Rethinking Bach Codes

2021 ◽  
pp. 227-250
Author(s):  
Daniel R. Melamed
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Scriptural Interpretation ◽  
Musical Works

J. S. Bach has long attracted claims that his music is fundamentally a code to be broken. Interpreters count notes and measures, add up numbers derived from texts, refer to ancient writings, parse doodles, trace out shapes made by notes on the page, and make detailed calculations, all in search of ciphers that reveal hidden meaning. Traditions of scriptural interpretation in which every detail has significance and purpose often provide a model. The idea of “perfection” repeatedly surfaces, suggesting mathematical completeness, along with hypotheses that Bach’s abstract works are connected to other aspects of eighteenth-century culture. The symbolic and allegorical make frequent appearances. There are attempts to relate Bach’s works to elements of his biography that go beyond routine Romantic associations of musical works with personal expression. Many of these theories are amateur work, undertaken perhaps because treatments of Bach’s music are often technical, and because many aspects of the music are alien to the esthetics of the modern world. But the approach also surfaces in scholarly writings. All new claims start from the insufficiently examined premise that Bach worked in codes at all.

Monarchy

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joël Félix
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Reform Initiatives ◽  
Old Regime ◽  
Political Crises ◽  
The Social ◽  
Major Reform ◽  
Louis Xvi ◽  
Louis Xv

This chapter examines the social and political structures of the absolute monarchy. It explores the extent to which tensions and conflicts in the mid-eighteenth century, in particular disputes between government and parlements, divided the elites over reform and policy, and opened up the realm of politics to public opinion. Reviewing the fate of major reform initiatives through the reigns of both Louis XV and his grandson Louis XVI, it argues that political crises paralysed the ability of royal institutions to enforce authority and generate consensus, thus making the transition from the old regime to the modern world necessary and inevitable.

Freedom of Expression and Democracy

2021 ◽  
pp. 81-105
Author(s):  
Ashutosh Bhagwat ◽  
James Weinstein
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Free Speech ◽  
Freedom Of Expression ◽  
Theoretical Perspective ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Popular Government ◽  
The Press ◽  
Political Association ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter focuses on the relationship between freedom of expression and democracy from both a historical and a theoretical perspective. The term ‘freedom of expression’ includes free speech, freedom of the press, the right to petition government, and freedom of political association. Eighteenth-century proponents of popular government had long offered democratic justifications for freedom of expression. The chapter then demonstrates that freedom of political expression is a necessary component of democracy. It describes two core functions of such expression: an informing and a legitimating one. Finally, the chapter examines the concept of ‘democracy’, noting various ways in which democracies vary among themselves, as well as the implications of those variations for freedom of expression. Even before democratic forms of government took root in the modern world.

Qing Connections to the Early Modern World: Ethnography and Cartography in Eighteenth-Century China

2000 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 623-662 ◽  
Author(s):  
LAURA HOSTETLER
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Literary Sources

‘Consulting literary sources is not as satisfactory as observation . . . If one wants to control the barbarian frontier area, one must judge the profitability of the land, and investigate the nature of its people.’—Qian Shu‘If one does not differentiate between their varieties, or know their customs, then one has not what it takes to appreciate their circumstances, and to govern them.’—‘Miaoliao tushuo’

scholarly journals The Culture of Poverty in Paris on the Eve of the Revolution

1967 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 277-291 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffry Kaplow
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Culture Of Poverty ◽  
The People ◽  
To Come ◽  
The One ◽  
Wage Earners

