scholarly journals Tanztheater und filmische Ästhetik. Cineastische Einflüsse und Gestaltungsweisen in den Kompositionen für die Ballets Suédois 1920–1925

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fabian Kolb

The central role that avant-garde music and dance theatre played in the interplay and synthesis of the arts and media in the 1920s, particularly in Paris, is well known. However, the creative potential of ballet has hardly been recognized in its manifold relationships with film and cinematic-inspired expression. The extent to which especially ballet music interacted with the latest cinematographic principles and techniques and referred to cinematic aesthetics in a variety of ways can instructively be seen regarding the productions of the Ballets Suédois. This is discussed in this article with an exemplary look at Les Mariés de la Tour Eiffel (1921), Within the Quota (1923), Skating Rink (1922) and Relâche (1924). By that it becomes clear that the transmedia inclusion of cinematographic ideas not only inspired the vocabulary of avant-garde dance and modern choreography, but was also distinctively reflected in the conception and composition of film-affected music.

CounterText ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 283-306
Author(s):  
Tamara Brzostowska-Tereszkiewicz

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.


2019 ◽  
pp. 275-294
Author(s):  
Scott MacDonald

Artist/scientist Erin Espelie was trained at Cornell University as a biologist, but turned down opportunities to study biology at the graduate level at Harvard and MIT in order to explore the New York City theater scene, before finding her way into independent, “avant-garde” filmmaking, first exploring her interests in biology and the history of science in a series of short films, then producing the remarkable essay-film The Lanthanide Series (2014), which explores the importance of the “rare earths” (the elements with atomic numbers 57–71) for modern communication and informational technologies. The imagery for The Lanthanide Series was recorded, almost entirely, off the reflective surface of an iPad. In her work as a moving-image artist, Espelie combines poetry, science, environmental politics, and modern digital technologies within videos that defy traditional knowledge categories. She is currently editor in chief for Natural History magazine and a director of the NEST (Nature, Environment, Science & Technology) Studio for the Arts at the University of Colorado-Boulder.


2012 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 143-173 ◽  
Author(s):  
BRIGID COHEN

AbstractThis article explores mid-century New York intellectual scenes mediated by the avant-garde émigré composer Stefan Wolpe (1902–72), with special emphasis on Wolpe's interactions with jazz composer George Russell (1923–2009) and political philosopher Hannah Arendt (1906–75). Cross-disciplinary communities set the stage for these encounters: Wolpe and Russell met in the post-bop circles that clustered in Gil Evans's basement apartment, while Wolpe encountered Arendt at the Eighth Street Artists’ Club, the hotbed of Abstract Expressionism. Wolpe's exchanges with Arendt and Russell, long unacknowledged, may initially seem unrelated. Yet each figure shared a series of “cosmopolitan” commitments. They valued artistic communities as spaces for salutary acts of cultural boundary crossing, and they tended to see forms of self-representation in the arts as a way to respond to the dehumanizing political disasters of the century. Wolpe and Arendt focused on questions of human plurality in the wake of their forced displacements as German-Jewish émigrés, whereas Russell confronted dilemmas of difference as an African American migrant from southern Ohio in New York. Bringing together interpretive readings of music with interview- and archive-based research, this article works toward a historiography of aesthetic modernism that recognizes migration as formative rather than incidental to its community bonds, ethical aspirations, and creative projects.


2007 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 272-296 ◽  
Author(s):  
CARLA VIVARELLI

The presence of two famous exponents of the French and Italian ars nova in Naples in 1318––respectively Petrus de Sancto Dionysio and Marchetto da Padova––substantiates Nino Pirrotta's hypothesis that the Angevin capital was an important center of musical culture in the early Trecento and a setting for avant-garde debates. It also aids in reconstructing the elusive biography of the Paduan musician and clarifies the much debated dating of his Pomerium. Pirrotta ultimately abandoned his Neapolitan hypothesis for lack of evidence, a difficulty caused and aggravated by the thorough destruction of Angevin chancery documents during the Second World War. Evidence has been found, however, in indirect sources, such as literary texts, works of local history, and documentary transcriptions and summaries that predate the archival losses. In addition to placing the two prominent musicians at the Angevin court in Naples, these sources confirm the presence there of minstrels (evidence for secular music within the court's recreational sphere), vouch for the continuity of the institution of the royal chapel (evidence for sacred music at court, clearly connected to the liturgy), and testify to Robert of Anjou's catalytic patronage of the arts and his passion for music in general. Thus Naples regains its status as a capital on the map of 14th-century music.


