scholarly journals AN ANALYSIS OF THE CHARACTERISTICS OF MUSIC CREATION IN MEFISTOFELE

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
LING YANG ◽  
SHENG-DONG YUE
Keyword(s):  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Classical Music ◽  
16Th Century ◽  
Specific Language ◽  
Complex Emotions ◽  
Internal Structures ◽  
True Meaning ◽  
History Of ◽  
Expression Of Emotions ◽  
The Aesthetic

Successful opera art cannot be separated from literary elements, but also from the support of music. Opera scripts make up plots with words. Compared with emotional resonance directly from the senses, music can plasticize the abstract literary image from the perspective of sensibility. An excellent opera work can effectively promote the development of the drama plot through music design, and deepen the conflict of drama with the "ingenious leverage" of music. This article intends to analyze the music design of the famous opera, Mefistofele, and try to explore the fusion effect of music and drama, and its role in promoting the plot. After its birth at the end of the 16th century and the beginning of the 17th century, western opera art quickly received widespread attention and affection. The reason for its success is mainly due to its fusion of the essence of classical music and drama literature. Because of this, there have always been debates about the importance of music and drama in the long history of opera art development. In the book Opera as Drama, Joseph Kerman, a well-known contemporary musicologist, firmly believes that "opera is first and foremost a drama to show conflicts, emotions and thoughts among people through actions and events. In this process, music assumes the most important performance responsibilities."[1] Objectively speaking, these two elements with very different external forms and internal structures play an indispensable role in opera art. A classic opera is inseparable from the organic integration of music and drama, otherwise it will be difficult to meet the aesthetic experience expected by the audience. On the stage, it is necessary to present wonderful audio-visual enjoyment, and at the same time to pursue thematic expressions with deep thoughts, but the expression of emotions in music creation must be reflected through its independent specific language rather than separated from its own consciousness. Only through the superb expression of music can conflicts, thoughts and emotions be fully reflected, or it may be reduced to empty preaching. Joseph Kerman once pointed out that "the true meaning of opera is to carry drama with music". He believes that opera expresses thoughts and emotions through many factors such as scenes, actions, characters, plots and so on. However, the carrier of these elements lies in music. Only under the guidance and support of music can the characters, thoughts and emotions of the drama be truly portrayed. Indeed, opera scripts fictional plots with words, and music presents abstract literary image specifically and recreationally, allowing more potentially complex emotions that are difficult to express in words to be perceived by the audience in the flow of notes, thereby resonate with people.[2] Mefistofele, which this article intends to explore, is such an opera that is extremely exemplary in the organic integration of music and drama.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Dana Seitler
Keyword(s):  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Literary Fiction ◽  
Economic Equality ◽  
Aesthetic Form ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Aesthetic Ideas

This book explores the pivotal role that various art forms played in American literary fiction in direct relation to the politics of gender and sexuality at the turn of the century. I track the transverse circulation of aesthetic ideas in fiction expressly concerned with gender and sexuality, and I argue that at stake in fin-de-siècle American writers’ aesthetic turn was not only the theorization of aesthetic experience, but also a fashioning forth of an understanding of aesthetic form in relation to political arguments and debates about available modes of sociability and cultural expression. One of the impulses of this study is to produce what we might think of as a counter-history of the aesthetic in the U.S. context at three (at least) significant and overlapping historical moments. The first is the so-called “first wave” of feminism, usually historicized as organized around the vote and the struggle for economic equality. The second is marked by the emergence of the ontologically interdependent homosexual/heterosexual matrix—expressed in Foucault’s famous revelation that, while the sodomite had been a temporary aberration, at the fin de siècle “the homosexual was now a species,” along with Eve Sedgwick’s claim that the period marks an “endemic crisis in homo-heterosexual definition.”...

