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.

EPISTEMOLOGY OF TONE: AN OBITUARY FOR JULIEN JALÂL ED-DINE WEISS

Tempo ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 71 (281) ◽  
pp. 71-79
Author(s):  
Stefan Pohlit
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Just Intonation ◽  
Modal System ◽  
Helpful Tool ◽  
Near Eastern ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
History Of ◽  
Major Discrepancy

AbstractDuring the 1980s, Julien Jalâl Ed-Dine Weiss, founder of the Al-Kindi ensemble of Aleppo, invented a qānūn in just intonation with which he attempted to solve a major discrepancy between the theory and practice of maqām-scales. Weiss objected to the introduction of Western standards, observing that they distort the significance of interval ratios and prevent a comparative understanding of the modal system as a transnational phenomenon. In the twentieth century, the implementation of equal-semitone temperament emerged simultaneously with a notable invasion of sociological criteria into musical inquiry. The polarity observed between westernisation and tradition can be seen most visibly in the present search for identity amongst Middle- and Near-Eastern musicians, but this schismogenic process can also be observed in the history of the Western avant-garde, where microtonal explorations have been halted in favour of extra-musical conceptuality. While cross-cultural musicians are faced with a new climate of distrust, it seems most likely that the principles that draw us apart may originate in the very patterns of thought in which our notion of culture operates. Weiss's tuning system may serve as a helpful tool to foster a new and universal epistemology of tone, bridging and transcending the apparent contradictions between the two spheres.

Artful Noise

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Siwe
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Music Education ◽  
Large Body ◽  
The United States ◽  
Dance Movement ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Technological Advances ◽  
Percussion Instruments

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.

scholarly journals “GRASP ALL, LOSE ALL”: RAISING AWARENESS THROUGH LOSS OF GRASP IN SEEMINGLY FUNCTIONAL INTERFACES

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Diogo Marques
Keyword(s):  
Digital Media ◽  
Sensory Perception ◽  
Digital Literature ◽  
Reading Processes ◽  
Reading And Writing ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Raising Awareness ◽  
Functional Mechanisms ◽  
The Way

From baroque proto-cybertexts to countercultural gestures by historical avant-gardes there is a longstanding tradition of disruptive strategies by artists at the interstices of societies’ demand for order, control and functionalism. For the avant-gardes, and their multiple artistic inf(l)ections, part of the strategy had to do with radical changes in the way sensory perception came to be depicted by Modernism. Placing emphasis on the confluence of several arts and media, the innovative character of their proposals had much to do with the ways in which they were able to embrace notions representing modernity, such as “simultaneity,” “dynamics”, “motion”, as well as ideas such as the symbiosis between human and machine. For that purpose, they searched to induce estrangement and defamiliarization, namely by using seemingly functional mechanisms in order to raise awareness through loss of grasp. Taking from the idea of raising awareness through seemingly functional mechanisms, I argue that non-functional/dysfunctional digital interfaces that are part of contemporary artworks dealing with digitally-based haptic reading processes (namely, digital literature) are largely influenced by early avant-garde artistic proposals. Through its metamedial aesthetic and poetic critique of digital media, digital literature reinvents inherited strategies of subversion and disruption already explored by modernism, raising awareness in regard to the artwork’s processes of signification and affect. Seen as a variation of a rich heritage of experimentation with seemingly functional mechanisms in the arts, such strategies reenact age-old tensions between tradition and innovation, while laying the foundation for (re)new(ed) ways of reading and writing in digital multimodal environments.

Sonorism

Artful Noise ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 136-145
Author(s):  
Thomas Siwe
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Relaxed Controls ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
George Crumb ◽  
The Arts ◽  
American Composer ◽  
Tone Color ◽  
Media Work

In this chapter, the use by twentieth-century composers of tone color, or timbre is explained with examples by those who made its use central to their compositional output. Poland, freed from the bonds of communism and the Soviet state, relaxed controls over the arts and in 1956 initiated the Warsaw Autumn festival where avant-garde Polish and Western music could be heard. Kazimierz Serocki cofounded the festival, contributing to the percussion canon his timbre-based sextet, Continuum. In the United States, the American composer George Crumb definitely had an ear for timbre coupled with a love for percussion evident in the works discussed. A young Polish/American composer, Marta Ptaszynska, created a number of works for both solo and ensemble percussion in the latter half of the century. Her work Siderals was conceived as an audio-visual, or mixed-media work utilizing ten percussionists, magnetic tape playback, and lighting. The three composers highlighted in this chapter approached the use of timbre in differing ways.

scholarly journals ‘The Woman Gardener’: Transnationalism, Gender, Sexuality, and the Poetry of Blanaid Salkeld

2012 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-71 ◽  
Author(s):  
Moynagh Sullivan
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Irish Literature ◽  
Active Participant ◽  
Her Family ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
High Modernism

