An historical perspective on ensemble performance

2021 ◽  
pp. 175-181
Author(s):  
Christopher Terepin
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
String Quartet ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Historical Perspective ◽  
Theoretical Context ◽  
Ensemble Performance ◽  
Made In ◽  
The Way

Recordings made in the early part of the twentieth century suggest a great deal of historical diversity in musicians’ attitudes to ensemble performance. The ensemble style of the Czech (formerly Bohemian) String Quartet, traces of which were captured on record in the 1920s, offers an intriguing example of an approach to “togetherness” that is strikingly unlike that of our own time. Drawing on their recording of the Lento movement of Dvorak’s famous String Quartet in F Op.96, this case study investigates aspects of the Czech Quartet’s unusual ensemble playing, and in particular the way they combine expressive asynchrony with coordinated, large-scale shaping strategies. By situating these practices in aesthetic and theoretical context, this chapter shows how the evidence of early recordings might contribute valuable nuance to our understanding of the conventions of (good) ensemble performance.

scholarly journals Reflections on Remote Teaching

2021 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-54
Author(s):  
Daniel Jones ◽  
John Meyer ◽  
John Meyer ◽  
Jingyu Huang ◽  
Jingyu Huang
Keyword(s):  
Teaching Methods ◽  
Joint Institute ◽  
Traditional Lecture ◽  
The Future ◽  
Travel Restrictions ◽  
The Way

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced us to reconsider the way we teach our students. The inability of UK-based lecturers to deliver via traditional lecture-based courses in China (due to ongoing travel restrictions) has been an obstacle to overcome but also an opportunity to investigate innovative remote-teaching methods. Here we review a case study based on teaching three different year groups at the Jinan University - University of Birmingham Joint Institute during the early part of 2020. We reflect on how technology was used, draw conclusions and discuss potential opportunities for the future of remote-teaching.

Exemplary Biography

Mnemosyne ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Murray
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Roman History ◽  
Marcus Tullius Cicero ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Way ◽  
Valerius Maximus

Abstract Moving away from the nineteenth century’s concern with Quellenforschung, serious study of Valerius Maximus’ Facta et dicta memorabilia in the twentieth century produced a variety of different approaches to this Tiberian text of exemplary tales. One of the most interesting projects in this regard was produced by T.F. Carney, who scrutinised a key exemplar, Gaius Marius, across the work. In constructing a ‘biography’ from the exempla themselves, Carney’s labour contributed much to Roman history generally, but also pioneered a novel methodology for reading Valerius Maximus—one that was taken up and imitated by later scholars. This methodology, however, is not without problems, particularly in relation to the way that Valerius has shaped, structured, and arranged his work at the level of chapter. By building upon Carney’s methodology, but also considering the context of the individual chapters themselves, I provide in this paper a case study of the way in which Valerius writes the life of Marcus Tullius Cicero—a figure unique in the Facta et dicta memorabilia in being both exemplar and a major source for the work. In doing so, this article elucidates the process of ‘exemplary biography’.

Modern Dating and Respectability on Trial

2019 ◽  
pp. 146-170
Author(s):  
Tyler Carrington
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
German Society ◽  
Middle Class Woman ◽  
The Face ◽  
Class Woman ◽  
Legal Strategy ◽  
The Way

Chapter 5 follows the sensational trial of Frieda Kliem’s murderer and the strategy of the defense, which was not so much a legal strategy as a way of turning the trial into a question of Frieda’s respectability as a middle-class woman. It interprets this trial—and the life of Frieda Kliem, more generally—as a microcosm of the large-scale confrontation between nineteenth-century society and the emerging twentieth-century world. It contends that identity, presented either authentically or as an illusion, became supremely relevant in the metropolis, where the ubiquity of strangers, new faces, and mysterious crimes shaped the way city people narrated the search for love and intimacy. And because enterprising outsiders like Frieda Kliem so flouted the established patterns of middle-class respectability, they remained on the outside looking in as German society clung to the nineteenth-century world that was crumbling in the face of a bewilderingly new twentieth-century one.

