Musical Representation and Vivaldi's Concerto Il Proteo, ò Il mondo al rovverscio, RV 544/572

2016 ◽  
Vol 69 (1) ◽  
pp. 111-177 ◽  
Author(s):  
Massimo Ossi

Vivaldi's concerto titles draw ambivalent reactions from historians, who see them as commercial hooks, rarely reflecting musical substance. But titles condition a work's reception, connecting it to a cultural context by which to steer a listener's reactions, both intellectual and affective. Eighteenth-century writers on aesthetics recognized the role of textual “ideas” in the reception of music. Vivaldi's Il Proteo, ò Il mondo al rovverscio is regarded as a “trick piece” in which the solo violin and cello parts are “reversed,” each being written in the other's clef. The concerto, however, invokes a deeper conception of the mundus inversus metaphor, in that it constitutes a remarkably sophisticated exploration of upside-down compositional practices. While the opening movement challenges notions of “correct” musical syntax, evoking the Carnival celebrations of the “world upside down,” the last presents a well-ordered example of Vivaldian ritornello form. Vivaldi included Il Proteo as the first concerto in a large group sold to Pietro Ottoboni in the mid-1720s, twelve of which bear titles. Some are as concrete as “The Four Seasons,” but others are more abstract, deriving from affective or intellectual subjects such as“Il riposo.” Il Proteo, in this context, seems especially sophisticated, cleverly satirizing some of the composer's own trademark compositional techniques. Its self-conscious treatment of style appears to address contemporary debates regarding music's ability to carry “meaning,” an ability that members of Ottoboni's Arcadian Academy seemed to deny but that others, such as the philosopher Antonio Conti, endorsed. Might Vivaldi have fueled these debates with a provocative set of concertos headed by Il Proteo?

2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 177-199
Author(s):  
ANA LOMBARDÍA

ABSTRACTSince the mid-eighteenth century the fandango has been regarded as the epitome of Spanish cultural identity. It became increasingly popular in instrumental chamber music, as well-known examples by Domenico Scarlatti, Antonio Soler and Luigi Boccherini show. To date, published musicological scholarship has not considered the role of solo violin music in the dissemination of the fandango or the shaping of a ‘Spanish’ musical identity. Now, eight rediscovered pieces – which can be dated to the period 1730–1775 – show that the violin was frequently used to perform fandangos, including stylized chamber-music versions. In addition to offering evidence of the violin's role in the genre, these pieces reveal the hybridization of the fandango with foreign musical traditions, such as the Italian violin sonata and French courtly dances, demonstrating hitherto overlooked negotiations between elite and popular culture in mid-eighteenth-century Spain. Analysis of these works’ musical features challenges traditional discourses on the ‘Spanishness’ of the fandango and, more broadly, on the opposition between ‘native’ and ‘foreign’ music in eighteenth-century Spain.


2011 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 200-213
Author(s):  
Vladimir Milenković

Contemporariness of architecture can be interpreted in diverse ways. Starting from a basically formulated modern context, which is even nowadays understood as such, in which the limits of stability of the architectural profession are examined, our concern is the designer's intention to research within a wider cultural context. We are actually considering the capacities of the profession for continuous development of its own critical apparatus. Through the question of the relation between the general and the individual, followed by the question of integrity and proportion of architectural effect, but also by the role of media and digitalization of the world, in the focus of this text projected are the scenes of reality filled with the values of architecture willing to develop, within itself, the analytical and synthetic concepts relying on the contextual, but also on the own indetermination and instability regarding the concept of the space and time.


2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju

What is the value of Yoruba epistemology, theory of knowledge, particularly its philosophy of perception, to humanity in general, and to contemporary Nigeria, in particular? How does Yorùbá epistemology connect with educational theory and practice in Nigeria? This essay recognizes but goes beyond the more general overviews on classical Yoruba education and its contemporary significance represented in works of Yorùbá and Africanist scholars. I demonstrate the significance of Yoruba philosophy of education beyond its cultural context, by projecting its universal and timeless value, foregrounding its distinctive concepts in dialogue with ideas from other cultures. In its engagement with Nigerian educational dynamics, the essay concentrates, first, on Yoruba epistemology in its intersection with ethical and metaphysical perspectives from Yoruba thought. Second, the essay deploys the African art-centered investigations of the role of the senses in relating with art, understood as paradigmatic of navigating the world.


