scholarly journals On Music and Computability: Contrasts between Harry Partch’s Bitter Music and Guerino Mazzola’s Topos of Music

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 44-55
Author(s):  
Wilfried Allaerts ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Algebraic Topology ◽  
Classical Music ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Human Sciences ◽  
New Developments ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Human Interactions ◽  
Abstract Architecture ◽  
The Mind

The clash of ideas between classical music and several avant-garde movements in the previous century, not only found its way into twentieth century musicology, it also lead to a number of new developments in music digitalization. This paper reflects on the inscription of these opposing ideas about the concept of music into the contemporary views on the human condition and the notion of computability of human interactions. Harry Partch, the American iconoclast broke away from the classic, predominantly European traditions in music, and contested the abstract architecture and well-tempered tonal system of it. The mathematician Guerrino Mazzola constructed an even bigger, abstract formalization system, that allegedly allows for a complete digitalization of music, from the mind and inner ear of the composer towards the scores, the gestures and sounds produced by the performers up to the auditory cortex of the listeners. In this paper we will mainly investigate the philosophical and musicological basis of this formalization system, which is essentially based on the Denotator system and a number of concepts from algebraic topology applied to music. Finally, we will unravel the typical de-humanizing aspects that are followed in the digitalization system as used by Mazzola, and what this approach implicates for humanity (and the human sciences).

Ważyk metafizyczny? / Ważyk – A Metaphysician?

2013 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-47
Author(s):  
Jerzy Święch
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Late Phase ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Strict Sense ◽  
Ontological Security ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Self Sufficiency

Summary Adam Ważyk’s last volume of poems Zdarzenia (Events) (1977) can be read as a resume of the an avant-garde artist’s life that culminated in the discovery of a new truth about the human condition. The poems reveal his longing for a belief that human life, the mystery of life and death, makes sense, ie. that one’s existence is subject to the rule of some overarching necessity, opened onto the last things, rather than a plaything of chance. That entails a rejection of the idea of man’s self-sufficiency as an illusion, even though that kind of individual sovereignty was the cornerstone of modernist art. The art of late modernity, it may be noted, was already increasingly aware of the dangers of putting man’s ‘ontological security’ at risk. Ważyk’s last volume exemplifies this tendency although its poems appear to remain within the confines of a Cubist poetics which he himself helped to establish. In fact, however, as our readings of the key poems from Events make clear, he employs his accustomed techniques for a new purpose. The shift of perspective can be described as ‘metaphysical’, not in any strict sense of the word, but rather as a shorthand indicator of the general mood of these poems, filled with events which seem to trap the characters into a supernatural order of things. The author sees that much, even though he does not look with the eye of a man of faith. It may be just a game - and Ważyk was always fond of playing games - but in this one the stakes are higher than ever. Ultimately, this game is about salvation. Ważyk is drawn into it by a longing for the wholeness of things and a dissatisfaction with all forms of mediation, including the Cubist games of deformation and fragmentation of the object. It seems that the key to Ważyk’s late phase is to be found in his disillusionment with the twentieth-century avant-gardes. Especially the poems of Events contain enough clues to suggest that the promise of Cubism and surrealism - which he sought to fuse in his poetic theory and practice - was short-lived and hollow.

Chávez (y Ramírez), Carlos (Antonio de Padua) (1899–1978)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christina Taylor Gibson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Classical Music ◽  
Symphony Orchestra ◽  
Musical Life ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Carlos Chavez

Composer and conductor Carlos Chávez was a dominant force in Mexican musical life during the middle of the twentieth century. His most influential post was as director of the Symphony Orchestra of Mexico [OrquestaSinfónica, OSM], which he led from 1928 to 1948. While leading the OSM, Chávez successfully broadened concepts of classical music to include symphonic, contemporary works by Mexican composers. At the same time, he began an international guest-conducting career that continued into the final years of his life. Although best known for a handful of nationalist works composed in the 1920s and 1930s, Chávez’s compositions demonstrate a diversity of esthetic interests, from avant-garde abstraction to popular genres; regardless of the approach used in a given work, Chávez’s intellectualism and care are evident.

Miguel Aguilar Ahumada (1931--)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicolás Masquiarán Díaz
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Classical Music ◽  
Charles Ives ◽  
Twelve Tone ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Musical Institutions ◽  
The Republic

Miguel Aguilar Ahumada is a Chilean composer, academic, and musicologist. His value in the Chilean and Latin American musical panorama lies in his role as a key figure for understanding the development of musical institutions outside the main centres of production. His work is a benchmark in the singular transition to Chilean avant-garde music in the mid-twentieth century, particularly as an outstanding example on the adoption of the twelve-tone system. He was instrumental in promoting avant-garde music until the 1973 putsch compromised his ability to maintain his connections in Santiago. Aguilar received the Municipal Prize of Art in Music (1986), the Charles Ives Award for Composers (1996), the Regional Award in Musical Arts (2006), and the President of the Republic Award in the Classical Music category (2006).