The Growth and Dissolution of a Large-Scale Business Enterprise

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gordon Boyce
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Financial Structure ◽  
Industrial Sector ◽  
Business Enterprise ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Family ◽  
The World

This book is an in-depth case study of the Furness Withy and Co Shipping Group, which operated both tramp and liner services and was one of the five major British shipping groups of the early twentieth century. It demonstrates how British shipowners of this period generated success by exploring Christopher Furness’ career in relation to the social, political, and cultural currents during a time of tremendous shipping growth in Britain and the establishment of some of the largest shipping firms in the world. It approaches the study from three angles. The first analyses how the Furness Group expanded its shipping activities and became involved with the industrial sector. The second illustrates the organisational and financial structure of the enterprise. Finally, the Group’s leadership and entrepreneurship is scrutinised and placed within the wider context of twentieth century British business. The case study begins in 1870, with an introduction explaining how Christopher Furness came to join the family company, Thomas Furness and Co. in order develop services, expand, and instigate the changes and mergers that brought the Furness Group into existence. There are thirteen chronologically presented chapters, a bibliography, and seven appendices of data including an ownership timeline, tonnage statistics, acquisitions, a list of maritime associates, and a timeline of Christopher Furness’ life. The book concludes in 1919 with the de-merging of the Furness Group’s shipping and industrial holdings, the resignation of the Furness family from the company’s board, the sale of their shares, and the move into managing the firm’s industrial interests.

'Glocalization' as a Key to the Interplay between Christianity and Asian Cultures: The Vision of Francis Wei in Early Twentieth Century China

2007 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 101-111 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Tze Ming Ng
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Chinese Culture ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
World Christianity ◽  
Henry Luce ◽  
The Way

AbstractThis article aims to apply the concept of 'glocalization' to the study of theology and culture. China is chosen as a case study, with particular focus on a Chinese theologians discussion of the interplay between Christianity and Chinese Culture in the early twentieth century China. Francis Wei was the first Chinese President of Huazhong University in Wuhan, 1929–1952, and he was appointed as the first Henry Luce Visiting Professor of World Christianity in 1945–46. Wei's conviction was that Christianity and Chinese culture could be complementary. He held that China needed Christianity for a better understanding of God's nature and the way human beings could communicate with God, while maintaining that Christianity needed China to move beyond western denominationalism. Moreover, Christianity could not become a universal religion without including China. This article argues that Wei's work is relevant to the contemporary discussion about interaction between globalization and localization, known as 'glocalization'.

scholarly journals A Case Study in Summitry: The Experience of Britain's Edward Heath, 1970-74

2006 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 261-293
Author(s):  
John Young
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Full Range ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Geographical Range ◽  
High Profile ◽  
British Experience ◽  
Time Periods ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Way

AbstractWhile summits are well served in the literature on diplomacy, the focus tends to be on specific, high-profile occasions such as Munich and Yalta or on the broad experience of multilateral conferences. Such approaches may obscure the full range of summits that were taking place by the later twentieth century. By focusing on a four-year period in the experience of a particular leader, this article provides a case study of summitry, which might serve as the basis for comparisons with other countries and time periods. It draws out the frequency, type and geographical range of summits experienced by Edward Heath as British premier and, in doing so, also raises issues about how types of summits are defined, the relationship between bilateral and multilateral meetings and the way that summitry has evolved as a diplomatic practice. In particular it emerges that summits were frequent and ofen perfunctory affairs, sometimes held as a simple courtesy to leaders who were passing through London. In this sense the British experience may have been unusual, but it is also evident from the number of Heath's interlocutors and the multilateral conferences that he attended that summits had become an integral part of political life for world leaders in the jet age.

scholarly journals The way to analyse ‘way’: A case study in word-specific local grammar

2019 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 247-269 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick Hanks ◽  
Sara Može
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Evidence ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Empirical Analysis ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
The Other ◽  
Lexical Analysis ◽  
Syntactic Theory ◽  
Local Grammar ◽  
Made In

