SAVING FAITH: STOCKHAUSEN AND SPIRITUALITY

Tempo ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 72 (283) ◽  
pp. 7-20
Author(s):  
Robin Maconie
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Online Discussions ◽  
Spiritual Life ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
John Tavener ◽  
Twentieth Century Music ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
English Composers ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

ABSTRACTInvited in 2011 by Robert Sholl and Sander van Maas to contribute to a proposed symposium on the spiritual in late twentieth-century music, I accepted, not because I agreed with the project and its aims, but to defend Stockhausen's character and reputation from convenient misrepresentation. Sin and virtue, spirituality and the spiritual life ask to be addressed in terms of actual works and personal witness – in my own case, not least given the composer's complaint late in life: ‘You have to watch out for Maconie's nihilism’. The test of spirituality inevitably entails scrutinizing the motives of former Stockhausen disciples who changed their minds, among them two English composers of my own generation, Jonathan Harvey and John Tavener, who have since passed away. In 2014 the opening sentence of the present paper provided theologian and Stockhausen-forum editor Thomas Ulrich with an amusing starting-point (‘Suffering? How very Protestant!’) for just the second of a trickle of online discussions of largely pathetic inconsequence.

‘A magic science’: rock music as a recording art

Popular Music ◽  
1983 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 195-213 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Clarke
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Rock Music ◽  
Sound Recording ◽  
Musical Practice ◽  
Order And Disorder ◽  
Twentieth Century Music ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
And Control ◽  
Jimi Hendrix ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

Jimi Hendrix once claimed ‘I'm working on music to be completely, utterly a magic science’ (Henderson 1981, p. 337). It is a description that fits not just the best of Hendrix's own music, but the best of all that late twentieth-century music in which the ability to capture and control sounds (on tape or disc) has become a means of extending old musical forms and traditions, and establishing new possibilities for them. Throughout his career, Hendrix drew nourishment from his musical roots in black traditions, but it was not until the summer of 1967 that he plugged himself fully into the new possibilities opened up by the technology of sound recording. Hendrix had already proved himself something of a musical ‘magician’ in the ancient sense in that he attempted, through music, to mediate between order and disorder, using his guitar as an expressive extension of himself to flirt with the danger and power of musical disintegration (for the parallel with non-Western musical practice see Shepherd 1977, p. 72; Mellers 1973, pp. 24–6; Clarke 1982, pp. 227–9).

The folk’ish heritage in Nordic democracy: Examples from Denmark and Norway

2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 432-447 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeppe Nevers ◽  
Jesper Lundsby Skov
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
European Integration ◽  
Reference Point ◽  
The People ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

Drawing on examples from Danish and Norwegian history, this article traces the ideological origins of Nordic democracy. It takes as its starting point the observation that constitutional theories of democracy were rather weak in the Nordic countries until the mid-twentieth century; instead, a certain Nordic tradition of popular constitutionalism rooted in a romantic and organic idea of the people was central to the ideological foundations of Nordic democracy. This tradition developed alongside agrarian mobilization in the nineteenth century, and it remained a powerful ideological reference-point through most of the twentieth century, exercising, for instance, an influence on debates about European integration in the 1960s and 1970s. However, this tradition was gradually overlaid by more institutional understandings of democracy from the mid-twentieth century onwards, with the consequence that the direct importance of this folk’ish heritage declined towards the late twentieth century. Nevertheless, clear echoes of this heritage remain evident in some contemporary Nordic varieties of populism, as well as in references to the concept of folkestyre as the pan-Scandinavian synonym for democracy.

Managing culinary diversity in urban China: On the reception of Sichuanese cuisine in the recent Guangzhou press

1970 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacob Klein
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cultural Influences ◽  
Sichuan Province ◽  
Urban China ◽  
Historical Background ◽  
Western China ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

Taking as its starting point the broad themes of globalisation and transnationalism, this paper focuses on what the author describes as an often neglected aspect of the growing interconnectedness of the late twentieth century: that is, the management of cultural influences moving between unequally positioned places within a single polity or region. In particular, the paper examines how the cuisine of Sichuan Province in south western China has been received in Guangzhou. Providing a summary of the historical background, the paper ends by outlining an agenda for further ethnographic research, which should look in particular at restaurateurs, restaurant workers, consumers and gastromic writers

György Ligeti and the Rhetoric of Autonomy

2004 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-28 ◽  
Author(s):  
CHARLES WILSON
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Significant Influence ◽  
Recent Past ◽  
Mass Market ◽  
Postmodern Theory ◽  
Gyorgy Ligeti ◽  
Twentieth Century Music ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Cultural Sphere ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

