Chávez (y Ramírez), Carlos (Antonio de Padua) (1899–1978)

Author(s):  
Christina Taylor Gibson

Composer and conductor Carlos Chávez was a dominant force in Mexican musical life during the middle of the twentieth century. His most influential post was as director of the Symphony Orchestra of Mexico [OrquestaSinfónica, OSM], which he led from 1928 to 1948. While leading the OSM, Chávez successfully broadened concepts of classical music to include symphonic, contemporary works by Mexican composers. At the same time, he began an international guest-conducting career that continued into the final years of his life. Although best known for a handful of nationalist works composed in the 1920s and 1930s, Chávez’s compositions demonstrate a diversity of esthetic interests, from avant-garde abstraction to popular genres; regardless of the approach used in a given work, Chávez’s intellectualism and care are evident.

2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 133-156
Author(s):  
SERGEI A. AIZENSHTADT ◽  

In this article we study forms and methods used to popularize western classical music in a South Korean TV series. The main subject of analysis is the TV series Beethoven Virus (2008) devoted to a symphony orchestra in a fictional South Korean city. The main purpose of this TV series is the promotion of classical music, and the author of the article comes to the conclusion that its popularity among Korean audience is explained by its engaging, convincing artistic methods with respect to national cultural specificities, which were used to show the working environment of professional musicians. The series reveals real problems of modern Korean musical culture: “crisis of overproduction” of academic musicians; discrimination of graduates of South Korean musical educational institutions; prejudice that classical music is only for the rich. The author emphasizes that immersion into the atmosphere of professional musical life allows the viewers to apprehend the educational value of the TV series more clearly. Beethoven Virus demonstrates traditional Korean attitude towards European classical music determined by the Confucian roots; and at the same time, it depicts changes in the modern culture conditioned by gradual departure from traditional values. The two main characters — the young and the old conductors — symbolize the old and the new in the Korean musical culture. They interact in a traditional eastern way: the new spirit does not openly conflict with the established convention, but sprouts from it. The author suggests that the music is explained in the film through emotional associations which let the viewers fully perceive the musical idea. The author believes that this method, compared to other ways widespread in the West, corresponds to the nature of the specific sensation of European classical music associated with Confucian cultural roots. An opinion is expressed that methods of music education used in Beethoven Virus were chosen in accordance to the South Korean serial genre traditions: leitmotivs in the soundtrack and gesture clichés are of particular significance here. The author suggests that the South Korean experience of promoting musical classics by means of serial films can be used abroad — given that the differences in mentality and realities of musical life are taken into account.


2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 44-55
Author(s):  
Wilfried Allaerts ◽  

The clash of ideas between classical music and several avant-garde movements in the previous century, not only found its way into twentieth century musicology, it also lead to a number of new developments in music digitalization. This paper reflects on the inscription of these opposing ideas about the concept of music into the contemporary views on the human condition and the notion of computability of human interactions. Harry Partch, the American iconoclast broke away from the classic, predominantly European traditions in music, and contested the abstract architecture and well-tempered tonal system of it. The mathematician Guerrino Mazzola constructed an even bigger, abstract formalization system, that allegedly allows for a complete digitalization of music, from the mind and inner ear of the composer towards the scores, the gestures and sounds produced by the performers up to the auditory cortex of the listeners. In this paper we will mainly investigate the philosophical and musicological basis of this formalization system, which is essentially based on the Denotator system and a number of concepts from algebraic topology applied to music. Finally, we will unravel the typical de-humanizing aspects that are followed in the digitalization system as used by Mazzola, and what this approach implicates for humanity (and the human sciences).


Author(s):  
Mark Slobin

This chapter focuses on Detroit’s Jewish community, first taking up its complex, many-layered internal musical life, from religious to politically radical, across a range of initiatives and institutions. Next comes an analysis of how the group used music as a mode of outreach to mainstream Detroit, impacting the city’s cultural life, especially through intense engagement with classical music. The role of the Jews in the survival of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra is outlined. Profiles of key activists’ careers—Julius Chajes, Mischa Mischakoff, Mischa Kottler, Emma Schaver--and the development of institutional life illustrate these practices of “border traffic.”


