英文摘要 |
"The Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore not only stirred a fierce debate in the English literary world from the 1910s to1930s but also evoked contemporary English composers to set his words to music. Most of the researches on the musical renditions of Tagore’s poems focus on compilation of materials on the composers and their works; yet very few studies actually analyze the relationship between music and the poetic texts closely. The present study focuses on Landon Ronald, John Foulds and Frank Bridge and their musical renditions of Tagore’s poems with special attention to the characteristics of musical genres selected and their implication to the composition of these songs. Ronald’s Song-Offerings is the first musical adaptation of Tagore’s poetry in the Western world. Whereas the first series of Song-Offerings composed in 1913 was branded with characteristics of the“drawing-room ballad,”the second done in 1920 was more religious and bore imprints of the romantic German Lieder. In the two songs he composed for Tagore’s play in 1919, Sacrifice, Foulds incorporated Indian musical instruments on top of a conventional Western string ensemble. This attempt predicts his lifelong interest in hybridizing the musical traditions of the East with the West. Bridge moved a step further to set Tagore’s three works to music in extended tonality, which are basically recitatives with slight variations achieved through the linguistic prosody of the poems. The loose vocal part is to be cemented by the clear logic constructed in the piano part. With these three songs dated from 1922 to 1925, Bridge bid farewell to his career as a song-composer and manifested his metamorphosis into an avant-garde composer." |