THE CURIOUS CASE OF ANTHONY GNAZZO: A LOST AMERICAN EXPERIMENTALIST

Tempo ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 74 (294) ◽  
pp. 39-47
Author(s):  
Michael Palmese
Keyword(s):  
Complex Network ◽  
Experimental Music ◽  
Historical Documents ◽  
Moral Issues ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Bay Area ◽  
Music Scene ◽  
Major Figure ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S

ABSTRACTArchival evidence indicates that Anthony Gnazzo was a major figure within the Bay Area avant-garde music scene of the 1960s and 1970s who retired from composition by 1983 and has since been largely forgotten. Historical documents reveal, however, that a study of Gnazzo enables us to better understand the complex network of influences and artists working on experimental music in the Bay Area during the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. This article outlines Gnazzo's career and work, from his earliest academic compositions to his late electronic pieces, and concludes with a consideration of the ethical and moral issues inherent in musicological research on living subjects, particularly in the case of a composer who consciously avoids discussion of his personal aesthetic or compositional output. Should one study music that appears to have been ‘abandoned’ by the artist?

Coming Home: Portraying Japanese Baseball on the Silver Screen

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher T. Keaveney
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Early History ◽  
Japanese Cinema ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Hollywood Films ◽  
History Of ◽  
Baseball Films ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Important Marker

Chapter 3 examines the long history of baseball films in Japan, a tradition nearly as old as the history of Japanese cinema itself. After a brief survey of the early history of cinema in Japan, a tradition whose history parallels that of the game of baseball chronologically, the study focuses on early shomingeki films and explores how baseball became an important marker of domesticity and middle class respectability in this genre of film in the 1930s. The chapter then examines several pivotal films in the postwar era, examining how baseball was used alternately to perpetuate a national hero in Suzuki Hideo’s Immortal Pitcher (1955) or to chart the corruption and greed surrounding professional baseball as in Kobayashi Masaki’s I Will Buy You (1956). In the 1960s and 1970s, as young filmmakers arose to challenge the dominance of the great postwar filmmakers and to produce often avant-garde and politically charged films that reflected an international challenge to the hegemony of Hollywood films, the baseball film was again adopted as a means to offer that challenge. Ōshima Nagisa’s Ceremonies, in a film that contests the very concept of the baseball film, uses baseball as a metaphor for the Japan’s abandonment of its citizens during the war. The recent splatter comedy baseball films of Yamaguchi Yūdai likewise play with the familiar tropes of Japanese baseball and of the baseball hero as antihero in problematizing the very concept of the baseball film.

The Counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Blake Slonecker
Keyword(s):  
Urban Areas ◽  
Sexual Revolution ◽  
Corporate America ◽  
Popular Imagination ◽  
Acid Rock ◽  
Bay Area ◽  
Aggressive Male ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
Mainstream Society ◽  
The 1960S

In the decade after 1965, radicals responded to the alienating features of America’s technocratic society by developing alternative cultures that emphasized authenticity, individualism, and community. The counterculture emerged from a handful of 1950s bohemian enclaves, most notably the Beat subcultures in the Bay Area and Greenwich Village. But new influences shaped an eclectic and decentralized counterculture after 1965, first in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district, then in urban areas and college towns, and, by the 1970s, on communes and in myriad counter-institutions. The psychedelic drug cultures around Timothy Leary and Ken Kesey gave rise to a mystical bent in some branches of the counterculture and influenced counterculture style in countless ways: acid rock redefined popular music; tie dye, long hair, repurposed clothes, and hip argot established a new style; and sexual mores loosened. Yet the counterculture’s reactionary elements were strong. In many counterculture communities, gender roles mirrored those of mainstream society, and aggressive male sexuality inhibited feminist spins on the sexual revolution. Entrepreneurs and corporate America refashioned the counterculture aesthetic into a marketable commodity, ignoring the counterculture’s incisive critique of capitalism. Yet the counterculture became the basis of authentic “right livelihoods” for others. Meanwhile, the politics of the counterculture defy ready categorization. The popular imagination often conflates hippies with radical peace activists. But New Leftists frequently excoriated the counterculture for rejecting political engagement in favor of hedonistic escapism or libertarian individualism. Both views miss the most important political aspects of the counterculture, which centered on the embodiment of a decentralized anarchist bent, expressed in the formation of counter-institutions like underground newspapers, urban and rural communes, head shops, and food co-ops. As the counterculture faded after 1975, its legacies became apparent in the redefinition of the American family, the advent of the personal computer, an increasing ecological and culinary consciousness, and the marijuana legalization movement.

