"If the Pretty Little Hand Won't Stretch": Music for the Fair Sex in Eighteenth-Century Germany

1999 ◽  
Vol 52 (2) ◽  
pp. 203-254 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Head
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Instrumental Music ◽  
Young Lady ◽  
Musical Performance ◽  
Private Sphere ◽  
Public Spheres ◽  
Musical Practice ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World

The image of the young lady at music is part of the mythology of the eighteenth century, nostalgically summoning a bygone era in European manners. How should such images be read, and to what uses are they put in the construction of the past and the present? Richard Leppert appeals to eighteenth-century iconography to argue the disciplinary function of music on women. This article extends Leppert's arguments in a newly uncovered repertory of songs and keyboard works published in eighteenth-century Germany "for the fair sex." Moving between prescriptions about musical practice specifically and women's character and place in the world more broadly, this music evinces cautionary and disciplinary rhetorics that accord with Leppert's readings. But whereas Leppert deals with paintings-more or less official representations-musical performance and reception complicate the picture. In performance, music offers possibilities for negotiation. On closer examination, instrumental music for the fair sex reveals a complex web of generic and stylistic motifs that undermine the manifest rhetoric of easiness and simplicity in the repertory and invoke the professional and public spheres. Questioning as well as espousing virtue, and haunted by the figure of the rake, songs for ladies reflect the instability in the emergent discourses of bourgeois femininity and the private sphere.

Christopher Smart's Madness

PMLA ◽  
1930 ◽  
Vol 45 (4) ◽  
pp. 1014-1022
Author(s):  
Charles David Abbott
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World ◽  
National Biography ◽  
Entire Text

Few lyric poems of the eighteenth century have aroused as much interest during the past fifty years as Christopher Smart's Song to David. Poets, critics, and scholars have lavished praises upon it ever since Browning so liberally commended it in his Parleyings. It appears—usually only in part—in nearly all the anthologies, and in England the entire text has several times been separately reprinted. So much attention to the poem has led inevitably to a desire for more knowledge about the poet, and various scholars have attempted to satisfy this desire. Nearly all, however, have been baffled by the complications of the poet's periods of insanity, or else have jumped to conclusions that will not fit the facts. The late Sir Edmund Gosse, by the beauty and urbanity of his appreciation of Smart's poetic genius, in Gossip in a Library in 1891, did much to rehabilitate him in the world of letters. Unfortunately, Sir Edmund was seriously wrong in many of his most essential statements concerning the poet's life, and his misconceptions and misinterpretations of the facts have served as the basis of nearly all subsequent accounts, including that by Thomas Seccombe in the Dictionary of National Biography.

scholarly journals An Artist in the Making. Yehuda Leib ben Eliyya Ha-Cohen’s Haggadah, Copenhagen, 1769

2020 ◽  
Vol 59 ◽  
pp. 43
Author(s):  
Ulf G. Haxen
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Old Testament ◽  
Library Of Congress ◽  
Book Illustration ◽  
Babylonian Talmud ◽  
New Approach ◽  
Home Town ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World ◽  
Historical Periods

