Search Term: Simon Wright

Nicholas Bugsworthy: an unknown Tudor composer?

By Simon Wright

Simon Wright digs into the curious history of an almost forgotten Tudor composer, Nicholas Bugsworthy. Thanks to an insert in OUP’s in-house magazine, ‘The Dominant’, published on 1 April 1928, Sir Richard Runciman Terry was able to bring the music of this prolific composer into the public domain. Simon Wright picks up where Terry left off, considering, amongst other things, the origins of a curious tune almost certainly shows the earliest version of musical patterns later to become threaded within Irving Berlin’s 1911 hit ragtime song “Everybody’s Doin’ It Now.”

Ralph Vaughan Williams: preserving the publishing legacy

By Simon Wright

In the Vaughan Williams’s 150th anniversary year, his primary publisher Oxford University Press are donating around 60 items to the British Library, to be preserved and made available to musicians and researchers. These items include artefacts from all stages in the publishing process, from conductor’s marked scores, copyist’s copies and handwritten notes by the composer. In this blog, Simon Wright highlights some interesting features amongst the titles being donated.

The old shall be made new

By Simon Wright
The issue and performance of previously unpublished musical works — juvenilia, early pieces, and even completions by others of music left by composers, for one reason or another, incomplete — always provokes interesting debate. Would the composer have wanted it? Does the newly presented work serve the best interests of the composer’s reputation? Does the music throw new (or even controversial) light on ‘the life and works’?

Sinfonia Antartica: ‘Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free’

By Simon Wright
One hundred years ago this month the bodies of Captain Scott and his companions were discovered, eight months after they had perished from starvation, frostbite, and exposure on their return journey from the South Pole. Ostensibly a scientific and research expedition, Captain Robert Falcon Scott and his party had raced against Roald Amundsen to be first at the South Pole, and lost.

Women & Literature: Lorraine Hansberry

By Margaret B. Winkerson

In this article from “Black Women in America” (2nd Ed.), Margaret B. Winkerson looks at the life and works of Lorraine Hansberry, author of “A Raisin in the Sun.”

Six jazz movies you may not know

By Kevin Whitehead

The film industry started making jazz-related features as soon as synchronized sound came in, in 1927: “I’m gonna sing it jazzy,” Al Jolson’s Jack Robin optimistically declares in the pioneering talkie The Jazz Singer, before taking off on Irving Berlin’s “Blue Skies.” (He gets closer to the jazzy mark whistling a quasi-improvised chorus of “Toot Toot […]

The 2018 classics book club at Bryant Park Reading Room

By Cassidy Donovan

Oxford University Press has once again teamed up with the Bryant Park Reading Room on their summer literary series. The Bryant Park Reading Room was first established in 1935 by the New York Public Library as a refuge for the thousands of unemployed New Yorkers during the Great Depression.

Richard Cobden: hero of the Left or Right?

By Anthony Howe

This year marks the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the death of the great Victorian politician and ‘sage’, Richard Cobden, born in 1804, who died on 2 April 1865. Once a name familiar to every school-child, the prophet of ‘free trade, peace, and goodwill’ is now all but forgotten save among professional historians but he has spawned a diverse political legacy.

Praising a cat to sell a horse

By Anatoly Liberman

For a long time the etymology of the word bad has been at the center of my attention (four essays bear ample witness to this fact), and the latest post ended with a cautious reference to the idea that Middle Engl. bad ~ badde, a noun that occurred only once in 1350 and whose meaning seems to have been “cat,” is, from an etymological point of view, identical with the adjective bad.

Ballet in black and white: the ‘piano reduction’

By Simon Wright

For ballet rehearsals in theatres around the world the piano has long been the musical instrument of choice. To engage orchestras to do the detailed, volatile work required in routine rehearsals would be impractical and prohibitively costly, and only at the dress rehearsal will dancers and the orchestra finally come together. The music at all earlier rehearsals is provided through a specially written version of the score called a ‘piano reduction’.

Ventriloquists, female impersonators, the genuine article?

By Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner

Among the earliest, most challenging inventors of troubadour lyric, Marcabru composed songs for the courts of southwestern France during the second quarter of the twelfth century, calling knights to crusade, castigating false lovers, defining and refining courtly values…

How much could 19th century nonfiction authors earn?

By Simon Eliot and John Feather
In the 1860s, the introduction of its first named series of education books, the ‘Clarendon Press Series’ (CPS), encouraged the Press to standardize its payments to authors. Most of them were offered a very generous deal: 50 or 60% of net profits. These payments were made annually and were recorded in the minutes of the Press’ newly-established Finance Committee. The list of payments lengthened every year, as new titles were published and very few were ever allowed to go out of print.

A year of reading with the OUP Publicity team

‘Tis the season for gift guides and round-ups, so our US Publicity team took a quick break from pitching the OUP front list to reflect on their year in reading…

Harriet Cohen: alluring woman, great pianist devoted to Bach

By Simon Wright

Harriet Cohen (1895-1967) was one of the leading British pianists of her age, but her unusually small hands (“I cannot normally cover more than eight notes with each hand”) led her naturally to specialize in intimate classical and pre-classical works, rather than in any thundering octaves of nineteenth-century piano music.

Words we’re thankful for

Here on the OxfordWords blog we’re constantly awed and impressed by the breadth and depth of the English language. As this is a great week to be appreciative, we’ve asked some fellow language-lovers which word they’re most thankful for. From quark to quotidian, ych a fi to robot, here’s what they said:

Finding the right word

How do you choose the right word? Some just don’t fit what you’re trying to convey, either in the labor of love prose for your creative writing class, or the rogue auto-correct function on your phone. Can you shed lacerations instead of tears? How is the word barren an attack on women? How do writers such as Joshua Ferris, Francine Prose, David Foster Wallace, Zadie Smith, and Simon Winchester weigh and inveigh against words?