‘… into another kind of life in which anything might happen …’ Popular music and late modernity, 1910–1930

Popular Music ◽  
1995 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 137-154 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Baxendale

One evening in Leeds, in about 1913, the young J.B. Priestley had a brush with modernity:… hot and astonished in the Empire, we discovered ragtime … It was as if we had been still living in the nineteenth century and then suddenly found the twentieth glaring and screaming at us. We were yanked into our own age, fascinating, jungle-haunted, monstrous … Out of these twenty noisy minutes in a music hall, so long ago, came fragmentary but prophetic outlines of the situation in which we find ourselves now, the menace to old Europe, the domination of America, the emergence of Africa, the end of confidence and any feeling of security, the nervous excitement, the frenzy, the underlying despair of our century … here was something new, strange, curiously disturbing … (Priestley 1962, pp. 66–7)

Semiotica ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 (235) ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
Anthony Splendora

AbstractIlluminating innovatively the dialectic by which “sign” is induced “to signify” requires an analysis of the inferrer-entailed symbolics constituting “signified,” a process particularly observable during relative, purposeful re-signification, particularly at high-visibility sites. Because Nathaniel Hawthorne focused intently his romantic-dramatic oeuvre on cynosural women, because of his affinity for allegorical signification, and especially for his tangibility to feminist themes and axiologies of virtue transcending even the highly reformist nineteenth century, he is here chosen an interpretation-open “carrier wave” for that research. Climactically and consonant thematically, also instructive is Umberto Eco’s unnamed, eponymous “Rose” for being an antiphrastic sign with a truth of its own signifying at least (like Hawthorne’s Puritan-oblique Hester Prynne) divergence from male/hieratic hermeneutics; at most (like Apuleius’s metaphysical Psyche, Hawthorne’s lodestar) ineffable, philosophical Good. As if to the generating premise, Eco wrote in The Name of the Rose, “Without an eye to read them[,] signs produce no concepts”; socially consequential signification-conditioned transformation, in that eye and toward those signifieds, symptomatic both historical and rhetorical, is here assayed.


1979 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 379-390
Author(s):  
Frederick Sontag

For some time it seemed as if Christianity itself required us to say that ‘God is in history’. Of course, even to speak of ‘history’ is to reveal a bias for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century forms of thought. But the justification for talking about the Christian God in this way is the doctrine of the incarnation. The centre of the Christian claim is that Jesus is God's representation in history, although we need not go all the way to a full trinitarian interpretation of the relationship between God and Jesus. Thus, the issue is not so much whether God can appear or has appeared within, or entered into, human life as it is a question of what categories we use to represent this. To what degree is God related to the sphere of human events? Whatever our answer, we need periodically to re-examine the way we speak about God to be sure the forms we use have not become misleading.


2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 227-242 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henry Johnson

The late nineteenth century and early decades of the twentieth century saw the drum kit emerge as an assemblage of musical instruments that was central to much new music of the time and especially to the rise of jazz. This article is a study of Chinese drums in the making of the drum kit. The notions of localization and exoticism are applied as conceptual tools for interpreting the place of Chinese drums in the early drum kit. Why were distinctly Chinese drums used in the early drum kit? How did the Chinese drums shape the future of the drum kit? The drum kit has been at the heart of most popular music throughout the twentieth century to the present day, and, as such, this article will be beneficial to educators, practitioners and scholars of popular music education.


2018 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 160
Author(s):  
Antonio Marcos Sanseverino