Abstract Traditionally, dictionaries are meaning-driven—that is, they list different senses (or supposed senses) of each word, but do not say much about the phraseology that distinguishes one sense from another. Grammars, on the other hand, are structure-driven: they attempt to describe all possible structures of a language, but say little about meaning, phraseology, or collocation. In both disciplines during the 20th century, the practice of inventing evidence rather than discovering it led to intermittent and unpredictable distortions of fact. Since 1987, attempts have been made in both lexicography (Cobuild) and syntactic theory (pattern grammar, construction grammar) to integrate meaning and phraseology. Corpora now provide empirical evidence on a large scale for lexicosyntactic description, but there is still a long way to go. Many cherished beliefs must be abandoned before a synthesis between empirical lexical analysis and grammatical theory can be achieved. In this paper, by empirical analysis of just one word (the noun way), we show how corpus evidence can be used to tackle the complexities of lexical and constructional meaning, providing new insights into the lexis-grammar interface.

scholarly journals Bourgeois opera:Death in Veniceand the aesthetics of sublimation

2010 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 175-216 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Chowrimootoo
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Terminal Illness ◽  
Wrong Side ◽  
Musical Rhetoric ◽  
Death In Venice ◽  
The Way

AbstractThrough investigating the production and reception ofDeath in Venice(1973), this essay considers the ways Britten and his audiences responded to the fraught discourse surrounding opera in the twentieth century. If the genre as a whole often threatened to fall on the wrong side of contemporaneous aesthetic oppositions – between abstraction and immediacy, the intellectual and the visceral, the high and the low – early critics of this particular work tended to translate its visual spectacles and musical rhetoric into more rarefied terms. Taking my cue from elements of contradiction and ambivalence in this sublimating criticism, I will examine how Britten's opera resists the very suppressions it promotes. I will suggest that, in simultaneously staging and confounding oppositions at the heart of contemporary operatic discourse,Death in Veniceoffers a powerful case study of the way composers, directors, critics and audiences responded to and overcame the terminal illness with which opera had been diagnosed in the middle third of the twentieth century.

Thus Spoke the Early Modernist:Zarathustraand Rotational Form in Webern's String Quartet (1905)

2015 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 225-251
Author(s):  
SEBASTIAN WEDLER
Keyword(s):  
String Quartet ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Large Scale Structure ◽  
Scale Structure ◽  
Musical Form ◽  
High Modernism ◽  
The Common ◽  
Modernist Discourse ◽  
The Way

AbstractThe large-scale structure of Anton Webern's String Quartet (1905) is an ongoing conundrum in music scholarship. Initially inspired by Giovanni Segantini'sTrittico della natura, the quartet has been interpreted by most commentators in terms of a tripartite episodic form. Through the lens of rotational theory, this article puts forward an understanding of the quartet that interprets it in dialogue with the sonata paradigm. Based on this reading, it will be argued that the quartet bears strong links to the early modernist discourse on musical form. This perspective will be further explored, with reference to Webern's manuscripts and sketches, in the way the quartet engages with theZarathustratrope. In casting the quartet in this light, this article challenges the common historiographical interpretation that sees it merely as a precursor to the high modernism of Webern's later development.

scholarly journals Violence and Social Memory in Twentieth-Century Belfast: Stories of Buck Alec Robinson

2014 ◽  
Vol 53 (3) ◽  
pp. 734-756 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sean O'Connell
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Social Memory ◽  
Political Elites ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Made In

AbstractThis article explores the life and commemoration of Buck Alec Robinson. A feared loyalist killer in 1920s Belfast, in more recent times he has featured as a lion-keeping “character” on wall murals and in tourist guide books. Robinson is employed as a case study to investigate two separate but, in this case, interlinked historiographical debates. The first involves Norbert Elias's analysis of the decline of violence. The second relates to discussion of the analysis of social memory in working-class communities, with violence being placed therein. The article supports historical assessments suggesting that the “civilizing offensive” had an uneven impact. That point is usually made in the context of working-class men. This article extends it to political elites in Belfast and probes their flirtations with violent hard men. The case is made that it is a mistake to assume the “civilizing” dynamic is to be understood as a teleological or top-down process.

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