Author(s):  
Martha M. F. Kelly

In a now classic 1994 article Victor Zhivov counters the idea that the eighteenth-century quest to create a modern Russian literature represented a wholesale rejection of Russia’s previous literary tradition. He shows instead how poets appropriated elements of Orthodox liturgical tradition in a bid to adapt the classical notion of ‘furor poeticus’, marking it by the eruption of Church Slavonic norms into modern poetics. This chapter demonstrates how, as Zhivov contends, elements of Orthodox liturgical culture have continued to shape the modern Russian poetic tradition from the eighteenth century into the present. In particular, Russian poets have long presented poetry as uniquely able to transform the world by drawing on Orthodox imagery of theosis or divinization—the transfiguration of human life and thus the world, by the divine light and being. The liturgically inflected religious concerns of Russian poetry that sections address include prophecy, human co-creation with God, the problem of the body, and the role of silence.


2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 111-117
Author(s):  
Amantai Sh. Znilkubaeva ◽  

The article uses a lot of factual material to reveal the role of ethnographisms associated with cooking during the most significant moments of human life: birth, wedding, burial. The connection of symbolism with ritual is revealed.The purpose of the article is based on the specifics of the work caused by the need for a linguoculturological description of the vocabulary of nutrition, the definition of extralinguistic factors (customs, traditions and religious beliefs) in the formation, development and functioning, as well as the disclosure of the symbolic essence of this LSH.The relevance of the article is determined by the need for linguistic and cultural understanding of the food vocabulary, which is widely reflected in paremia, concepts, phraseological units, and customs as the most stable lexical and semantic categories of the Turkic languages (more than 2 000 lexical and phraseological units).The material of the study was the vocabulary of nutrition of the Turkic languages. The main methods used in the work are descriptive, comparative, and interpretive.The reception and serving of food among the Turkic peoples and their reflection in customs and traditions are symbolic relations between people connected by social, gender, and age relations. For example, the symbolism of food associated with the birth of a child has its roots in the distant past of the Turkic people and means a sacrifice for the successful birth of a woman. These rituals include: preparing special meals to speed childbirth: Garissa (lit. Competition with the cauldron, where food is cooked), preparing special dishes: sut burysh, IIT mun, burial of the bones of a 「am slaughtered for a woman in labor, gnawing the neck vertebrae of a ram without a knife, burning meat, etc. These traditions are a symbol of introducing the baby to a new life denoting the appearance of a new person. As a result of the analysis of this thematic group, it was revealed that traditional household rituals are the most stable basis of the ethnic spiritual culture of the Turkic peoples, many symbolic actions related to food are common, which once again confirms the hypothesis of genetic kinship of these peoples.The concept of linguoculturological research of customs and traditions as one of the current trends in linguistics opens up new aspects of the relationship and connection of language and spiritual culture, language and folk mentality, language and folk art. In the conceptual picture of the world and the national - cultural context, the question of the place and role of the studied LSH is very significant.The scientific novelty of the research consists in the linguistic and cultural understanding of one of the traditionally established and most stable lexical and semantic categories of the Turkic languages - the vocabulary of nutrition. Such studies in modern linguistics have not been sofer conducted. Keywords: food vocabulary, symbols, ritual, linguoculturology, ethnographism, customs, traditions, conceptual picture of the world


2019 ◽  
pp. 37-56
Author(s):  
Tessa Whitehouse

This chapter investigates the role of friendship in the composition, publication, and circulation of biographical accounts and collected works of religious poets in the first half of the eighteenth century. Funeral sermons and elegaic poems published to mark the death of Isaac Watts in 1748 were typical of collective memory making within his reformed Protestant tradition that reinforced the primacy of religious ministers in the world of dissent. The examples of Elizabeth Rowe (in England) and Jane Turell (in America) complicate our picture of the role of memorial in sustaining a tradition of lay piety and authorship within a transatlantic religious community. The emotional and practical circumstances of friendship (as compared to family ties) contributed significantly to shaping the printed texts that were produced as memorials to Watts, Rowe, and Turell, to the reception of those texts, and to the reputations of those authors.