A escravidão é o nexo fundamental para pensar a literatura brasileira do século XIX. Na prosa machadiana, esse nexo histórico foi evidenciado por diferentes críticos (CHALHOUB, 2003, 2012; GLEDSON, 2006; SCHWARZ, 2000). Na leitura dos jornais, desde os anos de 1870, através da leitura de anúncios, vemos o quanto a presença do escravo doméstico era fato naturalizado no cotidiano do Rio de Janeiro (FREYRE, 2012; SCHWARCZ, 1987). Amas, copeiros, cozinheiros, moleques eram anunciados como objeto de venda ou de aluguel. Não apenas o trabalho era vendido ou alugado, mas o próprio trabalhar-escravo. Essa presença cotidiana de escravos é necessária (ou não) para a compreensão dos enredos? Alguns contos machadianos que trazem à primeiro plano do conflito a presença da escravidão: “Mariana” (1871), “O caso da vara” (1899) e “Pai contra mãe” (1906). Entretanto, há um apagamento da história pessoal do escravo enquanto personagem. A expressão “cria da casa” usada para caracterizar Mariana, uma mulata que vive como fosse da família, mostra o quanto a genealogia da personagem se apaga, diluída no pertencimento à casa do dono. Palavras-chave: Machado de Assis. Escravidão. Conto. Cria da casa.ABSTRACTSlavery is the fundamental link to think of nineteenth-century Brazilian literature. In Machado’s prose, this historical nexus was evidenced by different critics (CHALHOUB, 2003, 2012, GLEDSON, 2006, SCHWARZ, 2000). In the reading of the newspapers, from the 1870s, through the reading of advertisements, we see how the presence of the domestic slave was a naturalized fact in the daily life of Rio de Janeiro (FREYRE, 2012; SCHWARCZ, 1987). Mothers, cupbearers, cooks, brats were advertised as objects for sale or rent. Not only was work sold or rented, but the work-slave itself. Is this daily presence of slaves necessary (or not) for the understanding of entanglements? Some Machado tales that bring to the forefront of the conflict the presence of slavery: “Mariana” (1871), “The case of the stick” (1899) and “Father against mother” (1906). However, there is an erasure of the slave’s personal history as a character. The expression “housekeeper” used to characterize Mariana, a mulatta who lives as if she were one of the family, shows how much the character’s genealogy is extinguished, diluted in belonging to the owner’s house.Keywords: Machado de Assis. Slavery. Tale. Of the house.


Antíteses ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (20) ◽  
pp. 979
Author(s):  
Celso Kraemer ◽  
Dominique Santos ◽  
Aniele Crescêncio

RESUMO Ao observar as relações de Nietzsche com seus contemporâneos verifica-se que ele estava ciente das principais discussões relativas à Unificação da Alemanha (1871). Para a unificação era necessário que os 39 estados alemães compartilhassem o sentimento de pertencimento a uma pátria comum. Nesse meandro, os historiadores prussianos do século XIX desempenharam papel fundamental ao produzir um ambiente filosófico nacionalista, uma maneira científica e objetiva de pensar sobre a história. O objetivo deste trabalho é compreender as interações de Nietzsche com estes círculos intelectuais. Para isto, foram selecionados quatro dos chamados fragmentos póstumos de Nietzsche datados entre 1871 e 1873. De acordo com o ponto de vista de Nietzsche, as pretensões dos historiadores, não tinham nenhuma crítica, pois acreditavam, ingenuamente, que a verdade era um alvo tangível. Por outro lado, ele indicou a necessidade de uma história ligada à cultura, que era trabalhada em conjunto com "instintos artísticos".  ABSTRACT By observing the relationship of Nietzsche with his contemporaries one can notice that he was aware of the main discussions related to the unification of Germany (1871). Unification required 39 German states to share the feeling of belonging to a common homeland. Prussian historians of the nineteenth century played a key role in producing such a nationalist philosophical environment, a scientific and objectivist way of thinking about History. This work aim is to understand the interactions between Nietzsche and this intelectual circles. For this purpose, four of the so-called posthumous Nietzsche fragments, dated between 1871 and 1873, were selected. According to Nietzsche's point of view, some historians had a naive pretension to reach the truth, as if it were a tangible target. On another hand, he pointed out the necessity of a link between History and Culture, which should be understood altogether with ‘artistic instincts’. 