Neuroaesthetics

2017 ◽  
pp. 87-102
Author(s):  
Ana Teresa Contier ◽  
Laila Torres
Keyword(s):  
Perceptual Experience ◽  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Functional Neuroimaging ◽  
Imaging Techniques ◽  
Neural Architecture ◽  
History Of ◽  
System Memory ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Aesthetic

The aesthetic experience has been discussed throughout the history of mankind by philosophers and art historians, becoming a universal part of human experience, which leads us to some great interdisciplinary questions. It has been the subject of study by neuroscientists and neuro-psychologists since the 2000s. This recent evolution of neurology studies in the field of art, is due to in vivo brain imaging techniques, especially functional neuroimaging. Furthermore, recent research has provided evidence of cognitive interaction during the perception of an artwork indicating that the perceptual experience of art is not merely a passive one. This article reviews important studies in neuroaesthectics of visual art that point out that the aesthetic experience is related to the distribution in the neural architecture, suggesting the involvement of sensory-motor areas, emotional centers, reward system, memory and language.

The General Impact of Context on Aesthetic Experience

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Pelowski ◽  
Eva Specker
Keyword(s):  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
General Consideration ◽  
Present Knowledge ◽  
Future Studies ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Key Issues ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Key Aspects ◽  
Empirical Approaches

This chapter discusses the general impact of context on the aesthetic experience. It is designed to anticipate the other chapters’ discussions of context’s specific areas—the social, the physical or institutional, information and framing, museums, background or personality-related features. Here, the authors offer a more general consideration discussing key aspects such as: What even is context? How can it best be thought about? What are the key issues that might be considered? And, especially, how can it be generally integrated into present knowledge of models of aesthetic processing experience? Beginning with the interest in context throughout the history of aesthetics, the chapter builds a presentation of empirical approaches and especially theory, focusing on context’s main layers and points of influence. It then discusses how key context issues might be considered in models of aesthetic processing, with the goal of providing a framework for better approaching context aspects in this book and in one’s own future studies. This is also interspersed with what the authors consider to be some of the more intriguing studies in order to spur readers’ thinking about the potential for studying context. The chapter concludes with some major issues, some candidates for future consideration, and suggestions for further reading and education.

scholarly journals POLISH AESTHETIC DISCOURSE OF THE 20TH CENTURY: INTERPRETATION OF INTERPRETATIONS

2018 ◽  
pp. 25-29
Author(s):  
E. I. Onishchenko
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Aesthetic Theory ◽  
Specific Nature ◽  
Theoretical Orientations ◽  
Culture Studies ◽  
National University ◽  
Aesthetic Consciousness ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Aesthetic

The article is devoted to the analysis of the Polish aesthetic discourse of the twentieth century and the prospects for its interpretation in the Ukrainian aesthetics, particularly in the works by Kateryna Shevchuk, defended at the department of ethics, aesthetics and culture studies of Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv. These research greatly extend the idea of the aesthetic canon of the Polish thought, classically represented by the aesthetics R. Ingarden and W. Tatarkiewicz and reveal the names of virtually unknown in Ukraine Polish scientists, including special interest is the legacy of L. Blaustein, M. Wallis, H. Elzenberg and G. Ossowski. In particular, this perspective covers traditional for the twentieth century aesthetics problems, including psychology of art, collective aesthetic experience, ratio, fantasy, and imagination. Also, new interpretive perspectives of sublime and ugly, aesthetical experience are opened. The theoretical orientations of the Polish scholars, in one way or another, were connected with the cornerstones of the aesthetic science - its subject, the conceptual-categorical apparatus, the structure of aesthetic consciousness, the phenomenon of artistic creativity, the specific nature of art, and others. In the process of conceptual concretization, in the field of Polish aesthetics a number of problems have been rather clearly distinguished, among which the special attention of practically all of its leading representatives has attracted the phenomenon of aesthetical experience. K. Shevchuk’s investigation opens up an opportunity, at least in the format of a secondary interpretation, to join the research of the Polish scholars, whose work proved to be a giant "white spot" for the Ukrainian aestheticians. Introducing actually unexplored concepts Polish scientists to the modern Ukrainian aesthetic theory not only facilitates the opening of "unknown pages" in the history of the twentieth century aesthetics, but also makes actual mark of new approaches to the analysis of classical problems, the relevance of which will never be a subject of doubt.

