range of gestures and procedures, shifting between affirmative fulfilment and pessimistic negation. In this groundbreaking study, Stephen Downes explores the relationship of this aspect of Mahler's music to the output of Benjamin Britten, Kurt Weill and Hans Werner Henze. Their initial admiration was notably dissonant with the prevailing Zeitgeist – Britten in 1930s England, Weill in 1920s Germany and Henze in 1950s Germany and Italy. Downes argues that Mahler's music struck a profound chord with them because of the powerful manner in which it raises and intensifies dystopian and utopian complexes and probes the question of fulfilment or redemption, an ambition manifest in ambiguous tonal, temporal and formal processes. Comparisons of the ways in which this topic is evoked facilitate new interpretative insights into the music of these four major composers.

Britten, Weill, Henze and Romantic Redemption

In a wide-ranging study of sentimentalism’s significance for styles, practices and meanings of music in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a series of interpretations scrutinizes musical expressions of sympathetic responses to suffering and the longing to belong. The book challenges hierarchies of artistic value and the associated denigration of sentimental feeling in gendered discourses. Fresh insights are thereby developed into sentimentalism’s place in musical constructions of emotion, taste, genre, gender, desire, and authenticity. The contexts encompass diverse musical communities, performing spaces, and listening practices, including the nineteenth-century salon and concert hall, the cinema, the intimate stage persona of the singer-songwriter, and the homely ambiguities of ‘easy’ listening. Interdisciplinary insights inform discussions of musical form, affect, appropriation, nationalisms, psychologies, eco-sentimentalism, humanitarianism, consumerism, and subject positions, with a particular emphasis on masculine sentimentalities. Music is drawn from violin repertory associated with Joseph Joachim, the piano music of Chopin, Schumann, and Liszt, sentimental waltzes from Schubert to Ravel, concert music by Bartók, Szymanowski and Górecki, the Merchant-Ivory adaptation of The Remains of the Day, Antônio Carlos Jobim’s bossa nova, and songs by Duke Ellington, Burt Bacharach, Carole King, Barry Manilow and Jimmy Webb. The book will attract readers interested in both the role of music in the history of emotion and the persistence and diversity of sentimental arts after their flowering in the eighteenth-century age of sensibility.

Music and Sentimentalism in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

The Muse has long been figured as a divine or erotically alluring consort to the virile male artist, who may inspire him or lead him to the edge of madness. This book explores the changing cultural expressions of the relationship between the male artist with a beloved, imagined or desired Muse, to offer new and penetrating perspectives on musical representations and transformations of creative masculine subjectivity, and important aspects of the shift from the styles and aesthetics of Romantic Idealism to Modernist Anxiety in music of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Each of the chapters begins with explorations into male artists' relationships with their Muse, and moves to analysis and interpretation which uncovers cultural constructions of masculine artistic inspiration and production, and their association with creatively inspiring and erotically charged relationships with a Muse. New insights are offered into the musical meaning and cultural significance of selected works by Rossini, Beethoven, Chopin, Liszt, Schumann, Wagner, Sibelius, Mahler, Bartók, Scriabin, Szymanowski, Debussy, Berg, Poulenc and Weill.

Music, Erotic Fantasy and Male Creativity in the Romantic and Modern Imagination

The Muse as Eros

Aesthetics of Music: Musicological Approachesis an anthology of fourteen essays, each addressing a single key concept or pair of terms in the aesthetics of music, collectively serving as an authoritative work on musical aesthetics that remains as close to 'the music' as possible. Each essay includes musical examples from works in the 18th, 19th, and into the 20thcentury. Topics have been selected from amongst widely recognised central issues in musical aesthetics, as well as those that have been somewhat neglected, to create a collection that covers a distinctive range of ideas. All essays cover historical origins, sources, and developments of the chosen idea, survey important musicological approaches, and offer new critical angles or musical case studies in interpretation.

Musicological Perspectives

Aesthetics of Music

Downes presents a detailed examination of the significance of decadence in Central and Eastern European modernist music.

The Case of Central and Eastern Europe

Music and Decadence in European Modernism

Aesthetics of Music: Musicological Approaches is an anthology of fourteen essays, each addressing a single key concept or pair of terms in the aesthetics of music, collectively serving as an authoritative work on musical aesthetics that remains as close to 'the music' as possible. Each essay includes musical examples from works in the 18th, 19th, and into the 20th century. Topics have been selected from amongst widely recognised central issues in musical aesthetics, as well as those that have been somewhat neglected, to create a collection that covers a distinctive range of ideas. All essays cover historical origins, sources, and developments of the chosen idea, survey important musicological approaches, and offer new critical angles or musical case studies in interpretation.

Stephen Downes

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