When the poet becomes the muse

2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 351-374
Author(s):  
Nina Rolland
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Detailed Analysis ◽  
Musical Settings ◽  
Song Settings ◽  
The Gaze

Women are ubiquitous in Charles Baudelaire’s poetry, presented either as ideal, unattainable figures, or as earthly, abominable creatures. Instead of examining the gaze of the poet on women, it is interesting to reverse the roles and to explore the gaze of women on Baudelaire, or more precisely what women hear in Baudelaire’s poetry: what happens when the poet becomes the muse? While the most famous musical settings of Baudelaire’s poems have been composed by men (Duparc, Fauré, Debussy), this article aims to uncover musical settings of Baudelaire’s poetry by twentieth-century female composers. In a first instance, this article offers an overview of twentieth-century songs by female composers; from the mélodies of Marie Jaëll to the contemporary settings of Camille Pépin, what do song settings of Baudelaire tell us about the visibility of female composers? Secondly, the article provides a detailed analysis of L’Albatros (1987), a music-theatre piece by Adrienne Clostre. By deconstructing Baudelaire’s poems, Clostre offers a reflection on creativity that cannot be separated from a general understanding of the place of female composers in society.

“A History of Man and His Desire”: Ferruccio Busoni and Faust

2017 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 151-179
Author(s):  
Erinn Knyt
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Detailed Analysis ◽  
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe ◽  
Christopher Marlowe ◽  
Dark Side ◽  
Ferruccio Busoni ◽  
Dance Suite ◽  
History Of ◽  
Alter Ego ◽  
The Devil

Relying on knowledge of Karl Engel's edition of the Volksschauspiel, Karl Simrock's version of the puppet play, Gotthold Lessing's Faust fragments, and versions of the Faust legend by Christopher Marlowe and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, among others, Ferruccio Busoni crafted his own hybrid libretto that depicts a mystical and broadminded Faust. Busoni's music reflects the richness of Faust's mind, combining heterogeneous timbres, forms, and styles. Busoni juxtaposes a Gregorian Credo, Palestrina-style choral settings, a reformation hymn, a Baroque instrumental dance suite, an organ fantasia, recitatives, a lyrical ballad, and orchestral variations, with impressionistic symphonic writing, and experimental passages. While stylistic heterogeneity can be heard throughout many of his mature instrumental and vocal works, Busoni also used this heterogeneity in a descriptive way in Doktor Faust to characterize Faust. At the same time, Busoni sought to write “a history of man and his desire” rather than of a man and the devil. It is Faust's own dark side, rather than the devil, that distracts him and prevents him from completing his greatest work. With Kaspar removed from the plot, Mephistopheles, who as spirit is not always distinct from Faust the man, becomes Faust's alter ego. This duality is expressed musically when Faust assumes Mephistopheles's characteristic intervals. Although Busoni's incomplete Doktor Faust, BV 303, has already been studied by several scholars, including Antony Beaumont, Nancy Chamness, and Susan Fontaine, there is still no detailed analysis of Busoni's treatment of Faust. Through analyses of autobiographical connections, Busoni's early settings of Faustian characters, and the text and music in Doktor Faust, with special attention on the Wittenberg Tavern Scene that has no precedent among the versions of the Faust legend, this article reveals Busoni's vision of Faust as a broadminded, and yet conflicted character, shaped idiosyncratically to convey Busoni's personal artistic ideals. In so doing, the article not only contributes to ongoing discourse about Doktor Faust, but also expands knowledge about ways the Faust legend was interpreted and set musically in the early twentieth century through intertextual comparisons.

Rebuilding Finance’s “Action Man” through CNBC’sThe Closing Bell

2018 ◽  
Vol 20 (7) ◽  
pp. 702-719
Author(s):  
Diane L. Cormany
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Financial Crisis ◽  
Detailed Analysis ◽  
Global Financial Crisis ◽  
Structural Reform ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Market Change ◽  
Finance Capital ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

CNBC’s The Closing Bell contributed to the expansion of finance capital in the late twentieth century through its televisual emphasis on incremental market change that functions affectively to call for action. Such emphasis on short-term stock movement was called into question during the 2008 global financial crisis. However, detailed analysis demonstrates that The Closing Bell did not alter course. I argue that its ongoing focus on incremental movement has worked affectively to shore up a masculinized culture of finance during a period that demanded structural reform.

