Delius and the Sound of Place

Description

Few composers have responded as powerfully to place as Frederick Delius (1862-1934). Born in Yorkshire, Delius resided in the United States, Germany, and Scandinavia before settling in France, where he spent the majority of his professional career. This book examines the role of place in selected works, including 'On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring', Appalachia, and The Song of the High Hills, reading place as a creative and historically mediated category in his music. Drawing on archival sources, contemporary art, and literature, and more recent writing in cultural geography and the philosophy of place, this is a new interpretation of Delius' work, and he emerges as one of the most original and compelling voices in early twentieth-century music. As the popularity of his music grows, this book challenges the idea of Delius as a large-scale rhapsodic composer, and reveals a richer and more productive relationship between place and music.

Daniel M. Grimley is Professor of Music at the University of Oxford and a fellow of Merton College. He has published extensively on early twentieth-century Scandinavian and British music, and his previous books include Grieg: Music, Landscape and Norwegian Identity (2006) and Carl Nielsen and the Idea of Modernism (2011). He appears regularly on BBC Radio 3 and at the BBC Proms as a pre-concert speaker.

'Delius and the Sound of Place is a cutting-edge work of scholarship at the intersection of geography and music that takes seriously the insights of both critical communities and builds a genuine dialogue between them.' Robert J. Mayhew, Journal of Historical Geography '... [Grimley] has added significantly to Delius scholarship by boldly tackling the difficult issue of where Frederick (Fritz) Delius sits in terms of his cultural identity ... Handsomely produced, with copious musical examples ...' Helen Faulkner, Fontes Artis Musicae 'Grimley presents his wide-ranging research in rich prose, offering seven chapters with single-word titles referencing real or imagined places ... Recommended' S. C. Pelkey, Choice