Author(s):  
Nicolás Masquiarán Díaz

Miguel Aguilar Ahumada is a Chilean composer, academic, and musicologist. His value in the Chilean and Latin American musical panorama lies in his role as a key figure for understanding the development of musical institutions outside the main centres of production. His work is a benchmark in the singular transition to Chilean avant-garde music in the mid-twentieth century, particularly as an outstanding example on the adoption of the twelve-tone system. He was instrumental in promoting avant-garde music until the 1973 putsch compromised his ability to maintain his connections in Santiago. Aguilar received the Municipal Prize of Art in Music (1986), the Charles Ives Award for Composers (1996), the Regional Award in Musical Arts (2006), and the President of the Republic Award in the Classical Music category (2006).


CounterText ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 283-306
Author(s):  
Tamara Brzostowska-Tereszkiewicz

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.


2016 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 105-118
Author(s):  
Romana Huk

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.


Author(s):  
Oren Izenberg

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.


2013 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-47
Author(s):  
Jerzy Święch

Summary Adam Ważyk’s last volume of poems Zdarzenia (Events) (1977) can be read as a resume of the an avant-garde artist’s life that culminated in the discovery of a new truth about the human condition. The poems reveal his longing for a belief that human life, the mystery of life and death, makes sense, ie. that one’s existence is subject to the rule of some overarching necessity, opened onto the last things, rather than a plaything of chance. That entails a rejection of the idea of man’s self-sufficiency as an illusion, even though that kind of individual sovereignty was the cornerstone of modernist art. The art of late modernity, it may be noted, was already increasingly aware of the dangers of putting man’s ‘ontological security’ at risk. Ważyk’s last volume exemplifies this tendency although its poems appear to remain within the confines of a Cubist poetics which he himself helped to establish. In fact, however, as our readings of the key poems from Events make clear, he employs his accustomed techniques for a new purpose. The shift of perspective can be described as ‘metaphysical’, not in any strict sense of the word, but rather as a shorthand indicator of the general mood of these poems, filled with events which seem to trap the characters into a supernatural order of things. The author sees that much, even though he does not look with the eye of a man of faith. It may be just a game - and Ważyk was always fond of playing games - but in this one the stakes are higher than ever. Ultimately, this game is about salvation. Ważyk is drawn into it by a longing for the wholeness of things and a dissatisfaction with all forms of mediation, including the Cubist games of deformation and fragmentation of the object. It seems that the key to Ważyk’s late phase is to be found in his disillusionment with the twentieth-century avant-gardes. Especially the poems of Events contain enough clues to suggest that the promise of Cubism and surrealism - which he sought to fuse in his poetic theory and practice - was short-lived and hollow.


Author(s):  
Nataliia Kosaniak

Vasyl Bezkorovayny (1880–1966) was a talented artist, an active figure in the musical life of Galicia and a representative of post-war Ukrainian emigrants in the United States of America. He wrote more than 350 works of various genres. Among them are compositions for symphony orchestra; vocal works — for chorus, ensembles or solo singing; chamber and instrumental music — for piano, violin, zither, cello; music for dramatic performances. The article deals with the archival and musicological analysis of expressive and stylistic features of V. Bezkorovayny’s vocal works, based on the materials of Stefanyk Lviv National Library of Ukraine. Attention is paid to the place of the composer’s vocal masterpieces in the context of Ukrainian vocal music of the first half of the XX century. The most important achievements of the composer related to the genres of choral and chamber vocal music. In style, the composer’s works combine the influences of M. Lysenko, composers of the «Peremyshl school» and Western European romantic and post-romantic models. The original secular choral music of V. Bezkorovayny covers genres of songs, plays, and large-form choirs. In his solo songs the influences of romantic western European music and Ukrainian folk songs affected the formation and approval of the composer’s style. Keywords: vocal music, chorus, solos, melodic-intonation means, harmony, rhythm.


Author(s):  
Ananay Aguilar

This chapter discusses the London Symphony Orchestra’s creation and development of the pioneering orchestra-owned label LSO Live as a response to a classical music industry in crisis. The investigation of the label’s business model is framed within a production of culture perspective that considers six categories: industry structure, organizational structure, occupational careers, law and regulation, technology, and market. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and industry data, this chapter demonstrates how the London Symphony Orchestra increased its artistic and managerial independence and, in doing so, effectively multiplied its local and international reputation. As an example of forward-looking managerial culture and leadership, the LSO Live initiative continues to be imitated around the globe.


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