At the very beginning of the investigation, it is necessary to find a word to describe the European masses before the coming of the twin revolutions, the French and Industrial, that have contributed so much to the making of the modern world. “Proletariat” is clearly anachronistic; “wage-earners” is inadequate in a society where cash wages were far from being the most common form of payment for labor. “Working class” is too much identified with nineteenth century developments and, what is worse, conjures up an image of a homogeneous group that does not conform to eighteenth century realities. “Laboring poor” is by far the best, for it emphasizes two primary facts about the people with whom we are concerned: first, that, to one extent or another, they earned their living by doing manual labor, and, second, that they were being continuously impoverished, as Professor Labrousse has shown. The category has several virtues as a tool of historical analysis. It is large enough to take account of the complexities of eighteenth century social conditions, stressing the mobility and social intercourse that existed, albeit on a diminishing scale, between the master artisans and shopkeepers, their apprentices and journeymen on the one hand, and the domestics, beggars, criminals and floating elements in the population, on the other.Classes laborieusesandclasses dangereuseslived side by side and recruited their personnel from one another. They did in fact form a whole, whom contemporaries called“les classes inférieures”. If we look toward the future, we see that the French Revolution Was to bring about a temporary split in their ranks by politicizing those among them who became the sans-culottes, and that the Industrial Revolution was to complete this division on other bases by allowing some of the laboring poor to become petty capitalists, While forcing the majority to become proletarians or to fall further still into the nether world of the lumpen-proletariat. In sum, the use of the concept of the laboring poor enables us to come close to the reality of eighteenth century paris and to watch the disagregation of that reality with the passage of time.

Conclusion

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. Bruce Hindmarsh
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Religious Experience ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Christian Spirituality ◽  
Bearing Witness ◽  
History Of

Reviewing the arguments of the preceding chapters, it is possible to see evangelical devotion in all its intensity as an episode in the longer history of Christian spirituality, one that appears uniquely now in a society that is modernizing and naturalizing. We cannot do justice to the experience of eighteenth-century people by offering reductionist explanations of their religion that depend upon the modern, naturalist assumptions they were contesting. This would be to beg the question of what is the meaning of religious experience in the modern world by simply erecting an agnostic firewall against the very possibility. Instead, we may see the evangelicals of the eighteenth century as bearing witness in their lives and writings to the continued experience of God’s presence in the modern world. The perdurance of evangelical religion across three centuries and five continents suggests the evangelical quest for “true religion” will not slow anytime soon.

Knowledge and divergence from the perspective of early modern India

2008 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 361-387 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tirthankar Roy
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Institutional Setting ◽  
Modern World ◽  
The Cost

AbstractThis article explores the origins of divergent technological pathways in the early modern world, and the role that artisanal knowledge played in this process. It rejects older explanations based on societal differences in entrepreneurial propensities and incentives, and a more modern one based on factor cost. It argues instead for the importance of conditions that facilitated transactions between complementary skills. In India, the institutional setting within which artisan techniques were learned had made such transactions less likely than in eighteenth-century Europe. The cost of acquiring knowledge, therefore, was relatively high in India.

Economic Conditions in Early Modern Bengal: A Contribution to the Divergence Debate

2010 ◽  
Vol 70 (1) ◽  
pp. 179-194 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tirthankar Roy
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Income Growth ◽  
Economic Conditions ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Average Income ◽  
European Colonization

This article contributes to the debate on relative levels of living in the early modern world by estimating the income and probable range of income growth in Bengal before European colonization. The exercise yields two conclusions, (a) average income in Bengal was significantly smaller than that in contemporary Western Europe, and (b) there is insufficient basis to infer either growth or decline in average income in the eighteenth century.

The Constitutional Theories of Thomas Paine

1946 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 283-306 ◽  
Author(s):  
John J. Meng
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Human Values ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Industrial Capitalism ◽  
Common People ◽  
Thomas Paine ◽  
Great Ability ◽  
History Of ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries ◽  
The Common

The latter half of the eighteenth century was a period of tremendous social, political, and economic fermentation. Much of our contemporary civilization was shaped by the forces released during those five decades. Frenchmen, Englishmen, and Germans of great ability and deserved renown had written and were writing of the rights of man and of the citizen. More than ever before in the history of the modern world thought was being given to the lot of the common people. In America, and later in France, Thomas Paine epitomized this liberal intellectual trend in words that have been adopted as classic expressions of the inherent value of the human personality.Unfortunately, the phenomenal growth of industrial capitalism during he nineteenth and twentieth centuries caused the new bourgeois ruling classes to lose sight of the basic human values stressed so emphatically by the eighteenth-century intellectuals.

scholarly journals Na duchowych rozdrożach. „Nie-dualistyczne” podejście do zagadnień duchowych w prozie Olgi Tokarczuk

2020 ◽  
Vol 20 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zbigniew Mikołejko
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Western Culture ◽  
Literary Work ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Christian Mysticism ◽  
Spiritual Issues

