scholarly journals ‘I was listening … but did not succeed in hearing you’: Flann O’Brien, Ralph Cusack, and the Absurdities of Silent Musical Experience

2021 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 360-374
Author(s):  
Stan Erraught
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Musical Experience ◽  
Aesthetic Theory ◽  
Musical Expression ◽  
Flann O'brien ◽  
The Third ◽  
A Performance

The notion of soundless music seems contradictory, even absurd: the concept of soundless musical experience less so. In this article, I explore two quite different descriptions of this kind of experience as set out in two mid-twentieth-century Irish novels. In one, Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman, the narrator watches one of the titular sergeants enjoy music that he – the narrator – cannot hear. In the second, Ralph Cusack's Cadenza, the narrator watches as a village priest mimes playing the piano on a café table, a performance he ‘hears’ and appreciates. Speculatively combining and extending these episodes, and using the figures of the philistine and the aesthete in Adorno's Aesthetic Theory as a key, I suggest that an anxiety about music and musical expression characterized the newly independent Ireland, an anxiety linked to wider concerns often read as ‘postcolonial’.

The Macroform in Post-Tonalmusic. Listening and Analysis

2003 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 219-240 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mario Baroni
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Classical Music ◽  
Extreme Points ◽  
Musical Time ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Past ◽  
Hierarchical Levels ◽  
Twentieth Century Music ◽  
Recorded Performance ◽  
A Performance

Form in classical music is fundamentally a question of organising musical time in order to facilitate a listening corresponding to author's expectations. In the past this was obtained by coordinating different parameters towards a single goal. In twentieth century music, the more detached relationship between the composer and the listener meant that less importance was given to the idea of “correct” listening and to the coordination of parameters. This article is devoted to one of the extreme points in this process: A quartet by Bruno Maderna composed in 1956 under the influence of the ideologies of Darmstadt. The quartet was examined by three different groups of analysts. The first group examined the score of the quartet, while the third group only had a recorded performance at its disposal; the second group analyzed both the score and the performance. The three groups had to describe the form of the piece in terms of three hierarchical levels: Its microform {i.e. the organisation of minimal units not divisible into smaller parts); its macroform (i.e. its division into the minimum possible number of parts); the medium form {i.e. a collection of minimal units that could also be interpreted as an acceptable division of the parts at a macroformal level). Two basic criteria were used: Segmentation (local parametric discontinuity between two adjacent parts) and similarity (coherence between the parameters within each part). The results of the three analyses were somewhat diverse, thus demonstrating the tendency to relax the sense of form in such a quartet, as well as the presence of different procedures used when listening to a performance and analysing a score.

scholarly journals "PIECES FOR KIDS" ("PIECES POUR ENFANTS") by E. DENISOV

2020 ◽  
pp. 49-79
Author(s):  
Veronica Krivopalova ◽  
◽  
Olga Kharlamova ◽  
◽  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Musical Language ◽  
Musical Expression ◽  
Children's Music ◽  
Basic Principles ◽  
Modal Structure ◽  
The Third ◽  
Edison Denisov

The article discusses the specifics of children's music on the example of the collection "Pieces for Kids" by Edison Denisov. The authors use the example of the analysis of the musical language of this collection to define the specifics of music for kids of the second half of the twentieth century in general and some features of the author's style of Denisov in particular. Despite the traditional nature of the chosen means of musical expression, based on the basic principles of tonal organization (functionality, connection between harmony and form creation, etc.), the pieces sound very fresh and modern. This explains the fact that the pieces in the collection are difficult to enter into the pedagogical repertoire. At the same time, the composer expands the tonality by means of various types of major-minor (of the same name, parallel, one-point), and also uses the means of chromatic tonality. Updating the musical language is associated with updating the chord. Denisov uses not only chords of the third structure, but also fourth, second chords and accords. The modal structure of the pieces is also diverse. Along with major and minor, the collection contains examples of using a natural diatonic modes.

