scholarly journals Living With the I-Word: Improvisation and its Alternates

Author(s):  
Robert Labaree

The word improvisation is burdened with limitations placed on it by changes occurring in Europe in the 19th century, the period when the model of the hyphenated performer-composer prevailing in Europe up to that point was being split into two specialties. By the 20th century, composition and improvisation had been cast in bronze as mutually defining opposites, the presumed starting point of any approach to how music is made and heard, regardless of historical period or cultural origin. As a way of creating a more critical approach to discourse dependent on the ubiquitous "I-word," this essay seeks to problematize it by focusing on the more general concept of variability itself, or mouvance, as the French literary scholar Paul Zumthor described it in his studies of medieval lyric poetry. More than a century of scholarship on the music of Chopin, the songs of the medieval troubadours, folk music of the British Isles and Balkans, and Turkish classical music—all repertoires which do not rely on the conventions of I-discourse—will provide examples of differing levels of tolerance for performer control of musical events, of different definitions of musicianship, and of different performance poetics. Reflex jazz-related I-genres intentionally play no role in this exercise, forcing us to reflect on I-qualities where we least expect to find them and thus to re-examine our dependence on the I-concept in our thinking about the full spectrum of music-making. None of the I-alternates offered here—musicianship, mouvance, control, variability, or poetics—can be considered competitors for the I-word’s universalizing pretensions, but rather offer insight into what I believe is the I-word’s real content.

Author(s):  
Diana Lawryshyn

Ukrainian folk music has been embedded into much of the classical music we hear. Mykola Leontovych and Peter Wilhousky are credited for the ever-famous piece Carol of the Bells, an arrangement of a Ukrainian Epiphany carol called Shchedryk (Щедрик). Despite the applicability of Ukrainian folk-inspired music in our society, people are generally unaware of its origin. In fact, researcher Yakov Soroker provides evidence of Ukrainian folk inspiration in various classical pieces being misclassified as Russian, Polish, and/or Hungarian. Ukrainian classical music, for many reasons pertaining to its unstable history, is not well known outside Ukraine and, therefore, is rarely discussed. This has limited potential insights it might bring to those who have interest in its place in Western music. My research explores the influence that Ukrainian folk traditions have had on contemporary classical music. My research has come from gathering and sifting through historical literature about the origins of classical, Ukrainian classical, Ukrainian folk, and other folk music works. I have also listened to selected works and examined the critiques of experts to form conclusions about how composers today have been influenced, knowingly or otherwise, by Ukrainian folk music. Going one step further, in order to provide a deeper, practical insight into the creative process of composers who have been influenced by Ukrainian folk music, I have composed a piece of my own influenced by Ukrainian folklore. 


Diagnosis ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-11 ◽  
Author(s):  
Petteri Pietikainen ◽  
Jari Turunen

AbstractFocusing on the medical approach to the subjective forms of distress, this article has a three-fold argument. First, the historical starting point of diagnosing distress was neurasthenia during the last two decades of the 19th century. Second, the diagnosis of neurasthenia that initially contained more somatic than mental symptoms was gradually replaced by the more psychologically conceptualized neuroses. Such a psychiatrization of neurosis gradually separated mental and somatic syndromes into two distinct diagnostic categories, those of mental and somatic. Third, when modern “neuroses” are seen in the framework of distress rather than disease, it provides tools for new kinds of interventions, in which the principal aim is to alleviate the subjective distress with all possible and reasonable means and methods. As the social context constitutes a crucial “etiology” to medicalized forms of distress, we need new, context-based approaches to both analyze and alleviate such distress. In our historical and medical approach to these “diagnoses of distress”, we are guided by the belief that analyzing diagnostic categories can provide important insight into the mechanisms behind our changing conceptions of health and wellbeing.


2020 ◽  
pp. 24-67
Author(s):  
Peter Mercer-Taylor

Christian worship factored centrally in the American circulation of psalm and hymn tunes in the 19th century, but the repertoire traveled far and wide beyond actual church services. Musical societies, conventions, singing schools, social gatherings of a religious nature, and domestic settings all provided venues for the singing of psalmody. This chapter undertakes a broad exploration of the place of psalm and hymn tunes in pre–Civil War American culture. In its closing stretch, however, it pivots toward those vibrant registers of American sacred music-making that lay beyond the Europeanized psalmodic practices that form this book’s focus. Psalmodic adaptations of classical music would never have been encountered by most of the nation’s enslaved, nor by most Native Americans. They also had little impact on the lives of many in the country’s southern and western regions who preferred the markedly different psalmodic tradition associated with “shape notes.”


Author(s):  
Levente Puskás

The saxophone is one of the most popular, almost ubiquitous instruments of our time. It is unimaginable that the saxophone would not appear in an orchestra or band in jazz, popular music, dance music, pop music, or even folk music. It is not widely known, however, that the story and history of the saxophone dates as far back as around 170(!) years ago. In 2014 the 200th birthday of Adolphe Sax the inventor, after whom the instrument got its name, was celebrated. Sax was the first saxophone professor at the Conservatoire de Paris. For most of the 19th century, mostly Classical and Romantic pieces were usually played by the saxophone, as the genre of jazz came into existence only around the 1910s–1920s. At that point classical and jazz (popular) saxophone music separated. Differences between the two styles can still be observed in both musical approach and technique. This study presents the similarities and differences between these two highly distinct approaches. Keywords: saxophone, Adolphe Sax, classical music, jazz


2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 99-115
Author(s):  
Borislav Marušić ◽  
Sanda Katavić-Čaušić

Abstract The aim of this paper is to research the word class adjective in one sequence of the ESP: Business English, more precisely English business magazines online. It is an empirical study on the corpus taken from a variety of business magazines online. The empirical analysis allows a comprehensive insight into the word class adjective in this variety of Business English and makes its contribution to English syntax, semantics and word formation. The syntactic part analyses the adjective position in the sentence. The semantic part of the study identifies the most common adjectives that appear in English business magazines online. Most of the analysis is devoted to the word formation of the adjectives found in the corpus. The corpus is analysed in such a way that it enables its division into compounds, derivatives and conversions. The results obtained in this way will give a comprehensive picture of the word class adjective in this type of Business English and can act as a starting point for further research of the word class adjective.


