Desire in Chromatic Harmony

Author(s):  
Kenneth M. Smith

Of the many composers in the Western classical tradition who celebrated the marriage between psyche and sound, those explored in this book followed the lines diverging from Wagner in philosophizing the nature of desire in music. This book offers two new theories of tonal functionality in the music of the first half of the twentieth century that seek to explain its psychological complexities. First, the book further develops Riemann’s three diatonic chord functions, extending them to account for chromatic chord progression and substitution. The three functions (tonic, subdominant, and dominant) are compared to Jacques Lacan’s twin concepts of metaphor and metonymy, which drive the apparatus of human desire. Second, the book develops a technique for analyzing the drives that pull chromatic music in multiple directions simultaneously, creating a libidinal surface that mirrors the tensions of the psyche found in Schopenhauer, Freud, and the post-Freudians Lacan, Lyotard, and Deleuze. The harmonic models are tested in psychologically challenging pieces of music by post-Wagnerian composers. From the obsession with death and mourning in Suk’s Asrael Symphony to an exploration of “perversion” in Strauss’s Elektra, from the post-Kantian transcendentalism of Ives’s Concord Sonata to the “Accelerationism” of Skryabin’s late piano works, and from the Sufi mysticism of Szymanowski’s Song of the Night to the failed fantasy of the American dream in Copland’s The Tender Land, the book cuts a path through the dense forests of chromatic complexity and digs deep into the psychological makeup of post-Wagnerian psychodynamic music.

Author(s):  
Barbara Kellerman

The chapter focuses on how leadership was taught in the distant and recent past. The first section is on five of the greatest leadership teachers ever—Lao-tzu, Confucius, Plato, Plutarch, and Machiavelli—who shared a deep belief in the idea that leadership could be taught and left legacies that included timeless and transcendent literary masterworks. The second section explores how leadership went from being conceived of as a practice reserved only for a select few to one that could be exercised by the many. The ideas of the Enlightenment changed our conception of leadership. Since then, the leadership literature has urged people without power and authority, that is, followers, to understand that they too could be agents of change. The third section turns to leadership and management in business. It was precisely the twentieth-century failure of business schools to make management a profession that gave rise to the twenty-first-century leadership industry.


Author(s):  
Wesley J. Wildman

Subordinate-deity models of ultimate reality affirm that God is Highest Being within an ultimate reality that is neither conceptually tractable nor religiously relevant. Subordinate-deity models ceded their dominance to agential-being models of ultimate reality by refusing to supply a comprehensive answer to the metaphysical problem of the One and the Many in the wake of the Axial-Age interest in that problem, but they have revived in the twentieth century due to post-colonial resistance to putatively comprehensive explanations. Subordinate-deity ultimacy models resist the Intentionality Attribution and Narrative Comprehensibility dimensions of anthropomorphism to some degree but continue to employ the Rational Practicality dimension of anthropomorphism, resulting in a strategy of judicious anthropomorphism. Variations, strengths, and weaknesses of the subordinate-deity class of ultimacy models are discussed.


Human Arenas ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Croce

AbstractThis article addresses the call of the Psychology of Global Crises conference for linkage of academic work with social issues in three parts: First, examples from conference participants with their mix of bold calls for social transformation and realization of limits, a combination that generated few clear paths to achieving them. Second, presentation of Jamesian practical idealism with psychological insights for moving past impediments blocking implementation of ideals. And third, a case study of impacts from the most recent prominent crisis, the global pandemic of 2020, which threatens to exacerbate the many crises that had already been plaguing recent history. The tentacles of COVID’s impact into so many problems, starting with economic impacts from virus spread, present an opportunity to rethink the hope for constant economic growth, often expressed as the American Dream, an outlook that has driven so many of the problems surging toward crises. Jamesian awareness of the construction of ideological differences and encouragement of listening to those in disagreement provide not political solutions, but psychological preludes toward improvements in the face of crises.


Fascism ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-8 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roger Griffin

In the entry on ‘Fascism’ published in 1932 in the Enciclopedia Italiana, Benito Mussolini made a prediction. There were, he claimed, good reasons to think that the twentieth century would be a century of ‘authority’, the ‘right’: a fascist century (un secolo fascista). However, after 1945 the many attempts by fascists to perpetuate the dreams of the 1930s have come to naught. Whatever impact they have had at a local level, and however profound the delusion that fascists form a world-wide community of like-minded ultranationalists and racists revolutionaries on the brink of ‘breaking through’, as a factor in the shaping of the modern world, their fascism is clearly a spent force. But history is a kaleidoscope of perspectives that dynamically shift as major new developments force us to rewrite the narrative we impose on it. What if we take Mussolini’s secolo to mean not the twentieth century, but the ‘hundred years since the foundation of Fascism’? Then the story we are telling ourselves changes radically.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Erin Keenan

