"SYMPHONIC ETUDES" BY R. SCHUMANN: HISTORY OF CREATION AND THE PROBLEM OF INTERPRETING "POSTHUMOUS VARIATIONS"

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 126-131
Author(s):  
А. A. Trifonova ◽  
◽  

The article describes the history of the main editions of the "Symphonic Etudes" by Robert Schumann. The main stages of the cycle concept formation and its leading dramatic principles are highlighted in the historical context. The chronological "path" of five posthumously published manuscript variations is analyzed separately: having received several variants of their arrangement within the cycle, they were eventually excluded by the author from the latest editions. On the examples of the famous performances by Alfred Cortot, Vladimir Sofronitsky, Sviatoslav Richter and Maria Grinberg, various possibilities for a more complete interpretation of the "Symphonic Etudes" are presented, expanding them with the artistically valuable material of the five "posthumous variations". The article will be useful both for pianists and performers of Schumann's music, as well as for students and musicologists whose scientific interest lies in the piano music of the German composer.

Author(s):  
Matthew Roy

The emergence of imaginative children’s music in the second half of the nineteenth century reframed the relationship between children and music in revolutionary ways. The dominant paradigm had been for children to repetitiously practice mechanistic exercises, a time-consuming occupation that the German composer Robert Schumann considered particularly wasteful and tasteless. In response he composed Album für die Jugend in 1848, a collection of children’s pieces that utilised a combination of text, picture and music to appeal to the interests of children, and to inspire their enthusiasm for musical play. Schumann envisioned his music as an extension of familial nurturance, which played a powerful role in directing children towards a musically and spiritually rich adulthood. As the tradition of imaginative children’s music developed during the nineteenth century, the dual themes of entertainment and education remained central to its generic identity, and continued to speak to the significance of piano music as a tool for the socialisation of children. The work of Jacqueline Rose offers a lens through which to explore this music’s manipulative influence upon children. The multimodal and performative characteristics of these musical pieces demonstrate the hidden influence of the adult’s guiding hand and the dire consequences that come to those who transgress musical and social boundaries.


Author(s):  
Christopher Brooke

This is the first full-scale look at the essential place of Stoicism in the foundations of modern political thought. Spanning the period from Justus Lipsius's Politics in 1589 to Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Emile in 1762, and concentrating on arguments originating from England, France, and the Netherlands, the book considers how political writers of the period engaged with the ideas of the Roman and Greek Stoics that they found in works by Cicero, Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius. The book examines key texts in their historical context, paying special attention to the history of classical scholarship and the historiography of philosophy. The book delves into the persisting tension between Stoicism and the tradition of Augustinian anti-Stoic criticism, which held Stoicism to be a philosophy for the proud who denied their fallen condition. Concentrating on arguments in moral psychology surrounding the foundations of human sociability and self-love, the book details how the engagement with Roman Stoicism shaped early modern political philosophy and offers significant new interpretations of Lipsius and Rousseau together with fresh perspectives on the political thought of Hugo Grotius and Thomas Hobbes. The book shows how the legacy of the Stoics played a vital role in European intellectual life in the early modern era.


2020 ◽  
Vol 384 (2) ◽  
pp. 222-232
Author(s):  
P. V. Menshikov ◽  
G. K. Kassymova ◽  
R. R. Gasanova ◽  
Y. V. Zaichikov ◽  
V. A. Berezovskaya ◽  
...  