Ulf G. Haxen: An Artist in the Making – Yehuda Leib ben Eliyya Ha-Cohen’s Haggadah, Copenhagen, 1769 ‘Eclecticism’ as an artistic term refers to an approach rather than a style, and is generally used to describe the combination of different elements from various art-historical periods – or pejoratively to imply a lack of originality. Proponents of eclecticism argue more favourably, however, with reference to the 16th century Carracci family and their Bolognese followers, that the demands of modernity (i.e. the new Baroque style) could be met by skilful adaptation of art features from various styles of the past. The essay concerns the eighteenth century scribe and miniaturist Yehuda Leib ben Eliyah Ha-Cohen’s illustrated Haggadah liturgy of the second book of the, Old Testament Exodus, which represents a shift of paradigm away from the traditional Bohemia-Moravian school of Jewish book-painting towards a new approach. Our artist experiments freely, and to a certain extent successfully, with a range of different styles, motifs, themes, and iconographical traits, such as conversation pieces. Yehuda Leib Ha-Cohen may have abandoned his home-town, the illustrious rabbinic center Lissa/Leszno in Poland, after a fire devastated its Jewish quarter in 1767. He migrated to Denmark and lived and worked in Copenhagen for at least ten years, as indicated by two of his extant works, dated Copenhagen 1769 and 1779 respectively. He was thus a contemporary of another Danish Jewish master of the Bohemia – Moravian school, Uri Feibush ben Yitshak Segal, whose iconic miniature work The Copenhagen Haggadah (1739) is well-known by art historians in the field. Yehuda Leib Ha-Cohen drew some of his Haggadic themes from two main sources, the Icones Biblicae by Mathäus Merian and the Amsterdam Haggadot 1695 and 1712 (e.g. Pit’om and Ramses, The Meal Before the Flight). He never imitates his models, however. He adapts the standard motifs according to his own stylistic perception of symmetry and perspective, furnishing the illustrations with a muted gouache colouring. Several of his Haggadic themes are executed with inventiveness, pictorial imagination, and a subtle sense of humour, such as The Seder Table, The Four Sons, The Finding of the Infant Moses, Solomon’s Temple, and Belshazzars Feast.  Yehuda Leib’s enigmatic reference to the ‘the masons’ (Hebrew הבנאים ) in the manuscript’s colophon has until now hardly been satisfactorily interpreted. Incidentally, however, another Hebrew prayer-book written and decorated by Mayer Schmalkalden in Mainz in 1745, recently acquired by Library of Congress, bears the same phrase (fi ‘inyan ha-bana’im = according to the code of the Masons). Dr. Ann Brener, a Hebrew specialist at the Oriental Department of Library of Congress, suggests in an unpublished essay, that the reference may be an allusion to ‘the Talmudic scholars who engage in building up the world of civilization’, (The Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 114a). However that may be, Yehuda Leib Ha-Cohen’s miniatures constitute a veritable change of paradigm as far as eighteenth-century Hebrew book illustration is concerned.

Elijah in Dorset: William Freke and Enthusiasm in England and the Atlantic World at the Turn of the Eighteenth Century

2018 ◽  
Vol 87 (2) ◽  
pp. 424-451 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Greig
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
New Jerusalem ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World ◽  
Career Research ◽  
Second Coming

In 1709, William Freke, a pious, well-educated, and well-read English gentleman living in Dorset, declared to the world that he was the second coming of Elijah, sent to announce the arrival of the New Jerusalem and to proclaim the beginning of Christ's reign upon earth. There is no evidence to indicate that anyone at the time took him seriously, and given this absence of contemporary interest, it might be tempting to dismiss Freke as an isolated and insignificant crackpot. But this would be a misreading of his career. Research over the past couple of decades has decisively determined that the twenty years following 1690 were a period of intense religious speculation in England and the larger Atlantic world when expectations of the millennium were high. Far from being an isolated enthusiast crying in the wilderness, Freke was in fact a prophet who was connected in a variety of ways to a much larger network of religious enthusiasts in England and on the Continent that reveals much about the religious milieu of, and the millenarian interconnections that existed during, the last decade of the seventeenth and first decade of the eighteenth century.

On the Anniversaries of Mozart, Kierkegaard and Barth

1956 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 251-263
Author(s):  
Arthur C. Cochrane
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart ◽  
New Age ◽  
Karl Barth ◽  
The Other ◽  
New Era ◽  
The Past ◽  
200Th Anniversary ◽  
The World

Perhaps an astrologer would claim that due to some remarkable astral influence the year 1955–6 marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart on 27th January 1956; the centenary of the death of Sören Kierkegaard on 11th November 1955, and the seventieth birthday of Karl Barth on 10th May 1956. The three dates are being suitably observed by music-lovers and scholars the world over. But something more than a disposition of the stars links their names together. For if, as we believe, Kierkegaard and Barth, like Luther and Calvin in the sixteenth century, represent the end of an epoch and the dawn of a new era, then according to both men, Mozart is the herald of a new age. Though Mozart lived in the eighteenth century, he actually represented the end of the Age of Absolutism in which he lived and which lingered on in idealism and contemporary existentialism. At the same time he marked the beginning of a new day in which men would begin, not with expressions of their own consciousness, but with grateful praise to the Creator who has revealed Himself totheir consciousness. In Mozart's music Kierkegaard believed he had heard a No to the past: to man who is the measure of all things. Barth, on the other hand, believes he has heard a Yes to the goodness of God's creatures. Not that Mozart himself was a sort of Hegelian synthesis.

