Forward-Looking Retrospection: Enharmonicism in the Classical Era

2002 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 332-373 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paula Telesco

Enharmonicism steps to the fore only occasionally in 18th-century music. Indeed, over the past two centuries, it has been commonly assumed that it was invoked only when a special affect demanded it (as in the much-discussed "Dance of the Furies" from Rameau's Hippolyte et Aricie). But a survey of 18th-century music refutes this perception and reveals that the enharmonicism of the 18th century can be broadly defined as belonging to one of two categories: simultaneous or immediate enharmonicism, and retrospective enharmonicism. Most early 18th-century examples restrict their usage to the simultaneous/immediate type, which consists of reinterpretations of enharmonic pivot chords. Retrospective enharmonicism, on the other hand, is less common than immediate enharmonicism but is remarkable because it presages the expansion of the diatonic tonal system into the chromatic tonal system of the 19th century. Retrospective enharmonicism does not involve the reinterpretation of an enharmonic pivot chord, nor is a reinterpretation perceived at any one point; it becomes clear only in retrospect that one must have occurred. Rather than a negation of some resolution tendency, as happens in the reinterpretation of a dominant seventh as an augmented sixth, there is a (typically large-scale) trajectory away from some tonic which is eventually regained through the enharmonic door. Some note or chord is respelled as its enharmonic equivalent, but without any aural clue. Drastic key changes of the sort typically encountered in instances of retrospective enharmonicism are for the most part proscribed in the writings of such composers and theorists as Rameau, Kirnberger, Koch, Heinichen, and Vogler, all of whom wrote in detail about staying within an orbit of closely related keys and rarely going directly from one key to another too far away. Nevertheless, this type of enharmonicism was a recognized compositional resource which, though used relatively infrequently in the 18th century, came to occupy a more central place in the realm of available compositional techniques in the 19th century.

2017 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Ida Bagus Putu Prajna Yogi

The arrival of Chinese People on a large scale in the early 18th century in West Kalimantan due to the presence of a large gold potential in the area. Monterado is one of the gold mining landscape in West Kalimantan. This cultural landscape shows the activity of big mining and technology owned by the Chinese miners. In addition to the ability to mine, it turns out the Chinese also formed an organization called "kongsi" to support the mining activities. Settlements and cities that grew as a result of gold mining Monterado appear in coastal areas, which is currently a Singkawang. The dissolution of the kongsi in Monterado in the middle of the 19th century, led to stop mining activities in Monterado Similarly, for mining authority was taken over by the colonial, but the miners did not agree with it and choose to stop mining.Kedatangan orang Cina di Kalimantan Barat dalam sekala besar terjadi pada abad ke 18 Masehi, dikarenakan adanya potensi emas di wilayah tersebut. Monterado adalah salah satu lanskap pertambangan emas terbesar di Kalimantan Barat. Lanskap budaya tersebut menunjukan aktifitas pertambangan yang besar dan teknologi yang dimiliki oleh para penambang Cina pada saat itu. Selain kemampuan untuk tambang, ternyata China juga membentuk sebuah organisasi yang disebut "kongsi" untuk mendukung kegiatan pertambangan. Pemukiman dan kota-kota yang tumbuh sebagai pengaruh dari pertambangan emas Monterado muncul di wilayah pesisir, yang saat ini menjadi Kota Singkawang. Data mengenai permukiman di lokasi tambang sangat minim, hal tersebut diperkirakan masyarakat tambang lebih memilih untuk menetap di daerah pelabuhan. Namun, beberapa kuburan Cina dan sisa tiang rumah ditemukan di lokasi tambang. Pembubaran kongsi di Monterado di pertengahan abad ke-19 menyebabkan berhentinya kegiatan pertambangan di lokasi tersebut. Setelah pertambangan diambil alih oleh pemerintah Belanda para penambang emas Cina tetap memilih untuk tidak menambang lagi sebab kegiatan menambang emas tersebut dianggap sudah tidak menguntungkan.


