Britten and the Far East: Asian Influences in the Music of Benjamin Britten (Aldeburgh Studies in Music)

Benjamin Britten's strong interest in the musical traditions of the Far East had a far-reaching influence on his compositional style; this book explores the highly original cross-cultural synthesis he was able to achieve through the use of material borrowed from Balinese, Japanese and Indian sources. Britten's visit to Indonesia and Japan in 1955-6 is reconstructed from archival sources, and shown to have had a profound impact on his subsequent work: the techniques of Balinese gamelin music were used in the ballet "The Prince of the Pagodas" (1957), and then became an essential feature of Britten's compositional style, at their most potent in "Death in Venice" (1973); and the No rama and Gagaku court music of Japan were the inspiration for the trilogy of church parables Britten composed in the 1960s. The precise nature of these influences is discussed: Britten's sporadic borrowings fromIndian music are also fully analyzed. There is a survey of critical response to Britten's cross-cultural experiments.