Books by Paul Griffiths

Paul Griffiths uses Oulipoaen constraints to imagine Beethoven visiting Boston to fulfill a commission to write a Biblical Oratorio for the Handel and Hayden Society.

Olivier Messiaen was one of the outstanding creative artists of his time. The strength of his appeal, to listeners as well as to composers, is a measure of the individuality of his music, which draws on a vast range of sources: rhythms of twentieth-century Europe and thirteenth-century India, ripe romantic harmony and brittle birdsong, the sounds of Indonesian percussion and modern electronic instruments. What binds all these together is, on one level, his unswerving devotion to praising God in his art, and on another, his independent view of how music is made. Messiaen's music offers a range of ways of experiencing time: time suspended in music of unparalleled changelessness, time racing in music of wild exuberance, time repeating itself in vast cycles of reiteration.In Olivier Messiaen and the Music of Time, leading writer and musicologist, Paul Griffiths, explores the problems of religious art, and includes searching analyses and discussions of all the major works, suggesting how they function as works of art and not only as theological symbols. This comprehensive and stimulating book covers the whole of Messiaen's output up to and including his opera, Saint Fran,oise d'Assise.

Returned from twenty years of travelling in China, Marco Polo now languishes in a Genoan prison cell. Paul Griffiths writes superbly.' Hilary Mantel, Daily Telegraph'A thoroughly modern piece of fiction which queries the nature of authorship, readership and truth itself ...

The English were punished in many different ways in the five centuries after 1500. These studies of penal practice explore violence, cruelty and shame, while offering challenging new perspectives on the timing of the decline of public punishment, the rise of imprisonment and reforms of the capital code.

Paul Griffiths shows how music has changed through the centuries, and suggests how that change mirrors development in the human notion of time, from the eternity of heaven to the computer's microsecond. An essential read for students, teachers and classical music lovers alike.

Explores in detail the lives and achievements of a huge range of composers, and examines key topics such as music history (from medieval plainchant to contemporary minimalism), performers, theory and jargon. This dictionary is a useful reference book for lovers of music, whether amateur or professional.