A special role in the development of a pianist as a musician, composer and performer, as shown by the examples of the well-known, included in the history of art, and the most ordinary pianists, their listeners and admirers, lovers of piano music and music in general, are played by moments associated with psychotherapeutic abilities and music features. The purpose of the study is to comprehend the psychotherapeutic aspects of performing activities (using pianists as an example). The research method is a theoretical analysis of the psychotherapeutic aspects of performing activities: the study of the possibilities and functions of musical psychotherapy in the life of a musician as a “(self) psychotherapist” and “patient”. For almost any person, music acts as a way of self-understanding and understanding of the world, a way of self-realization, rethinking and overcoming life's difficulties - internal and external "blockages" of development, a way of saturating life with universal meanings, including a person in the richness of his native culture and universal culture as a whole. Art and, above all, its metaphorical nature help to bring out and realize internal experiences, provide an opportunity to look at one’s own experiences, problems and injuries from another perspective, to see a different meaning in them. In essence, we are talking about art therapy, including the art of writing and performing music - musical psychotherapy. However, for a musician, music has a special meaning, special significance. Musician - produces music, and, therefore, is not only an “object”, but also the subject of musical psychotherapy. The musician’s training includes preparing him as an individual and as a professional to perform functions that can be called psychotherapeutic: in the works of the most famous performers, as well as in the work of ordinary teachers, psychotherapeutic moments sometimes become key. Piano music and performance practice sets a certain “viewing angle” of life, and, in the case of traumatic experiences, a new way of understanding a difficult, traumatic and continuing to excite a person event, changing his attitude towards him. It helps to see something that was hidden in the hustle and bustle of everyday life or in the patterns of relationships familiar to a given culture. At the same time, while playing music or learning to play music, a person teaches to see the hidden and understand the many secrets of the human soul, the relationships of people.


This first-ever history of the US National Intelligence Council (NIC) is told through the reflections of its eight chairs in the period from the end of the Cold War until 2017. Coeditors Robert Hutchings and Gregory Treverton add a substantial introduction placing the NIC in its historical context going all the way back to the Board of National Estimates in the 1940s, as well as a concluding chapter that highlights key themes and judgments. The historic mission of this remarkable but little-understood organization is strategic intelligence assessment in service of senior American foreign policymakers. It has been at the center of every critical foreign policy issue during the period covered by this volume: helping shape America’s post–Cold War strategies, confronting sectarian conflicts around the world, meeting the new challenge of international terrorism, and now assessing the radical restructuring of the global order. Each chapter places its particular period of the NIC’s history in context (the global situation, the administration, the intelligence community) and assesses the most important issues with which the NIC grappled during the period, acknowledging failures as well as claiming successes. With the creation of the director of national intelligence in 2005, the NIC’s mission mushroomed to include direct intelligence support to the main policymaking committees in the government. The mission shift took the NIC directly into the thick of the action but may have come at the expense of weakening its historic role of providing over-the horizon strategic analysis.


Author(s):  
Stephen R. Barley

The four chapters of this book summarize the results of thirty-five years dedicated to studying how technologies change work and organizations. The first chapter places current developments in artificial intelligence into the historical context of previous technological revolutions by drawing on William Faunce’s argument that the history of technology is one of progressive automation of the four components of any production system: energy, transformation, and transfer and control technologies. The second chapter lays out a role-based theory of how technologies occasion changes in organizations. The third chapter tackles the issue of how to conceptualize a more thorough approach to assessing how intelligent technologies, such as artificial intelligence, can shape work and employment. The fourth chapter discusses what has been learned over the years about the fears that arise when one sets out to study technical work and technical workers and methods for controlling those fears.


Author(s):  
Stephen D. Bowd

Renaissance Mass Murder explores the devastating impact of war on the men and women of the Renaissance. In contrast to the picture of balance and harmony usually associated with the Renaissance, it uncovers in forensic detail a world in which sacks of Italian cities and massacres of civilians at the hands of French, German, Spanish, Swiss, and Italian troops were regular occurrences. The arguments presented are based on a wealth of evidence—histories and chronicles, poetry and paintings, sculpture and other objects—which together provide a new and startling history of sixteenth-century Italy and a social history of the Italian Wars. It outlines how massacres happened, how princes, soldiers, lawyers, and writers, justified and explained such events, and how they were represented in contemporary culture. On this basis the book reconstructs the terrifying individual experiences of civilians in the face of war and in doing so offers a story of human tragedy which redresses the balance of the history of the Italian Wars, and of Renaissance warfare, in favour of the civilian and away from the din of the battlefield. This book also places mass murder in a broader historical context and challenges claims that such violence was unusual or in decline in early modern Europe. Finally, it shows that women often suffered disproportionately from this violence and that immunity for them, as for their children, was often partially developed or poorly respected.