Puppets and Machines of the Mind: Robert Lepage and the Modernist Heritage

2005 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 124-138 ◽  
Author(s):  
CHRISTOPHER INNES
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Performance Space ◽  
Robert Wilson ◽  
Peter Brook ◽  
Post Modernism ◽  
The Mind

The work of Robert Lepage is examined in the context of the avant-garde, from Robert Wilson and Peter Brook, through the French Surrealists, back to Edward Gordon Craig. As well as being an icon of post-modernism, analysis of productions such as Needles and Opium, Elsinore and Zulu Time show the degree to which Lepage has realized Craig's ideals of the Übermarionette, and his screens, as well as ‘Scene’, his concept of a flexible, mechanized performance space. What this demonstrates is the unity of the modernist movement throughout the twentieth century.

Bergson, Henri-Louis (1859–1941)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keith Ansell-Pearson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Bertrand Russell ◽  
Practical Utility ◽  
Philosophy Of Life ◽  
Material Reality ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Human Intellect ◽  
And Control ◽  
Practical Instrument

Bergson’s thinking focuses on the major questions of philosophy: What is time? What is the nature of consciousness? What is the significance of evolution? What are the sources of morality? Many readers, including prominent philosophers of the twentieth century, have admired him for the clarity, rigour, and precision he seeks to bring to bear on these topics. He has had his detractors too (the most prominent example being Bertrand Russell). Bergson’s thinking orients itself around a philosophy of life and the attempt is made to think beyond the human condition: that is, beyond our established and prevailing habits of representation. It is from the primacy that is to be accorded to life that adequate conceptions of other areas of philosophy, including metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics, can be developed. Such a method of thinking has to work against the most inveterate habits of the mind and consists in an interchange of insights that correct and add to each other. For Bergson such an enterprise ends by expanding the humanity within us and so allows humanity to surpass itself by reinserting itself in the whole. This is accomplished through philosophy, for it is philosophy that provides us with the means for reversing the normal directions of the mind, so upsetting its habits. According to Bergson, the human intellect has evolved as a practical instrument for manipulating material reality and its habits are fundamentally those of utility and control. By contrast, philosophy has the ‘duty’ to ‘examine the living without any reservation as to practical utility’, and it seeks to free itself from habits that are strictly intellectual (Bergson [1907] 2007a: 126).

Multisensory Modalities and Modernist Translation

CounterText ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 283-306
Author(s):  
Tamara Brzostowska-Tereszkiewicz
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Reader Response ◽  
Sensory Integration ◽  
Cultural Anthropology ◽  
Sensory Perception ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Artistic Production ◽  
High Modernism ◽  
The Arts

Multisensory and cross-modal perception have been recognised as crucial for shaping modernist epistemology, aesthetics, and art. Illustrative examples of how it might be possible to test equivalences (or mutual translatability) between different sensual modalities can be found in theoretical pronouncements on the arts and in artistic production of both the avant-garde and high modernism. While encouraging multisensory, cross-modal, and multimodal artistic experiments, twentieth-century artists set forth a new language of sensory integration. This article addresses the problem of the literary representation of multisensory and cross-modal experience as a particular challenge for translation, which is not only a linguistic and cross-cultural operation but also cross-sensual, involving the gap between different culture-specific perceptual realities. The problem of sensory perception remains a vast underexplored terrain of modernist translation history and theory, and yet it is one with potentially far-reaching ramifications for both a cultural anthropology of translation and modernism's sensory anthropology. The framework of this study is informed by Douglas Robinson's somatics of translation and Clive Scott's perceptive phenomenology of translation, which help to put forth the notion of sensory equivalence as a pragmatic correspondence between the source and target texts, appealing to a range of somato-sensory (audial, visual, haptic, gestural, articulatory kinaesthetic, proprioceptive) modalities of reader response.

