scholarly journals Transgressive Gestures: Women and Violin Performance in Eighteenth-Century Europe

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Hester Bell Jordan
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Significant Group ◽  
Physical Movement ◽  
Violin Concerto ◽  
Number Of Factors ◽  
Economic Support ◽  
Violin Performance ◽  
Gendered Roles ◽  
Violin Playing

<p>Studies concerning eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century women musicians abound within recent musicological scholarship, but the focus on singers and keyboard players – whose musical activities are understood to have “affirmed” their femininity – has had the effect of obscuring players of less typical instruments. Violin-playing, frequently cast as a man’s activity and imbued with indecent associations, was a case in point. Yet despite the connotations of the instrument, a small but significant group of women did play the violin: it is these violinists that this thesis takes as its central focus. Looking first at the complex reasons behind objections to women’s violin performance, a number of factors that restricted women’s access to the violin – including the influence of the male gaze and limits placed on women’s physical movement – are revealed. Particular conditions nevertheless enabled certain women to play the violin, namely the personal, educational, and economic support available from diverse sources such as family members, patrons, and institutions like convents and the Venetian ospedali.  In addition to placing women violinists in their historical context, this thesis centres on an analysis of a violin concerto by one of the most well-known female violinists of the era, the Italian virtuoso Regina Strinasacchi. The analysis of Strinasacchi’s Violin Concerto in B flat major is strongly performance based and focuses on the issue of gender and physical movement (performance gesture), topics which were of much interest to eighteenth-century commentators who witnessed women violinists performing. As such the analysis engages with concepts from “embodied” musicology. In exploring Strinasacchi’s concerto we see that female violinists could experiment with a variety of gendered roles through violin performance, embodying both masculinity and femininity through their transgressive gestures. By taking a closer look at women’s violin performance and experiences, this thesis aims to show that these violinists were not as peripheral to the workings of the wider musical community as is sometimes implied. Furthermore, it aims to put women violinists more firmly at the centre of their own stories, challenging the tendency to treat female violinists as novel anomalies.</p>

scholarly journals Transgressive Gestures: Women and Violin Performance in Eighteenth-Century Europe

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Hester Bell Jordan
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Significant Group ◽  
Physical Movement ◽  
Violin Concerto ◽  
Number Of Factors ◽  
Economic Support ◽  
Violin Performance ◽  
Gendered Roles ◽  
Violin Playing

<p>Studies concerning eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century women musicians abound within recent musicological scholarship, but the focus on singers and keyboard players – whose musical activities are understood to have “affirmed” their femininity – has had the effect of obscuring players of less typical instruments. Violin-playing, frequently cast as a man’s activity and imbued with indecent associations, was a case in point. Yet despite the connotations of the instrument, a small but significant group of women did play the violin: it is these violinists that this thesis takes as its central focus. Looking first at the complex reasons behind objections to women’s violin performance, a number of factors that restricted women’s access to the violin – including the influence of the male gaze and limits placed on women’s physical movement – are revealed. Particular conditions nevertheless enabled certain women to play the violin, namely the personal, educational, and economic support available from diverse sources such as family members, patrons, and institutions like convents and the Venetian ospedali.  In addition to placing women violinists in their historical context, this thesis centres on an analysis of a violin concerto by one of the most well-known female violinists of the era, the Italian virtuoso Regina Strinasacchi. The analysis of Strinasacchi’s Violin Concerto in B flat major is strongly performance based and focuses on the issue of gender and physical movement (performance gesture), topics which were of much interest to eighteenth-century commentators who witnessed women violinists performing. As such the analysis engages with concepts from “embodied” musicology. In exploring Strinasacchi’s concerto we see that female violinists could experiment with a variety of gendered roles through violin performance, embodying both masculinity and femininity through their transgressive gestures. By taking a closer look at women’s violin performance and experiences, this thesis aims to show that these violinists were not as peripheral to the workings of the wider musical community as is sometimes implied. Furthermore, it aims to put women violinists more firmly at the centre of their own stories, challenging the tendency to treat female violinists as novel anomalies.</p>

Jean Sibelius's Violin Concerto

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tina K. Ramnarine
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
New Paradigm ◽  
Recording Technology ◽  
Violin Concerto ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Russian Empire ◽  
Violin Playing ◽  
Political Figure ◽  
Early Training