Blanaid Salkeld (1880–1959), a published poet, actress, writer of verse plays, reviewer, and publisher, is fascinating both as an active participant in literary and artistic circles of early and mid-twentieth century Ireland and as a poet in her own right. In terms not just of style but also of politics, Salkeld is considered neither postcolonial nor properly modernist. Salkeld's class and access to international influences would appear to disqualify her from subalternity, given the relatively privileged metropolitan circles in which she moved. And yet her metropolis, Dublin, while incubating much powerful creativity, was not a centre for the radical avant-garde experimentalism that had characterized high modernism. Her family had been part of the colonial machinery in India yet she had close working and personal friendships with Dorothy Macardle and other republicans. In this essay, I consider how the transnational poetics elaborated by Jahan Ramazani can re-situate Salkeld's seemingly anomalous work, moving it from the margins of Irish literature, to the centre of a ‘cross-hemispheric and transhistorical common terrain’, postulated by Ramanzani. I go on to argue that reading Salkeld's work across modernist and postcolonial discourses enlarges the possibilities for exploring her poetry's concern with issues of gender and genesis.

scholarly journals Krótki wykład o muzyce XX wieku. Kompendium dydaktyczne / A Short Lecture on Twentieth-Century Music. A Teaching Compendium

2014 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Tomasz Jasiński
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Electronic Music ◽  
First Century ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Arts And Humanities ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Twentieth Century Music ◽  
History Of ◽  
Recent Trends ◽  
Concrete Music

AbstractThe article is a comprehensive presentation of the history of music in the twentieth century, taking into account the main trends and phenomena of this period, inter alia impressionism, expressionism, neoclassicism, dodecaphony, punctualism, and total serialism, then avant-garde solutions and pluralism after World War Two (inter alia electronic music, concrete music (musique concrète), graphic music, aleatoric music, open forms, instrumental theater, minimal music), and finally the most recent trends (e.g. spectral music, new complexity, polystylistics), including a clearly marked return to the Romantic tradition. The chronologically presented discourse includes opinions that concisely explain some compositional solutions, as well as the list of composers and the titles of their works that exemplifi ed the problems discussed. The paper ends with the thoughts on the future of music in the new, twenty-first century.The article is meant as teaching material for the arts and humanities programs.

Moving Modernism

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nell Andrew
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Interwar Period ◽  
Significant Role ◽  
Modern Art ◽  
Modern Dance ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Lumiere Brothers ◽  
Twentieth Century Europe

This book reenacts the simultaneous eruption of three spectacular revolutions—the development of pictorial abstraction, the first modern dance, and the birth of cinema—which together changed the artistic landscape of early twentieth-century Europe and the future of modern art. Rather than seeking dancing pictures or pictures of dancing, however, this study follows the chronology of the historical avant-garde to show how dance and pictures were engaged in a kindred exploration of the limits of art and perception that required the process of abstraction. Recovering the performances, methods, and circles of aesthetic influence of avant-garde dance pioneers and experimental filmmakers from the turn of the century to the interwar period, this book challenges modernism’s medium-specific frameworks by demonstrating the significant role played by the arts of motion in the historical avant-garde’s development of abstraction: from the turn-of-the-century dancer Loïe Fuller, who awakened in symbolist artists the possibility of prolonged vision; to cubo-futurist and neosymbolist artists who reached pure abstraction in tandem with the radical dance theory of Valentine de Saint-Point; to Sophie Taeuber’s hybrid Dadaism between art and dance; to Akarova, a prolific choreographer whose dancing Belgian constructivist pioneers called “music architecture”; and finally to the dancing images of early cinematic abstraction from the Lumière brothers to Germaine Dulac. Each chapter reveals the emergence of abstractionas an apparatus of creation, perception, and reception deployed across artistic media toward shared modernist goals. The author argues that abstraction can be worked like a muscle, a medium through which habits of reception and perception are broken and art’s viewers are engaged by the kinesthetic sensation to move and be moved.

Pavel Chistiakov and Jan Ciągliński: New Approaches to Art Pedagogy in Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Russia

2019 ◽  
Vol 46 (4) ◽  
pp. 305-319
Author(s):  
Isabel Wünsche
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Art Education ◽  
Modern Art ◽  
Fine Arts ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Academic System ◽  
Imperial Academy ◽  
Art Pedagogy

Abstract This essay looks at art education in Russia in the nineteenth century, specifically at artist-training practices at institutions such as the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts and the Imperial Society for the Encouragements of the Arts in St. Petersburg. Particular emphasis is on the role and significance of Pavel Chistiakov and Jan Ciągliński, charismatic teachers who developed their distinct art-pedagogical systems as an alternative to the existing academic system and paved the way for the emergence of modern art and the avant-garde in Russia.

‘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.

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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