Seeing Stein’s Masculinity

2018 ◽  
pp. 39-67
Author(s):  
Chris Coffman
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
Gertrude Stein ◽  
September 11 ◽  
Visual Images ◽  
The Gaze ◽  
Written Texts ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Man Ray

“Seeing Stein’s Masculinity” analyses the shifting significance of visual images of and written texts about Stein. Driven by recent reinterpretations of Jacques Lacan’s theory of the gaze, this chapter reads his theories against the grain to counter arguments about the visual that reproduce binary thinking about gender. Queering his account of the gaze makes it possible to register the expanded array of masculinities mobilized in photographs of Stein by George Platt Lynes, Henri Manuel, and Man Ray as well as in their recent reception during the 2011 Seeing Gertrude Stein exhibit in San Francisco. Moreover, Stein’s own comments in The Autobiography about being photographed by Man Ray queer the heteronormative gaze that drives James Agee’s review of that book in the September 11, 1933 issue of Time whose cover featured Lynes’s image of Stein in profile. Tracking changes that have taken place between the early twentieth century and the present in attitudes toward her queer sexuality and masculinity, this chapter argues that traces of abjection remain in contemporary reactions to Stein despite greater acceptance of her gender, sexuality, and innovative writing.

The Only Tone for Terror: Tony Harrison and the Gorgon’s Gaze

2019 ◽  
pp. 205-220
Author(s):  
Henry Stead
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
Documentary Film ◽  
European History ◽  
Class Politics ◽  
Experimental Medium ◽  
The Gaze ◽  
Current Affairs ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Film And Video

This chapter introduces the reader to Tony Harrison’s audiovisual poetry, composed for and broadcast on British television through the late 1980s and 1990s. Harrison has to date made twelve full documentary film-poems, and one film-poem feature, entitled Prometheus (1998). They all brim with the darker side of European history, current affairs and class politics, and explore what limits of what poetry might do, and how it might do it, in the televisual age. The chapter sets Harrison’s film poetry in its cultural context by paying attention to the poet’s major influences in the experimental medium (John Grierson’s GPO film unit and early Soviet filmmaking), before homing in on his 1992 film-poem The Gaze of the Gorgon as a species of social psychotherapy. The act of gazing at the Medusa-like and thus usually petrifying image of twentieth-century atrocity is offered here not as a ‘dope’ to mankind, but a stimulant towards its cure. The film-poem draws explicitly on Nietzsche’s concept of ‘Dionysiac art’ and Simone Weil’s pacifist notion of ‘force’, and Robert Jay Lifton’s work on trauma and the holocaust. Harrison’s hugely ambitious and uniquely accessible film-poems are currently publically unavailable. Are they the ‘missing link’ in the evolution of contemporary film and video poetry?

Johanna Müller-Hermann’s Lied der Erinnerung: Austria, America, and Beyond

2021 ◽  
pp. 211-228
Author(s):  
Jennifer Ronyak
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Complex Terrain ◽  
Musical Settings ◽  
Critical Success ◽  
Program Notes ◽  
The U.S ◽  
Made In

Scholarship on musical settings of Walt Whitman’s When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d has only briefly looked into one of the most ambitious pieces composed on the poem in the earlier twentieth century: the Austrian woman composer Johanna Müller-Hermann’s orchestral cantata Lied der Erinnerung, premiered in Vienna in 1930. Through the piece has not remained in the repertoire, seen in light of its original context the cantata was a rich site for negotiating a complex terrain of ‘American’, ‘Austrian’, and ‘universal’ concepts. Through her structural decisions involving Whitman’s poem, her attempts to have the work reach American audiences, her use of borrowed melodies, and claims made in the work’s program notes, Müller-Hermann situated the work carefully between these competing frames while seeking to achieve critical success as a woman composer. The Whitmanesque vision of America that Müller-Hermann created would have also had a politically charged significance in both Austria and the U.S. in the period surrounding the work’s premiere.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-147
Author(s):  
Stephen Menn ◽  
Justin E. H. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Detailed Analysis ◽  
The Political ◽  
Medical Philosophy ◽  
Archival Documents ◽  
History Of ◽  
Intellectual Context ◽  
Academic Dissertations

The life of Anton Wilhelm Amo is summarized, with close attention to the archival documents that establish key moments in his biography. Next the history of Amo’s reception is considered, from the first summaries of his work in German periodicals during his lifetime, through his legacy in African nationalist thought in the twentieth century. Then the political and intellectual context at Halle is addressed, considering the likely influence on Amo’s work of Halle Pietism, of the local currents of medical philosophy as represented by Friedrich Hoffmann, and of legal thought as represented by Christian Thomasius. The legacy of major early modern philosophers, such as René Descartes and G. W. Leibniz, is also considered, in the aim of understanding how Amo himself might have understood them and how they might have shaped his work. Next a detailed analysis of the conventions of academic dissertations and disputations in early eighteenth-century Germany is provided, in order to better understand how these conventions give shape to Amo’s published works. Finally, ancient and modern debates on action and passion and on sensation are investigated, providing key context for the summary of the principal arguments of Amo’s two treatises, which are summarized in the final section of the introduction.

