Past Tense

2020 ◽  
pp. 300-326
Author(s):  
Lisa Colton
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Past Tense ◽  
Musical Borrowing ◽  
Ambivalent Relationship ◽  
Historical Practices

This essay examines a number of key works by British composer Margaret Lucy Wilkins, whose music regularly engaged with medievalism its inspiration, choice of texts, musical borrowing, and in the composer’s broader evocation of historical practices and architecture. Through analysis of pieces composed across two decades, the discussion confronts several tensions between Wilkins’ reception of the medieval past and her emphatically modern aesthetic. Focusing on four pieces—Witch Music (1971), Ave Maria (1974), Revelations of the Seven Angels (1988), and Musica Angelorum (1991)—this essay shows how Wilkins’s medievalism manifests an ambivalent relationship with central compositional aesthetics of the twentieth century such as serialism and modernism.

Music Technology in Ethnomusicology

2017 ◽  
pp. 56-64
Author(s):  
Gabriel Solis
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Digital Humanities ◽  
Data Analytics ◽  
Music Technology ◽  
Vantage Point ◽  
Contextual Knowledge ◽  
Recording Technology ◽  
Critical Engagement ◽  
Ambivalent Relationship ◽  
Critical Turn

Ethnomusicology has often had an ambivalent relationship with technology: we owe our discipline to mid-twentieth-century developments in recording technology. Nevertheless there is a strong counter-modern streak that characterizes ethnomusicologists as a group. This essay investigates the reasons for ethnomusciologists’ mistrust of certain kinds of music technology and interprets ambivalence as a mode of critical engagement. It surveys turning points in the field from comparative musicology to the critical turn and from the critical turn to the new digital humanities. I conclude that digital humanities needs ethnomusicological ambivalence in the form of critical engagement. Good data analytics needs a skeptical view from the vantage point of music scholars and contextual knowledge-bearers in the cultures of study.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-11
Author(s):  
Marion Schmid
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Film History ◽  
Discursive Construction ◽  
New Wave ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Medium Specificity ◽  
French New Wave ◽  
Ambivalent Relationship ◽  
Struggle For Recognition ◽  
Purity And Impurity

The introduction contextualises the French New Wave's ambivalent relationship to the older arts with regard to cinema's wider struggle for recognition in the course of the twentieth century. Surveying the debates around medium specificity, cinematic 'purity' and 'impurity' from the classical avant-garde to the Nouvelle Vague, it addresses the French New Wave's complex discursive construction in relation to the more established arts. Reframing traditional studies of the French New Wave, it argues for an intermedial approach to illuminate this seminal movement of film history. The corpus, rationale and approach of the book are also introduced and clarified.

Scottish Conservatism and Northern Ireland: Mapping an Ambivalent Relationship

2020 ◽  
pp. 154-168
Author(s):  
Jonathan Evershed
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Northern Ireland ◽  
Peace Process ◽  
First Century ◽  
Historical Overview ◽  
Political Force ◽  
Political Forces ◽  
Ambivalent Relationship ◽  
Scottish Independence ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter explores shifting and often contradictory dynamics which have manifested themselves in the relationship between Scottish Conservatism and Ulster Unionism. It provides a brief historical overview of this relationship which, it argues, has been highly salient in the consolidation of Conservatism as a political force in Scotland during the twentieth century, but which has become more ambiguous as understandings of ‘Union’, processes of secularisation, patterns of integration and differentiation, as well as the nature of centre-periphery relations in Northern Ireland and Scotland have increasingly diverged. The chapter also looks at how this relationship has continued to be reshaped into the twenty-first century by a potent mix of political forces which has included the Irish peace process, the Scottish independence referendum and Brexit.

The Obsequies of Realism

Philosophy ◽  
1932 ◽  
Vol 7 (26) ◽  
pp. 201-214
Author(s):  
John Laird
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Past Tense ◽  
New Realism ◽  
The Past ◽  
Better Than

It is the custom, nowadays, to say that “realism” is very dead indeed, and to speak of it invariably in the past tense, or only in the historical present. What happened, we are told, was that, during the first quarter of the twentieth century, two distinct bodies of men propounded either “naïf” or “new” realism. The naif realists followed Mr. G. E. Moore—to some extent and without his consent; and they were called naif (by some misogynist) because the masculine form of the adjective expressed their rugged creed better than the more usual feminine form. (They were esprits forts rather than esprits fins).

