scholarly journals Erard Harps in the Collection of the Czech Museum of Music

Musicalia ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 85-114
Author(s):  
Daniela Kotašová

Abstract The present harp collection of the National Museum – Czech Museum of Music contains Erard pedal harps from various periods of that famed Parisian company’s activity. In creating musical instruments, Sébastian Erard built upon the work of G. Cousineau and C. Groll and became the most successful manufacturer of double-action pedal harps with a fourchette (fork) mechanism (mécanique à fourchettes et à double mouvement). Erard’s work as an instrument maker influenced not only the historical development of the harp, but also the work of other instrument makers. In Bohemia, the Czech harp maker Alois Červenka (1858–1938) built upon Erard’s work with great success. The Erard harps in the collection of the Czech Museum of Music document the Czech socio-cultural context in which the harps of the French instrument maker were used from the late nineteenth century until the middle of the twentieth.

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 227-242 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henry Johnson

The late nineteenth century and early decades of the twentieth century saw the drum kit emerge as an assemblage of musical instruments that was central to much new music of the time and especially to the rise of jazz. This article is a study of Chinese drums in the making of the drum kit. The notions of localization and exoticism are applied as conceptual tools for interpreting the place of Chinese drums in the early drum kit. Why were distinctly Chinese drums used in the early drum kit? How did the Chinese drums shape the future of the drum kit? The drum kit has been at the heart of most popular music throughout the twentieth century to the present day, and, as such, this article will be beneficial to educators, practitioners and scholars of popular music education.


2004 ◽  
Vol 129 (1) ◽  
pp. 24-76 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jann Pasler

Throughout the nineteenth century, musical instruments were seen as embodiments of a country's distinction, useful in ‘the study of man, the diverse races, and their degree of civilization’. This article, focusing on the illustrated French press between 1870 and 1900, examines popular colonial representations of instruments in the context of the complex racial ideologies and the material as well as ideological struggles underlying imperialism. Images of exotic instruments, I argue, served not only to teach about foreign cultures, but also to shape French perceptions of Africa and Indo-China during imperialist expansion there. As such, they help us to situate ethnomusicology's prehistory within French colonialism.


Author(s):  
Margarita Diaz-Andreu

This was the way that one of the executive members of the Swiss National Museum phrased, at the end of the nineteenth century, the changes that had taken place in the previous decades: the interest in the national past was replacing the former emphasis on the Great Civilizations. Another transformation that had occurred was that the study of prehistory, rather than the history of the Roman and medieval periods, was definitively on the agenda. This change of emphasis, which took place between the 1860s and 1880s, had been in motion throughout the century but had finally crystallized in the last two decades of the century. By then, nationalism had transformed its character into a predominantly conservative doctrine. Another adjustment was also apparent. The acceptance of evolutionism had emerged as a major scientific theory to explain change. Issues of nationalism, regionalism, and imperialism became intertwined with scientific theory and further nourished the interest in the remote past. The development of methods to study evolution in the natural sciences promoted a scientific approach to the prehistoric period. At the same time, this affected attitudes towards the Roman and the medieval past. In this chapter, therefore, I reject the view expressed by other historians of archaeology such as Trigger (1989: 148) and to a certain degree Sklenár (1983: 123–6), who think that nationalism constituted a threat to cultural evolutionism and its eventual dismissal. This, they think, took place when scholars moved towards the adoption of the culture-historical perspective in the first decades of the twentieth century. The following pages will reveal, however, that the belief in evolutionism was not contrary to the nationalist cause. Late nineteenth-century archaeologists believed in the evolutionary theories to a greater or lesser extent. Despite this, they also became deeply implicated in the construction of their national past, to a degree not seen in previous decades. Culture-history did not oppose evolutionism; it accepted its tenets and moved beyond them.


Folklorica ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 23 ◽  
pp. 1-42
Author(s):  
Dorian Jurić

This article presents three short passages describing coffee and coffeehouse culture among Bosnian and Herzegovinian Muslims in the late nineteenth century. These texts are drawn from manuscripts collected by lay, Croatian folklore and folklife collectors who submitted them to two early collecting projects in Zagreb. The pieces are translated here for the first time into English and placed into historical and cultural context regarding the history of coffee culture in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the wider Ottoman Empire as well as the politics of folklore collection at the time. By using the Pan-Ottoman concept of ćeif as a theoretical lens, I argue that these early folklorists produced impressive folklife accounts of Bosniak foodways, but that these depictions inevitably enfolded both genuine interest and negative by-products of the wider politics of their era.


2007 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 131-163
Author(s):  
Lydia Hamessley