scholarly journals From Microphone to the Wire: Cultural change in 1970s and 1980s music writing

2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 531-555
Author(s):  
STEPHEN GRAHAM
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cultural Change ◽  
White Male ◽  
Experimental Music ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Music Scenes ◽  
Independent Music ◽  
Attitude And Practice ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Uk

AbstractIn this article I examine localized cultural change that nevertheless serves as an applied instance of broader change. Focusing mostly on British, white male musicians and music writers active in the improvised and experimental music scenes of the UK (and, to a lesser extent, United States and Europe) across the 1970s and early 1980s, I identify clear shifts in taste, attitude, and practice. These shifts arc across what Ben Piekut calls the ‘mixed avant-garde’ of the 1960s to what I describe as the ‘unpop avant-garde’ of the late 1970s and 1980s, in which influences from popular and non-Western music play more significant roles than before and liminal, quasi-popular practices such as noise are in the emergence. I trace the appearance of the unpop avant-garde through independent music publications from the period, most prominently Microphone, Musics, Collusion, Impetus, and Re/Search, using these published scene discourses as barometers of the musical atmosphere of the time.

scholarly journals “Breakin' the Rules”: Eleo Pomare and the Transcultural Choreographies of Black Modernity

2012 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-63 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Fensham
Keyword(s):  
Modern Dance ◽  
Amiri Baraka ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Radical Innovations ◽  
Black Performance ◽  
Jazz Music ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
African American Artists

The radical innovations of African-American artists with artistic form during the 1960s and 1970s, according to black performance theorist Fred Moten, led to a new theorization of the avant-garde. His book, In the Break: The Radical Aesthetics of the Black Tradition, discusses the poetry and jazz music of artists, from Amiri Baraka and Billie Holiday to Charles Mingus, and extols their radical experimentation with the structures and conventions of aurality, visuality, literature, and performance dominant in European art and aesthetics. In this essay, I consider the implications of these processes of resignification in relation to the choreographic legacy of the artist, Eleo Pomare, whose work and career during this period was both experimental and radical and, I will suggest, critical to the formation of a transnational, multiracial conception of modern dance.

scholarly journals Terrorens poetik: Revolutionen skrives med småt

2009 ◽  
Vol 37 (107) ◽  
pp. 52-73
Author(s):  
Susanne Stoltz ◽  
Anders Tønnesen
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
Situationist International ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Red Army ◽  
The Spectator ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Aesthetic

The Poetics of Terror: The Manifestoes of the RAF:This paper points to a ‘forgotten’ literary history of the Red Army Fraction (RAF) in order to contest a common misconception. The RAF is often perceived solely as a political phenomenon and its justification of terrorism as a political discourse. Thereby many scholars bluntly fail to pinpoint the attractiveness of the left-wing terrorism of the 1960s and 1970s. The paper argues that the writings of the first generation of the RAF also convey a ‘poetics’ of terrorism. It points to a somewhat overlooked strategy of justification in the writings, which can be formulated as follows: Both the act of terrorism and the utterance of its defence are justified as aesthetic experiences. Furthermore, this was constructed under heavy influence from groups of avant-garde artists in the tradition of the Situationist International (SI). The paper analyses the strategy of justification found in the first few RAF-statements. Beneath the political jargon of left-wing radicalism and the »credo of immediate action«, the paper locates another strategy of justification that carries the sign of avant-garde thought. According to the manifestoes of the RAF, the aesthetic experience of a terrorist act could liberate the spectator. The study concludes that the writings of RAF unveil a ‘poetics’ of terrorism. The act of terrorism is a radical transgression of reality. Hence, the terrorist act destroys the ‘mechanical’ system of cognitive oppression because it shows the possibility of another world. That is why the RAF views terror as a model of spiritual liberation. In addition to this the statements communicate a parallel concept to the ‘poetics’ of the terror act. The RAF constructed a concept of revolutionary language, ‘the armed propaganda’, which claimed to break down the barriers of ‘domination’ in the consciousness of the recipient. In doing so the statements perform what they preach; they are themselves acts of terror. The RAF’s concept of terrorism comprises both word and deed. The writings are acts and the acts are utterances. Accordingly, RAF’s ‘poetics’ of terrorism can be described as the transgression of reality in the word or deed of terror that leads to spiritual liberation.