Author(s):  
Ellen Reese ◽  
Ian Breckenridge-Jackson ◽  
Julisa McCoy

This chapter explores the history of maternalist mobilization and women’s community politics in the United States. It argues that both “maternalism” and “community” have proved to be highly flexible mobilizing frames for women. Building on the insights of intersectionality theory, the authors suggest that women’s maternal and community politics is shaped by their social locations within multiple, intersecting relations of domination and subordination, as well as their political ideologies and historical context. The chapter begins by discussing the politically contradictory history of maternalist mobilization within the United States from the Progressive era to the present. It then explores other forms of women’s community politics, focusing on women’s community volunteerism, self-help groups, and community organizing. It discusses how these frames have been used both to build alliances among women and to divide or exclude women based on perceived differences and social inequalities based on race, nativity, class, or sexual orientation.


Author(s):  
Eugenia Roldán Vera ◽  
Susana Quintanilla

The Mexican policy of state provision of standardized textbooks for all was instituted in 1959 and still ongoing. This is an overview of the previous history of state intervention in the production and distribution of school textbooks, an examination of the particular circumstances in which the 1959 policy was figured and implemented, and a description of the characteristics of the different generations of textbooks that have since been published, corresponding with several educational reforms. The arguments for and against standardized textbooks mobilized by different sectors of society throughout sixty years are discussed in their historical context. Far from this being a debate about the authoritarian intervention of the state in education, issues of social equality and teaching quality have been central.


2020 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 449-465
Author(s):  
Stanley N. Katz ◽  
Leah Reisman

AbstractThis article discusses the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement on the arts and cultural sector in the United States, placing the 2020 crises in the context of the United States’s historically decentralized approach to supporting the arts and culture. After providing an overview of the United States’s private, locally focused history of arts funding, we use this historical lens to analyze the combined effects of the pandemic and Black Lives Matter movement on a single metropolitan area – Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. We trace a timeline of key events in the national and local pandemic response and the reaction of the arts community to the Black Lives Matter movement, arguing that the nature of these intersecting responses, and their fallout for the arts and cultural sector, stem directly from weaknesses in the United States’s historical approach to administering the arts. We suggest that, in the context of widespread organizational vulnerability caused by the pandemic, the United States’s decentralized approach to funding culture also undermines cultural organizations’ abilities to respond to issues of public relevance and demonstrate their civic value, threatening these organizations’ legitimacy.


2021 ◽  
pp. 216507992096196
Author(s):  
Sandra J. Domeracki

Background: Tennis leg (TL), a musculotendon injury to the gastrocnemius, has been associated with the eponymous sport since 1883. This article examines the historical context of TL as a sports compared with an occupational injury. This was juxtaposed with the history of tennis elbow, a tendon injury to the upper extremity also associated with sport. Methods: Bibliometric databases (PubMed, Web of Science [WOS], Hathi Trust) were keyword-searched; relevant citations were investigated in depth. Results: The search yielded 71 citations for TL (PubMed). The majority ( n = 43) were key word linked to sport terms; only one was linked to work-related search terms. Furthermore, none of the top four cited publications (Web of Science) alluded to work-related risk factors in TL in full textual analysis. Hathi Trust yielded the earliest work-related case, reported in a non-biomedical source. Tennis elbow was more frequently reported ( n = 189 citations in PubMed) and more frequently linked ( n = 193; 9.7%) to occupational search terms. Conclusion/Application to Practice: The history of TL, juxtaposed with tennis elbow, demonstrates how nosology can influence but does not wholly explain disease attribution, potentially to the detriment of taking into account occupational causality. The lack of recognition of occupational factors revealed in this literature search was notable because TL occurred most commonly in males of working age. By providing perspective on how historical context and nosology can affect the conceptualization of disease, this review may help inform prevention, treatment, and regulatory policy.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document