2021 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 195-217

Among the various human attitudes toward a pandemic, along with fear, despair and anger, there is also an urge to praise the catastrophe or imbue it with some sort of hope. In 2020 such hopes were voiced in the stream of all the other COVID-19 reactions and interpretations in the form of predictions of imminent social, political or economic changes that may or must be brought on by the pandemic, or as calls to “rise above” the common human sentiment and see the pandemic as some sort of cruel-but-necessary bitter pill to cure human depravity or social disorganization. Is it really possible for a plague of any kind to be considered a relief? Or perhaps a just punishment? In order to assess the validity of such interpretations, this paper considers the artistic reactions to the pandemics of the past, specifically the images of the plague from Alexander Pushkin’s play Feast During the Plague, Antonin Artaud’s essay “The Theatre and the Plague” and Albert Camus’s novel The Plague. These works in different ways explore an attitude in which a plague can be praised in some respect. The plague can be a means of self-overcoming and purification for both an individual and for society. At the same time, Pushkin and Camus, each in his own way and by different means, show the illusory nature of that attitude. A mass catastrophe can reveal the resources already present in humankind, but it does not help either the individual or the society to progress.


2018 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-73 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charlotte Galves

Abstract This article introduces the Tycho Brahe Corpus (TBC), a parsed corpus of Historical Portuguese built on the model of the Penn-York Corpora of English. As an illustration of the usefulness of the TBC, the article presents research on the evolution of the position and interpretation of subjects in Portuguese from the 16th to the 19th century. Two main claims emerge, in response to questions that have largely remained unanswered until now, due to the paucity of available data. One is that the texts of the classical period instantiate verb-movement to Comp in matrix clauses, reflecting a V2 grammar. The other is that quantitative and qualitative changes appearing in the texts of the authors born from the beginning of the 18th century on indicate that, at this period, verb-movement to Comp was lost and the modern SVO grammar emerged.


Author(s):  
Mark V. Barrow

The prospect of extinction, the complete loss of a species or other group of organisms, has long provoked strong responses. Until the turn of the 18th century, deeply held and widely shared beliefs about the order of nature led to a firm rejection of the possibility that species could entirely vanish. During the 19th century, however, resistance to the idea of extinction gave way to widespread acceptance following the discovery of the fossil remains of numerous previously unknown forms and direct experience with contemporary human-driven decline and the destruction of several species. In an effort to stem continued loss, at the turn of the 19th century, naturalists, conservationists, and sportsmen developed arguments for preventing extinction, created wildlife conservation organizations, lobbied for early protective laws and treaties, pushed for the first government-sponsored parks and refuges, and experimented with captive breeding. In the first half of the 20th century, scientists began systematically gathering more data about the problem through global inventories of endangered species and the first life-history and ecological studies of those species. The second half of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st centuries have been characterized both by accelerating threats to the world’s biota and greater attention to the problem of extinction. Powerful new laws, like the U.S. Endangered Species Act of 1973, have been enacted and numerous international agreements negotiated in an attempt to address the issue. Despite considerable effort, scientists remain fearful that the current rate of species loss is similar to that experienced during the five great mass extinction events identified in the fossil record, leading to declarations that the world is facing a biodiversity crisis. Responding to this crisis, often referred to as the sixth extinction, scientists have launched a new interdisciplinary, mission-oriented discipline, conservation biology, that seeks not just to understand but also to reverse biota loss. Scientists and conservationists have also developed controversial new approaches to the growing problem of extinction: rewilding, which involves establishing expansive core reserves that are connected with migratory corridors and that include populations of apex predators, and de-extinction, which uses genetic engineering techniques in a bid to resurrect lost species. Even with the development of new knowledge and new tools that seek to reverse large-scale species decline, a new and particularly imposing danger, climate change, looms on the horizon, threatening to undermine those efforts.


2006 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 235-246 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Trudgill ◽  
Elizabeth Gordon

The division of the world’s Englishes into rhotic and non-rhotic types is clearly due to the fact that the former are conservative in not having undergone loss of non-prevocalic /r/, whereas the latter have. The beginnings of the loss of non-prevocalic /r/ in English have generally been dated by historians of the language to the 18th century. It is therefore obvious, and has been widely accepted, that Irish English, Canadian English, and American English are predominantly rhotic because the English language was exported to these colonial areas before the loss of rhoticity in England began; and that the Southern Hemisphere Englishes are non-rhotic because English was exported to these areas in the 19th century after the loss of rhoticity. Analysing newly-discovered data from Australia, we present some surprising evidence that shows that this obvious conclusion is incorrect.


