Review. Pop out: queer Warhol. Jennifer Doyle, Jonathan Flatley, Esteban Munoz (eds). Bike boys, drag queens, and superstars: avant-garde, mass culture, and gay identities, in the 1960s underground cinema. Juan A Suarez

AbstractThis article argues that Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern demonstrates a unique approach to music-drama that stems from the perceptual capacities of listeners, and their desire to search for meaning in what they hear. Beginning with the claim that Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern can be viewed as the culmination of an aesthetic project begun at the point of Lachenmann's emergence as a distinctive voice of the European avant-garde during the 1960s, the article first examines two major aspects of Lachenmann's aesthetics – musique concrète instrumentale and aura – outlining a composing philosophy that has been at the heart of Lachenmann's practice throughout his career. The article claims that Lachenmann sought to establish a rejuvenated semiotics, freed from cultural baggage and tied to the perceptual and cognitive capacities of listeners. Drawing upon the studies of Naomi Cumming and Luke Windsor, it outlines a theoretical framework that takes into account this composing philosophy and its implications, applying it in analyses of various excerpts from Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern. My analysis illuminates a music-drama that forms around the interplay of internally represented images and sensations, the emergence of which is facilitated by a musical language that prepares sounds to take on certain types of meaning. The article concludes with a brief discussion of the possible implications this has for audience members.

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The ‘civic religion’ of the Resistance in post-war Italy

Modern Italy ◽

10.1080/713685680 ◽

2000 ◽

Vol 5 (2) ◽

pp. 113-132 ◽

Cited By ~ 10

Author(s):

Stephen Gundle

Keyword(s):

Mass Culture ◽

Significant Degree ◽

Artistic Representations ◽

The First World War ◽

Civic Religion ◽

Post War ◽

Economic Boom ◽

The 1960S ◽

High Degree ◽

First World

SummaryThe problem of the legitimacy or otherwise of the Resistance tradition in post-war Italy has been addressed in recent years mainly in terms of the role of the partisan struggle and its political legacy. This article aims to assess the tradition in terms of commemorative practices, rituals, artistic representations and monuments. It seeks to evaluate whether the Resistance gave rise to a civic religion that may be compared to those which existed in the Liberal period, based on the heroic struggles and figures of the Risorgimento, and the Fascist period, which drew on the feelings of loss and injustice that followed the First World War. It is argued that, although the Resistance lacked, prior to the 1960s, a high degree of official sponsorship, it did acquire some of the features of a civic religion. Its appeal was mainly limited to the regions administered by the Left which had seen a significant degree of Resistance activity in 1943-5. Even here, however, it was difficult to sustain the tradition as a key feature of community life during and after the economic boom: the eclipse of public culture, the decline of public mourning and the development of commercial leisure and mass culture all served to deprive it of meaning. Although intellectuals, politicians and ex-partisans reacted to this situation, the visual and rhetorical languages associated with the commemoration of the Resistance became increasingly divorced from everyday life and dominant social values.

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The Folk Fight Back: Protesting the Cancellation of Don Messer’s Jubilee in 1969

Canadian Historical Review ◽

10.3138/chr-2020-0009 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Greg Marquis

Keyword(s):

Popular Culture ◽

New Brunswick ◽

Mass Culture ◽

Generation Gap ◽

Folk Culture ◽

Television History ◽

Canadian Nationalism ◽

The 1960S

This article examines part of the reaction to the 1969 cancellation of Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s (cbc) television’s Don Messer’s Jubilee, one of the most popular Canadian-produced programs of the era. In addition to an exploration of television history and popular culture, it is also a look at the neglected topic of “square” Canada in the 1960s. Messer began fiddling at dances in rural New Brunswick in the 1920s and moved to radio and recording prior to becoming an unlikely national television star by 1961. After exploring possible classifications of the show’s music, the article explores themes in protest letters and petitions sent to the cbc. These included Canadian nationalism in opposition to American mass culture, Canadian folk culture, cbc elitism, Maritime regionalism, nostalgia, and the related themes of the generation gap and permissive society. The article concludes that fans viewed Messer as a custodian of Canadian folk culture that was being erased by the national broadcaster at a time of heightened nationalism.

