Confronting the Social: Mode of Production and the Sublime for (Indian) Art Music

2000 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Regula Burckhardt Qureshi
Author(s):  
Eduardo Manzano Moreno

This chapter addresses a very simple question: is it possible to frame coinage in the Early Middle Ages? The answer will be certainly yes, but will also acknowledge that we lack considerable amounts of relevant data potentially available through state-of-the-art methodologies. One problem is, though, that many times we do not really know the relevant questions we can pose on coins; another is that we still have not figured out the social role of coinage in the aftermath of the Roman Empire. This chapter shows a number of things that could only be known thanks to the analysis of coins. And as its title suggests it will also include some reflections on greed and generosity.


Author(s):  
Louçã Francisco ◽  
Ash Michael

This book investigates two questions, how did finance become hegemonic in the capitalist system; and what are the social consequences of the rise of finance? We do not dwell on other topics, such as the evolution of the mode of production or the development of class conflict over the longer run. Our theme is not the genesis, history, dynamics, or contradictions of capitalism but, instead, we address the rise of financialization beginning in the last quarter of the twentieth century and continuing into the twenty-first century. Therefore, we investigate the transnationalization of the circuits and processes of capital accumulation that originated the expansion and financialization of the mechanisms of production, social reproduction, and hegemony, including the ideology, the functioning of the states, and the political decision making. We do not discuss the prevailing neoliberalism as an ideology, although we pay attention to the creation and diffusion of ideas, since we sketch an overview of the process of global restructuring of production and finance leading to the prevalence of the shadow economy....


2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 115-136 ◽  
Author(s):  
HETTIE MALCOMSON

AbstractIn contrast to established musicians, lesser-known composers have received scant attention in art music scholarship. This article, based on an ethnographic study, considers how a group of British composers construed ideas of success and prestige, which I analyse in terms of anthropological writings on exchange, Bourdieusian symbolic economies, and Foucauldian notions of disciplinary power. Prestige was ascribed to composers who created ‘interesting’ music, a category that eclipsed novelty as an aim. Individuality, enacted within a context of individualism, was key to assessing whether music was interesting. This individuality had to be tempered, structured, and embedded in the social norms of this and related ‘art worlds’. The article examines the social processes involved in creating this individuality, musical personality, and music considered interesting.


2018 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 60-77 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katarzyna Grebosz-Haring ◽  
Martin Weichbold

Contemporary art music (CAM) has experienced significant aesthetic changes in recent decades and has acted as a seismograph for socio-cultural movements. New music festivals have had a significant influence on the development and perception of this music by promoting aesthetic pluralism, introducing new concert formats, and expanding to unusual venues. These movements induce changes in the social patterns of CAM consumers and have an impact on the traditional high culture audience profile. This article relies on audience surveys at three European CAM festivals and draws on Bourdieu’s (1984) and Schulze’s (1992) class and lifestyle concepts in order to explore demographic characteristics and social class in CAM audiences. As the results show, consumption of CAM is still a distinctive practice sustained by an exclusive community having considerable education and “musical capital”. Nevertheless, the festivals show heterogeneity in the age structure and motivational structure of attendees as well as in specific patterns regarding knowledge, experience and active involvement with CAM. The analysis shows that aesthetic pluralism can lead to greater social openness regarding social class affiliation.


Beyond Reason ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 87-112
Author(s):  
Sanjay Seth

Showing that history writing is not the simple application of a method to sources bequeathed to us from the past, but rather a code that constructs “the past” in particular ways, this chapter explicates the elements of the code. Modern history treats past objects and texts as the objectified remains of humans who endowed their world with meaning and purpose, while constrained by the social circumstances characterizing their times; this time of theirs is dead, and it can only be represented, not resurrected; the past is only ever the human past, and it does not include ghosts, gods, spirits, or nature. In outlining these core elements of the code of history, it engages with those forms of history writing—the history of art, music, and science—that do not always share all the elements of the code, but for that very reason illuminate all the more clearly what the discipline presupposes.


1979 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 277-300 ◽  
Author(s):  
Johan Galtung

The main thesis of the paper is that technology is not merely a mode of production and therefore neutral; it carries within it a code of structures - economic, social, cultural, and also cognitive. The economic code that inheres in Western Technology demands that industries be capital-intensive, research-intensive, organization-intensive and labour-extensive. On the social plane, the code creates a ‘centre’ and a ‘periphery’, thus perpetuating a structure of inequality. In the cultural arena, it sees the West as entrusted by destiny with the mission of casting the rest of the world in its own mould. In the cognitive field, it sees man as the master of nature, the vertical and individualistic relations between human beings as the normal and natural, and history as a linear movement of progress. The transfer of Western technology is thus a structural-cultural invasion, which is not clearly seen as such parly because it is not accompanied by the West's physical presence (as in the days of colonialism), and partly because the fragmentation inherent in Western technology fragments the perception of the total picture. For techniques that create different structures to come into their own, a very clear perception of the interlocking of technology and structures is needed. Also needed is the political will to use alternative technologies as an instrument to bring about a structural change.


2017 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
pp. 257-282
Author(s):  
Ceri Owen

Vaughan Williams's celebrated set of Robert Louis Stevenson settings, Songs of Travel, has lately garnered liberal scholarly attention, not least on account of the vicissitudes of its publication history. Following the cycle's premiere in 1904 it was issued in two separate books, each gathering stylistically different songs. Though a credible case for narrative coherence has been advanced in numerous accounts, the cycle's peculiar amalgamation of materials might rather be read as a signal to its projection of multiple voices, which unsettle the longstanding critical tendency to map a single protagonist through its progress. The division marked by the cycle's publication history may productively be understood to reflect a tension inherent in its aesthetic propositions, one constitutive of much of Vaughan Williams's work, which frequently mediates between the individualistic and the collective, the “artistic” and the “accessible,” and, as I suggest, the subjective voice of the individual artist in its invitation to the participation of a singing and listening community. I propose that Vaughan Williams's early songs frequently frame the idea or demand the engagement of a listener's contribution, as particular modes of singing and listening—and singing-as-listening—are figured and invited within the music's constitution. Composed as he was searching for an individual creative voice that simultaneously sustained a nascent commitment to the social utility and intelligibility of national art music, these songs explore the possibility of achieving a self-consciously collective authorial subjectivity, often reaching toward a musical intersubjectivity wherein boundaries between self and other—and between composer, performer, and listener—are collapsed. In the recognition of such processes lies a means of examining the tendency of Vaughan Williams's work toward projecting a powerfully subjective voice that simultaneously claims identification with no single agency.


Author(s):  
William H. Shaw

Historical materialism tenders a sociological theory of morality. According to it, different types of society are characterized by different and distinctive moral codes, values, and norms, and these moral systems change as the societies with which they are linked evolve. Morality is not something immutable and eternal; rather, it is part of ‘the general process of social, political and intellectual life’ - part of the social consicousness - which is conditioned by the general mode of production of material life. It is no accident, but rather a functional requirement, that different forms of moral consciousness accompany different modes of production. Moreover, since all existing societies have been class societies, their moralities have been class moralities in the sense that they sustain and reflect the material relations that constitute the basis of the different forms of class rule.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document