scholarly journals Magical Serialism: Modernist Enchantment in Elisabeth Lutyens's O Saisons, O Châteaux!

2017 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 271-303
Author(s):  
ANNIKA FORKERT
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Serial Music ◽  
British Music ◽  
Personal Branding ◽  
Manchester School ◽  
Composition Technique

AbstractElisabeth Lutyens's music of the 1940s and 1950s provides one important, but frequently overlooked, link between British music and modernism before the so-called Manchester School. I argue that the main reason that the composer and her music have not yet received much attention is that early twentieth-century modernism, as it is commonly understood, has been gendered masculine. This article engages with the composition, texts, and reception of Lutyens's 1946 cantata O saisons, ô châteaux! in the context of other Lutyens pieces in order to argue that the composer sought to transcend what she perceived as a complex of disadvantages in the reception of her music (both regarding her gender and composition technique): the Cantata is an essentially melodic piece of ‘magical serialism’. Rather than ‘taming’ or ‘feminizing’ her serial music, Lutyens thus carves out a place for herself as Arthur Rimbaud's magician, reflecting on the set text of O saisons, ô châteaux! and anticipating her later ‘credo’, in which she declares her music's allegiance with secret science rather than note counting or personal branding.

Music, Theosophical spirituality, and empire: the British modernist composers Cyril Scott and John Foulds

2008 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 163-182 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bob van der Linden
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Personal Relationships ◽  
Imperial Culture ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
South Indian ◽  
British Music ◽  
Musical Exoticism ◽  
Indian Nationalism ◽  
Global Movement

AbstractThis article deals with the life and work of the early twentieth-century British modernist composers Cyril Scott and John Foulds, in the context of British national music and ‘imperial culture’ at large. Through a discussion of their Theosophical spirituality, Indian musical exoticism, and modernist aesthetics (for all of which they became outsiders to the British music establishment), it tentatively investigates their ideas as part of an ‘alternative’ ideological cluster, which equally influenced British ‘imperial culture’. Furthermore, it discusses the role of Theosophists (such as Annie Besant, Margaret Cousins, and Rukmini Devi) in Indian nationalism and the making of modern South Indian music. This situates the cases of Scott and Foulds within Theosophy as a global movement, and illustrates how cosmopolitan radicalism, Western self-questioning, modernist aesthetics, and anti-establishment thinking linked up with the emergence of non-Western anti-imperial nationalism through an intricate network of personal relationships in metropolis and colony.

Some Polish Composers of To-Day

Tempo ◽  
1948 ◽  
pp. 25-28
Author(s):  
Andrzej Panufnik
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Fertile Soil ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Progressive Group ◽  
Karol Szymanowski

It is ten years since KAROL SZYMANOWSKI died at fifty-four. He was the most prominent representative of the “radical progressive” group of early twentieth century composers, which we call “Young Poland.” In their manysided and pioneering efforts they prepared the fertile soil on which Poland's present day's music thrives.

V1214: Edward Loughborough Keyes: An Early Twentieth Century Leader In Urology

2004 ◽  
Vol 171 (4S) ◽  
pp. 320-320
Author(s):  
Peter J. Stahl ◽  
E. Darracott Vaughan ◽  
Edward S. Belt ◽  
David A. Bloom ◽  
Ann Arbor
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Early Twentieth Century

New insights into the controversy surrounding marine biological laboratory (Marine Station) facilities in the Firth of Clyde in the early twentieth century

2015 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 165-170
Author(s):  
P. G. Moore
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Marine Biological Laboratory ◽  
Biological Station ◽  
Marine Biological ◽  
Biological Laboratory ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Marine Station ◽  
Regius Professor ◽  
Adjacent Island

Three letters from the Sheina Marshall archive at the former University Marine Biological Station Millport (UMBSM) reveal the pivotal significance of Sheina Marshall's father, Dr John Nairn Marshall, behind the scheme planned by Glasgow University's Regius Professor of Zoology, John Graham Kerr. He proposed to build an alternative marine station facility on Cumbrae's adjacent island of Bute in the Firth of Clyde in the early years of the twentieth century to cater predominantly for marine researchers.

Revaluations through Dance: Friedrich Nietzsche's Thought in Isadora Duncan's Speech The Dance of the Future

2019 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 206-219
Author(s):  
Meindert E. Peters
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The Body ◽  
Eternal Recurrence ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Mind

Friedrich Nietzsche's influence on Isadora Duncan's work, in particular his idea of the Dionysian, has been widely discussed, especially in regard to her later work. What has been left underdeveloped in critical examinations of her work, however, is his influence on her earlier choreographic work, which she defended in a famous speech held in 1903 called The Dance of the Future. While commentators often describe this speech as ‘Nietzschean’, Duncan's autobiography suggests that she only studied Nietzsche's work after this speech. I take this incongruity as a starting point to explore the connections between her speech and Nietzsche's work, in particular his Thus Spoke Zarathustra. I argue that in subject and language Duncan's speech resembles Nietzsche's in important ways. This article will draw attention to the ways in which Duncan takes her cues from Nietzsche in bringing together seemingly conflicting ideas of religion and an overturning of morality; Nietzsche's notion of eternal recurrence and the teleology present in his idea of the Übermensch; and a renegotiation of the body's relation to the mind. In doing so, this article contributes not only to scholarship on Duncan's early work but also to discussions of Nietzsche's reception in the early twentieth century. Moreover, the importance Duncan ascribes to the body in dance and expression also asks for a new understanding of Nietzsche's own way of expressing his philosophy.

Conformity and Idiosyncrasy: Jean Rhys

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vike Martina Plock
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Jean Rhys ◽  
Left Bank ◽  
Female Images ◽  
Image Construction ◽  
Political Modernity ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Good Morning ◽  
Professional Mobility

By looking at Jean Rhys’s ‘Left Bank’ fiction (Quartet, After Leaving Mr Mackenzie, Good Morning, Midnight, ‘Illusion’, ‘Mannequin’), this chapter investigates how new operational procedures such as Fordism and Taylorism, which were introduced into the French couture industry at the beginning of the twentieth century, affected constructions of modern femininity. Increasingly standardized images of feminine types were produced by Paris couturiers while the new look of the Flapper seemingly advertised women’s expanding social, political and professional mobility. Rhys, this chapter argues, noted fashion’s ability to provide resources for creative image construction but she simultaneously expressed criticism of its tendency to standardize female costumes and behaviour. Ultimately, Rhys demonstrates in her fiction that the radically modern couture of the early twentieth century was by no means the maker of social change and women’s political modernity. To offset the increased standardization of female images that she witnessed around her, Rhys created heroines and texts that relied on an overt display on difference.  

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