Miguel Ángel Estrella

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carol A. Hess
Keyword(s):  
Latin American ◽  
The United States ◽  
Dirty War ◽  
Political Activities ◽  
Latin American Music ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Status ◽  
Nadia Boulanger ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S

This chapter examines the place of Argentine pianist Miguel Ángel Estrella in the politics of Latin American music, focusing on the Dirty War, the wave of repression and violence by military regimes during the 1960s and 1970s. It begins with Estrella’s recital in September 1987 as a tribute to Nadia Boulanger, who died in October 1979 and was one protagonist in Estrella’s story. It then considers Estrella’s political activities in Argentina and his being formally charged with subversion, sedition, and terrorist activities, as well as his promotion of the masterworks of the Western canon. It also contextualizes Estrella’s experience in light of a number of broader issues, relating Estrella and his traditionalist repertory to the ongoing debate among composers and critics over socially engaged music (música comprometida); the historical antecedents of this debate and how they inform present-day reactions to the status of either the avant-garde or the Western canon in música comprometida; and how scholars in the United States might understand Estrella’s story.

Literary theorists in and beyond French academic space (1960–1970s)

2020 ◽  
Vol 68 (5) ◽  
pp. 1108-1123
Author(s):  
Lucile Dumont
Keyword(s):  
Literary Theory ◽  
Public Engagement ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
French History ◽  
Social Strategies ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Theoretical Approaches ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Collective Strategy

This article demonstrates how social strategies deployed at the margins of French academic space to legitimize theoretical approaches to literary texts (semiology, semantics, structural analysis of narratives) in the 1960s and 1970s strongly relied on the interventions of their promoters beyond the academy. It specifically examines two strategies privileged by promoters of literary theory which allowed some of them to bypass several requirements for academic careers in taking advantage of the transformations of higher education, of the absence of stable and strong disciplinary frames, and of their own integration into the intellectual and literary fields. First, either through the alliance with literary avant-gardes or by the temporary constitution as one, the collective strategy of the literary avant-garde became a way to engage both politically and aesthetically. Second, the investment of transnational networks and internationalization allowed the critics and theorists to get around the national path to symbolic and academic consecration, and to reframe the modalities of their public engagement. Ultimately, this article offers an understanding of how, for aspirant or marginalized academics, interventions beyond the perimeter of the academic space have, at a certain point in French history, helped their acquisition of academic legitimacy.

scholarly journals “It Isn’t Race or Nation Governs Movement”: New Writers’ Press and the Transnational Scope of Irish Experimental Poetry in the 1960s and 1970s

Humanities ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 178
Author(s):  
Will Fleming
Keyword(s):  
Experimental Poetry ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Irish Poetry ◽  
Small Press ◽  
The Press ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Contemporary Irish Poetry ◽  
The Many ◽  
Editorial Decisions

In this paper, I seek to contribute to the resurrection from critical obscurity of an overlooked tradition in contemporary Irish poetry: namely, that of small-press poetic experimentalism. Taking as a case study the Dublin-based New Writers’ Press (NWP, established 1967), I will interrogate the absence of virtually any mention of small Irish experimental presses in critical narratives of late modernist poetry of the British Isles in the 1960s and 1970s. By using an array of insights gleaned from the many letters, typescripts and other ephemera in the NWP archive housed at the National Library of Ireland, such absences in scholarship are explored in the context of what the press’ founding editors faced in navigating the small Irish poetry market of the mid-twentieth century. Through this archival lens, the reasons why a cohesive avant-garde network of British and Irish poetic experimentalists never materialised are analysed, and an argument for how Irish poetic experiments of the last half century have not received anywhere near the same degree of critical attention as those of their British counterparts will emerge. In the first half of this paper, I focus on the Irish commercial poetry scene in the 1950s and 1960s, ultimately illustrating how narrow and competitive it was in comparison to the British market, as well as the peculiar individual context of an Irish campus magazine, Trinity College’s Icarus (1950-). This will in turn suggest that the absence of presses such as NWP from critical accounts of late modernist poetic experimentalism may well be due to editorial decisions made by those Irish presses themselves. In the second half of this paper, I foreground some important archival evidence to review a number of instances in NWP’s history in which it comes close to forging alliances with presses within the more cohesive British experimental scene, though it never manages to do so. Drawing on this evidence, I present an archival basis for counterarguments to the possible conclusion that the responsibility for the general absence of Irish presses from narratives of small-press experimentalism lies with those Irish presses themselves.

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