<p>Māori urbanisation and urban migrations have been the subject of much discussion and research, especially following World War Two when Māori individuals, whānau and communities increasingly became residents of towns and cities that were overwhelmingly Pākehā populated. However, Māori urbanisation experiences and urban migrations are difficult topics to address because kaumātua are reluctant to discuss ‘urban Māori’, especially considering its implications for Māori identities. The original contribution this thesis makes to histories of Māori urban migrations is that it explores these and other understandings of urbanisations to discover some of their historical influences. By discussing urbanisations directly with kaumātua and exploring historical sources of Māori living in, and moving to, the urban spaces of Wellington and the Hutt Valley through the twentieth century, this thesis is a ‘meeting place’ for a range of perspectives on the meanings of urbanisations from the past and the present. Although urbanisation was an incredible time of material change for the individuals and whānau who chose to move into cities such as Wellington, the histories of urban migration experiences exist within a scope of Māori and iwi worldviews that gave rise to multiple experiences and understandings of urbanisations. The Wellington region is used to show that Māori in towns and cities used Māori social and cultural forms in urban areas so that they could, through the many challenges of becoming urban-dwelling, ensure the persistence of their Māoritanga. Urbanisations also allowed Māori to both use traditional identities in urban areas, as well as develop new relationships modelled on kinship. The Ngāti Pōneke community is used as an example of the complex interactions between these identities and how many Māori became active residents in but not conceptually ‘of’ cities. As a result, the multiple and layered Māori identities that permeate throughout Māori experiences of the present and the past are important considerations in approaching and discussing urbanisations. Urban Māori communities have emphasised the significance of varied and layered Māori identities, and this became particularly pronounced through the Māori urban migrations of the twentieth century.</p>


Author(s):  
Cristiano Casalini

One key to the success of Jesuit education has been the tension between the recognizable mark of uniformity that long distinguished the methods, contents, and practices of Jesuit schools and their ability to adapt to different contexts and times. Both of the aspects could be said to have found explicit support in that unique foundational document, the Ratio Studiorum, which retained some sway up until the middle of the twentieth century despite the many variations and complexities that had arisen since early modernity. Soon after the Ratio fell into oblivion, Jesuit schools began to think about what made them distinctively Jesuit. There was a need to clarify the profile of their mission in the contemporary world. This chapter will sketch a history of Jesuit education, focusing on both the permanent and changing traits of its distinctive pedagogy.


2021 ◽  
Vol 53 (3) ◽  
pp. 473-476
Author(s):  
Nadav Samin

The tribe presents a problem for the historian of the modern Middle East, particularly one interested in personalities, subtleties of culture and society, and other such “useless” things. By and large, tribes did not leave their own written records. The tribal author is a phenomenon of the present or the recent past. There are few twentieth century tribal figures comparable to the urban personalities to whose writings and influence we owe our understanding of the social, intellectual, and political history of the modern Middle East. There is next a larger problem of record keeping to contend with: the almost complete inaccessibility of official records on the postcolonial Middle East. It is no wonder that political scientists and anthropologists are among the best regarded custodians of the region's twentieth century history; they know how to make creative and often eloquent use of drastically limited tools. For many decades, suspicious governments have inhibited historians from carrying out the duties of their vocation. This is one reason why the many rich and original new monographs on Saddam Hussein's Iraq are so important. If tribes are on the margins of the records, and the records themselves are off limits, then one might imagine why modern Middle Eastern tribes are so poorly conceived in the scholarly imagination.


Author(s):  
Lila Caimari

This introductory chapter begins with the author's account of the origins of the present volume, which can be traced back to her interest in a late nineteenth-century set of concepts, images, and metaphors that grew up around the figure of the modern criminal. It then discusses the population growth in Buenos Aires, which jumped from about 1.5 to 2.5 million in the two decades between the world wars and the corresponding urban expansion. This sets the stage for a description of the book's purpose, namely to explore the many dimensions of porteño life in the early decades of the twentieth century: its vital network of neighborhood associations, its literacy campaigns, its grassroots politics, its many reformist projects, and so forth.


Author(s):  
P. J. E. Peebles

This introductory chapter provides an overview of cosmology. The starting assumption for cosmology, as in all branches of natural science, is that nature operates by kinds of logic and rules that one can discover by careful examination of what is observed, informed by past experience of what has worked. But despite the many demonstrations of its power, physics, along with all the rest of natural science, is incomplete. Research in cosmology in the twentieth century usually was done in small groups, often an individual working alone or maybe with a colleague or a student or two. In the twenty-first century, ongoing research in cosmology grew richer and called for larger groups to develop special-purpose equipment for data acquisition, which in turn called for groups of comparable size to reduce the data and interpret it. Big Science has become important to this subject: One has to get used to gathering data in vast amounts, analyzing these data, and employing massive numerical simulations that help bridge the gap between theory and observation. This book provides an account of how cosmology grew, presenting histories of six lines of research that were developing more or less separately.


2021 ◽  
pp. 86-114
Author(s):  
Julie Golia

This chapter examines the advice column “Advice to the Wise and Otherwise,” which ran in the Chicago Defender, one of the most successful black newspapers in the United States. In the early twentieth century, black publishers recognized the many ways that mainstream newspapers reinforced the racial status quo in America and failed to address the needs of African American readers. They also sought to offer more feature content to women readers. “Advice to the Wise and Otherwise” was one of the country’s most widely read black advice columns. Columnist Princess Mysteria, a vaudeville mentalist, embraced the Defender’s mission of racial “uplift” and advocacy. But her counsel also reflected a unique sensitivity to the dual prejudices that her female readers faced as African Americans and as women. The columnist offered a worldview very different from that of white columnists, one that doled out assertive, even feminist advice.


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