Zemlinsky's “Expressionist” Moment: Critical Reception of the Second String Quartet, 1918–1924

2018 ◽  
Vol 71 (2) ◽  
pp. 371-438
Author(s):  
Clare Carrasco
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Politics ◽  
String Quartet ◽  
Public Life ◽  
Critical Reception ◽  
Early History ◽  
German Culture ◽  
Concert Hall ◽  
Political Debates ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Great War

In the years after 1918, discourse about musical expressionism was controlled by critics rather than composers. Understanding expressionism to be as much a public matter emanating from the concert hall as a private one rooted in the composer's workshop, critics at that time often identified as “expressionist” works that fall outside the conventional notion of an expressionist repertory. In a particularly striking case, those who reviewed the 1918 premiere of Zemlinsky's Second String Quartet, op. 15, described it as experimental, revolutionary, indeed expressionist music. Today, scholars consistently count opus 15 among Zemlinsky's most compelling works, but they do not usually frame it in such charged terms. This article uses reviews of the earliest public performances of the quartet to elucidate the diverse and changing ways in which critics positioned it, as an instrumental chamber work, relative to expressionism between 1918 and 1924. In addition to discussing its music-stylistic features, critics involved the quartet in the heated musical-political debates surrounding expressionism in Austro-German culture at the end of and just after the Great War. These debates concerned everything from the threat of “musical bolshevism” to the (re)interpretation of Bach's and Beethoven's legacies in a postwar age. Zemlinsky's short-lived “expressionist” moment was thus very much a public moment. Reconstructing it opens a window onto the vicissitudes of the early history of musical expressionism, revealing ways in which expressionism was originally meaningful not in relation to composers’ inner lives, but in relation to the turbulent musical and cultural politics that shaped public life.

The Unlike Pair

2020 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 158-196
Author(s):  
Clare Carrasco
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Cultural Value ◽  
German Language ◽  
Historical Writing ◽  
Music Criticism ◽  
Political Debates ◽  
Chamber Symphony ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Great War ◽  
Political Radicalism

Between 1919 and 1923 Arnold Schoenberg’s Chamber Symphony, op. 9 (1906) and Franz Schreker’s Chamber Symphony (1916) were repeatedly programmed together on public concerts in Germany. Critics reviewing these and other postwar performances often framed the two works in a distinctive and, by today’s standards, surprising way: they aligned Schoenberg’s Chamber Symphony with an “expressionist” and Schreker’s Chamber Symphony with an “impressionist” musical aesthetic. With roots in prewar German critical and historical writing, impressionism and expressionism functioned as multifaceted, contextually contingent concepts in postwar music criticism. They bore not only music-stylistic but also psychological, national, and racial implications, thus serving as important mechanisms through which critics could engage music in broader cultural and political debates. Even as critics writing after the Great War almost universally—if certainly reductively—aligned Schreker’s Chamber Symphony with impressionism and Schoenberg’s Chamber Symphony with expressionism, they fiercely disagreed about the relative cultural value of these contrasting orientations. Schoenberg and Schreker were thereby implicated in discussions that related their music to pressing contemporary questions of political radicalism, national identity, and Jewishness. Critical reception of postwar performances of this “unlike pair” of chamber symphonies thus documents a consequential yet neglected chapter in the conceptual history of musical “impressionism” and “expressionism”: a chapter in which German-language critics first connected the two terms in a complex, politically laden relationship.

Some early history of replica techniques for electron microscopy

1992 ◽  
Vol 50 (2) ◽  
pp. 1076-1077
Author(s):  
Robert M. Fisher
Keyword(s):  
Thin Film ◽  
Electron Microscopy ◽  
Optical Microscope ◽  
Early History ◽  
Bulk Materials ◽  
Thin Sections ◽  
Transmission Electron ◽  
Reflected Light ◽  
History Of ◽  
Electron Microscopes

By 1940, a half dozen or so commercial or home-built transmission electron microscopes were in use for studies of the ultrastructure of matter. These operated at 30-60 kV and most pioneering microscopists were preoccupied with their search for electron transparent substrates to support dispersions of particulates or bacteria for TEM examination and did not contemplate studies of bulk materials. Metallurgist H. Mahl and other physical scientists, accustomed to examining etched, deformed or machined specimens by reflected light in the optical microscope, were also highly motivated to capitalize on the superior resolution of the electron microscope. Mahl originated several methods of preparing thin oxide or lacquer impressions of surfaces that were transparent in his 50 kV TEM. The utility of replication was recognized immediately and many variations on the theme, including two-step negative-positive replicas, soon appeared. Intense development of replica techniques slowed after 1955 but important advances still occur. The availability of 100 kV instruments, advent of thin film methods for metals and ceramics and microtoming of thin sections for biological specimens largely eliminated any need to resort to replicas.

The early history of tuberous sclerosis

1979 ◽  
Vol 115 (11) ◽  
pp. 1317-1319 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. E. Morgan
Keyword(s):  
Tuberous Sclerosis ◽  
Early History ◽  
History Of

New Light on the Early History of the Greater Northwest

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander Henry ◽  
David Thompson
Keyword(s):  
Early History ◽  
History Of

Review of A school history of the Great War.

1919 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 176-176
Author(s):  
No authorship indicated
Keyword(s):  
Great War ◽  
School History ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Great War

Socio-political and confessional preconditions of the birth of the Ukrainian Evangelical-Reformed Church in Western Ukraine (20-30 years of the twentieth century)

2000 ◽  
pp. 67-75
Author(s):  
R. Soloviy
Keyword(s):  
Public Life ◽  
First World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Reformed Church ◽  
Religious Influences ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Western Ukraine ◽  
History Of ◽  
Religious Factor ◽  
First World

In the history of religious organizations of Western Ukraine in the 20-30th years of the XX century. The activity of such an early protestant denominational formation as the Ukrainian Evangelical-Reformed Church occupies a prominent position. Among UCRC researchers there are several approaches to the preconditions for the birth of the Ukrainian Calvinistic movement in Western Ukraine. In particular, O. Dombrovsky, studying the historical preconditions for the formation of the UREC in Western Ukraine, expressed the view that the formation of the Calvinist cell should be considered in the broad context of the Ukrainian national revival of the 19th and 20th centuries, a new assessment of the religious factor in public life proposed by the Ukrainian radical activists ( M. Drahomanov, I. Franko, M. Pavlik), and significant socio-political, national-cultural and spiritual shifts caused by the events of the First World War. Other researchers of Ukrainian Calvinism, who based their analysis on the confessional-polemical approach (I.Vlasovsky, M.Stepanovich), interpreted Protestantism in Ukraine as a product of Western cultural and religious influences, alien to Ukrainian spirituality and culture.

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