scholarly journals a vital past

2021 ◽  
pp. 67-67
Author(s):  
Elena Grigoryeva ◽  
Konstantin Lidin
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New World ◽  
Family Relations ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Past ◽  
Special Meaning ◽  
Design And Construction

We lived and lived. But then, whoops!We found ourselves in other times…Timur Shaov. “Other times (listening to Galich once again)”Crises shaking our reality in the last decades happen so often that they overlap each other like roof tiles. Linear development of the second half of the twentieth century gave way to the era of cardinal changes. While building a new world, we strongly feel the need to preserve and comprehend the past. It is possible to understand the new only in comparison with the past. The disappearing world that consists of separate, isolated and selfcontained fragments is embodied in monuments of architecture. Images, techniques and practices of design and construction acquire a special meaning and new relevance in these new times. Wooden architecture of Siberia and stone merchant houses in Yalutorovsk, ancient churches and Leonidov’s avant-garde project, ruins of Stalin’s camps and the Korean Garden in Irkutsk are elements of the past that we need to understand the present. Protesting against the unification of tastes, breach of family relations and destruction of traditions, glocalization is on the rise.

POLITICAL ATHEISM: THE SECULARIZATION AND LIBERALIZATION OF AMERICAN PUBLIC LIFE

2018 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 249-277 ◽  
Author(s):  
DAVID SEHAT
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Republican Party ◽  
Public Reason ◽  
Public Life ◽  
The United States ◽  
Overlapping Consensus ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Past

The United States is a deeply Christian country, but over the last sixty years American public culture has become increasingly detached from religious concerns. Christian activists, when not speaking within the Republican Party, have had to assert their privilege in a way that they never had to do in the past. In spite of their efforts, the role of Christianity in culture and politics has seen a more or less continuous decline. This essay examines how and why that process occurred. It puts forward a schematic narrative that relies on the concepts of public reason, the avant-garde, and an overlapping consensus to explain how different people came together in the mid-twentieth century to secularize and liberalize American public life.

scholarly journals The Memory of the Avant-Garde and the New Wave in the Contemporary Serbian Novel

2020 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Marko Avramović
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
First Century ◽  
New Wave ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Past ◽  
Twenty First Century

This article is dealing with the topic of two past twentieth-century epochs in a few representative Serbian novels at the turn from the twentieth to the twenty-first century. These are the 1980s and the New Wave era in Yugoslavia, an epoch close to the past that can still be written about from the perspective of an immediate witness, and the avant-garde era, that is, the period between the two world wars marked in art by different movements of the historical avant-garde. The novels Milenijum u Beogradu (Millennium in Belgrade, 2000) by Vladimir Pištalo, Vrt u Veneciji (The Garden in Venice, 2002) by Mileta Prodanović, and Kiša i hartija (Rain and Paper, 2004) by Vladimir Tasić are being interpreted. In these novels, it is particularly noteworthy that the two aforementioned epochs are most commonly linked as part of the same creative and intellectual currents in the twentieth century.

The Recovery of Modern Music: George Rochberg in Conversation

Tempo ◽  
2002 ◽  
pp. 8-12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert R. Reilly
Keyword(s):  
String Quartet ◽  
New World ◽  
American Music ◽  
Modern Music ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Past ◽  
Serial Music ◽  
George Rochberg ◽  
Concert Halls ◽  
World Records

Composer George Rochberg (b. 1918) is the pivot point around which American music took a decisive turn away from Arnold Schoenberg's systematized dissonance, generally known as 12–tone or serial music, and back toward tonality. If it is now safe to return to the concert halls, it is largely because of him. Before turning against 12–tone music in the mid–1960s, Rochberg had been one of its most adept and prestigious practitioners. Thus his ‘conversion’ provoked an outraged reaction from the musical establishment and the avant-garde. However, Rochberg's courage helped to free the next generation of composers from the serial straightjacket to write music that was once again comprehensible to audiences. On a two–CD set, New World Records has re-released recordings of Rochberg's Quartets Nos.3–6, brilliantly performed by the Concord String Quartet (New World Records 80551–2). These works, especially the Third Quartet, were very much at the heart of the controversy caused by Rochberg's attempt to ‘regain contact with the tradition and means of the past’. At his home in Pennsylvania, I spoke with Maestro Rochberg about what is at stake in modern music and about his own extraordinary spiritual and musical journey.

