scholarly journals Slovenian Music in its Central European Context: the 20th-century experience

2021 ◽  
Vol 40 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 267-276
Author(s):  
Niall O'Loughlin

Slovenia has had a rich and varied musical histoiy, despite the fact that it was part of the Habsburg Empire and then a constituent part of Yugoslavia. Its recent smooth transition to independence and its realignment with Central Europe have been noteworthy. In the past, Slovene or part-Slovene composers such as Gallus, Tartini and Wolf worked abroad, while in the 20th century composers normally returned to Slovenia after studying abroad. For example, Marij Kogoj and Slavko Osterc studied in Central Europe and maintained a strong musical connection with Central European modernism in the 1920s and 1930s. Kogoj's strong links with Viennese expressionism were well expressed in the opera Črne maskeof 1927, while Osterc's connections with Hindemith, Honegger and others is evident in the opera Krog s kredo and orchestral works such as Mouvement symphonique. On the other hand, Kozina, Arnič and Škerjanc developed a less advanced style and kept less contact with the rest of Europe. The political situation in the 1940s and 1950s made outside travel difficult, changing the situation dramatically. Composers such as Ramovš and Uroš Krek had different experiences: Ramovš managed to study with Frazzi and Casella in Italy, while Krek did not study abroad. Both, however, produced works in a distinctive neo-classical style that typified the immediate post-war period. Ivo Petrić's music follows the styles of Prokofiev and Shostakovich. From the late 1950s onwards  the situation  changed  with  strong contacts with Croatia, Poland and countries of the West: France, Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States in particular. This contact encouraged the emergence of a new avant-garde in Slovenia in the 1960s with such composers as Petrić, Ramovš, Lebič, Jež, Božič, Matičič, Globokar, Stibilj and Štuhec coming into prominence. Later they were joined by Pavel Mihelčič and Maks Strmčnik. Matičič and Globokar mostly stayed abroad, while Stibilj returned permanently later. In the decades before and after independence in 1991, a new generation of composers became established, with the most advanced composition by Aldo Kumar, Uroš Rojko, Tomaž Svete, Brina Jež-Brezavšček and Nenad Firšt. Postmodern tendencies are found in the music of Jani Golob and Marko Mihevc. Ali these composers are providing the Slovene musical scene with a wide variety of distinctive music that is both challenging and interesting.

2020 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 648-680
Author(s):  
SHANE HAMILTON

A range of private and public institutions emerged in the United States in the years before and after the Great Depression to help farmers confront the inherent uncertainty of agricultural production and marketing. This included a government-owned and operated insurance enterprise offering “all-risk” coverage to American farmers beginning in 1938. Crop insurance, initially developed as a social insurance program, was beset by pervasive problems of adverse selection and moral hazard. As managers and policy makers responded to those problems from the 1940s on, they reshaped federal crop insurance in ways that increasingly made the scheme a lever of financialization, a means of disciplining individual farmers to think of farming in abstract terms of risk management. Crop insurance became intertwined with important changes in the economic context of agriculture by the 1960s, including the emergence of the “technological treadmill,” permanently embedding financialized risk management into the political economy of American agriculture.


2017 ◽  
Vol 57 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Lili Zách

ABSTRACTIn the aftermath of the Great War, the birth of new independent small states in East-Central Europe was closely followed in Irish nationalist circles due to the possibility of Partition in Ireland. Newspaper editorials, journal articles and diplomatic accounts illustrate that post-war Ireland had an open attitude toward the settlement of borders on the Continent as the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire was similarly controversial. This paper aims to investigate how contemporary Irish commentators perceived the question of boundary settlements in Central Europe in order to provide an insight into the transformation of political space in both Ireland and Central Europe. After providing a brief background to the Irish boundary question, this paper touches upon the most important points in historiography with regard to border settlements in the post-World War I era.. It also discusses Irish Partition history in detail, concentrating on the North-Eastern Boundary Bureau (NEBB) and the Boundary Commission, and the importance of Central European precedents in their work. Moreover, this paper also proposes to provide an insight into the Irish interest in the minority problem in European borderland regions after 1925 in order to illustrate the outward-looking attitude to Irish nationalists, even in relation to borders and minorities.


2015 ◽  
Vol 47 (47) ◽  
pp. 39 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karoline Kühl

The conditions for the Danish language among Danish emigrants and their descendants in the United States in the first half of the 20th century were tough: The group of Danish speakers was relatively small, the Danes did not settle together as other immigrant groups did, and demographic circumstances led many young, unmarried Danish men to marry non-Danish speaking partners. These were all factors that prevented the formation of tight-knit Danish-speaking communities. Furthermore, US nationalistic propaganda in the wake of World War I and the melting-pot effect of post-war American society in the 1950s contributed to a rapid decline in the use of Danish among the emigrants. Analyses of recordings of 58 Danish-American speakers from the 1970s show, however, that the language did not decline in an unsystematic process of language loss, only to be replaced quickly and effectively by English. On the contrary, the recordings show contactinduced linguistic innovations in the Danish of the interviewees, which involve the creation of specific lexical and syntactical American Danish features that systematically differ from Continental Danish. The article describes and discusses these features, and gives a thorough account of the socioeconomic and linguistic conditions for this speaker group.


