Problems of Meter in Early-Seventeenth-Century and Twentieth-Century Music

2020 ◽  
pp. 296-346
Author(s):  
Christopher Hasty

This chapter assesses meter in early-seventeenth-century and twentieth-century music. Specifically, it analyzes compositions by Monteverdi, Schütz, Webern, and Babbitt. Monteverdi's “Ohimè, se tanto amate” from the fourth book of madrigals presents a metrical subtlety rarely encountered in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century music. Here the projective field is very mobile, and mensural determinacy is restricted to relatively small measures. Meanwhile, Schütz's concertato motet “Adjoro vos, filiae Jerusalem” from the Symphoniae sacrae, Book I (1629), demonstrates extremely subtle rhythmic detail and great projective contrast used in the service of a compelling larger gesture. Here the repetition of small melodic figures is used for the creation of complex projective fields that serve the continuity of phrases and sections. The chapter then looks at the much smaller measures and much greater ambiguity in some music of the twentieth century.

Author(s):  
Marlé Hammond

This chapter introduces the fictional tale by tracing its evolution from its unknown origins in what was probably the seventeenth century to its historicisation and Christianisation in the nineteenth century, to its infiltration of popular culture and the fine arts in the twentieth century. Its adaptations across various media, including literature, cinema and music, are explored. The chapter furthermore shows how the tale inscribes the endemic paradigms of the ʿUdhrī love narrative and the popular epic or sīra with the western model of the damsel-in-distress fairy tale. Finally, the chapter relates the process by which the tale becomes absorbed into Arabic culture to Yuri Lotman’s notion of the ‘boundary’ as the site of artistic innovation and the creation of new genres.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ivan Sablin ◽  
Kuzma Kukushkin

Focusing on the term zemskii sobor, this study explored the historiographies of the early modern Russian assemblies, which the term denoted, as well as the autocratic and democratic mythologies connected to it. Historians have discussed whether the individual assemblies in the sixteenth and seventeenth century could be seen as a consistent institution, what constituencies were represented there, what role they played in the relations of the Tsar with his subjects, and if they were similar to the early modern assemblies elsewhere. The growing historiographic consensus does not see the early modern Russian assemblies as an institution. In the nineteenth–early twentieth century, history writing and myth-making integrated the zemskii sobor into the argumentations of both the opponents and the proponents of parliamentarism in Russia. The autocratic mythology, perpetuated by the Slavophiles in the second half of the nineteenth century, proved more coherent yet did not achieve the recognition from the Tsars. The democratic mythology was more heterogeneous and, despite occasionally fading to the background of the debates, lasted for some hundred years between the 1820s and the 1920s. Initially, the autocratic approach to the zemskii sobor was idealistic, but it became more practical at the summit of its popularity during the Revolution of 1905–1907, when the zemskii sobor was discussed by the government as a way to avoid bigger concessions. Regionalist approaches to Russia’s past and future became formative for the democratic mythology of the zemskii sobor, which persisted as part of the romantic nationalist imagery well into the Russian Civil War of 1918–1922. The zemskii sobor came to represent a Russian constituent assembly, destined to mend the post-imperial crisis. The two mythologies converged in the Priamur Zemskii Sobor, which assembled in Vladivostok in 1922 and became the first assembly to include the term into its official name.


Author(s):  
Tobias Harper

This chapter examines the creation of new orders at the beginning of the twentieth century, which was the culmination of a prolonged period of “unprecedented honorific inventiveness” starting in the late nineteenth century. In Britain the new Order of the British Empire was branded the “Order of Britain’s Democracy” in recognition of the fact that it extended far deeper into non-elite classes in British society than any previous honour. Between 1917 and 1921 more than 20,000 people in Britain and throughout the British Empire were added to this new Order. This was an unprecedented number, orders of magnitude larger than honours lists in previous years. While the new Order was successful in reaching a wider, more middle-class audience than the honours system before the war, which was socially narrow, there was a substantial backlash to what was widely perceived by elites to be an excessive (and diluting) opening-up of the “fount of honour.” This backlash was connected to political controversies about the sale of honours that eventually helped bring about Lloyd George’s downfall. This chapter also contains a brief description of all the components of the British honours system at the beginning of the twentieth century.


1981 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 236-270 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. A. Ying

Notwithstanding the inclusion of “Admiralty and maritime jurisdiction” within the constitutional grant of federal judicial power, current Admiralty jurisdiction in Australia is based solely on a nineteenth century Imperial statute, the Colonial Courts of Admiralty Act 1890. That this has remained the case for so long is regrettable, and reflects in part a traditional deference to Imperial control over international shipping (although lately there have been indications of greater legislative assertiveness over maritime matters generally), and in part a reluctance to interfere with the present allocation of jurisdiction among State courts. A concerted effort is now under way to lay the foundation for the creation of a modern indigenous Admiralty jurisdiction, and with this in mind, the author sets out to examine the nature and extent of the current colonial jurisdiction, its interrelationship with the federal jurisdiction under section 76(iii) of the Constitution, and the desirability of abandoning the rigid nineteenth century base of the former to realise the full twentieth century promise of the latter.


