scholarly journals The Art of Listening

2021 ◽  
Vol 51 (4) ◽  
pp. 468-506
Author(s):  
Matthias Dörries

Music and seismology merged in the daily work of the Caltech professor Hugo Benioff, who united the avant-garde technology of the 1920s with a nineteenth-century Helmholtzian aesthetic, cultural, and scientific understanding of music. The transducer facilitated this merger, mediating between science and music and allowing for new ways of listening to waves outside the audible range. Benioff had the capacity to listen—“listening” understood here not as passive perception, but as an active search to distinguish and separate signal from noise, whether from in- or outside of the instrument. For more than forty years, Benioff worked as a sonic expert, perfecting the recording and reproduction of waves and vibrations of all types and frequencies. After tracing elements of Benioff’s biography, I examine how he incorporated the technology of the transducer in his workshop into his seismological and musical instruments, notable not only for the control, austerity, and clarity of lines of their modernist design, but also for a new kind of poetic technology. Benioff’s seismological instruments made it possible to listen to a large variety of previously undetectable phenomena such as the free oscillations of the earth, and his work with the pianist Rosalyn Tureck on electric musical instruments aimed to reproduce the pure sound of traditional instruments. I argue that Benioff’s search for an aesthetic reconciliation of the scientific modern with an enchanted view of the world is very much a product of the social, cultural, technical, and scientific conditions of the interwar period.

Author(s):  
Leo Tolstoy

Resurrection (1899) is the last of Tolstoy's major novels. It tells the story of a nobleman's attempt to redeem the suffering his youthful philandering inflicted on a peasant girl who ends up a prisoner in Siberia. Tolstoy's vision of redemption achieved through loving forgiveness, and his condemnation of violence, dominate the novel. An intimate, psychological tale of guilt, anger, and forgiveness, Resurrection is at the same time a panoramic description of social life in Russia at the end of the nineteenth century, reflecting its author's outrage at the social injustices of the world in which he lived. This edition, which updates a classic translation, has explanatory notes and a substantial introduction based on the most recent scholarship in the field.


2021 ◽  
Vol 65 (2) ◽  
pp. 157-167
Author(s):  
Grzegorz Sokół

The subject of this essay is Andrzej Waśkiewicz’s book Ludzie – rzeczy – ludzie. O porządkach społecznych, gdzie rzeczy łączą, nie dzielą (People–Things–People: On Social Orders Where Things Connect Rather Than Divide People). The book is the work of a historian of ideas and concerns contemporary searches for alternatives to capitalism: the review presents the book’s overview of visions of society in which the market, property, inequality, or profit do not play significant roles. Such visions reach back to Western utopian social and political thought, from Plato to the nineteenth century. In comparing these ideas with contemporary visions of the world of post-capitalism, the author of the book proposes a general typology of such images. Ultimately, in reference to Simmel, he takes a critical stance toward the proposals, recognizing the exchange of goods to be a fundamental and indispensable element of social life. The author of the review raises two issues that came to mind while reading the book. First, the juxtaposition of texts of a very different nature within the uniform category of “utopia” causes us to question the role and status of reflections regarding the future and of speculative theory in contemporary social thought; second, such a juxtaposition suggests that reflecting on the social “optimal good” requires a much more precise and complex conception of a “thing,” for instance, as is proposed by new materialism or anthropological studies of objects and value as such.


2021 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 491-508
Author(s):  
Silvia Fernanda de Mendonça Figueirôa

Abstract Oscar Nerval de Gouvêa was a scientist and teacher in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, whose work spanned engineering, medicine, the social sciences, and law. This paper presents and discusses a manuscript entitled “Table of mineral classification,” which he appended to his dissertation Da receptividade mórbida , presented to the Faculty of Medicine in 1889. The foundations and features of the table provide a focus for understanding nineteenth-century mineralogy and its connections in Brazil at that time through this scientist. This text was Gouvêa’s contribution to the various mineral classification systems which have emerged from different parts of the world.


Author(s):  
James Revell Carr

This chapter addresses Hawaiians' roles in the multicultural environment aboard European and American sailing ships during the nineteenth century, focusing particularly on the expressive culture of American whalers. Whaling ships began regularly calling at Hawaiian ports in 1820, and over the next six decades thousands of Hawaiian men shipped out as whalemen, joining one of the most cosmopolitan workforces in the world. The chapter begins by describing the social conditions aboard American ships that enabled a variety of performing arts to flourish and encouraged intercultural bonding. It then explicates the different styles and contexts of shipboard music starting with the work song tradition known as the sea chantey (or shanty). It describes the recreational music-making activities of sailors, distinct from the work song tradition, providing accounts of Hawaiian singing and dancing aboard ships at sea and in various global ports, and the responses of Euro-American sailors to that music and dance.