Author(s):  
Pete Dale

Numerous claims have been made by a wide range of commentators that punk is somehow “a folk music” of some kind. Doubtless there are several continuities. Indeed, both tend to encourage amateur music-making, both often have affiliations with the Left, and both emerge at least partly from a collective/anti-competitive approach to music-making. However, there are also significant tensions between punk and folk as ideas/ideals and as applied in practice. Most obviously, punk makes claims to a “year zero” creativity (despite inevitably offering re-presentation of at least some existing elements in every instance), whereas folk music is supposed to carry forward a tradition (which, thankfully, is more recognized in recent decades as a subject-to-change “living tradition” than was the case in folk’s more purist periods). Politically, meanwhile, postwar folk has tended more toward a socialist and/or Marxist orientation, both in the US and UK, whereas punk has at least rhetorically claimed to be in favor of “anarchy” (in the UK, in particular). Collective creativity and competitive tendencies also differ between the two (perceived) genre areas. Although the folk scene’s “floor singer” tradition offers a dispersal of expressive opportunity comparable in some ways to the “anyone can do it” idea that gets associated with punk, the creative expectation of the individual within the group differs between the two. Punk has some similarities to folk, then, but there are tensions, too, and these are well worth examining if one is serious about testing out the common claim, in both folk and punk, that “anyone can do it.”


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (11) ◽  
pp. 6159
Author(s):  
Huihui Gao ◽  
Shangyi Zhou

The notion of place has raised great concern within weaving tourism studies in recent decades. Nevertheless, dialectical indigenous considerations of Edward Relph’s phenomenological concepts of place and placelessness are still insufficient, particularly in non-Western countries. Phenomenology, as an immersive approach, provides an open and descriptive examination of the diverse perceptions and constitutive meanings of a place. From a phenomenological perspective, this article aims to explore the dynamic grasping of place and placelessness in tourism experiences. Twenty-four tourists participated in the research in Marco Polo Plaza in Italian Style Town, a concession for a particular historical period, in Tianjin, China. The findings suggest that tourists’ experiences could be ordered into three themes: (1) encountering a place labelled recreation and entertainment, (2) encountering an exotic heterogeneous place, and (3) encountering a lived place in the lifeworld. These results emphasize that place and placelessness are intertwined paradoxically beyond the binary, and such a nonlinear, dialectical, and subtle dimension is the possible inspiration that the phenomenological perspective brings to tourism research. Drawing on the inevitability of tourists’ diverse perceptions, we advance that an open multi-sensuous engagement and inclusive geographic practices offer an insight into the understanding of sustainability.


Antiquity ◽  
1990 ◽  
Vol 64 (243) ◽  
pp. 275-282 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marilyn Palmer

A thematic or a period discipline?Industrial archaeology has generally been defined as a thematic discipline, concerned with only one aspect of man’s past activity. Although the term ‘archaeology of industry’ was used in the 19th century, it was Michael Rix who used the phrase ‘industrial archaeology’ in print for the first time (Rix 1955). He later defined industrial archaeology as ‘recording, preserving in selected cases and interpreting the sites and structures of early industrial activity, particularly the monuments of the Industrial Revolution’ (Rix 1967: 5). The emphasis on the term ‘industrial monument’ followed a need to define an industrial class of Ancient Monument so that some examples would be scheduled. Industrial archaeology, then, grew from the need to record and preserve standing structures threatened with demolition rather than an inherent desire to understand more about the historical period of the monuments. It was perhaps felt that understanding of the industrial revolution period was more readily arrived at by other means, particularly written historical evidence. During the ‘rescue’ years of the 1960s and 1970s, archaeology was one of the two areas of fastest university expansion and very popular in extra-mural teaching. But none of the archaeology departments took up industrial archaeology, although many of the extra-mural departments did; it is largely as a part-time, amateur interest that industrial archaeology has flourished ever since. The author’s post as an industrial archaeologist in the Leicester archaeology department is one of the first occasions on which the specialism has been given a place in full-time undergraduate archaeology courses.


Author(s):  
Johann Boos ◽  
Toivo Leiger

The paper aims to develop for sequence spacesEa general concept for reconciling certain results, for example inclusion theorems, concerning generalizations of the Köthe-Toeplitz dualsE×(×∈{α,β})combined with dualities(E,G),G⊂E×, and theSAK-property (weak sectional convergence). TakingEβ:={(yk)∈ω:=𝕜ℕ|(ykxk)∈cs}=:Ecs, wherecsdenotes the set of all summable sequences, as a starting point, then we get a general substitute ofEcsby replacingcsby any locally convex sequence spaceSwith sums∈S′(in particular, a sum space) as defined by Ruckle (1970). This idea provides a dual pair(E,ES)of sequence spaces and gives rise for a generalization of the solid topology and for the investigation of the continuity of quasi-matrix maps relative to topologies of the duality(E,Eβ). That research is the basis for general versions of three types of inclusion theorems: two of them are originally due to Bennett and Kalton (1973) and generalized by the authors (see Boos and Leiger (1993 and 1997)), and the third was done by Große-Erdmann (1992). Finally, the generalizations, carried out in this paper, are justified by four applications with results around different kinds of Köthe-Toeplitz duals and related section properties.


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