2012 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 147-169 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan Graffius

The Stuart artefacts described in this article have not previously been examined as an entity, and many are relatively unfamiliar to scholars. This paper will consider this unique collection of relics and discuss their significance within the personal as well as national and international contexts of their origins. That significance rests largely in their royal provenance, which was valued by the custodians at the English Jesuit College of St Omers, the predecessor of Stonyhurst College, founded to educate English Catholic boys in 1593. The Stuart cause, from Mary Queen of Scots to Charles Edward Stuart represented the best hope of English Catholics for a formal restoration of the faith. Relics, such as Mary Queen of Scots’ Thorn, were powerful symbols of tenacity and hope, providing an unbroken thread from the Passion of Christ to the martyred Queen, the more valued as the College gained its own seventeenth-century martyrs. Artefacts which arrived at Stonyhurst College after 1794 were valued for their romantic association with the failed Stuart cause. The creation of the Stuart Parlour in 1911and the adoption of the Borrodale tartan as part of the girls’ uniform in the 1990s demonstrate the significance these objects possess well into the twentieth century.


PMLA ◽  
1960 ◽  
Vol 75 (5) ◽  
pp. 577-582
Author(s):  
Harry Modean Campbell

In his discerning book entitled Emerson's Angle of Vision, Sherman Paul has pointed out two fundamental ways in which Whitehead, in spite of some obvious differences, is like Emerson. Both Emerson and Whitehead, says Paul, exalted the moral, ethical, and imaginative science of the seventeenth century over the analytical rationalism of the eighteenth century, and, as a logical consequence of this emphasis, both condemned Lockean sensationalism in the same way. Following Professor Paul's suggestion, the purpose of this study is to explore in some detail the basic views of Emerson and Whitehead about religion—man's relation to Nature and God. The remarkable similarities between the views of Emerson and those of Whitehead on this subject may not indicate much, if any, indebtedness of the twentieth-century philosopher to his nineteenth-century predecessor, but if these parallels are extensive and important enough, they may well indicate that Whitehead's total achievement in the philosophy of religion is like that of Emerson—that, religiously, Whitehead may be said to be a kind of twentieth-century Emerson, in one important way, as may appear, more of a transcendentalist than Emerson. Indeed, though the obscurity of his style will prevent him from being as popular as his predecessor, Whitehead's influence as a leader in the religious revolt against the “philosophy of logical analysis” and the other philosophies that make ours an “age of analysis” may in time be as great as that of Emerson in the similar romantic-transcendentalist revolt against the analytical rationalism of the age of “Enlightenment.” More of this later, but first let us examine the evidence.


2008 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 163-164
Author(s):  
JOHN BUTT

I clearly remember that when this journal was first devised there lay some niggling doubt behind my tremendous enthusiasm for this timely initiative. Wasn’t there something problematic about viewing the eighteenth century as a whole? Did I intuit some sort of fundamental divide, perhaps somewhere between the deaths of J. S. Bach and Handel, one that somehow cast this century into two irreconcilable worlds? The seventeenth century was perhaps enough of a mess for its disunity to become a historiographical topic in its own right, its separate threads providing at least some narrative potential, even if these could never convincingly be drawn into a single whole. And the nineteenth century was perhaps sufficiently punctuated with various revolutions and restorations, together with an overriding story of industrial progress, to fall into a coherent (if divisive) family of narratives. Even the twentieth century – that which surely saw the largest number of changes in the human condition and the exponential pluralizing of ‘legitimate’ musical traditions – seems to have a clear enough trajectory, much of the music at its end having a discernible genealogical connection with that of its beginning. So what was it that was worrying me about the eighteenth century?


2019 ◽  
pp. 106-127
Author(s):  
Haun Saussy

Nineteenth-century origin stories about culture and poetry assume a pattern of development and diversification from a single starting point—be that a primitive language or a single ethnic community. But according to twentieth-century models, the development of culture depends on the clash of different patterns of activity that disrupt the forward movement of simple rhythms. Marcel Mauss’s account of the techniques of the body and Ezra Pound’s practices of translation supply two examples of the breaking of rhythm and the creation of new cultural patterns, sometimes in response to the destruction of European ideals in the Great War.


2021 ◽  
pp. 228-244
Author(s):  
John Parker

This chapter considers the transformation from a culture of speaking about death to one which included writing and reading about death. It spotlights the final quarter of the nineteenth century, from the creation of the British Crown Colony of the Gold Coast in 1874 to its expansion with the formal incorporation of Asante and the savanna hinterland to the north in 1901–2. The chapter focuses on literacy and print culture as they developed on the Gold Coast littoral, a process which would extend into Asante and beyond only in the twentieth century. This print culture comprised both vernacular African languages and, with the departure of the Dutch in 1872, the language of the remaining colonizing power: English. The former was particularly associated with the Basel Mission, whose European and African agents pioneered the transcription of Ga and Twi as written languages and produced the first vernacular printed texts: prayer books, primers, dictionaries, the gospels and, by the 1860s to 1870s, compete translations of the Bible. The Bible, of course, has a great deal to say about mortality and the ends of life, however, the chapter concentrates on a different, secular medium of entextualized discourses about death: newspapers, which, as in Europe, 'accorded mortality new openings.'


Author(s):  
Gavin Flood

On the one hand, we have the development of science from the seventeenth to nineteenth century, while on the other, we have a focus on life in philosophy at the dawn of the nineteenth century. Here, life is understood in terms of nature as a dynamic process linked to impulse or drive. Partly stemming from a mystical discourse in the seventeenth century, the concern for life comes to be disseminated through the history of both Romantic poetry and Romantic philosophy. This vitalist spirit can be traced through to the twentieth century. Life itself comes to be articulated through a mystical theological discourse that ends in Romantic poetry and through a philosophical discourse that ends in phenomenology.


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