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  • Book cover of Harry White; or, the boy who wished to be a soldier
  • Book cover of Music and the Irish Literary Imagination
    Harry White

     · 2008

    This new reading of Irish literature identifies, for the first time, the formative influence of music in Irish writing over the past 200 years. Although this influence has long been acknowledged in studies of Shaw and Joyce, White explores music as an abiding preoccupation in the work of Moore, Yeats, Synge, Shaw, Joyce, Beckett, Friel, and Heaney.

  • Book cover of Shorthand Music
  • Book cover of Anatomy of Censorship
    Harry White

     · 1997

    Bringing together diverse disciplines such as literary and legal history, modern psychology and contemporary feminism, Anatomy of Censorship sorts out the many confusing explanations and often misleading justifications for censorship to reveal the underlying conditions and motivations that lead to the suppression of various forms of communication. It explains why censors are notoriously incapable of identifying what defines obscene, immoral or illicit expression and how they actually profit from this failure on their part. It shows how censors ultimately aim not to define expression, but people: how they use censorship to stigmatize classes of people as more prone to corruption and depravity, and how they thereby seek to protect the authority of the few rather than, as they falsely claim, the morality of the many. Above all, it offers a timely critique of the most seductive and bogus justification for censorship: that expression has the capacity to cause actual harm. It shows how the law and the censor conspire to foster this unsupported fabrication in the face of overwhelming evidence that no causal link between expression and harm has ever been discovered.

  • Book cover of The Musical Discourse of Servitude
    Harry White

     · 2020

    Examining, for the first time, the compositions of Johann Joseph Fux in relation to his contemporaries Bach and Handel, The Musical Discourse of Servitude presents a new theory of the late baroque musical imagination. Author Harry White contrasts musical "servility" and "freedom" in his analysis, with Fux tied to the prevailing servitude of the day's musical imagination, particularly the hegemonic flowering of North Italian partimento method across Europe. In contrast, both Bach and Handel represented an autonomy of musical discourse, with Bach exhausting generic models in the mass and Handel inventing a new genre in the oratorio. A potent critique of Lydia Goehr's seminal The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works, The Musical Discourse of Servitude draws on Goehr's formulation of the "work-concept" as an imaginary construct which, according to Goehr, is an invention of nineteenth-century reception history. White locates this concept as a defining agent of automony in Bach's late works, and contextualized the "work-concept" itself by exploring rival concepts of political, religious, and musical authority which define the European musical imagination in the first half of the eighteenth century. A major revisionist statement about the musical imagination in Western art music, The Musical Discourse of Servitude will be of interest to scholars of the Baroque, particularly of Bach and Handel.

  • Book cover of Fieldwork: Essays on the Cultural History of Music in Ireland
    Harry White

     · 2025

    An absorbing study of the development and reception of musical culture in Ireland by a pioneering and deservedly renowned author. This volume is a collection of fourteen essays on the history and reception of Irish music and music in Ireland. It addresses three prevailing themes: the historiography of Irish music, the influence of music on Irish writing (and vice versa), and the cultural identity and reception of Irish music both domestically and in the world at large. Its principal protagonists include Thomas Moore, W. H. Grattan Flood, George Moore, Edward Martyn, Charles Villiers Stanford, James Joyce, Dora Pejačević, Ina Boyle, Aloys Fleischmann and Jennifer Walshe. These essays also identify and interrogate key questions underpinning a general crisis of reception in relation to Irish music, and particularly art music, within the domain of Irish studies. Fieldwork examines this crisis in the aftermath of The Encyclopaedia of Music in Ireland (published in 2013) and a major retrospective of Irish art music, Composing the Island (curated and presented in 2016). It thereby engages closely with contemporary Irish art music and the challenges which this music has faced in the early decades of the twenty-first century. This well-conceived and beautifully written work testifies to Harry White's central place in the shaping of the discourse surrounding the cultural history of Irish music over the last 40 years. White's gift for expression and memorably poetic turns of phrase allows the complexity of ideas and range of historical and literary knowledge examined in these essays to be deftly excavated and evaluated. Curiosity, provocativeness, imagination and literature are threaded through his exploration of how Irish history and experience have been imagined musically.

  • Book cover of The Well-Tempered Festschrift
    Harry White

     · 2020

    "The Well-Tempered Festschrift" is a reading of "Music Preferred: Essays in Musicology, Cultural History and Analysis in Honour of Harry White", edited by Lorraine Byrne Bodley and published by Hollitzer Verlag in 2018. "The Well-Tempered Festschrift" reflects on each of the essays in "Music Preferred" in turn, and it also accounts for the circumstances in which Harry White met the contributors to "Music Preferred" throughout the course of his working life. "The Well-Tempered Festschrift" is thus a musicological memoir as well as a detailed review of the contents of "Music Preferred", dedicated to the friends whose work is pictured within. It responds to the liber amicorum of "Music Preferred" with an answering echo that may well be unique in the annals of scholarly Festschriften.

  • Book cover of The Story of Bass
    Harry White

     · 2022

    Packed with rare and unpublished images, this is the definitive story of an iconic British brand - Bass.

  • Book cover of AN INVESTIGATION OF THE EFFECTS OF EXTREME LOW TEMPERATURES UPON COLD STARTING OF SPARK IGNITION ENGINES USING STANDARD GASOLINE.
  • Book cover of The Progress of Music in Ireland
    Harry White

     · 2005

    This book collects a number of essays on the relationship between music, cultural history and musicology in Ireland which, taken together, comprise a natural progression from the author's widely acclaimed monograph, The Keeper's Recital (1998). The progress of music in Ireland contains essays on contemporary music and musical infrastructures in Ireland; on Irish musical nationalism in the context of German and Czech traditions; on the presence of music in the work of Brian Friel and Samuel Beckett; on Joyce and music; on university education and Irish musical education; on the discourse of musicology in Ireland; and on the work of Brian Boydell and Aloys Fleischmann as pioneers in Irish musical scholarship.