On Spiritual Crossroads: A “Non-Dualist” Approach to Spiritual Issues in the Prose of Olga TokarczukThe author attempts to reconstruct the spiritual structure that emerges from the literary work of Olga Tokarczuk. In his opinion, the direct context of this structure is a sense of a crisis or even the twilight of contemporary Western culture. For this reason, Tokarczuk seeks a paradoxical synthesis of antinomies which are tearing the modern world apart and which grow out of radically different intellectual, religious and civilisational traditions. Above all, she aims to combine the rational and empirical tradition of the European Enlightenment with prophetic and messianic currents, as well as elements of folk magic. For Tokarczuk, what has become a model of such a fusion is eighteenth-century Podolia, a region in the eastern borderlands of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, where numerous forms of Jewish and Christian mysticism and messianism were born in stormy historical circumstances. Na duchowych rozdrożach. „Nie-dualistyczne” podejście do zagadnień duchowych w prozie Olgi TokarczukAutor podejmuje – z perspektywy religioznawczej oraz filozoficznej – próbę rekonstrukcji struktury duchowej, która wyłania się z literackiej twórczości Olgi Tokarczuk. W jego przekonaniu bezpośredni kontekst owej konstrukcji stanowi poczucie kryzysu, a nawet zmierzchu dzisiejszej kultury Zachodu. Z tego względu Tokarczuk zmierza ku paradoksalnej syntezie antynomii rozdzierających współczesny świat, które wyrastają z radykalnie odmiennych tradycji intelektualnych, religijnych i cywilizacyjnych. Przede wszystkim Tokarczuk chodzi o zespolenie racjonalnej i empirycznej tradycji europejskiego oświecenia z nurtami profetycznymi i mesjańskimi, jak również elementami ludowej magii. Wzorem takiego rodzaju fuzji stało się dla pisarki osiemnastowieczne Podole – kraina położona na wschodnich rubieżach Rzeczpospolitej Obojga Narodów, gdzie w burzliwych okolicznościach rodziły się liczne formy mistycyzmu żydowskiego i chrześcijańskiego.

scholarly journals VALUE OF ARTIFICAL EDUCATOIN FOR ARCHITECTURAL LANDSCAPE AT THE MODERN STAGE

2020 ◽  
pp. 160-166
Author(s):  
E. M. Bozhko ◽  
◽  
M. V. Spornik ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Linear Perspective ◽  
Modern World ◽  
New Materials ◽  
Present Stage ◽  
Art Exhibitions ◽  
Modern Artists ◽  
The City ◽  
Better Than

Analyzing relevant and informative sources for acquaintance with modern fine art, catalogs of various art exhibitions, article questions and problems associated with the creation of architectural and landscape compositions are considered from a practical point of view. A significant role in art belongs to the architectural landscape, as a genre variety. Promising types of cities - Veduta (A. Canaletto, V. Bellotto) have become separate types of architectural landscape. The genre of painting is the Veduta, which developed in the eighteenth century in Venice. This is an image of views of the city and its environs. Lead amaze with its accuracy. At that time, such images served as photographs. The requirements for the paintings corresponded to their purpose: the accuracy of the image of objects, down to the smallest detail. With the advent of photography, the requirements for graphic images have lost their relevance. The camera can accurately capture the object, transmit small details better than the artist. The changes that are taking place in modern realistic painting are connected precisely with the appearance of photography. Many modern impressionists, trying to impress the landscape they saw, write sketches with wide, wide strokes. For the sake of such a technique, they ignore many important elements of the landscape in order to maximize the expressiveness of their work. Modern artists working in the realistic direction of the architectural landscape pay attention to color reproduction, color of painting, while paying due attention to drawing, linear perspective and construction. Painting and photography at the present stage are fundamentally different from each other. Painting corresponds to its name - living writing, generalization, typification and stylization of forms, the viewer's impression of lightness, airiness and illumination. Modern realistic painting is modified relative to the painting of the VIII-XIX centuries. This process is due to the technical development of the modern world, the advent of digital photography, new materials for creativity. Picturesque language goes into the language of flowers. Professional art education plays a fundamental role in understanding the landscape as a genre of painting. Education allows you to combine composition, the picturesque effect, which is an innovation in realistic landscape painting, for the complete deep impression of the viewer.

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