A fresh and comprehensive study of Frank Bridge, exploring his modernism, overlooked works and transformative contributions to British music.


Frank Bridge (1879-1941), student of Stanford and famously teacher of Benjamin Britten, was arguably one of the first British composers developing a radical modern musical language for his generation. The chapters in this collection situate Bridge in a broad intellectual context. They bring together new archival evidence that challenges existing characterisations of Bridge's life and works. Other chapters dealing with modernism address conceptual difficulties in defining his art, as well as problematic concepts in British music studies. The volume also offers new readings of one of Bridge's largest works, Oration, and one of his smallest, Sunset, while chapters on 'form' reveal new understandings of structural processes. The volume also addresses areas that have received little or no scholarly attention to date: song and theatre. Altogether, its focus pays tribute to what Arnold Whittall has described as Bridge's conjunction of 'classical and modernist tendencies' and his transformations of his own compositional technique into something that 'effectively challenged traditional, diatonically rooted ideals of classical coherence and integration'.