Classical Music Competitions as Complex Performances

2020 ◽  
pp. 78-96
Author(s):  
Lisa McCormick

This chapter presents a cultural approach to studying competitions that involves conceptualizing competitions as performative events where individuals and collectivities present and negotiate meanings. In the first part of the chapter, the promise of this approach is illustrated through an analysis of international competitions in classical music. It presents four arguments concerning the wider cultural significance and interactional structure of music competitions which result from interpreting them as complex performances. The second part of the chapter explores how these arguments could be extended by considering the political, educational, media, and vocational context surrounding international classical music competitions. The final part of the chapter suggests directions for future research by outlining a systematic comparison of competitions across the arts and beyond.

2019 ◽  
Vol 49 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 336-353
Author(s):  
Florian Lippert

While the European migrant crisis is omnipresent in political and medial discourses, two of its key causes are only seldom addressed by politicians and journalists: mistakes in Europe’s domestic, foreign and development policies; and Eurocentric, clichéd or ill-informed press coverage on migration. What impedes such political and medial self-criticism? What happens if politicians or journalists publicly address their own mistakes? Creative culture, in turn, has a long tradition of public self-reflexivity. In the wake of the crisis, many literary texts and films self-critically reflect on the literary and filmic framing of migrants, and challenge the political and medial ‘externalization’ of the crisis. Building upon these observations, this contribution suggests a new direction for discursive research: the analysis of self-criticism as an ethical challenge for public communication. It highlights research desiderata, discusses the theoretical foundations for comparing self-reflexivity across discourses, and outlines a transdisciplinary terminology and exemplary methods for future research.


Muzikologija ◽  
2015 ◽  
pp. 119-133
Author(s):  
Aleksandar Vasic

The monthly magazine Review of Music was published six times in Belgrade from January to June 1940. Each edition comprised thirty-two pages, half of which were devoted to a sheet-music supplement, popular compositions of the time for voice and piano. Review of Music published 222 articles and scores in total. The aim of the magazine was to popularise classical music, but it also encompassed jazz, films and film music, theatre, literature, fashion, and even sport. Review of Music was different from all other Serbian inter-war music magazines, not only because of its wide range of topics, but also because it published anonymous articles, probably taken from other sources, but it is not known from where. This study analyses the articles about classical music in Review of Music. In several short chapters the author presents the concept of the magazine, its genre structure, themes addressed, and the style of its music writers. Selected examples show that article authors tended to exploit elements of narrative (with an emphasis on impressive details), humour, and moral teaching. The authors also especially emphasized the neutral attitude of Review of Music towards contemporary music, although the magazine published different views of contemporary composers concerning the aesthetics of modern music. Review of Music started four months after Germany invaded Poland. However, in the journal references to social and political events are non-existant. The journal seems to have been interested only in culture and the arts. However, the author of this study presents examples in which the political circumstances of the time can be perceived. One of these examples is the visit of the Frankfurt Opera House to Belgrade in 1940. That extraordinary cultural event was attended by Prince Paul Karadjordjevic and Princess Olga, the Yugoslav Prime Minister, and almost all other government ministers. In this news, any authority on the political situation of the time could see that the Yugoslav government and the political elite took care of delicate relations with Germany at that time. This is the first study to analyse the concept and content of classical music in Review of Music. This magazine is certainly an interesting source, not only for the history of Serbian music periodicals, but also for cultural history.


Author(s):  
Laurent Dubreuil
Keyword(s):  

Laurent Dubreuil provocatively proposes an extremist rethinking of the limits of politics – toward a break from politics, the political and policies. Rather than yet another re-articulation, he calls for a refusal of politics, suggesting a form of apolitics that would make our lives more liveable. The first chapter situates the refusal of politics in relation to different contemporary theoretical attempts to renew politics, and makes the case for a greater rupture. The second moment takes up what is liveable in life by way of apolitical experience, in contrast to appropriations of the collective, including a discussion of the arts. Finally, Dubreuil draws up an incomplete inventory of means: forms of existence – often frail and fleeting – that make an exit toward atopia.


Author(s):  
Philippe Steiner

The chapter first considers how the issue of commodification was handled in the legislative process that produced the ban on the market for organ transplantations, the political step necessary to make this form of transaction illegal. The second part considers some of the theoretical issues related to the conceptualization of illegality within the domain of exchange, examining the role that violence, secrecy, and the frontier between legality and illegality play in the functioning of illegal transactions. In the final part, the chapter considers three cases of illegal transplantation, paying particular attention to the organizational dimension and to the work of concealment that must be done in order to cross the frontier between the legal and the illegal worlds.