Anthropology ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roxanne Varzi ◽  
Andrew McGrath

Stan Brakhage (b. 1933–d. 2003) was a visual artist and filmmaker who embodied many of the theoretical tensions and pragmatic themes in cultural anthropology in the 20th century, despite not being an anthropologist and working almost totally through experiments in 16mm film. In traversing, and being claimed by, both modernist and postmodernist thinkers and artists alike, he was a creator as much influenced by the poetry of American Romanticism as he was the harbinger of a millennial deconstruction. He is generally considered, along with the filmmaker Maya Deren, the quintessential savant of American avant-garde cinema. His phenomenological approach to filmmaking and his attention to poesis in visuality, combined with his persistent dispensation with narrative and plot, drew to light still pressing existential questions about the space between structure and individualism, the unconscious mind, myth, and intersubjective experiences in the shared quotidian of everyday being. While his early works of the mid-1950s showed solidarity with the surrealist and Freudian-inspired themes of compatriots like Maya Deren, in the 1960s Brakhage quickly engaged with what he viewed as the untapped potential of cinematic celluloid as a malleable medium with which to both capture and express the immediacy of sensual experience. At the core of his creative impulse was an exploration of visual perception unfiltered by symbolic textuality. To that end, his 16mm films were mostly soundless, color-saturated, nonlinear impressions of the most consequential of life’s relational phenomena; birth, sex, human development, death, and familial intimacies untethered from linguistic discourses, character drama, and traditional act-based storytelling structures. Brakhage’s process of etching and painting directly onto the emulsified film strips he used for shooting enabled his impressionistic questioning of the boundaries of representation in moving images. Brakhage asserted that, much as with human vision, such manipulations punched holes in the epistemic orthodoxy of experiential narrative and instead stressed the messy and affective ways that our sensory organs force us to negotiate our immanent worlds. His early artistic tenure found him characteristically prolific in modernist aesthetics as he explored concepts ranging from the psychoanalysis of dreaming and the Freudian death-drive in Reflections on Black (1955) to the metaphysical man-myth opus Dog Star Man (1961–1964). Such themes paralleled similar theoretical concerns emergent in anthropology in the mid-20th century as evident in both the structuralism of Levi-Strauss and the persistence of the Freudian unconscious as an explanatory hermeneutic. Today, Stan Brakhage’s influence in anthropology is evident in ethnographic filmmaking that challenges the documentary impulse, ambiguates hegemonic truth claims, and explores the modalities of sensorial representation related to human experience through iterative experimentation.


2020 ◽  
pp. 405-422
Author(s):  
David G. Tompkins

In the aftermath of World War II, the Red Army as a symbol of power was supported in many other arenas so as to counteract the rival influence of the United States on Central Europe. The Soviet Union brought new urgency to these efforts from 1948, with music—and culture more broadly—providing a case for Russia’s attractiveness and superiority with respect to the West. This chapter discusses the nature and scope of Soviet influence in the Central European music world through the examples of East Germany and Poland, and through the prism of the music and persona of Sergei Prokofiev. After his return to the USSR in 1936, Prokofiev, along with Shostakovich, became associated with the very definition of what made music Soviet and thus worthy of emulation. And even more than Shostakovich, Prokofiev and his music functioned as powerful but malleable symbols that could be appropriated by all Soviet actors for their own ends.


2019 ◽  
Vol 53 (2) ◽  
pp. 556-563
Author(s):  
JAY GARCIA

Recalling his work as cofounder and contributor toUniversities and Left Review, or the ULR group, in the lead-up to the founding of cultural studies during the 1950s, Stuart Hall noted that much of that work had to do with the United States. “In geopolitical terms we were of course neutralists, hostile to the politics emanating from the State Department in Washington,” Hall wrote, “but culturally we were nonetheless attracted by the vitality of American popular life, indeed to the domain of mass culture itself.” If the ULR group and similar collectives shared an “anxiety about the stupendous power of the booming consumer capitalism of post-war America,” they were also united by an appreciation for the ways the “vitality and raucousness of American culture certainly loosened England's tight-lipped, hierarchical class cultures and carried inside it possibilities – or the collective dream? – for a better future, which we felt was a serious political loss to deny.” Not unrelatedly, by the 1960s and 1970s, cultural studies and certain quarters of American intellectual life were proceeding along comparable tracks. Many American scholars and at least some working in cultural studies moved toward social history that emphasized the “hidden experiences of subordinated groups and classes.” Undertaken in concert with the new social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, this version of social history would ramify widely, furnishing the very questions and analytic habits of many fields, not least American studies.