2013 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 50-98 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leo Catana

Abstract This article critically explores the history and nature of a hermeneutic assumption which frequently guided interpretations of Plotinus from the 18th century onwards, namely that Plotinus advanced a system of philosophy. It is argued that this assumption was introduced relatively late, in the 18th and 19th centuries, and that it was primarily made possible by Brucker’s methodology for the history of philosophy, dating from the 1740s, to which the concept of a ‘system of philosophy’ was essential. It is observed that the concept is absent from Ficino’s commentary from the 15th century, and that it remained absent in interpretations produced between the 15th and 18th centuries. It is also argued that the assumption of a ‘system of philosophy’ in Plotinus is historically incorrect—we do not find this concept in Plotinus’ writings, and his own statements about method point in other directions. Eduard Zeller (active in the second half of the 19th century) is typically regarded as the first to give a satisfying account of Plotinus’ philosophy as a whole. In this article, on the other hand, Zeller is seen as having finalised a tradition initiated in the 18th century. Very few Plotinus scholars have examined the interpretative development prior to Zeller. Schiavone (1952) and Bonetti (1971), for instance, have given little attention to Brucker’s introduction of the concept of a ‘system of philosophy’. The present analysis, then, has value for an understanding of Plotinus’ Enneads. It also explains why “pre-Bruckerian” interpretations of Plotinus appear alien to the modern reader; the analysis may even serve to make some sense of the hermeneutics employed by Renaissance Platonists and commentators, who are often eclipsed from the tradition of Platonism.


Rangifer ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 9 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lennart Lundmark

In the middle of the 16th century we get the first opportunity to a more detailed knowledge of reindeerpastoralism in Sweden. At that time the Sami lived in a hunter-gatherer economy. A family had in average about 10-20 domesticated reindeer, mainly used for transport. They could also be milked and used as decoys when hunting wild reindeer. During late 16th century the Swedish state and merchants bought large amounts of fur from the Sami. The common payment was butter and flour. This created a new prosperity, which lead to a considerable increase in population in Swedish Lapland. The population became too large for a hunter-gatherer economy. A crisis in early 17th century was the starting point for the transition to a large-scale nomadic reindeer pastoralism. Up to the middle of the 18th century intensive reindeer pastoralism was successful. But the pastoralism became gradually too intensive and diseases started to spread when the herds were kept too densely crowded for milking in summertime. During the first decades of the 19th century reindeer pastoralism in Sweden went through a major crisis. The number of reindeer herding mountain-Sami decreased considerably, mainly because they went to live permanently along the Norwegian coastline. Intensive reindeer pastoralism started to give way for extensive herding towards the end of the 19th century. In the north of Sweden influences from the Kautokeino Sami were an important factor, in the south extensive reindeer herding started to expand when the market for meat came closer to the Sami. During the 1920s the milking of reindeer ceased in Sweden, except in a few families. At that time Sami families from the north had been removed southwards. They further demonstrated the superiority of extensive herding to the Sami in mid- and southern Lapland. Reindeer pastoralism is basically a system of interaction between man and animal, but it has been heavily influenced by market forces and state intervention during hundreds of years. To a large extent these long-term external influences have made reindeer pastoralism what it is today. That aspect should not be overlooked when assessing the future prospects of reindeer pastoralism in Scandinavia.Renskötseln i Sverige 1550-1950Abstract in Swedish / Sammanfattning: Först vid mitten av 1500-talet finns det källmaterial som ger oss en tämligen detaljerad bild av renskötseln i Sverige. Vid den tiden levde samerna i en jakt- , fiske- och samlarekonomi. En familj hade normalt 10-20 renar som främst utnyttjades vid transporter. Tamrenarna kunde också mjölkas och fungera som lockdjur vid vildrensjakt. Under senare delen av 1500-talet köpte svenska staten och handelsmän stora mängder pälsverk av samerna. Den vanligaste betalningen var smör och mjöl. Detta skapade ett välstånd som ledde till en betydande folkökning i svenska lappmarken. Befolkningen blev för stor för att rymmas inom ramarna för en jaktochfiskeekonomi. En kris i början av 1600-talet blev startpunkten för övergången till en storskalig rennomadism.Fram till mitten av 1700-talet var den intensiva renskötseln framgångsrik. Men renskötseln blev efterhand alltför intensiv. Under senare delen av 1700-talet började det spridas sjukdomar i de tätt sammanhållna hjordarna. De första decennierna av 1800-talet innebar en allvarlig kris i renskötseln. Antalet renskötande fjällsamer minskade kraftigt, främst genom utvandring till norska kusten. Den intensiva renskötseln med mjölkning av renarna började ersättas av en extensiv renskötsel inriktad på köttproduktion de sista decennierna av 1800-talet. I norr var naturförhållandena och influenser från Kautokeino-samerna en viktig faktor, i söder utvecklades renskötseln i extensiv riktning främst därför att marknaden för renkött kom närmare renskötarna. Under 1920-talet upphörde mjölkningen av renar i Sverige, utom i några enstaka familjer. Då hade förflyttningarna av samer från nordligaste Sverige söderut påskyndat utvecklingen och ytterligare markerat den extensiva renskötselteknikensöverlägsenhet. Tamrenskötsel är ett samspel mellan människa och djur, men det är inte bara en fråga om renskötaren och hans hjord. Externa marknadsfaktorer, beskattning och lagstiftning har haft ett betydandeinflytande på renskötselns utveckling under hundratals år. De har till stor del format renskötseln till vad den är idag. Detta bör beaktas när man gör bedömningar av renskötselns framtid. 