2020 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-37
Author(s):  
Jamie J. Kelly

In 1755, William Robertson delivered a sermon before the Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge, entitled The Situation of the World at the Time of Christ's Appearance…. He addresses British imperial expansion and its prospects for civil and moral improvement, while denouncing the moral decay manifest in the growth of slavery and exploitation of natives. Through advocating a considered balance between submission to revealed religious principles and the exercise of reason, Robertson stresses the necessity of both for promoting virtue and preventing vice. The SSPCK, an organisation dedicated to spreading ‘reformed Christianity’ as a catalyst of cultural progress (and thus the growth of virtue) among rural Scots and Natives in North America, was responding to a perceived lack of government commitment to this very task. Empire provided the framework for mission, yet the government's secular agenda often outweighed religious commitments. This article makes use of SSPCK sermons from the eighteenth century to trace the attitudes of Scottish churchmen and missionaries towards the institutions and motives driving empire, in a period when they too were among its most prominent agents. This will shed light on the Scottish church's developing views on empire, evangelism, race, improvability and the role of government.


Author(s):  
Stewart J. Brown

Through the Moderate movement, the clergy of the later eighteenth-century Church of Scotland became actively engaged with the intellectual culture of the Enlightenment. This chapter explores the role of the Moderate sermon in this process of cultural engagement, focusing on two main themes. First, it considers how Moderate sermons in the later eighteenth century conveyed an optimistic, world-affirming and highly practical set of theological teachings. For Moderate preachers, God had given individuals the innate capacity—in the form of the moral sense or conscience—that would enable them to respond actively to the divine guidance of Scripture in exercising self-control and contributing to social progress. Second, the chapter shows how Moderate sermons also proclaimed that God was active in history, using human actors, often in ways not intended by those actors, to advance the divine plan for the world, which involved progress towards a future order of peace and freedom.


Author(s):  
Cristina Gimeno-Maldonado

Resum: Carmelo Esmaltado con tantas brillantes estrelles, cuantas flores terceras, fecundas de frutos de virtud y religión, cultivó y fijo en el cielo de la Santa Iglesia la venerable Orden Tercera de Nuestra Señora del Carmen, és el títol de l’obra que el carmelita aragonès Roque Alberto Faci (1684-1744) va publicar el 1743. El llibre és un tractat per als membres de la tercera ordre del Carmel en què trobem diverses biografies de terciàries carmelites. El que pretendrem a partir de l’anàlisi de la obra i les biografies, és fixar el paper de les terciàries al món carmelita. Per això, analitzarem l’objectiu de l’autor tenint en compte la religiositat i espiritualitat del segle XVIII i la projecció de la Il·lustració. Paraules clau: Carmel, Dones, Religiositat, Seglar, Terciaris Abstract: Carmelo Esmaltado con tantas brillantes estrelles, cuantas flores terceras, fecundas de frutos de virtud y religión, cultivó y fijo en el cielo de la Santa Iglesia la venerable Orden Tercera de Nuestra Señora del Carmen, is the title of the book wrote by the aragonian carmelite Roque Alberto Faci (1684-1744) published in 1743. The issue is a treaty for the members of the Third Order of Carmel where we can find several biographies of the carmelites woman of third order. What we pretend by analyzing their work and biography is to set the role of the woman of the third order in the world Carmel. For that, we aimed copyright considering religiosity and spirituality of the eighteenth century and the projection of the Enlightenment.   Keywords: Carmel, Woman, Religiosity, Secular, Tertiary


2020 ◽  
pp. 29-39
Author(s):  
Veronika Horodets’ka

This article explores the linguistic worldview of a Ukrainian poet – postmodernist Yuriy Andrukhovytch – realized through the concept of “Christian sacred symbols” analyzed from the perspective of anthropological and cognitive aspects of lingual and cultural studies. It defines the essence and the ways of implementing the concept in the spatio-temporal continuum of poetry collection “India” as well as highlights the role of man in the poet’s imaginary world through the archetypes of the world culture and decodes symbolic meaning of cultural context of the author’s works. Contrary to a generally accepted view that the earth is round, spatial reality for the author turns out to be a planet which resembles a cake, a fl at surface, a desert, a kingdom and a bridge. The sky is seven crystal hemispheres, out lining the heavenly space with stars and planets fixed at each level. The space is represented by such geographical notions as East Asia, India, China, the river Nile. The author of the article supposes that India becomes for the writer the embodiment of our civilization at all times of mankind, another way to present man in the space of eternity, and a kind of life philosophy. The synthesis of pagan, Jewish, Hindu, Muslim and Christian ideas about man’s place in the world and his moral peace, happiness and overall love is represented by such symbols as angels, harpes, gehennr hell hrifony, dragons, percale books, lilies, honey, pythons, fl ags, birds, reptiles, saints, timpani, newts, tulips, furies, devils, Yuri’s sword, Yasmin and others.


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