This book highlights the unique insights that Jean Sibelius’s Violin Concerto in D Minor (op. 47) offers into the composer’s musical imagination, violin virtuosity, and connections between violin-playing traditions. It discusses the concerto’s cultural contexts, performers who are connected with its early history, and recordings of the work. Beginning with Sibelius’s early training as a violinist and his aspirations to be a virtuoso player, the book traces the composition of the concerto at a dramatic political moment in Finnish history. This concerto was composed when Finland, as an autonomous Grand Duchy within the Russian Empire, was going through a period of intense struggle for self-determination and protest against Russian imperial policies. Taking the concerto’s historical context into consideration leads to a new paradigm of the twentieth-century virtuoso as a political figure, which replaces nineteenth-century representations of the virtuoso as a magical figure. The book explores this paradigm by analyzing twentieth-century violin virtuosity in terms of labor, recording technology, and gender politics, especially the new possibilities for women aiming to develop musical careers. Ultimately, the book moves away from the compositional context of the concerto and a reading of the virtuoso as a political figure to reveal how Sibelius’s musical imagination prompts thinking about the long ecological histories of musical transmission and virtuosity.

Collective Burial in Late Prehistoric Virginia: Excavation and Analysis of the Rapidan Mound

2003 ◽  
Vol 68 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-128 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gary H. Dunham ◽  
Debra L. Gold ◽  
Jeffrey L. Hantman
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
North America ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Late Prehistoric ◽  
Mortuary Ritual ◽  
New Information ◽  
Virginia Piedmont ◽  
Burial Mounds ◽  
Secondary Burial ◽  
Lines Of Evidence

Recent excavation and analysis of the remaining section of the endangered Rapidan Mound site (44OR1) in the central Virginia Piedmont provide new insights into a unique complex of burial mounds in the Virginia interior. Known since Thomas Jefferson's eighteenth-century description, the mounds are both earth and stone and accretional earthen mounds. Thirteen are recorded, all dating to the late prehistoric and early contact era (ca. A.D. 900-1700). Typically containing few artifacts, the accretional mounds are unusual in North America in the numbers of individuals interred, more than one thousand in at least two cases, and in the nature of the secondary, collective burial ritual that built up the mounds over centuries. Following a review of the characteristics of the mound complex, we focus on the Rapidan Mound and the analysis of the collective, secondary burial features in the mound. Precise provenience information and bioarchaeological analyses of two large and intact collective burial features provide new information on health and diet, and several lines of evidence for demographic reconstruction. Finally, we discuss the mortuary ritual conducted at the mounds within the cultural and historical context of the region.

Sex in the City that Peter Built: The Demimonde and Sociability in Mid-Eighteenth Century St. Petersburg

Slavic Review ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 76 (4) ◽  
pp. 907-930
Author(s):  
Igor Fedyukin
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Reading Public ◽  
Associational Life ◽  
The Public ◽  
The World ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
The City

This article uses the materials of the Drezdensha affair, a large-scale investigation of “indecency” in St. Petersburg in 1750, to explore unofficial sociability among the Imperial elite, and to map out the institutional, social, and economic dimensions of the post-Petrine “sexual underworld.” Sociability and, ultimately, the public sphere in eighteenth century Russia are usually associated with loftier practices, with joining the ranks of the reading public, reflecting on the public good, and generally, becoming more civil and polite. Yet, it is the privately-run, commercially-oriented, and sexually-charged “parties” at the focus of this article that arguably served as a “training ground” for developing the habits of sociability. The world of these “parties” provides a missing link between the debauchery and carousing of Peter I's era and the more polite formats of associational life in the late eighteenth century, as well as the historical context for reflections on morality, sexual licentiousness, foppery, and the excesses of “westernization.”

The Integration of Mission Theology and Practice: Zinzendorf and the Early Moravians

2008 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 185-210 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Gallagher
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Holy Spirit ◽  
Social Issues ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Cultural Humility ◽  
Spiritual Renewal ◽  
Mission Theology ◽  
Key Characteristics ◽  
The Holy Spirit

AbstractThis paper explores the key characteristics of Count Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf's mission theology that influenced the early Moravian missional practice. After discussing the early eighteenth century European historical context and the Spirit-renewal of the Herrnhut community, the paper considers Zinzendorf's theology on the death of Christ, the prominent role of the Holy Spirit, and harvesting the "first fruits." These theological distinctives contributed in determining the motivation and message of these pioneer Protestant missionaries. It then takes into account some of the subsequent methods such as working with the marginalized, practicing the love of Christ in cultural humility, and preaching the gospel in the vernacular. The main contributions of the early Moravians to mission were that they brought an understanding that spiritual renewal preceded mission renewal, the atoning death of Christ is central to mission theology, and a Protestant recognition that it had an obligation to do mission. On the other hand, the foremost negative aspects of Moravian mission were their obsession with the physical death of Christ and an ignorance of the broader social issues that at times resulted in a lack of contextualization, religious syncretism, indifference to social justice, and extreme subjectivism.