Author(s):  
David Fearn

Eschewing historicist certainties, this chapter reassesses the political salience of Alcaeus’ lyric poetry by investigating his literary contribution to sympotic culture. Placing Alcaeus’ politically engaged voices within recent theoretical perspectives on deixis, ecphrasis, and the distinctiveness of lyric as a literary mode, the chapter argues that Alcaeus makes a systematic issue of the question of the accessibility of the contexts gestured towards, and in so doing opens up as an alluring prospect the idea of political engagement through literature. The literary and cultural significance of proverbial statements in Alcaeus is also discussed. Alcaeus’ lyric claims are felt across time and space via their special foregrounding of both material culture and political engagement, through performance and reception.


Author(s):  
Siobhan Keenan

The Progresses, Processions, and Royal Entries of King Charles I, 1625–1642 is the first book-length study of the history, and the political and cultural significance, of the progresses, public processions, and royal entries of Charles I. As well as offering a much fuller account of the king’s progresses and progress entertainments than currently exists, this study throws new light on one of the most vexed topics in early Stuart historiography—the question of Charles I’s accessibility to his subjects and their concerns, and the part that this may, or may not, have played in the conflicts which culminated in the English civil wars and Charles’s overthrow. Drawing on extensive archival research, the book opens with an introduction to the early modern culture of royal progresses and public ceremonial as inherited and practised by Charles I. Part I explores the question of the king’s accessibility and engagement with his subjects further through case studies of Charles’s ‘great’ progresses in 1633, 1634, and 1636. Part II turns attention to royal public ceremonial culture in Caroline London, focusing on Charles’s royal entry on 25 November 1641. More widely travelled than his ancestors, Progresses reveals a monarch who was only too well aware of the value of public ceremonial and who did not eschew it, even if he was not always willing to engage in ceremonial dialogue with his people or able to deploy the power of public display to curry support for his policies as successfully as his Tudor and Stuart predecessors.


Author(s):  
Andrea Harris

This chapter explores the international and interdisciplinary backdrop of Lincoln Kirstein’s efforts to form an American ballet in the early 1930s. The political, economic, and cultural conditions of the Depression reinvigorated the search for an “American” culture. In this context, new openings for a modernist theory of ballet were created as intellectuals and artists from a wide range of disciplines endeavored to define the role of the arts in protecting against the dangerous effects of mass culture. Chapter 1 sheds new light on well-known critical debates in dance history between Kirstein and John Martin over whether ballet, with its European roots, could truly become “American” in contrast to modern dance. Was American dance going to be conceived in nationalist or transnationalist terms? That was the deeper conflict that underlay the ballet vs. modern dance debates of the early 1930s.


2009 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 347-368 ◽  
Author(s):  
PAOLO RIGUZZI

AbstractThis essay evaluates the political economy of Mexico during the Porfirian period (1876–1911), with the aim of discussing advances in scholarship and presenting an outline of the elements for a future research agenda. To this end, the essay examines the current state of knowledge on four crucial aspects of the Mexican economy: growth and its dimensions; the state, finance and economic strategies; the construction and functioning of the internal market; and the international economic relations of Mexico during the first period of globalisation. In particular, it assesses the arguments that link features of Porfirian economic organisation with the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution in 1910.


Author(s):  
Takeuchi Ayano

AbstractPublic participation has become increasingly necessary to connect a wide range of knowledge and various values to agenda setting, decision-making and policymaking. In this context, deliberative democratic concepts, especially “mini-publics,” are gaining attention. Generally, mini-publics are conducted with randomly selected lay citizens who provide sufficient information to deliberate on issues and form final recommendations. Evaluations are conducted by practitioner researchers and independent researchers, but the results are not standardized. In this study, a systematic review of existing research regarding practices and outcomes of mini-publics was conducted. To analyze 29 papers, the evaluation methodologies were divided into 4 categories of a matrix between the evaluator and evaluated data. The evaluated cases mainly focused on the following two points: (1) how to maintain deliberation quality, and (2) the feasibility of mini-publics. To create a new path to the political decision-making process through mini-publics, it must be demonstrated that mini-publics can contribute to the decision-making process and good-quality deliberations are of concern to policy-makers and experts. Mini-publics are feasible if they can contribute to the political decision-making process and practitioners can evaluate and understand the advantages of mini-publics for each case. For future research, it is important to combine practical case studies and academic research, because few studies have been evaluated by independent researchers.


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