2006 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 157-189 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. Pauling ◽  
H. Paeth

Abstract. We investigate the changes of extreme European winter (December–February) precipitation over the last half millennium and show for various European regions that return periods of extremely wet and dry winters are subject to significant changes both before and after the onset of anthropogenic influences. Additionally, we examine the spatial pattern of the changes of the extremes covering the last 300 years where data quality is sufficient. Over central and eastern Europe dry winters occurred more frequently during the 18th and the second part of the 19th century relative to 1951–2000. Dry winters were less frequent during both the 18th and 19th century over the British Isles and the Mediterranean. Wet winters have been less abundant during the last three centuries compared to 1951–2000 except during the early 18th century in central Europe. Although winter precipitation extremes are affected by climate change, no obvious connection of these changes was found to solar, volcanic or anthropogenic forcing. However, physically meaningful interpretation with atmospheric circulation changes was possible.


Author(s):  
Wilson McLeod

This chapter gives a historical overview of Gaelic in Scotland, including an analysis of its spread to different parts of Scotland in the Middle Ages and the trajectory of demographic decline and language shift since the 18th century. Gaelic became the language of the first Scottish monarchy (the kingdom of Alba) and was widely spoken across Scotland, but then began to decline in the 12th century and became confined to the mountainous northwest of the country (the Highlands). The language became stigmatised as a language of barbarism and the Gaelic community was economically and socially marginalised. Traditional Gaelic society was shattered in the 18th century, with the repression following the Battle of Culloden (1746), followed by the Highland Clearances of the 19th century, which involved large-scale removal of population. Since the 18th century there has been steady language shift in the Highlands, now reaching the last Gaelic communities. The future of Gaelic as a community language has become very uncertain.


MIGRAINE (‘sick headache’) is a common malady, primarily comprising a characteristic visual disturbance (shimmering or scintillating zigzag ‘scotoma’) associated with headache and nausea. The condition is considered to be of very ancient origin, albeit the extreme vagueness of many of the claims for early accounts cited as indicative of migraine. By the 18th century, however, there appear descriptions connoting certain symptoms which undeniably can be construed as migraine, although it was not really until the 19th century that the disease received really serious scientific or medical analysis. The present century, particularly the past twenty-five years, has witnessed considerable research into migraine, and an impressive body of literature, which grows daily, exists on the subject (1). The primary purpose of the present paper is to draw attention to a historically important but overlooked original contribution to the study of migraine made over a century ago by Sir George B. Airy (1801-1892; F.R.S. 1836; P.R.S. 1871; R. S. Copley, and Royal, Medallist) as several of his observations have subsequently become well established clinical entities in the large array of symptoms now recognized as pathognomonic, or variants, of migraine.


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