During the last decades of the nineteenth century, women figured prominently in a marketing campaign by banjo manufacturers who sought to make the banjo a respectable instrument for ladies. Their overarching aim was to "elevate" the banjo's status from its African-American and minstrel-show associations, thereby making the instrument acceptable in white bourgeois society. At the same time, stereoview cards, three-dimensional photographs produced by the millions, were a popular parlor entertainment featuring a variety of contemporary images, including women playing the banjo. Yet, instead of depicting a genteel lady in the parlor playing her beribboned banjo, the stereoviews presented humorous and sometimes risque scenes of banjo-playing women. Further, virtually no stereoviews exist that show the banjo played by a lady in a parlor setting. Through a study of stereoscopic depictions of women in a variety of scenes, I place these unexpected images of women's music-making in a context that explains their significance. In particular I examine the way stereoviews provide insights about the tensions regarding the position and status of women in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American culture as revealed in the figure of the New Woman. Typical of constructions of this threatening figure, stereographic images picture the New Woman wearing bloomers, riding bicycles, attending college, smoking, neglecting her wifely duties and children, and even indulging in lesbian eroticism. Yet, stereoviews are distinctive in that they also show the New Woman playing the banjo, and I argue that the link between the banjo and the New Woman had a decisive and negative impact on the effectiveness of the banjo elevation project. Through an examination of these three-dimensional views, and drawing on late-nineteenth-century writing and poetry about the banjo, I show how the banjo in the hands of the New Woman became a cautionary cultural icon for middle- and upper-class women, subverting the respectable image of the parlor banjo and the bourgeois women who played it. I place this new evidence in the context of Karen Linn's paradigm describing the banjo elevation project as one that sought to shift the banjo from the realm of sentimental values to official values. The figure of the New Woman does not fit within Linn's dichotomy; rather, she falls outside both sets of values. Often viewed as a third sex herself, in a sense mirroring the gender tensions surrounding the banjo, the New Woman helped to shift the banjo into a third realm, that of revolutionary and perhaps even decadent values. This study enhances what we know about the way musical instruments have been used to reconfigure attitudes toward gender roles in the popular imagination and furthers our understanding of the complex role women have played in the history of the banjo. Moreover, this evidence demonstrates how gender and sexuality can affect the reception of music, and musical instruments, through powerful iconographic images.


Author(s):  
Nora E. Jaffary

This chapter uses eighteenth- and nineteenth-century news publications, medical periodicals, and an 1895 catalogue of birth anomalies from Mexico’s National Museum of History to study evolving ideas about birth monstrosity. In the late colonial period, Mexicans understood anomalous births as evidence of New Spain’s prodigious fertility, a perspective that reflected both the particularized manner in which the Enlightenment developed in Mexico and the late colonial development of “creole patriotism”. Nineteenth-century reports of monstrous births revealed some changes. The later notices conveyed popular attitudes of revulsion and horror toward birth monsters. Second, whereas the late colonial notices restricted speculation as to the origins of unusual infants to “the rare effects of nature,” by the late nineteenth century, scientists and physicians, particularly obstetrician Juan María Rodrígez, turned their focus directly onto (and into) the bodies of the mothers who had produced such phenomena. They increasingly monitored the biological conditions of aberrant embryos’ development in the female uterus. This view allowed for the possible biological regeneration of monstrous productions but also contributed to the construction of the inherent pathology of Mexican women’s reproductive anatomy.


MANUSYA ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-65
Author(s):  
Nathamon Sunthikhunakorn

In the late-nineteenth century, Victorian people lived their lives in fear and anxiety caused by the negative consequences of the Industrial Revolution and uncertainty about their future. The concept of degeneration invented by influential nineteenth-century European scientists was used to explain the causes and effects of these pessimistic outcomes. It terrified Victorian people because it proposed the idea that the Caucasian race would be physically degraded and would, unavoidably, face extinction because later generations would become morally and culturally corrupted. This concept is reflected in the analysis of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) in the form of sexual degeneration in the form of sexual degeneration in the late-nineteenth century and how the novel seeks to deal with the tensions of the era by both reinforcing Victorian values and highlighting the importance of an adaptability to change. Relying on the social and cultural context of degeneration in nineteenth-century Britain, this paper shows that vampires in the novel can be seen to represent degenerate people and they also symbolize the Victorians’ fear regarding changes in gender roles during the late-nineteenth century. Decadent women of the period are portrayed through the figures of the female vampires and Lucy Westenra who express their lack of self-control by being excessively sexual and resigning wifehood and motherhood. While Lucy is eliminated from the text, Mina Harker survives through to the end since she is proved to be a good and loyal wife who uses her knowledge and intellect to provide her husband with support when it is needed. A character like Mina helps reduce the tension and anxiety about sexual morality, gender roles and the possibility that the English race will become extinct because she reaffirms Victorian values and also proves that it is not necessary for the country to collapse because of change.


2007 ◽  
Vol 101 (2) ◽  
pp. 289-301 ◽  
Author(s):  
JAMIE L. CARSON ◽  
ERIK J. ENGSTROM ◽  
JASON M. ROBERTS

Most political observers agree that incumbent legislators have a considerable advantage over nonincumbents in modern congressional elections. Yet there is still disagreement over the exact source of this advantage and the explanation for its growth over time. To address this debate we utilize a unique set of historical elections data to test for the presence of an incumbency advantage in late-nineteenth-century House elections (1872–1900). We find a modest direct effect of incumbency and a substantial candidate quality effect. Moreover, the cartel-like control of ballot access by nineteenth century political parties created competition in races that the modern market-like system simply does not sustain. Our results suggest that candidate quality is a fundamental piece of the puzzle in understanding the historical development of the incumbency advantage in American politics.


Author(s):  
Adalyat Issiyeva

In the late nineteenth century, the growing popularity of the Aryanist and Asianist (Vostochnik) movements attracted many members of Russia’s political and educated elite. This chapter outlines Russian music theoretical discourse on cultural affiliation with the Aryan race and reveals that there was a widespread agreement that in Russia Aryan or Asian culture was far more influential than that of Europe. Some Russian music critics argued that the Russian connection to the East could be traced in the modal or pentatonic structure of folk melodies, while others believed that Russian musical instruments were proof of Russia’s Asian heritage. Because of growing nationalism and the Russo-Japanese War (1904–5), discourses of Russian cultural superiority proliferated at the turn of the century. Although music writings did not overtly claim Russia’s cultural preeminence, they suggested it through visual representations of Asian and Russian musicians, and discussion of the repertoire of Russian instruments.


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