2011 ◽  
Vol 19 (5) ◽  
pp. 1265-1271 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tiago Braga do Espírito Santo ◽  
Taka Oguisso ◽  
Rosa Maria Godoy Serpa da Fonseca

The object is the relationship between the professionalization of Brazilian nursing and women, in the broadcasting of news about the creation of the Professional School of Nurses, in the light of gender. Aims: to discuss the linkage of women to the beginning of the professionalization of Brazilian nursing following the circumstances and evidence of the creation of the Professional School of Nurses analyzed from the perspective of gender. The news articles were analyzed from the viewpoint of Cultural History, founded in the gender concept of Joan Scott and in the History of Women. The creation of the School and the priority given in the media to women consolidate the vocational ideal of the woman for nursing in a profession subjugated to the physician but also representing the conquest of a space in the world of education and work, reconfiguring the social position of nursing and of woman in Brazil.


Author(s):  
R. J. W. Selleck

In part this paper is about ideas, especially those held by some men in nineteenth-century Melbourne who set about establishing a university. They had carried a set of ideas about what a university should be with them as they journeyed across the world, some of them in search of a promised land. They found that turning these ideas into reality was complex and disappointing, but their struggle sheds light on the social, political, and educational life of Antipodean society.


Porównania ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 325-339
Author(s):  
Markéta Kittlová

This study focuses on Adam Borzič, one of the most distinctive contemporary Czech poets. The study contextualises his work within current Czech poetry but also examines his other work that is not strictly classified as art as though it were cultural work with avant-garde features. It investigates four volumes of Borzič’s work in terms of the changes in the author’s creative gesture, which expands from his conviction that the world is at a turning point and the avant-garde longing to change the world by poetry. In the four volumes of Borzič’s poetry (written so far), this gesture is embodied through delicately intimate, acutely physical, or even gigantically all-embracing positions, where he employs motives of the heart, head, hand and mouth. The study attempts to evaluate the change in Borzič’s work in the lightof T. S. Eliot’s understanding of the social role of poetry and avant-garde longing to change reality through art. The Czech poet, Adam Borzič, is one of the most distinctive figures of the current Czech literary scene. His poetry is distinct because of its unique gesture andalso represents a strong current in the poetry production of the past decade with its emphasis on the social function of poetry7 and the poet’s role as somebody who should nurture the world through his/her work or even change it. This study attempts to portray Borzič’s work as focused on the mentioned topics and related issues of the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century and renew interest in them, contextualise his work within current Czech poetry but also investigate his other work, which is not strictly artistic but which possesses some avant-garde features.


Author(s):  
Johannis Tsoumas

The Japanese ceramic tradition that was to emerge along with other forms of traditional crafts through the Mingei Movement during the interwar period, as a form of reaction to the barbaric and expansive industrialization that swept Japan from the late nineteenth century, brought to light the traditional, moral, philosophical, functional, technical and aesthetic values that had begun to eliminate. Great Japanese artists, art critics and ceramists, such as Soetsu Yanagi and Shōji Hamada, as well as the emblematic personality of the English potter Bernard Leach, after caring for the revival of Japanese pottery, believed that they should disseminate the philosophy of traditional Japanese pottery around the world and especially in the post-war U.S.A. where it found a significant response from great American potters and clay artists, but also from the educational system of the country.  This article aims to focus precisely on the significant influence that postwar American ceramic art received from traditional Japanese pottery ideals. The author in order to document the reasons for this new order of things, will study and analyze the work of important American potters and ceramic artists of the time, and will highlight the social, philosophical and cultural context of the time in which the whole endeavor took place. 


1996 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 24-30 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Lee

No other town in Queensland is so well favoured by nature for combining these rare advantages. We have the healthiness of climate, the coolness of a fine English summer, the pure and rarefied air of a moderate elevation, which dwellers along the hot and humid coast so much desire. We have beauty of scenery in picturesque variety, with a panorama of rolling Downs and far-reaching plain … ours is the first town on the elevated Downs after rising from the close and exhausting atmosphere of the ‘littoral’ country.So rhapsodised the editorial in the Toowoomba Chronicle on 14 June, 1890. From the nineteenth century the drop in temperature which greeted the traveller's ascent to the elevated tablelands of the Darling Downs was greeted as a sign of a more vitalising and health-giving climate than the sub-tropical humidity of the Brisbane coastal plain. Katie Hume in 1866 felt Toowoomba's air 'cool and English like … after the heat of Brisbane’, while the consumptive Walter Coote argued in 1887 that the Downs possessed ‘a climate as healthful and even invigorating as that of any place in the World’ (Hume 160, Coote 201). The Social-Darwinist connection between the moral character of a people and the temperature of their climate was a frequent theme of nineteenth century culture. The imperial triumphs of European civilisation were often explained by Europe's temperate climate, for the cooler the climate the more ‘civil’ the people are deemed to be (Spurr); and Europe's temperate climate was also an acknowledged cause of the reasoned moral restraint of the civilised colonial settler. Thus the celebration of Toowoomba's ‘European’ climate served to familiarise an alien Australian space as a place which would support European settlement.


2018 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 205-219
Author(s):  
Raluca Muşat

The interwar period was a time when the rural world gained new prominence in visions of modernity and modernisation across the world. The newly reconfigured countries of Eastern Europe played a key role in focusing attention on the countryside as an important area of state intervention. This coincided with a greater involvement of the social sciences in debates and in projects of development and modernisation, both nationally and internationally. This article examines the contribution of the Bucharest School of Sociology to the creation of an idea of ‘the global countryside’ that emerged in the interwar years and only matured in the post-war period.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document