The Debate with Space

The emotional power of music has been much examined and discussed. Based on new research, this book takes a close look at how music expresses and arouses emotions, and how it becomes an object of aesthetic judgments. It asks: can music really arouse emotions? If so, which emotions? How, exactly, does music arouse such emotions? Why do listeners often respond with different emotions to the same piece of music? Are emotions to music different from other emotions? Why do we respond to fictive events in art as if they were real, even though we know they are not? What is it that makes a performance of music emotionally expressive? Music is often regarded as consisting of abstract sequences of notes, which are devoid of meanings. This book argues that this is not true. Adopting an evolutionary perspective, the book shows how psychological mechanisms from our ancient past engage with meanings in music at multiple levels of the brain to evoke a broad variety of affective states — from startle responses to profound aesthetic emotions. Finally, it asks: but why do these mechanisms respond to music?

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The Actors' Brief: Experiences with Chekhov

Theatre Research International ◽

10.1017/s0307883300019362 ◽

1994 ◽

Vol 19 (2) ◽

pp. 134-142 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Alfred Nordmann

Keyword(s):

Instrumental Reason ◽

Work Of Art ◽

Theatrical Performance ◽

Theatrical Performances ◽

Internal Relations ◽

Intentional Structure ◽

As If ◽

A Performance

Künstler ist nur einer, der aus einer Lösung ein Rätsel machen kann. (Karl Kraus)Only that person is an artist who can turn a solution into a riddle. (Karl Kraus)The aphorism by Karl Kraus captures the intuition that an artwork is an intentional structure, that it represents the response to a question or the solution to a problem, if only a problem of self-expression. Even when, for example, a theatrical performance is riddled with accidental omissions of text and other mishaps, we find ourselves watching and appreciating it as if everything in it was meant to be as we see it. It has therefore been said that in the presence of art we ‘suspend disbelief’, we suspend the sceptical suspicion according to which the arrangement of internal relations within the artwork might be less than perfectly meaningful: in the presence of art we begin as absolute believers in the integrity of the artwork.But there is another dimension to Kraus's remark: what appears to be the solution to a problem or a coherent response to some situation becomes a riddle of its own. The apparent integrity of the work may result from interpretation rather than through the deliberate intentionality of the artwork itself. Moreover, it is the exception for a work of art to be reducible to providing a solution to a particular problem. Indeed, we would tend to deny that artworks are governed by instrumental reason. This is true even in the case of theatrical performances: a performance is bound to provide more than a solution to the problem of how to stage a particular play; it cannot be regarded merely as an instrumental means of conveying a drama.

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Robert Louis Stevenson's Musical Interests

PMLA ◽

10.2307/460179 ◽

1957 ◽

Vol 72 (4-Part-1) ◽

pp. 700-704 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Robert Stevenson

Keyword(s):

Real Life ◽

Musical Composition ◽

First Year ◽

Saranac Lake ◽

Musical Interests ◽

As If ◽

Huntington Library ◽

A Performance

“Robert Louis Stevenson's earliest preserved efforts at musical composition are contained in two manuscript books owned by the Huntington Library in California and date from his thirty-first year, the year Treasure Island was completed. But almost a decade earlier he confessed that music had already become his ”consuming passion.“ From Frankfort in 1872 he had written home telling of his ”terrible excitement“ at a performance of Halévy's La Juive, and adding: “An opera is far more real than real life to me… It seems as if… opera would never stale upon me.” The next winter back in Edinburgh he heard his first Beethoven quartet, and with typical impetuosity forsook his love of opera for other loves. Later he was to write from Saranac Lake: “Wealth is only useful for two things—a yacht and a string quartette. For these two I will sell my soul. Except for these, I hold that £700 a year is as much as anybody can possibly want.”

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Organized Time

10.22501/nmh-ar.628657 ◽

2019 ◽

Author(s):

◽

Christian Blom

Keyword(s):

Large Scale ◽

Research Project ◽

Amount Of Information ◽

Performance Group ◽

As If ◽

A Performance

For many years I was a part of a performance group called Verdensteatret. We made large scale performances and installations. They were often dense with information. Speech, movements, video, lights, sounds and music, all utilizing their full scales at once, fast to slow, loud to soft, bright to dark and so forth. This meant that we had many situations where the amount of information was overwhelming. Anyone attending would have to make choices of where to focus and what to follow. I recall sitting in rehearsal for the work Louder (Verdensteatret 2007) thinking: Isn’t that sound finishing off Marius’ movement? They are both coming to a halt after finishing a similar arch through the room. And the sound continues ten seconds after Marius has stopped. They start together but finish separately. A connection appears as they separate. The connection is clear for the ten seconds between when Marius is finished, and the sound finishes in a similar manner as Marius did. Nothing else enters and connects more strongly to either and their initial connection is strong since they start out as if in unison. I didn’t think all this then, it’s only now that I can put words to it. After all things are indications before they become phenomena (Bachelard 1958, 176). This glimpse and my imaginative memory is the basis for organized time. Through this research project I have tried to recreate this glimpse, to isolate it and force it to show itself. It has been a hunt. I started fiddling about, juxtaposing things and hoping for a dialectic miracle and as things became more clear I increased precision and gradually formulated a strategy for transmedial composition.

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Opera and the Built Environment

Cambridge Opera Journal ◽

10.1017/s0954586721000057 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 1-10

Author(s):

Laura Vasilyeva

Keyword(s):

Built Environment ◽

String Quartet ◽

Healthcare Workers ◽

Cell Phones ◽

Opera House ◽

As If ◽

A Performance

In June 2020 one more video was released into the all-accommodating cloud. This one shows a concert addressed to 2,292 plants, one in each seat of a red velvet-lined auditorium at the Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona. These hand-selected plants are the leafy audience at a performance of Puccini's ‘Crisantemi’ string quartet, conducted in honour of healthcare workers amid lockdown measures to slow the spread of COVID-19. Once the usual announcements about silencing cell phones have been made, the camera closes in on four musicians as each bows to the verdant audience and takes a seat. When the music starts, our view advances from behind the musicians into the opera house: the camera scans the initial rows of the orchestra stalls, then moves into the boxes and balconies. In each successive section of the theatre we see the avatars chosen to listen in place of us. Our representatives are docile and beatific – Puccini seems to soothe them. For a moment the wondrous intrusion of the outside world indoors even starts to seem natural, as if the auditorium can hold the whole world within it, as if there is no outside to this windowless world.

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Improvement of an artificial test substrate technique for evaluation of em immunocytochemical labeling

Proceedings, annual meeting, Electron Microscopy Society of America ◽

10.1017/s0424820100128122 ◽

1987 ◽

Vol 45 ◽

pp. 762-763

Author(s):

G. D. Gagne ◽

M. F. Miller

Keyword(s):

Bovine Serum Albumin ◽

Serum Albumin ◽

Bovine Serum ◽

Artificial Substrate ◽

Chemical Fixation ◽

As If

We recently described an artificial substrate system which could be used to optimize labeling parameters in EM immunocytochemistry (ICC). The system utilizes blocks of glutaraldehyde polymerized bovine serum albumin (BSA) into which an antigen is incorporated by a soaking procedure. The resulting antigen impregnated blocks can then be fixed and embedded as if they are pieces of tissue and the effects of fixation, embedding and other parameters on the ability of incorporated antigen to be immunocyto-chemically labeled can then be assessed. In developing this system further, we discovered that the BSA substrate can also be dried and then sectioned for immunolabeling with or without prior chemical fixation and without exposing the antigen to embedding reagents. The effects of fixation and embedding protocols can thus be evaluated separately.

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