scholarly journals Johannes Semper hobusega. Avangard, takerduja tehnika ja looduse vahel / Johannes Semper with a horse: Avant-garde between technology and nature

2019 ◽  
Vol 18 (23) ◽  
Author(s):  
Tiit Hennoste
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Interpersonal Relationships ◽  
Fast Food ◽  
New World ◽  
New Technology ◽  
Modern Technology ◽  
Italian Futurism ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The World ◽  
Russian Futurism

Artikkel annab ülevaate 20. sajandi alguse kirjandusliku avangardi suhetest tehnikaga. Avangardi (eriti futurismi) jaoks pidi tehnika saama loomise eeskujuks ja masinate seadused esteetilise loovuse seadusteks. Artikkel väidab, et paljud avangardi tekstiuuenduslikud ideaalid on vastuolus tehnika ideaalidega ja iseloomustavad ennekõike loodust. Tehnika väärtustas tulemust, avangard protsessi. Tehnika väärtustas süsteemsust, ennustatavust, koopialisust, avangard vabarütme, ennustamatust ja originaalsust. Tehnika nõudis ratsionaalsust ja eesmärgipärast tegutsemist, avangard kuulutas intuitsiooni ja prohvetlikku kujutlust. Tehnika tõi odavad masstooted, avangard hindas haruldust. Tehnika väärtustas funktsionaalsust, avangard ebafunktsionaalsust. Tehnika väärtustas puhtust ja hügieeni, avangard järgis inetuse esteetikat. Tehnika nõudis tootmises vigade ja häirete vältimist, avangard tõstis vea loovaks ideeks.   The article examines the relationship between the early twentieth century international and Estonian literary avant-garde and new technology, which radically changed life and interpersonal relationships in Europe and America (trains, airplanes, metro, telephone, telegraph, skyscrapers, fast food, etc.). At first, I highlight general features connecting the new technology and its products, which emerged in distinct opposition to nature. The central activity in the world of technology appeared to be efficient, planned, and purposeful production, in which the main agents were engineer, designer, and worker. The new technology emphasized the value of the product, which rapidly became standardized and cheaply made mass-produced perfect copies of each other. The beauty of the new era was to be a technological, functionalist beauty. Production as a process had to operate without failures and the ideal product had to be without any defects. Therefore, the technological process had to be clean, even hygienic. The new technology established its own rhythm in modern cities, characterized by repeatability and predictability. At the same time, the technology covered cities by the voices that made up the noise of technology. It could be said, even, that the new technology exceeded the limits of time and space. The result was a world of simultaneity. At the same time, relationships and links between people became increasingly loose and the world and man’s worldview was characterized by increasing fragmentation. The early European avant-garde at the beginning of the twentieth century greeted the new world of technology and speed with great enthusiasm (Italian futurism, constructivism, etc.). Perhaps only early expressionism and Russian futurism had even more ambivalent attitude to the technology. The First World War significantly decreased the pre-war fascination with technology. The war destroyed the faith in the machines; the machine now became a destroyer, and the new mechanical man (a fusion of man and machine) came into view as a killer with killed soul. At the same time, modern technology became more and more common in the everyday life, and, hence, the attitude towards technology changed. The technology became a harrowing phenomenon. For early European avant-garde, the new technology was supposed to become a model for the creation and laws of machines laws of aesthetic creativity (Marinetti). We can find several features in the texts of avant-garde (especially in poetry), which are in accordance with the new world of speed and technology. Simultaneous and fragmented text represented simultaneity and fragmentarity of the world. The speed was intermediated by the telegram style, parataxis, glossolalia, onomatopoeia, mathematical symbols, etc. The artist’s ideal was engineer and machine had to become a model for making the text. I present examples of such new texts in Estonian avant-garde poetry and prose. However, much of the avant-garde ideas and ideals for textual innovation contradicted the ideals of technology. Whilst technology predominantly esteemed the result, the avant-garde valued the process of making the text. In addition, the world of technology expected systematics, predictability, repetitive rhythms, and copies while avant-garde proclaimed free rhythms, free verse, unpredictability, and originality. Technology insisted on rational and purposeful acting; avant-garde proclaimed intuition and prophetic imagination. Technology brought cheap mass products; avant-garde appreciated the rarity and expensiveness. Technology promoted utilitarianism and functionality; avant-garde non-functionality. Technology put stress on the cleanliness and hygiene of the products; avant-garde often followed the aesthetics of ugliness. Technology required efficiency and economy of production, avoiding mistakes and disturbances; avant-garde regarded error as a creative idea. I argue that many of these avant-garde ideas are very similar to nature. For example, chaos, illogicality, glossolalia, words-in-freedom, and zaum truly characterize nature. Originality, variability, unpredictable rhythms, non-systematicity are also the qualities of nature. Lack of purpose, irrationality, and lack of thought are features of nature. An error or a shift as the basis of creation and inefficiency characterizes nature, too. The aesthetics of ugliness parallels the ugliness of nature. Thus, the observance of the avant-garde ideals results in a text that, on the one hand, craves the world of technology and machines, but on the other hand goes back to the ideas and ideals of nature and seeks solutions largely in the same way as nature.