Revaluations through Dance: Friedrich Nietzsche's Thought in Isadora Duncan's Speech The Dance of the Future

2019 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 206-219
Author(s):  
Meindert E. Peters
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The Body ◽  
Eternal Recurrence ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Mind

Friedrich Nietzsche's influence on Isadora Duncan's work, in particular his idea of the Dionysian, has been widely discussed, especially in regard to her later work. What has been left underdeveloped in critical examinations of her work, however, is his influence on her earlier choreographic work, which she defended in a famous speech held in 1903 called The Dance of the Future. While commentators often describe this speech as ‘Nietzschean’, Duncan's autobiography suggests that she only studied Nietzsche's work after this speech. I take this incongruity as a starting point to explore the connections between her speech and Nietzsche's work, in particular his Thus Spoke Zarathustra. I argue that in subject and language Duncan's speech resembles Nietzsche's in important ways. This article will draw attention to the ways in which Duncan takes her cues from Nietzsche in bringing together seemingly conflicting ideas of religion and an overturning of morality; Nietzsche's notion of eternal recurrence and the teleology present in his idea of the Übermensch; and a renegotiation of the body's relation to the mind. In doing so, this article contributes not only to scholarship on Duncan's early work but also to discussions of Nietzsche's reception in the early twentieth century. Moreover, the importance Duncan ascribes to the body in dance and expression also asks for a new understanding of Nietzsche's own way of expressing his philosophy.

‘Out Past / Self-Dramatization’: Maurice Scully's Several Dances

2016 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 105-118
Author(s):  
Romana Huk
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
William Carlos Williams ◽  
The Self ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
George Oppen ◽  
American Poets

What has lyric to do with any radical phenomenology's choreography? Maurice Scully in Several Dances asks that question, as he has for years now, alongside other poets of Ireland's avant-garde whose ‘distinguishing (not inhibiting) feature’, as Sarah Bennett writes (acknowledging the work of Alex Davis and Eric Falci before her) is that in it ‘the lyric subject persists’ – in tandem with, this essay argues, what she names ‘an interest in perception … [which] is perhaps the most compelling commonality in these poets' work’. What distinguishes Scully's from the lyric phenomenology of American poets from William Carlos Williams (invoked throughout the volume) to George Oppen (also invoked) is that he queries existentialism's ‘singular’ approach to phenomena, achieved as Heidegger thought through the phenomenological ‘bracketing’ of individual (and communal) preconceptions from the perception of things. Cosmic – even theological – speculation enters in as Scully's poems move out past both self-centered lyric and twentieth-century cancellations of all preconceptions in the ‘limit-thinking’ and being-toward-death that phenomenology proposed for seeing past the self. Yet Scully works with mortality always in his sights too as he sings ‘the Huuuman / Limit-at-tation Blues’ (p.118) and, more vertiginously, considers both the undelimitability and the fragility of us.

Leroi-Gourhan and the Field of Ethnology

Paragraph ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 10-44
Author(s):  
Christopher Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Natural Environment ◽  
Human Sciences ◽  
Arctic Circle ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
Language Technology ◽  
Formative Experience ◽  
Post War

The work of French ethnologist and prehistorian André Leroi-Gourhan (1911–86) represents an important episode in twentieth-century intellectual history. This essay follows the development of Leroi-Gourhan's relationship to the discipline of ethnology from his early work on Arctic Circle cultures to his post-war texts on the place of ethnology in the human sciences. It shows how in the pre-war period there is already a conscious attempt to articulate a more comprehensive form of ethnology including the facts of natural environment and material culture. The essay also indicates the biographical importance of Leroi-Gourhan's mission to Japan as a decisive and formative experience of ethnographic fieldwork, combining the learning of a language with extended immersion in a distinctive material and mental culture. Finally, it explores how in the post-war period Leroi-Gourhan's more explicit meta-commentaries on the scope of ethnology argue for an extension of the discipline's more traditional domains of study to include the relatively neglected areas of language, technology and aesthetics.

Being Numerous

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Oren Izenberg
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Literary Life ◽  
Aesthetic Politics ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Common ◽  
Century Poetry ◽  
Practical Question ◽  
Language Poets

This book offers a new way to understand the divisions that organize twentieth-century poetry. It argues that the most important conflict is not between styles or aesthetic politics, but between poets who seek to preserve or produce the incommensurable particularity of experience by making powerful objects, and poets whose radical commitment to abstract personhood seems altogether incompatible with experience—and with poems. Reading across the apparent gulf that separates traditional and avant-garde poets, the book reveals the common philosophical urgency that lies behind diverse forms of poetic difficulty—from William Butler Yeats's esoteric symbolism and George Oppen's minimalism and silence to Frank O'Hara's joyful slightness and the Language poets' rejection of traditional aesthetic satisfactions. For these poets, what begins as a practical question about the conduct of literary life—what distinguishes a poet or group of poets?—ends up as an ontological inquiry about social life: What is a person and how is a community possible? In the face of the violence and dislocation of the twentieth century, these poets resist their will to mastery, shy away from the sensual richness of their strongest work, and undermine the particularity of their imaginative and moral visions—all in an effort to allow personhood itself to emerge as an undeniable fact making an unrefusable claim.

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