scholarly journals OS LIMITES DO CORPO

2012 ◽  
Vol 19 (1.2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Cássio M. Turra
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Technological Development ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World ◽  
Socioeconomic Consequences

Our chances of reaching 100 years of age are significantly higher than those of our ancestors who lived until the eighteenth century. Over the past two centuries, advances in public health, income gains, and the continuous technological development have enabled longevity to reach historically unprecedented levels. This article critically surveys the large and growing literature on factors that may have contributed to reducing mortality levels in the world. We are particularly interested on issues that currently have been the focus of demographers: the levels and patterns of mortality at advanced ages, the proliferation of centenarians, and the demographic and socioeconomic consequences of longevity gains. Whenever possible, we discuss the specific case of Brazil.

England in 1946

1946 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 501-510
Author(s):  
Bernard Wall
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Other ◽  
Standard Of Living ◽  
The Past ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The World ◽  
The Stability ◽  
Striking Contrast

It is perhaps of the nature of wars that they should hasten developments endemic in a society and bring to pass in a few short years what would also have happened under conditions of peace, but in a much longer span of time. This at least has been in some measure the effect of the recent war on Great Britain's position in the world. It is now apparent and generally recognized that the situation of privilege if not domination which was the lot of the English people from the time before the Seven Years War—or from the middle of the eighteenth century onwards—has come to an end. Perhaps this change in England's position has been recognized for some while in the United States. On the other hand Americans have perhaps never realized the striking contrast in the past between the standard of living and the stability and security of this island and that of the larger continental countries and centers of force—France and Germany.

What is Ancient History?

Daedalus ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 145 (2) ◽  
pp. 113-121
Author(s):  
Ian Morris ◽  
Walter Scheidel
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Classical Model ◽  
World History ◽  
Turning Points ◽  
Evolutionary Model ◽  
First Century ◽  
Ancient History ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World ◽  
Ancient Times

Every society has told stories about ancient times, but contemporary ancient history was the product of two main developments. The first was the invention of writing, which made scholarly study of the past possible, and the second was the explosion of knowledge about the world from the eighteenth century onward. Europeans responded to this explosion by inventing two main versions of antiquity: the first, an evolutionary model, was global and went back to the origins of humanity; and the second, a classical model, treated Greece and Rome as turning points in world history. These two views of antiquity have competed for two hundred and fifty years, but in the twenty-first century, the evidence and methods available to ancient historians are changing faster than at any other time since the debate began. We should therefore expect the balance between the two theories to shift dramatically. We close by considering some possible areas of engagement.

Antiquities and Political Prestige in the Early Modern Era

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margarita Diaz-Andreu
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Urban Landscape ◽  
Country House ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The World ◽  
The One ◽  
Early Modern Era ◽  
Modern Era

Television programmes about archaeology, the Asterix series on many children’s bookshelves, Celtic-flavoured holidays in Ireland, the megalomaniacal classical style in the business buildings erected since the late 1980s—all these tell us about the enduring popularity of the past in people’s minds. The intellectual ‘other side of the coin’ are the departments of archaeology, museums of archaeology, and heritage departments operating all over the world. This interest in the past is certainly not new. Whereas the latter—the museums, university and heritage departments—only appeared in the urban landscape less than two hundred years ago, by then several generations of intellectuals with knowledge in the arts had been aware of the existence of an ancient past. A Doric folly on the bank of the river overlooked by the cathedral in the pretty city of Durham was built in 1830 by a Polish count and the eighteenth-century estate of La Alameda de Osuna on the outskirts of Madrid, with its Greek-inspired temple of love with a statue of Bacchus (substituting the original Venus statue that had been taken by the Napoleonic troops on their withdrawal to France)—are only two examples of my own personal daily encounter with the past I have had at diVerent periods in my life. Yet, a different type of past is also familiar to me, a past that is more related to the nation’s past. In La Alameda de Osuna estate, in addition to its many classical features, there is an eighteenth-century copy of a medieval hermit’s chapel, and a country house which used to have displayed automatons in traditional dress. In the seventeenth century a beautiful Gothic-style font cover was made for Durham cathedral illustrating a continuity with a medieval past. Many other examples could be added. All of them illustrate an obsession with the past which on the one hand has lasted at least several centuries. On the other, however, they also appear to indicate an initial quasi-fixation with the classical period, which gradually became counter-balanced by an appeal to each country’s past. This reveals a continuous transformation in time and space in the discourse of the past.