Author(s):  
Warren Buckland

Since the 1960s, film theory has undergone rapid development as an academic discipline—to such an extent that students new to the subject are quickly overwhelmed by the extensive and complex research published under its rubric. “Film Theory in the United States and Europe” presents a broad overview of guides to and anthologies of film theory, followed by a longer section that presents an historical account of film theory’s development—from classical film theory of the 1930s–1950s (focused around film as an art), the modern (or contemporary) film theory of the 1960s–1970s (premised on semiotics, Marxism, feminism, and psychoanalysis), to current developments, including the New Lacanians and cognitive film theory. The second section ends with a very brief overview of film and/as philosophy. The article covers the key figures and fundamental concepts that have contributed to film theory as an autonomous discipline within the university. These concepts include ontology of film, realism/the reality effect, formalism, adaptation, signification, voyeurism, patriarchy, ideology, mainstream cinema, the avant-garde, suture, the cinematic apparatus, auteur-structuralism, the imaginary, the symbolic, the real, film and emotion, and embodied cognition.


Author(s):  
Dan Bacalzo

Beginning in the 1960s and continuing into the present day, a wide range of performers and playwrights have contributed to Asian American experimental theater and performance. These works tend toward plot structures that break away from realist narratives or otherwise experiment with form and content. This includes avant-garde innovations, community-based initiatives that draw on the personal experiences of workshop participants, politicized performance art pieces, spoken word solos, multimedia works, and more. Many of these artistic categories overlap, even as the works produced may look extremely different from one another. There is likewise great ethnic and experiential diversity among the performing artists: some were born in the United States while others are immigrants, permanent residents, or Asian nationals who have produced substantial amounts of works in the United States. Several of these artists raise issues of race as a principal element in the creation of their performances, while for others it is a minor consideration, or perhaps not a consideration at all. Nevertheless, since all these artists are of Asian descent, racial perceptions still inform the production, reception, and interpretation of their work.


Author(s):  
Dafydd Townley

The Watergate affair has become synonymous with political corruption and conspiracy. The crisis has, through fact, fiction, and debate, become considerably more than the arrest of five men breaking into the Democratic Party’s national headquarters in the Watergate complex in Washington DC in the early hours of Saturday, June 17, 1972. Instead, the term “Watergate” has since come to represent the burglary, its failed cover-up, the press investigation, the Senate enquiry, and the eventual resignation of the thirty-seventh president of the United States, Richard Nixon. Arguably, Watergate has come to encompass all the illegalities of the Nixon administration. The crisis broke when the Vietnam War had already sunk public confidence in the executive to a low ebb, and in the context of a society already fractured by the turbulence of the 1960s. As such, Watergate is seen as the nadir of American democracy in the 20th century. Perversely, despite contemporaries’ genuine fears for the future of the US democratic system, the scandal highlighted the efficiency of the US governmental machine. The investigations that constituted the Watergate enquiry, which were conducted by the legislative and judicial branches and the fourth estate, exposed corruption in the executive of the United States that stretched to the holder of the highest office. The post-war decades had allowed an imperial presidency to develop, which had threatened the country’s political equilibrium. Watergate disclosed that the presidency had overreached its constitutional powers and responsibilities and had conspired to keep those moves hidden from the electorate. More significantly, however, the forced resignation of Richard Nixon revealed that the checks-and-balances system of government, which was conceived almost 200 years before the Watergate affair, worked as those who devised it had planned. Watergate should illustrate to Americans not just the dangers of consolidating great power in the office of the president, but also the means to counteract such growth.


2017 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 342-349
Author(s):  
Ewa Kołodziejczyk

Abstract The article traces the impact of Czesław Miłosz’s first American stay on his image of Central Europe in Rodzinna Europa [Native Realm]. In the United States, the post-war immigrant from Vilnius learned to perceive, understand and evaluate American culture; he also gained a new perspective on his region of Europe and Slavic immigrants. This experience enabled him to adopt an American point of view in his autobiographical essay. Following William Faulkner, Miłosz carries on an analysis of Eastern and Central Europe’s history and identities. The uses Western historical and sociological glossary to describe processes that formed his “native realm.” Analogically, the poet from pre-war Vilnius reflects on American multi-ethnicity and religious diversity from a Central European perspective. In Rodzinna Europa, Miłosz takes the position of a migrant translator and a two-way mediator between East and West.


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