Historical Fragments’ Mobile Echo

Transfers ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 115-119 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan E. Bell ◽  
Kathy Davis
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
Ming Dynasty ◽  
Third Century ◽  
Refugee Crisis ◽  
The Third ◽  
Opium War ◽  
The Subject

Translocation – Transformation is an ambitious contribution to the subject of mobility. Materially, it interlinks seemingly disparate objects into a surprisingly unified exhibition on mobile histories and heritages: twelve bronze zodiac heads, silk and bamboo creatures, worn life vests, pressed Pu-erh tea, thousands of broken antique teapot spouts, and an ancestral wooden temple from the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) used by a tea-trading family. Historically and politically, the exhibition engages Chinese stories from the third century BCE, empires in eighteenth-century Austria and China, the Second Opium War in the nineteenth century, the Chinese Cultural Revolution of the mid-twentieth century, and today’s global refugee crisis.

A war hero or a Hitler soldier?

2019 ◽  
pp. 50-57
Author(s):  
Pavel Gotovetsky
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Interwar Period ◽  
Military Service ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
National Committee ◽  
World War ◽  
The Third ◽  
The World ◽  
The Third Reich

The article is devoted to the biography of General Pavlo Shandruk, an Ukrainian officer who served as a Polish contract officer in the interwar period and at the beginning of the World War II, and in 1945 became the organizer and commander of the Ukrainian National Army fighting alongside the Third Reich in the last months of the war. The author focuses on the symbolic event of 1961, which was the decoration of General Shandruk with the highest Polish (émigré) military decoration – the Virtuti Militari order, for his heroic military service in 1939. By describing the controversy and emotions among Poles and Ukrainians, which accompanied the award of the former Hitler's soldier, the author tries to answer the question of how the General Shandruk’s activities should be assessed in the perspective of the uneasy Twentieth-Century Polish-Ukrainian relations. Keywords: Pavlo Shandruk, Władysław Anders, Virtuti Militari, Ukrainian National Army, Ukrainian National Committee, contract officer.

Past

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara Kellerman
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Business Schools ◽  
First Century ◽  
Recent Past ◽  
Lao Tzu ◽  
Leadership And Management ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Agents Of Change ◽  
The Many

The chapter focuses on how leadership was taught in the distant and recent past. The first section is on five of the greatest leadership teachers ever—Lao-tzu, Confucius, Plato, Plutarch, and Machiavelli—who shared a deep belief in the idea that leadership could be taught and left legacies that included timeless and transcendent literary masterworks. The second section explores how leadership went from being conceived of as a practice reserved only for a select few to one that could be exercised by the many. The ideas of the Enlightenment changed our conception of leadership. Since then, the leadership literature has urged people without power and authority, that is, followers, to understand that they too could be agents of change. The third section turns to leadership and management in business. It was precisely the twentieth-century failure of business schools to make management a profession that gave rise to the twenty-first-century leadership industry.

Carthage after the Punic Wars and the Neo-Punic Legacy

2019 ◽  
pp. 182-196
Author(s):  
Matthew Hobson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
North Africa ◽  
Cultural Change ◽  
Language Use ◽  
Cultural Development ◽  
Initial Examination ◽  
The Third ◽  
Funerary Rituals ◽  
Before And After ◽  
Punic Wars

This chapter provides a brief introduction to how the historiographical development of Roman studies, since mid-twentieth century decolonization, has altered our understanding of the developments which took place in North Africa following the destruction of Carthage in 146 bce. The reader is introduced to literary, epigraphic, and archaeological sources of evidence, which have traditionally been used to argue for either cultural change or continuity. After an initial examination of the immediate aftermath of the Third Punic War, Roman land appropriation and taxation, the focus is on sources of evidence usually described as “Punic,” “neo-Punic” or “Late Punic,” covering the spheres of municipal institutions, language use, and religious and funerary rituals. The vibrant multiculturalism and regional diversity of the Mediterranean and especially North Africa, both before and after the Roman conquest, is the dominant theme. This is used to shift emphasis away from grand explanatory paradigms based on essentialist identity categories, and toward a more nuanced picture of the complex and multivariate processes of cultural development and integration.

Music in the British Workplace: From Voice to a Technique of Control?