Author(s):  
Miguel Angel De la Cova Morillo

Resumen: El “mouleur” Charles Lasnon representa la convivencia que durante el primer tercio del siglo XX se dará entre las Artes y Oficios y las nuevas técnicas de representación vinculadas a la fotografía. Lasnon realizará para Le Corbusier una serie de maquetas que presentarán sus propuestas a escala doméstica y urbana, primera aproximación a una expresión tridimensional de sus teorías: los modelos 1:20 de los Salones de Otoño en 1922 y 1923, a camino entre el objet-type y la escultura de vanguardia, y las del “Urbanisme á trois dimensions” del Plan Obus y Nemours. Las maquetas de las Villas se establecerán como “manifiestos estéticos y arquitectónicos”. En ellas se ensayarán principios teóricos plásticos, previos incluso a una idea de construcción, indagaciones que abren la puerta a transferencias entre la representación a escala realizada en yeso y la arquitectura a realizar. Por otra parte, la vinculación de Lasnon con el Service Geographique de l’Armée le familiarizará con las nuevas técnicas de representación del territorio. Así, realizará los Carte-Relief de Argel coetáneamente a la ejecución de las maquetas de las propuestas urbanas argelinas de Le Corbusier, garantes no sólo del rigor geométrico de sus postulados: quedan en ellas registradas el paisaje original, cuya topografía se modela y manipula como si de un trabajo plástico se tratara. Utopías en busca de un lugar imaginado sobre un trozo de yeso. Abstract: Charles Lasnon, "mouleur",represents the coexistence between the Arts and Crafts and the new rendering techniques related to photography that took place in the first quarter of the twentieth century. Commissioned by Le Corbusier, Lasnon made in those years several models that represent his new proposals at a domestic and urban scale. That was the first approach to a three-dimensional expression of his theories –the scale models of 1:20 from "Salon d'Automne" in 1922 and 1923, which were halfway between objet-types and avant-garde sculptures, and the theories of "L'Urbanisme à trois dimensions" from Plan Obus and Nemours. The scale-models of "Villas" were established as “aesthetic and architectural manifestos”. They were used to test theoretical and plastic principles, formulated before the idea of construction. These tests resulted in "transfers" between plaster-craft scale models and the architecture to be built. Additionally, the links between Lasnon and the “Service Geographique de l’Armée” enabled him to be familiar with new techniques to represent landscape. Thus, Lasnon made the Carte-Reliefs d'Argel at the same time as Le Corbusier made the models for the urban proposals in Alger. These models not only guarantee the geometrical accuracy of his proposals, but also capture an original landscape whose topography is modeled as if it was a plastic craftwork. Utopias seeking an imaginary place on a plaster slice.  Palabras clave: maqueta; moulage; Charles Lasnon; urbanismo; plan-relief; Salón de Otoño. Keywords: model; "moulage", Charles Lasnon; urbanism; plan-relief; Salon d'Automne. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4995/LC2015.2015.729


Author(s):  
David Vichnar ◽  
Louis Armand

Etymologically and conceptually linked with sense perception (as opposed to, in the Platonic tradition, noēsis or intellection) in ancient, medieval, and early-modern thought, aisthēsis formed part of theorizing not only questions surrounding beauty and art, but also perception, epistemology, and even ontology (in, for instance, the work of Plato, Aristotle, and Thomas Aquinas). During the Enlightenment and its project of subdivision and categorization of the “humanities,” aisthēsis became subsumed, in the work of Alexander Baumgarten, by “aesthetics,” the study of beauty in the narrower sense. However, by the beginning of the 20th century and the Marxist/Freudian/Saussurean revolution in humanist inquiry and the “avant-garde” revolution in the arts, aisthēsis resumed its place and function as a central node in a vast network of concerns: for the Marxists, the history of aisthēsis follows the pattern of social development of progressive mastery over nature by humankind, described as a process of rationalization (the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory); in psychoanalysis and phenomenology, artistic activity is regarded as the “sublimated” expression of socially objectionable energies, taking place in a world conceived of as indefinite and open multiplicity (John Dewey, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, et al.); in poststructuralist theory, the image not simply “acquires” a politico-aesthetic function by way of an act of judgement, but rather accedes in its very technological condition to a political imaginary, to an aesthetics as such (Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, et al.). In the second half of the 20th century, with the progressive technologization of society, aisthēsis formed the backbone of media studies, which examines how technological innovation overthrows a settled political and aesthetic order, with special attention paid to the effects of electronic media and the hypertext: non-linearity, repetitiveness, discontinuity, intuition (e.g., Marshall McLuhan and Jay David Bolter). At the dawn of the 21st century, in the aesthetico-mimetic doubling of the mediasphere, from teletext and satellite TV to the World Wide Web and GPS, a critical, ecological mode of thinking aisthēsis assumes the ideal function of an “avant-gardism” in affecting the structure of how things come to mean, how meaning is virtualized, and how the virtual is lived.