Is Gandhi’s Approach to Technology Irrelevant in the Modern Age of Technology?

2019 ◽  
pp. 99-137
Author(s):  
Douglas Allen
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Detailed Analysis ◽  
Herbert Marcuse ◽  
Power Elite ◽  
Important Work ◽  
Modern Age ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Power Elite

Gandhi’s most important work on technology, Hind Swaraj, seems hopelessly ignorant, anti-modern, and anti-technology. This essay focuses on Gandhi’s perplexing writings on technology, maintaining that Gandhi’s critiques and alternatives are very significant today, but only if we are creatively selective in appropriating, reformulating, and reapplying what remains insightful. It presents a detailed analysis of Hind Swaraj and technology and Gandhi’s debates with Nehru, Tagore, and others. This essay then considers Gandhi’s positions on “modern civilization,” true civilization, and technology, and the future significance of Gandhi’s approach to technology. Included are contributions from Herbert Marcuse and other twentieth-century scholars and formulations of contemporary crises such as climate change and growing inequality with the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the power elite. We consider the insights of a dynamic, contextually relevant Gandhian position on the appropriate role of technology in addressing such personal existential and global crises.

Breaking White Supremacy

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gary Dorrien
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Detailed Analysis ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Social Gospel ◽  
Christian Leadership ◽  
Civil Rights Movements ◽  
Southern Christian Leadership Conference ◽  
Martin Luther King

Breaking White Supremacy analyzes the twentieth-century heyday of the black social gospel and its influence on the Civil Rights Movement. Asserting that Martin Luther King Jr. did not come from nowhere, it describes major figures who influenced King, offers a detailed analysis of King’s leadership of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and his catalyzing and unifying role in the southern and northern Civil Rights Movements, and interprets the legacy of King and the black social gospel tradition.

scholarly journals Hybridization and the Creation of “Third Spaces”: an Analysis of Two Works by Tomás Gubitsch

2011 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 75-100
Author(s):  
Alberto Munarriz
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Detailed Analysis ◽  
Dirty War ◽  
Artistic Collaboration ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Third Spaces ◽  
The Many ◽  
Shed Light

Tango’s recent resurgence has greatly intensified the momentum of a long process of “international dissemination” that began with the genre’s arrival in Paris during the first decade of the twentieth century. The many dialogues promoted by this renewed popularity have set the stage for an unprecedented period of development marked by artistic collaboration, experimentation, and hybridization. As a result, the genre is undergoing numerous changes; among the most striking are the new sonic shapes it is assuming. Through the detailed analysis of two compositions by Argentine guitarist and composer Tomás Gubitsch, who since the 1970s—the time of the country’s notorious and brutal “Dirty War”—has resided in Paris, this paper examines some of the processes currently shaping the sonic form of some of tango’s numerous variants. This work hopes to shed light on Gubitsch the composer and on the current tango phenomenon itself, as well as to contribute to a better understanding of the ways musical hybrids are constructed.

The Gaze in Polybius' Histories

1991 ◽  
Vol 81 ◽  
pp. 10-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Davidson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Roman History ◽  
The Sun ◽  
The Gaze ◽  
Roman Imperialism ◽  
Unitary Reality ◽  
As If

Summarizing Polybius' contribution to the study of Roman history, Mommsen paid him the following compliment: ‘His books are like the sun in the field of Roman history; where they begin, the misty veils which still cloak the Samnite and Pyrrhic wars are lifted, where they finish, a new and if possible still more vexatious twilight begins.’ Since Mommsen our understanding of Polybius' methods, his bias and omissions, his ideology and concerns, has progressed immeasurably, thanks largely to the work of Pédech and Walbank. Nevertheless, the idea that the Histories represent, at least in their conception, the illumination of an intrinsic reality persists. Polybius' supposed ‘poor style’ is often treated as in some way an absence of historiographical mediation. In this case, ‘transparency’ in a text, the sensation that it provides unmediated access to what it describes, is achieved not by a smooth and inconspicuous style, but by coarseness. Tarn compared Polybius' work to rescripts and despatches, as if he were only interested in an unobtrusive recording role, and this attitude to the historian, far from being in decline, has received some radical and authoritative support in recent years. One reappraisal of Roman imperialism has argued that Polybius was much closer to the reality of the process than many twentieth-century historians. Another study claims to ‘want to say no more than what Polybius said’. Ultimately, I have no argument with those who stress Polybius' honesty and reliability. More problematic, however, is an attitude to our use of Polybius' history which is often assumed in eulogies of his truthfulness: that when we read Polybius, we are enabled to gaze directly on the landscape of Roman history, a single substantial unitary reality, structured out of objective facts.

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