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marek Korczynski
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Control ◽  
Social History ◽  
Singing Voice ◽  
Industrial Noise ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of

This chapter examines music in the British workplace. It considers whether it is appropriate to see the history of music in the workplace as involving a journey from the organic singing voice (both literal and metaphorical) of workers to broadcast music appropriated by the powerful to become a technique of social control. The chapter charts four key stages in the social history of music in British workplaces. First, it highlights the existence of widespread cultures of singing at work prior to industrialization, and outlines the important meanings these cultures had for workers. Next, it outlines the silencing of the singing voice within the workplace further to industrialization—either from direct employer bans on singing, or from the roar of the industrial noise. The third key stage involves the carefully controlled employer- and state-led reintroduction of music in the workplace in the mid-twentieth century—through the centralized relaying of specific forms of music via broadcast systems in workplaces. The chapter ends with an examination of contemporary musicking in relation to (often worker-led) radio music played in workplaces.

scholarly journals SOME NOTES ON THE ‘NEW APULEIUS’

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-6
Author(s):  
Lukas J. Dorfbauer
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Latin Translation ◽  
Latin Text ◽  
The Third ◽  
Editio Princeps

In 2016 Justin Stover published an important editio princeps of a fragmentarily preserved text that was originally discovered by Raymond Klibansky in the first half of the twentieth century: a kind of Summarium librorum Platonis which Klibansky took as a Latin translation of a lost Greek original, whereas Stover argues it was written by Apuleius, namely as the third book of his De Platone. The following notes deal primarily with details pertaining to the constitution of the text, but I will start with one remark on a detail of Stover's translation and close with a discussion concerning the alleged medieval reception of the so-called ‘New Apuleius’. Chapters, pages, Latin text, apparatus criticus entries, and translations are quoted according to Stover's edition; all bold highlights are mine, as are all translations from works other than the ‘New Apuleius’ if not indicated otherwise.

Collecting to understand: the art of children and the medical-pedagogical approach in twentieth-century Portugal

2021 ◽  
pp. 0957154X2110037
Author(s):  
João Pedro Fróis
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Intellectual Disabilities ◽  
Child Psychiatry ◽  
Emotional Development ◽  
Pedagogical Approach ◽  
Children's Art ◽  
The Third

In this essay I look at the art of children as a tool in the medical-pedagogical approach, as proposed by the founder of child psychiatry in Portugal, Vítor Fontes (1893–1979). First, the topic of the art of children is introduced, and the second part focuses on the model of medical pedagogy as it was practised in Portugal. The third and fourth parts present Fontes’s own investigations on the drawings of children with intellectual disabilities under observation at the Instituto Médico-Pedagógico António Aurélio da Costa Ferreira (IAACF) in Lisbon. In the conclusion it is argued that Fontes contributed to the development of child psychiatry in Portugal by showing that children’s art can mirror their cognitive and emotional development.

scholarly journals Hearing through the théâtrophone: Sonically constructed spaces and embodied listening in the late nineteenth-century French theatre

2016 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-90 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melissa Van Drie
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Context ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Teenth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
French Theatre ◽  
Subscription Service ◽  
Theoretical Reflection ◽  
A Performance

This article presents a historical and theoretical reflection of the théâtrophone, a late nine- teenth-century telephone broadcast service that allowed users at a distance to listen in live to local theatre performances (spoken theatre, opera and musical concerts). Often cited as the first binaural experience in 1881, the théâtrophone’s much longer history as a subscription service, which operated in Paris from 1889 through the mid-1930s, is relatively unknown. This article considers what hearing through a théâtrophone meant to nineteenth- and twentieth- century users beyond its initial 1881 prototype. To hear through the théâtrophone means adopting a methodology mirroring the artefact itself: moving between social, professional, artistic, sensory registers. In doing so, the ways in which the théâtrophone was attuned to dis- course and practice emerge, as do more subtle processes involved in new nineteenth-century constructs of hearing and listening. Precisely the théâtrophone’s development is examined in relation to its particular social context: its installation on the spectacular Parisian boulevards and its relation to fin de siècle theatre culture. The article first investigates how theatrophonic listening was accorded to existent practices of theatre-going. Second, the article explores the more radical propositions of the théâtrophone in relation to important aesthetic and prac- tical changes occurring simultaneously in theatre culture. The théâtrophone’s virtual sonic experience multiplied the forms of a performance and its modalities of creation and recep- tion. Through accounts of ‘listening in’ the aspects of the new sonically constructed space are described, as are postures of early mediatised listening. The article posits that new modalities of listening are articulated through the théâtrophone, with certain users, including Proust, defining it as a monitoring and creative tool. In this capacity, ‘theatrophonic’ listening contrib- uted to the development of a refined ear, capable of detecting sonic nuance, which was central to artistic sensibilities at the time. 

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