Performatywny charakter estetyki

2019 ◽  
Vol 26 (26) ◽  
pp. 32-50
Author(s):  
Grzegorz Dziamski
Keyword(s):  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Marcel Duchamp ◽  
Popular Art ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Louise Bourgeois ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Cognitive Perspectives ◽  
Making Art

Many lecturers of aesthetics feel that the subject of their lectures is not necessarily aesthetics, but history of aesthetics, the aesthetic views of Plato and Aristotle, Kant and Hegel, Hume and Burke, the British philosophers of taste and German romanticists. Does that mean that aesthetics feeds on its own past, is nurtured by reinterpretations of its classics, defends concepts and categories that inspire no one and do not open new cognitive perspectives? Does it mean that aesthetics is dead today, like Latin or Sanskrit, while its vision of art and beauty is outdated, invalid and totally useless? Aesthetics is a polysemous concept, which has never been sufficiently defined. It can determine a way of perceiving and experiencing the world that is specific for a given community, in other words, taste, yet it can also mean certain countries’ or regions’ contribution to aesthetic thought, to the aesthetic self-knowledge of man. Thus its dimension is practical, cultural and philosophical. Today aesthetics faces new challenges that it has to live up to; its major tasks include the defence of popular art, polishing the concept of aesthetic experience, aestheticization of everyday life and de-aestheticization of art, transcultural aesthetics and its approach to national cultures. In the book “Aesthetics: the Big Questions” (1998) Carolyn Korsmeyer reduces the main issues of contemporary aesthetics to six questions. The first question, old but valid, is a question about the definition of art. What is art? Nowadays everything can be art because art has shed all limitations, even the limitations of its own definition, and has gained absolute freedom. It has become absolute, as Boris Groys says. It has become absolute, because it has made anti-art a full-fledged part of art, and it has not been possible either to question or negate art since, as even the negation of art is art, legitimized by a more than 100 year long tradition, going back to the first ready-made by Marcel Duchamp in 1913. Today making art can be art and not making art can be art, as well, art is art and anti-art is art. The old question: “What is art?” loses its sense, and so does Nelson Goodman’s question: “When art?”. When does something become art? These questions are substituted by new ones: “What is art for you?”, “What do you expect from art?”. There can be a lot of answers, because defining art has a performative character. Louise Bourgeois has expressed the performative character of defining art in an even better way: “Art is whatever we believe to be art”. And for some reasons, which we do not fully realize ourselves, we want to make others share our belief.

scholarly journals Aesthetic Experience as a Spiritual Support of Homo Post-Secularis

Religions ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 250 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victor Bychkov
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
Spiritual Support ◽  
History Of ◽  
Secular Age ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Universe

The essay begins with an analysis of the cultural situation of humanity after its transition to secular mentality and a gradual disenchantment with secularism, which leads to the formation of post-secular mentality. It further suggests that aesthetic experience traditionally served as a bridge between the secular and the religious/spiritual and can serve in this capacity again in the post-secular age. It outlines the main traits of the post-secular person (homo post-saecularis). Two aspects of aesthetic experience are emphasized: its in-depth penetration into nature in an attempt to achieve unity with it, and the aesthetic observation of artworks. In pursuing both of these aspects, the post-secular person attempts, just as Romantics and Symbolists previously, to grasp something invisible beyond visible forms and escape from banal reality into higher spiritual realms of being, ultimately experiencing him- or herself as having a place in the universe. Aesthetic experience, if it is correctly understood and practiced, can give all this to the present-day post-secular person. The rest of the essay is devoted to a brief history of twentieth-century views of art, mainly in French and Russian thought, that foreshadow its post-secular role, and to the author’s authentic theoretical framework for understanding art and aesthetic experience, as well as his, equally authentic, program of how to achieve the post-secular function of art in practice for a present-day person.