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Danish Avant-Garde Filmmakers of the 1960s: Technology, Cross-aesthetics and Politics

Avant-Garde Film ◽

10.1163/9789401200035_016 ◽

2007 ◽

pp. 261-275

Keyword(s):

Aesthetics And Politics ◽

Avant Garde ◽

The 1960S

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Zwischen Heroismus und Antiheroismus Ligetis Mikropolyphonie in 2001 revisited

Studia Musicologica ◽

10.1556/6.2016.57.1-2.6 ◽

2016 ◽

Vol 57 (1-2) ◽

pp. 73-90

Author(s):

Beate Kutschke

Keyword(s):

Avant Garde ◽

Time Period ◽

The 1960S

This article re-investigates the use of Ligeti’s second movement of his Requiem “Kyrie” (1963/1965) in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 — A Space Odyssey (1968). It does so in light of allusions to heroic models and the – obviously – heroic Zarathustra fanfare, both of which are pervasive in Kubrick’s film. The article aims at determining compositional means that refer to heroic ideas in avant-garde music of the 1960s, a time period in which radically new and skeptical views of heroism came to the fore that also affected the articulation of the heroic in music.

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Whose Voices? The Fate of Luigi Nono's Voci destroying muros

Journal of the American Musicological Society ◽

10.1525/jams.2016.69.1.179 ◽

2016 ◽

Vol 69 (1) ◽

pp. 179-236 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Robert Adlington

Keyword(s):

Compositional Style ◽

Antonio Gramsci ◽

Text Setting ◽

Factory Workers ◽

Female Prisoners ◽

Avant Garde ◽

Political Music ◽

Small Orchestra ◽

The 1960S ◽

Current Reality

Luigi Nono's Voci destroying muros for female voices and small orchestra was performed for the first and only time at the Holland Festival in 1970. A setting of texts by female prisoners and factory workers, it marks a sharp stylistic departure from Nono's political music of the 1960s by virtue of its audible quotations of revolutionary songs, its readily intelligible text setting, and especially its retention of the diatonic structure of the song on which the piece is based, the communist “Internationale.” Nono's decision, following the premiere, to withdraw the work from his catalogue suggests that he came to regard it as transgressing an important boundary in his engagement with “current reality.” I examine the work and its withdrawal in the context of discourses within the Italian left in the 1960s that accused the intellectuals of the Partito Comunista Italiano of unhelpfully mediating the class struggle. Nono's contentious reading of Antonio Gramsci, offered as justification for his avant-garde compositional style, certainly provided fuel for this critique. But Voci destroying muros suggests receptivity on the part of the composer—albeit only momentary—to achieving a more direct representation of the voices of the dispossessed.

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Beethoven Returns to Bonn: Origins, Belonging and Misuse in Mauricio Kagel’s Ludwig van (1969)

Current Musicology ◽

10.52214/cm.v107i.7195 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 107 ◽

pp. 29-61

Author(s):

Elaine Fitz Gibbon

Keyword(s):

West Germany ◽

Music Culture ◽

Adobe Acrobat ◽

German Government ◽

Avant Garde ◽

Cultural Legacy ◽

East German ◽

German Jewish ◽

The 1960S ◽

One Year

In 1969 West Germany, the country was abuzz with anticipation of the approaching Beethoven bicentennial. That year the composer and experimental filmmaker Mauricio Raúl Kagel, born in Argentina to Russian- and German-Jewish parents in 1931 and living in Cologne since 1957, was commissioned by the State to commemorate the momentous occasion. What resulted was a film that surely no West German official had anticipated. Entitled Ludwig van: A Report and strongly inflected by Kagel’s absurdist aesthetic, Kagel’s film critiques the fetish object that Beethoven’s music and person had become in twentieth-century West Germany, touching upon, amongst many topics, East German claims of Beethoven’s “misuse” by the West German government, as well as the rise in the 1960s of the theory that Beethoven was Black. While Ludwig van has been recognized for its sendup of bourgeois music culture, it has yet to be analyzed from the perspective of diasporic experience. Simultaneously a love letter to and deconstruction of Beethoven’s cultural legacy, Ludwig van asks its audience to consider the complex diasporic experiences of avant-garde artists in the wake of WWII. Drawing on work by Brigid Cohen, I argue for the centrality of the theme of migration and displacement in Ludwig van. And in reading two central scenes from the film, I consider, in dialogue with Scott Burnham, what light the fifty-one-year-old film’s critique of the fetishization of origins and genealogy might shed on the celebration of Beethoven’s 250th birthday in 2020, and such acts of memorization more generally. [Please note: This article contains embedded video files. These files cannot be played on all PDF readers. Current Musicology recommends Foxit PDF Reader, Adobe Acrobat, or any other PDF reader capable of reading "enriched" media.]

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