Composers’ self-representations – in articles, programme notes, and interviews – have exerted a significant influence on twentieth-century music scholarship, shaping not only the reception of particular outputs but also wider historiographical conceptions of the recent past. This article traces one particular mode of discourse through the published statements of György Ligeti – a ‘rhetoric of autonomy’, which tends to disavow allegiances to ‘schools’ or institutions and underplay stylistic or aesthetic commonalities with the work of other composers. This type of rhetoric, together with the image it promotes of an artistic culture created out of the polarized activities of individuals, colludes naturally with the now familiar pluralist paradigm of late-twentieth-century culture, a paradigm that much postmodern theory, despite its putative deconstruction of the ‘ideology of the unique self’ (Jameson), has left largely unchallenged. Except that, for an artist such as Ligeti, the rhetoric of autonomy may no longer accomplish its objective purpose. Within a cultural sphere increasingly subsumed by the commercial, the image of the radically autonomous creator, once powerfully symbolic of a refusal of the mass market, becomes inescapably caught up in its mechanisms as an explicitly promotional tool.

Nine Centuries of Man

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Diverse Range ◽  
Gender Expectations ◽  
Court Records ◽  
The Past ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Police Reports ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Scottish History ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

What did it mean to be a man in Scotland over the past nine centuries? Scotland, with its stereotypes of the kilted warrior and the industrial ‘hard man’, has long been characterised in masculine terms, but there has been little historical exploration of masculinity in a wider context. This interdisciplinary collection examines a diverse range of the multiple and changing forms of masculinities from the late eleventh to the late twentieth century, exploring the ways in which Scottish society through the ages defined expectations for men and their behaviour. How men reacted to those expectations is examined through sources such as documentary materials, medieval seals, romances, poetry, begging letters, police reports and court records, charity records, oral histories and personal correspondence. Focusing upon the wide range of activities and roles undertaken by men – work, fatherhood and play, violence and war, sex and commerce – the book also illustrates the range of masculinities that affected or were internalised by men. Together, the chapters illustrate some of the ways Scotland’s gender expectations have changed over the centuries and how, more generally, masculinities have informed the path of Scottish history

Trey Ellis's Platitudes: Redefining Black Voices

2009 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-76
Author(s):  
Quan Manh Ha
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Black Experience ◽  
Racial Issues ◽  
Black Voices ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
One Year ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

Trey Ellis has emerged as a prominent African American writer of the late-twentieth century, despite the small number of his published works. “The New Black Aesthetic,” an essay that he first published in CaUaloo in 1989, one year after the publication of his first novel, Platitudes, stands as a manifesto that defines and articulates his perspective on the emerging black literary voices and culture of the time, and on “the future of African American artistic expression” in the postmodern era.1 According to Eric Lott, Ellis's novel parodies the literary and cultural conflict between such male experimental writers as lshmael Reed and such female realist writers as Alice Walker.2 Thus, Ellis's primary purpose in writing Platitudes is to redefine how African Americans should be represented in fiction, implying that neither of the dominant approaches can completely articulate late-twentieth-century black experience when practiced in isolation. In its final passages, Platitudes represents a synthesis of the two literary modes or styles, and it embodies quite fully the diversity of black cultural identities at the end of the twentieth century as it extends African American literature beyond racial issues. In this way, the novel exemplifies the literary agenda that Ellis suggests in his theoretical essay.

A New Denominational Historiography?

1995 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 249-263
Author(s):  
John F. Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Recent Analysis ◽  
General Factor ◽  
Religious Organization ◽  
Religious Institution ◽  
Large Numbers ◽  
The Status ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
American Society ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

Over the last decade, a noteworthy number of published studies have, in one fashion or another, been defined with reference to religious denominations. This is an arresting fact, for, coincidentally, the status of religious denominations in the society has been called into question. Some formerly powerful bodies have lost membership (at least relatively speaking) and now experience reduced influence, while newer forms of religious organization(s)—e.g., parachurch groups and loosely structured movements—have flourished. The most compelling recent analysis of religion in modern American society gives relatively little attention to them. Why, then, have publications in large numbers appeared, in scale almost seeming to be correlated inversely to this trend?No single answer to this question is adequate. Surely one general factor is that historians often “work out of phase” with contemporary social change. If denominations have been displaced as a form of religious institution in society in the late twentieth century, then their prominence in earlier eras is all the more intriguing.

Archaeology, Historicity, and Homosexuality in the New Cultus of Antinous

2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 237-259
Author(s):  
Ethan White
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Gay Men ◽  
Second Century ◽  
Roman Emperor ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

In the second century, the Roman Emperor Hadrian deified his male lover, Antinous, after the latter drowned in the Nile. Antinous’ worship was revived in the late twentieth century, primarily by gay men and other queer-identified individuals, with Antinous himself being recast as “the Gay God.”

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