| Popis: |
George Bernard Shaw is best known today for his plays, but he first exercised his incisive wit as a drama and music critic in London, intermittently from 1876, regularly from 1888 to 1894, and intermittently again to the end of his life. Shaw explicitly intended to make his reviews both educational and accessible to the general public, combining performance critiques with broader considerations, including aspects of music theory and music education, and avoiding technical terms to the extent possible. Thus, his music criticism serves as an example of public music theory. This chapter surveys Shaw’s music-theoretic comments through this lens, analyzing what they demonstrate about his own musical understanding and underlying ideologies, the educational purpose of his reviews, and the level of musical knowledge he assumed on the part of his late nineteenth-century London readership. |