The Library of Bryant Barrett, Laceman and Country Squire

2013 ◽  
Vol 31 (4) ◽  
pp. 549-572
Author(s):  
Frans Korsten ◽  
Jos Blom ◽  
Frans Blom
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Present Article ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
New Developments ◽  
Ordinary Life ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World ◽  
Opening Up ◽  
Insight Into

Bryant Barrett (c.1715–1790) was a Catholic tradesman who managed to become affluent enough to be able to collect a library of nearly 2,000 volumes. His library catalogues are still extant and the aim of the present article is to analyse these in order to get an insight into the intellectual world of an eighteenth-century RC self-made man. There are a number of catalogues of institutional RC libraries and the occasional catalogue of an RC clergyman, but as far as we know the Barrett catalogues are a unique register of the books possessed by an ‘ordinary’ RC layman. The traditional picture of eighteenth-century English Catholic life is that of a dwindling community with a rather provincial and conservative outlook on life. Heroic martyrdom was a feature of the past: ordinary life entailed guarding against modern enlightenment views and – towards the end of the century – internal discussions about the concessions necessary to achieve Catholic emancipation. Barrett's library modifies this picture in a number of ways: it reveals an eminently practical man who was also an intellectual, someone interested in the past, loyal to his faith, knowledgeable about the latest developments in industry and science, intrigued by perspectives opening up through exploration and travel, fascinated with new developments and ideas. Barrett was a both a devout Roman Catholic and a well-read man of the world.

scholarly journals Traditional music of Prizren Gora in the shadow of the Ottoman empire

Muzikologija ◽  
2016 ◽  
pp. 101-132 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sanja Rankovic
Keyword(s):  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Instrumental Music ◽  
Traditional Music ◽  
Musical Performance ◽  
The Balkans ◽  
The Past ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
New Religion ◽  
Traditional Manner

Located at the southernmost part of Kosovo and Metohija, on the slopes of the Sharr Mountains, Gora represents a place once inhabited by the Serbian Orthodox population, who converted to Islam under the Turkish occupation of the Balkans. The faith conversion began in the 16th and ended in the 19th century, at which point there had still been some remains of Orthodox churches left on the territory of Gora. The acceptance of the new religion and other values passed on by the Ottoman Empire brought about changes in terms of identity, so, nowadays, inhabitants identify themselves as the Goranci/Gorani people. To this very day, their cultural matrix reflects a combination of musical creations which probably preceded the change of religion as well as those variations established by the Turkish domination. These phenomena can be tracked on the level of both their context and the musical text. The Gorani celebrate Christian holidays (Christmas and St George?s Day), and keep those holidays that are part of Islamic practice (Sunnah and Bayram). As an example of an older, traditional manner of musical expression, the two-part ?aloud? (na glas) singing has a dominant second interval in a narrow tonal ambitus and a free metro-rhythmical organization. This form of singing is usually shaped into octosyllable and it is characterized by text improvisation which happens simultaneously with a certain action. Its interpretation is associated with St George?s Day, wedding, Sunnah, and other holidays. Songs that accompany the dance are sung in a heterophonic manner or in unison, accompanied by the tambourine (emic term: daire or def). Unlike the two-part ?aloud? singing, performing the songs in unison with the tambourine and dance has wider tonal systems with a periodical case of an excessive second. However, the very emergence of numerous instruments such as the tambourine, kaval, tambura and zurla, shows a considerable Turkish-Eastern influence. This influence is especially noticeable in the Romani ?musicking? using zurla, which typically involves a combination of traditional music of different nations, predominantly Turkish and Albanian. Turkish influence tied to instrumental music was conveyed to the vocal singing, particularly to singing songs together with using the tambourine while dancing, as well as to singing to the accompaniment of the tambura. Within these modes of musical performance, asymmetrical rhythms are used, along with the augmented second, which ethnomusicological literature often cites as an element of Oriental culture. By overviewing the Gorani musical practice and the ?otherness? in diachrony, it is evident that what was known as otherness in the past now represents an integral part of the identity. The practices established before Islam, as well as those brought by this religion, are manifested in terms of context and text. It is obvious that the Gorani people have created their own musical uniqueness throughout the centuries of cultural turmoil.

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