An Abandoned Jurisprudence

2020 ◽  
pp. 201-224
Author(s):  
Edward A. Jr. Purcell
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Federal Courts ◽  
Judicial Power ◽  
Warren Court ◽  
Historical Practices ◽  
The U.S

This chapter examines Justice Antonin Scalia’s views on Article III of the U.S. Constitution and the nature of the federal judicial power that it established. One of Scalia’s principal goals was to limit severely the power of the federal courts and to undo many of the decisions of the Warren Court, including their ability to create implied private causes of action, and the chapter argues that in pursuing that goal Scalia departed from originalist views and that the arguments he advanced were themselves self-contradictory. The chapter shows, moreover, that originalist doctrines and historical practices actually contradicted his claims about limits on the federal judicial power. Further, the chapter argues that his views were based not on originalist ideas but on the twentieth-century positivism associated with Erie Railroad v. Tompkins, and that in Sosa v. Alvarez-Machain, he explicitly acknowledged that his positivist ideas were not the ideas of the Founders. The chapter concludes that in this area, Scalia simply abandoned originalism and did so, once again, to achieve his own ideological and political goals

Changing Our Minds: Legal History Meets the World Wide Web

1999 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 385-387 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bernard J. Hibbitts
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World Wide Web ◽  
Legal History ◽  
World Wide ◽  
New Technology ◽  
Traditional Methods ◽  
The World ◽  
Ambivalent Relationship

Legal historians have had an ambivalent relationship with new technology. As students and spokespersons of the somewhat-stodgy legal past, our sympathies have predictably been with traditional methods of doing things rather than with the latest and greatest devices of our own age. In the twentieth century we have tended to champion writing and books more than radio, television, and computers. Today we may use new tools to help us create our scholarship and even to help us teach, but like most of our academic colleagues in law and in history we generally employ those tools as extensions of established media instead of exploiting their potential to deploy information and develop ideas in new ways.

The Era of Overseas Scholarships: Islam, Modernization, and Decolonization in Northern Nigeria, c. 1954-1966

2014 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 62-91 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander Thurston
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Unintended Consequences ◽  
Muslim World ◽  
Northern Nigeria ◽  
Islamic Thought ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
Independence Era ◽  
Ambivalent Relationship ◽  
Muslim Communities ◽  
Muslim Scholars

AbstractIn independence-era Northern Nigeria, different segments of the modernizing elite contended over defining the place of Islam in society. This article argues that the case of Northern Nigeria disrupts scholarly periodizations of twentieth-century Islamic thought and activism that depict the 1950s and 1960s as a time of secularist dominance. The specificity of Muslim communities’ experiences of colonialism and decolonization helped shape the role Islam played in different societies during this period. This article develops this thesis by examining the semiautonomous Northern Nigerian regional government’s program of sending young, Arabophone Muslim scholars to Arab and British universities between 1954 and 1966. The overseas scholarships system was to be the culmination of British colonial efforts to produce ‘modern’ Muslim judges and teachers. However, Arabophones’ experiences overseas, and their ambivalent relationship with the Northern government after their return highlight the unintended consequences of colonial policies and of scholarship winners’ encounters with the broader Muslim world.

Revision as Nostalgic Practice: The Imagined Adaptation of The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

Adaptation ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wibke Schniedermann
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Narrative Strategies ◽  
The Past ◽  
Ambivalent Relationship ◽  
The One ◽  
Affective Involvement ◽  
National Mythology

Abstract This article investigates the role of nostalgia vis-à-vis practices of adaptation and revision in the genre of the American Western and specifically in Joel and Ethan Coen’s episodic film The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018). It proposes a view of the Western as a genre that originates in the revisionist adaptation of American national mythology. As an inherently nostalgic genre, the Western has grappled with its ambivalent relationship with the past throughout the twentieth century. Recent Western productions demonstrate their awareness of the genre’s sentimental falsifications of the past and integrate nostalgic tensions into their aesthetic repertoire. Buster Scruggs taps into both the current success of nostalgic formats on screen and the specific affordances of the Western genre. The close readings in this article explore the visual, structural, and narrative strategies the film employs to, on the one hand, permit and, in fact, encourage nostalgic indulgence while, on the other, engaging in the revision of both the postmodern aversion against affective involvement and its wholesale acceptance in the Western’s early incarnations.

Towards a Phenomenology of Musical Borrowing

2019 ◽  
Vol 24 (02) ◽  
pp. 174-183
Author(s):  
Sean Russell Hallowell
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Comprehensive Evaluation ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Musical Borrowing ◽  
Western Art ◽  
Western Art Music ◽  
Ex Nihilo ◽  
The Right ◽  
Musique Concrete ◽  
Music Tradition

In discourse on the topic, the question of what constitutes a musical ‘borrowing’, if raised at all, is usually restricted in scope and framed as one of terminology – that is, of determining the right term to characterise a particular borrowing act. In this way has arisen a welter of terms that, however expressive of nuance, have precluded evaluation of the phenomenon as such. This is in part a consequence of general disregard for the fact that to conceive of musical borrowing entails correlative concepts, all of which precondition it, yet none self-evidently. Further preclusive of clarity, the musico-analytic lens of borrowing is typically invoked only in counterpoint to a quintessentially Western aesthetic category of composition ex nihilo. As a consequence, the fundamental role played by borrowing in musical domains situated at the periphery of the Western art music tradition, specifically pre-modern polyphony and twentieth-century musique concrète, has been overlooked. This article seeks to bridge such lacunae in our understanding of musical borrowing via phenomenological investigation into its conceptual and historical foundations. A more comprehensive evaluation of musical borrowing, one capable of accounting for its diverse instantiations while simultaneously disclosing what makes all of them ‘borrowings’ in the first place, is thereby attainable.

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