Shadows of the Past: Akhmatova’s Poem Without a Hero and Lourié’s Incantations

2008 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 79-108 ◽  
Author(s):  
KLÁRA MÓRICZ
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Song Cycle ◽  
Role Playing ◽  
Close Friend ◽  
Personal History ◽  
Silver Age ◽  
Intimate Friend ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Past ◽  
Gradual Disappearance

AbstractArthur Vincent Lourié (1891–1966), futurist, communist commissar of music, and close friend of Stravinsky in Paris in the 1920s, was an important member of avant-garde Russian artistic circles in the first three decades of the twentieth century. Yet by the 1950s he seems to have faded into obscurity. This article attempts to fill the gap left by the lack of discussion of the strange permutations of Lourié’s career after his emigration in 1922 by way of an analysis of his miniature 1961 song cycle Zaklinaniya (‘Incantations’). The cycle consists of five settings of lines from Anna Ahkmatova’s Poema bez geroya (‘Poem Without a Hero’), whose first part recalls Lourié and Akhmatova’s shared past in Russia’s Silver Age. Akhmatova (1889–1966), an intimate friend of the dandyish Lourié and at the centre of avant-garde artistic circles in pre-Revolutionary St Petersburg, describes the early 1910s as a Meyerholdian nightmarish masquerade in which the protagonists were constantly in danger of losing their identity through nihilistic role playing. Lourié’s elusive figure can be seen as the embodiment in the Poema of the frightening, superfluous shadow with ‘neither face nor name’. Rather than any unfortunate turn of political or personal history, it was Lourié’s affection for masks – for taking up exaggerated poses and concealing his real face – that provides the most compelling reason for his gradual disappearance from view in the chaos of the first half of the twentieth century.

Fighting with Words: American Composers' Commentary on Their Work

1985 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 430-460 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine M. Cameron
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
American Art ◽  
Art Music ◽  
American Music ◽  
New Music ◽  
American Composers ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Past ◽  
Early Twentieth Century

In the past few decades, there has been an explosion of literature concerning the changes taking place in American art music. In many cases, this literature is the work of the very people who are making those changes, the composers of new music. Much of their commentary is written in a manifesto style reminiscent of avant-garde movements of the early twentieth century. The dominant topic concerns the changes composers feel are needed to revolutionize American music.

Voices from beyond: Verdi's Don Carlos and the modern stage

2006 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 151-179 ◽  
Author(s):  
GUNDULA KREUZER
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Academic Discourse ◽  
German Language ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Past ◽  
Performance Tradition ◽  
History Of ◽  
Don Carlos

It has often been suggested that a renewed fascination with Verdi’s Don Carlos coincided with the advent of Regieoper (or radically revisionist staging) in Germany over the past few decades. However, Don Carlos already counted among the most frequently revived operas in German-language theatres during the first half of the twentieth century. This article argues that neglect of this rich performance tradition is linked both to a German-centred narrative of the history of operatic production, which constructs the 1930s and 1940s as a gap in the development of ‘avant-garde’ direction, and to an over-emphasis on the visual side in recent academic discourse on operatic staging. These attitudes are challenged by a close look at selected German productions of Don Carlos from the 1920s to 1940s. Treatment of the opera's most difficult scenes – the mystical elements of the auto-da-fé finale and the dénouement – reveals striking continuities between the Weimar and Nazi eras, as well as conceptual affinities to some of the most acclaimed recent stagings. These findings call for a more historically grounded approach to operatic production.