scholarly journals Seizures among the Participants of the Inconfidência Mineira as a Source for Research on the History of Books and Libraries (1789)

2018 ◽  
Vol 36 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
André Figueiredo Rodrigues
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
North America ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Minas Gerais ◽  
Reading Habits ◽  
Minas Gerais State ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Books ◽  
Separatist Movement

ABSTRACT This article discusses the seizure of assets owned by the participants in the Minas Gerais State separatist movement known as the Inconfidência Mineira in Brazil, and whether these seizure records may serve as a source for research on the history of books, libraries, and general reading habits in Minas Gerais in the second half of the eighteenth century. First, the historical context of books and the intersection between the seizures and the region’s literary culture were examined. The possibilities and the limits to the use of these seizure records in the study of private libraries is also analyzed. Finally, some of the conspirators’ reading habits, which were influenced by the revolutionary ideas that circulated Europe and North America, are presented.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-20
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Philosophy And Literature ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
The Relationship

This introductory chapter provides context for the volume’s subsequent contributions on Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship on a variety of levels. It begins by explaining its aims with regard to the relationship between philosophy and literature. It then locates Goethe’s novel within this set of aims in three ways: first, by providing a brief outline of Goethe’s career; second, by locating his novel in the literary-historical context of late eighteenth-century Europe; and third, by outlining the connections between the Goethe of Wilhelm Meister and specific philosophers and thinkers who influenced his thought and for whom his work was in turn influential.

The Rise of Sex in the Eighteenth Century: Historical Context and Historiographical Implications

Signs ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 37 (4) ◽  
pp. 802-812 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas W. Laqueur
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Historical Context

scholarly journals Sustainable Illumination for Baroque Paintings with Historical Context Considerations

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (20) ◽  
pp. 8705
Author(s):  
Pedro Luengo
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seasonal Changes ◽  
Light Exposure ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Zero Energy ◽  
Museum Displays ◽  
Zero Energy Building ◽  
Sustainable Conservation ◽  
Scholarly Attention ◽  
Selection Of

The topic of museum illumination and conservation has been richly developed in recent years to take steps toward a zero-energy building concept. Most artworks preserved in museums’ expositions were designed for specifically defined light contexts, wherein daylight and seasonal changes were part of the artistic effect, an issue which has received little scholarly attention. From this premise, this paper aims to prove that defining the original illuminative context of artworks is required for a sustainable conservation, perception, and ultimate interpretation. To do this, a selection of seventeenth and eighteenth century churches and palaces from Europe, the Americas, and Asia will be presented using modern conservation frameworks for artworks. The results demonstrate that both aspects, chosen materials and light exposure, were connected, allowing the spaces to be effective without consuming too much electric lighting. This leads to a discussion about if museum displays should incorporate this context, if it is a more sustainable solution, and if it presents the artworks more accurately to visitors, even as other problems may arise.

scholarly journals Feminism and the Public Sphere in Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

1998 ◽  
Vol 53 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel K. Carnell
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Narrative Structure ◽  
Century Model ◽  
Separate Spheres ◽  
The Public ◽  
Cultural Power ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Different Levels

The bipartite narrative structure of Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) has been interpreted recently as an attempt to subvert the traditional Victorian rubric of separate spheres. Reconsidering this novel in terms of Jürgen Habermas's concept of the eighteenth-century public sphere broadens the historical context for the way we understand the separate spheres. Within Brontë's critique of Victorian gender roles, we may identify a reluctance to address the Chartist-influenced class challenges to an older version of the public good. In hearkening back to an eighteenth-century model of the public sphere, Brontë espouses not so much a twentieth-century-style challenge to the Victorian model of separate spheres as a nineteenth-century-style nostalgia for the classical liberal model of bourgeois public debate. At the same time, the awkward rupture in Brontë's narrative represents the inherent contradictions between the different levels of discourse-literary, political, and scientific-within the public sphere itself and the complex ways in which these contradictions are both accorded and denied cultural power.

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