2007 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 213-220
Author(s):  
Reviews Poston-Anderson ◽  
Magnus Schneider ◽  
Ben Wiles

Dance and Dancers in the Victorian and Edwardian Music Hall Ballet, Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain series, Alexandra Carter, (2005) Aldershot: Ashgate, 177 pp., ISBN 0 7546 3736 0 (hbk), 50.00Operatic Migrations: Transforming Works and Crossing Boundaries, Roberta Montemorra Marvin and Downing A. Thomas (eds.), (2006) Aldershot (UK) and Burlington (US): Ashgate, 274 pp., ISBN 0 7546 5098 7 (hbk), 65.00The Musical as Drama: A Study of the Principles and Conventions Behind Musical Shows from Kern to Sondheim, Scott McMillin, (2006) Princeton: Princeton University Press, 230 pp., ISBN 0691127301 (hbk), 15.95


2009 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 205-225
Author(s):  
Roger Sabin

The article argues that the significance of the nineteenth-century comics character Ally Sloper cannot be understood without reference to the parallel career that this fictional celebrity developed across other media, most notably music hall. The history and evolution of the textual character, and of his various incarnations on stage and screen, are chronicled, with the aim both of documenting the expansion of working-class leisure culture and of demonstrating the centrality of Sloper to the development of a specifically British theatrical tradition that moved away from earlier continental models. Contemporary responses to Sloper, including moral outrage, are discussed, and the article concludes by analysing the skilled commercial exploitation of the character which would influence later practices in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.


2019 ◽  
pp. 156-184
Author(s):  
Joan Wallach Scott

This chapter explores the complex uses of feminism and appeals to “sexual democracy” in the new discourse of secularism. The story is anything but straightforward and involves the insistence on sex as a public matter, and on women's sexuality (and by extension, nonnormative sexualities) as a right of individual self-determination. The emphasis on individualism is a part of neoliberalism's “rationality;” it is not the same as its nineteenth-century antecedent. At the same time, the difference of sex and its heteronormative claims has not disappeared, confusing woman's status as a desiring subject with her status as an object of (male) desire. The contemporary discourse of secularism, with its insistence on the importance of “uncovered” women's bodies equates public visibility with emancipation, as if that visibility were the only way to confirm women as sexually autonomous beings (exercising the same rights in this domain as men). The contrast with “covered” Muslim women not only perpetuates the confusion between Western women as subjects and objects of desire, it also distracts attention from (or flatly ignores) persisting racialized gender inequalities in markets, politics, jobs, and law within each side.


2017 ◽  
pp. 29-45
Author(s):  
Vito Adriaensens ◽  
Steven Jacobs

In its earliest years of existence, cinema seems to have been fascinated by stasis and stillness. As if emphasizing its capacity to represent movement, early cinema comprises many scenes in which moving people interact with static paintings and sculptures. Moreover, films made shortly before and after 1900 often make explicit the contrast between the new medium of film and the traditional arts by means of the motif of the statue or the painting coming to life. In so doing, early film continued a form of popular entertainment that combined the art of the theater with those of painting and sculpture, namely the tableau vivant, or living picture. Focusing on the trick films of Georges Méliès and the early erotic films by the Viennese Saturn Company, this chapter reveals the importance and continuity of nineteenth-century motifs and traditions with regard to tableaux vivants as they were presented on the legitimate stage, in magic, in vaudeville, and in burlesque.


2017 ◽  
pp. 59-74
Author(s):  
Barbara A. E. Bell

Scottish theatre, from the mid-eighteenth century onwards, has been characterised by a distinctive performance culture that values anti-illusionist techniques, breaking the fourth wall, music and song, strongly physical acting styles and striking visual effects. These were accepted traits of the Georgian theatre as a whole; however, they endured in Scotland through the music hall and pantomime traditions, when late nineteenth-century Western theatre was focused on realism/naturalism. Their importance to the search for a distinctive Scottish Gothic Drama lies in the way that the conditions of the Scottish theatre during the Gothic Revival valued these skills and effects. That theatre was heavily constricted in what it could play by censorship from London and writers were cautious in their approach to ‘national’ topics. At the same time a good deal of work portraying Scotland as an inherently Gothic setting was imported onto Scottish stages.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document