Towards a new world order: a twentieth century story

2001 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 265-272 ◽  
Author(s):  
JO-ANNE PEMBERTON
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New World ◽  
Manhattan Project ◽  
World Order ◽  
New World Order ◽  
Historical Materials ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Enlightenment Project ◽  
Theoretical Issues

Andrew Williams, Failed Imagination? New World Orders of the Twentieth Century (Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1998)International relations (IR) has had an opportunistic relationship with history. IR scholars have used the past, as Conal Condren has written of political theorists, as ‘a quarry ... [as a] ... source of useable facts; of entries to, and illustrations of, theoretical issues’. The result was an IR canon, of the ‘Plato to Nato’ variety, which was substantially anachronistic. Its dismantling over the last twenty years has much to do with efforts in the area of conceptual history. Despite this, and the keenness of post-positivist IR theorists to display an historical consciousness, IR and history maintain an uneasy association. Where the past is approached in contemporary IR writings, there is a tendency to build out of historical materials, or more worryingly commentaries on them, conceptual superstructures which are then accorded a determining force. Notions like the Enlightenment Project are the result of such acts of reification and are no less anachronistic than were the pantomime Machiavellis which used to pop up in IR text books. (It is doubtful that such a Project ever existed. Robert Wokler observes that the expression is of ‘more recent pedigree than “the Manhattan Project“‘.) What is purported to be historical explanation may seem more like a ghostly ballet in which structures, processes and agencies execute precisely choreographed routines.

Contemporary Discourse and the Oblique Narrative of Avant-gardism in Twentieth-Century Nigerian Art

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-23
Author(s):  
Clement Akapng
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Content Analysis ◽  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Modern Art ◽  
Time Lag ◽  
American Modernism ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of

The history of Twentieth Century Nigerian art is characterized by ambiguities that impede understanding of the underlying modernist philosophies that inspired modern art from the 1900s. In the past five decades, scholars have framed the discourse of Contemporary Nigerian Art to analyze art created during that period in Africa starting with Nigeria in order to differentiate it from that of Europe and America. However, this quest for differentiation has led to a mono-narrative which only partially analyze modernist tendencies in modern Nigerian art, thus, reducing its impact locally and globally. Adopting Content Analysis and Modernism as methodologies, this research subjected literature on Twentieth Century Nigerian art to critical analysis to reveal its grey areas, as well as draw upon recent theories by Chika Okeke-Agulu, Sylvester Ogbechie, Olu Oguibe and Okwui Enwezor to articulate the occurrence of a unique Nigerian avant-gardism blurred by the widely acclaimed discourse of contemporary Nigerian art. Findings reveal that the current discourse unwittingly frames Twentieth Century Nigerian art as a time-lag reactionary mimesis of Euro-American modernism. This research contends that such narrative blocks strong evidences of avant-garde tendencies identified in the works of Aina Onabolu, Ben Enwonwu, Uche Okeke and others, which exhibited intellectual use of the subversive powers of art for institutional/societal interrogation. Drawing upon modernist theories as a compass for analyzing the works of the aforementioned, this paper concludes that rather than being a mundane product of contemporaneity, Twentieth Century Nigerian art was inspired by decolonization politics and constituted a culture-specific avant-gardism in which art was used to enforce change. Thus, a new modern art discourse is proposed that will reconstruct Twentieth Century Nigerian art as an expression of modernism parallel to Euro-American modernism.

The Director, the Spectator and the Eiffel Tower

2005 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 36-48 ◽  
Author(s):  
DENNIS KENNEDY
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Final Section ◽  
Cultural Authority ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Past ◽  
Modern Age ◽  
The World ◽  
The Spectator ◽  
Theatre Historiography

Though directors have been central to the theatre for more than a century, it is not easy to describe their function or explain fully what they do. Since they have not all done the same things, theorizing the office is a slippery enterprise. Despite this difficulty, the cultural authority of directors has become embedded in the thinking of both the commercial and subsidized sectors in most countries in the world, including many parts of Asia, so that directors are fundamental to the way we comprehend and value theatrical work. Though dictatorial modes of direction have been challenged in the past three decades by a variety of strategies, the theatre industry continues to rely heavily upon the managerial and aesthetic skills of the director, who stands as an icon of the successes and failures of twentieth-century theatre. This essay discusses two alternative histories of the director in the modern age, the modernist avant-garde model and an industrial model, showing that the two are much closer than typically claimed. Using André Antoine as case study, the essay offers a critique of certain tendencies in modernist theatre historiography. A final section looks at the interrelationship of the director and the spectator.

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