Author(s):  
Stephen Ross

The term modernism denotes an explosion of aesthetic innovation in Europe, Britain, Ireland and America from roughly 1880 to 1950. It embraces a hugely diverse group of works which unevenly manifest some or all of the following characteristics: a sense of a decisive break with tradition; formal experimentation; previously forbidden or marginalized content; a mania for the new; emphasis upon perception and experience over objective reality; exploration of new models of subjectivity; and challenges to existing scientific, technological, philosophical and religious models. A spirit of critique animates many of these characteristics, as artists used aesthetic innovation to demand that Western civilization be either renovated or razed. The variety of works it encompasses means, of course, that no one work exemplifies all these traits, or to the same extent, and that many works do so in contradictory ways. As such, the formal experimentation and spirit of critique that typify modernism in general can manifest in wildly divergent ways in specific works: minimalism or prolixity, masculinism or feminism, fascism or communism, postcolonialism or imperialism, violence or pacifism, art as cultural saviour or disease to be cured. The aesthetics to which these tendencies give rise are likewise various, both within and across the arts, producing effects that range from the soothing soft focus of Impressionism to the harsh dehumanization of Futurism, and from the extreme close-up of stream of consciousness to the impenetrability of abstract expressionism - and almost everything else in between, even including realism (deployed to absurdist effect). Modernism is the art of modernity. As such, it cannot be understood separately from its contexts. It emerged from, was driven by, and reacted against massive changes in society, technology, science, geopolitics and philosophy. The bewildering pace and shocking nature of many of these changes, led some modernists to proclaim a qualitative shift in human history, to which art must respond. In response, modernist artists made formal experimentation and nontraditional subjects the sine qua non of the new age. Starting from the premise that the old forms could no longer be adequate to a new world, the modernists sought to capture the exuberance, contradictions, horrors and utopian possibilities of modernity. They also both helped create and capitalized upon the modern speculative market in avant-garde art, publishing one another in little magazines and reviews, showing one another’s work, perfecting the art of the limited edition and manuscript sales, and facilitating contacts with well-endowed collectors. Their success in these endeavours is indisputable. Nonetheless, modernism’s fortunes varied wildly during the remainder of the twentieth century, going from hegemonic status as the pinnacle of (white, male, Western) high culture under the label high modernism (c.1950s-60s), to gradual inclusion of women artists and artists of colour (c.1970s-80s), vilification as the epitome of intolerance and elitism (c.1980s-90s) and finally to a resurgence in dramatically more catholic form, signified by a pluralization: modernisms (1999-present).


Author(s):  
Thomas Siwe

A substantial body of musical literature for solo and ensemble percussion was created in the twentieth century. This book examines percussion literature’s evolution: how it came to be and the styles that composers embraced as they produced a large body of music for percussion instruments alone. The focus is on the music that was created, the various genres that arose, and the composers who contributed seminal works. The question is posed: What world and cultural events brought composers to reject the past and embrace modernism? The twentieth century is notable for its many technological advances as well as for the global conflicts that disrupted the lives of millions. Both had significant impact on the arts. Tape recorders, synthesizers, and computers became useful tools for the avant-garde composer. Artists, exiled from their homelands by the war’s devastation, arrived in the Americas with new ideas to share. On the West Coast of the United States, composers found that percussion music was an ideal accompaniment for a nascent modern dance movement. The end of World War II brought monumental change to higher education and to music education in the States. College-trained percussionists became an important resource for the modern composer, who contributed new solo and ensemble works to the percussion canon. The twentieth century witnessed the rise of the percussive arts to a status equal to that of other instrumental groups.


Author(s):  
Dariya Aleksandrovna Streltsova

This article is devoted to musical pedagogy in the broadest sense of this concept. The teaching of the performing arts is very specific. In our country, there is a system of training musicians, which, as a rule, consists of the initial, secondary professional and higher stages of ascent to mastery. Such a professional school has evolved over several centuries. It received its consolidation in practice in the 19th and 20th centuries. The performing art of Russian musicians and singers is recognized all over the world. The arts education system continues to improve. The author of this article offers her analysis of the professional training of students at the Department of Art at the higher educational institution. The materials of the article will be of interest to our colleagues, especially in the part related to the comprehension of the educational standard in the musical variety art.


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