scholarly journals A Reflection on the Aesthetics of Indian Music, With Special Reference to Hindustani Raga-Sangita

SAGE Open ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 215824401667451 ◽  
Author(s):  
Santosh Kumar Pudaruth
Keyword(s):  
Special Reference ◽  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Classical Music ◽  
Ultimate Reality ◽  
Spiritual Exercise ◽  
Art Forms ◽  
Indian Aesthetics ◽  
Indian Classical Music ◽  
Indian Music ◽  
The Aesthetic

Like in any other heteronomous art-forms, the practitioners of Indian music and dance ( Bharatiya Sangita) aim at expressing emotions and creating the aesthetic or the “beautiful.” Indian thinkers and musicologists have gone a step further in declaring that Indian classical music ( Raga-Sangita) is the most appropriate means for attaining aesthetic experience and delight, and the most suitable pathway, if not, downright, short-cut, toward self-realization or realization of the Ultimate Reality or Truth. Thus, aesthetics and spirituality make up the very woof and warp of the Indian arts, in general, and Raga-Sangita, in particular. Raga-Sangita is, thus, considered a spiritual exercise ( nada sadhana) to attain salvation ( moksha) through sound. This conceptual article reflects upon and sheds light on the Theory of Rasa, as propounded in Indian Aesthetics, and attempts to make an assessment of it in relation to Hindustani Raga-Sangita. Through this theory, the author examines and explains the different causes leading to an aesthetic experience, referred to as “out-of-this-world” ( alaukika). In doing so, he also brings to light the possible pitfalls which both the performer and the listener should avoid.

Introduction: music and urban history

Urban History ◽  
2002 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-7 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vanessa Harding
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Urban History ◽  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Fine Arts ◽  
New Historicism ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Urban Experience ◽  
Academic Field ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Aesthetic

Music – as many of the contributors to this special issue of Urban History point out – is an important component of the urban experience and can play a significant role in the construction of a civic identity, and yet it is a topic that urban historians have tended to overlook. There are some parallels with the case of the fine arts, to which a special issue of this journal was devoted in 1995, both in the causes for this neglect – which similarly include ‘the intimidating traditions of connoisseurship associated with the field’ and the difficulty we have with analysing the ‘aesthetic experience’ – and in the developments which are helping to overcome such inhibitions. So far, the impulse seems to be coming from musicologists and music historians, who, inhabiting a fairly small corner of the academic field, are fully conscious of the need to forge connections with other disciplines and historiographical traditions. The importance of contextualizing and historicizing not only the composition but also the production, transmission and reception of music has been recognized for some time, but so far urban historians have not responded as perhaps the music historians thought they might to the insights and openings that a musical ‘new historicism’ seems to offer. But there is clearly an opportunity – indeed, a pressing need – to develop a broadly-based cultural history of towns and cities in which music will take its place. The aim of this special issue is to promote that objective by illustrating the state of the art and suggesting some of the ideas, tools and methodologies with which it might be developed in future.

scholarly journals The Roaring Lion: Critical Musicology, the Aesthetic Experience, and the Music Department

2013 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-33 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Gramit
Keyword(s):  
North American ◽  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Classical Music ◽  
Music Instruction ◽  
Music Department ◽  
Critical Scholarship ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Western Classical Music

This paper argues that a number of recent responses within North American musicology to critical scholarship that has challenged disciplinary conventions have in common a deep loyalty to the aesthetic experience of music as a supreme value. The vigour with which this value is defended has close parallels in religion, and such defences have indeed sometimes resorted to explicitly religious terminology. The institutional situation of North American musicology in university music departments dominated by Western classical music instruction strengthens this ideology, which continues to resist socially oriented study of music.

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