scholarly journals Electroacoustic Experiments of the Art Zoyd and Their Implementation in Soundtracks for Silent Films

2021 ◽  
pp. 230-251
Author(s):  
O.A. Platonova ◽  

The article is devoted to the work of Art Zoyd, a French group whose experimental style is often defined by modern researchers as “la musique nouvelle” (from the French — “new music”) and is viewed through the prism of the genre-style dialogue between rock and contemporary academic music. The idea of “metamusic”, expressed in the co-creation of several composers, as well as in the unity of visual, plastic, and musical components, is also important for understanding the style of the group. This trend is especially closely related to the personality of one of the founders of the group, Gerard Hourbette, who combines the gift of a composer with the talent of a programmer. The obvious reliance on the achievements of electroacoustic music, the desire to combine the scientific understanding of the phenomenon of sound with the implementation of practical musical projects (expressed in the creation of the research and creative center Art Zoyd Studios), make him related to the figure of the pioneer of musique concrète and the founding father of Groupe de Recherches Musicales, Pierre Schaeffer. The idea of the synthesis of the arts is reflected in the innovative multimedia performances of the group, as well as in the soundtracks to silent films. The article analyzes the sound scores for the films Nosferatu by Friedrich Murnau, Häxan by Benjamin Christensen, The Fall of the House of Usher by Jean Epstein.

2007 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 259-265 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jean-Christophe Thomas

AbstractIt is a habit to invoke Aristotle when dealing, within the arts, with ‘Nature’ – that the Man–Artist (and not only the musician) would be, he says, ‘inclined’ to imitate. It is true, the history of music clearly attests to the temptation and of the ‘pleasure’ (as Aristotle also says) found in mimesis. We know that very lately in history musique concrète gives a new perspective to this question as well as to other questions, and changes the deal: because the sound objects of the world, of the whole world – the ‘noises’ – that needed to be imitated, can now be easily captured through technology, almost in a photographic way, and then they can be gathered, kept, and finally be composed. Hopefully Pierre Schaeffer, its genial inventor, has, concerning the question of nature within new music, a position that tears him apart, which is paradoxical, uncomfortable, fundamental: that the nature that is so easily captured, he does not want to exhibit; to understand the lessons, the hidden musical lessons, he only wants to examine it. This almost heroic model will only be partially followed by the composers (concrète, electroacoustic, acousmatic, anecdotical composers) who have been working during the last sixty years in this passionate domain. At the end of this article, the sketch of a typology, based on musical examples, tries to clarify the way nature is dealt with, when it appears in musique concrète.


Author(s):  
Rebecca Colesworthy

Chapter 1 takes a cue from recent anthropologists who have stressed the influence of Mauss’s socialism on his sociological work. Returning to Mauss’s The Gift, the chapter argues that what links his essay to the experimental writing of his literary contemporaries is not their shared fascination with the primitive, as other critics have suggested, but rather their shared investment in reimagining social possibilities within market society. Mauss was, as his biographer notes, an “Anglophile.” Shedding light on his admiration of British socialism and especially the work of Beatrice and Sidney Webb—friends of Virginia and Leonard Woolf—as well as competing usages of the language of “gifts” in the social sciences and the arts, the chapter ultimately provides a new material and conceptual framework for understanding the intersection of largely French gift theory and Anglo-American modernist writing.


2014 ◽  
Vol 26 (31) ◽  
pp. 230-238
Author(s):  
Greta Kaušikaitė ◽  
Tatyana Solomonik-Pankrašova

In the Middle Ages, interpreter was thought to be a poet, skilled in the art of composition; and an exegete, able to turn the enigmatic mode of the Scriptures into the human language. Medieval translation appertained to a hermeneutical performance, with the ‘modus inveniendi’ as its constituent part. This article aims at revealing the enigmatic mode of medieval translation in Cædmon’s ‘Hymn of Creation’. Cædmon, an unenlightened cowherd, miraculously acquired the gift to recite a Christian Song, which rendered the world ‘as a Dive work of Art’. Cædmon is re–creating the original texts by imposing his ‘enarratio poetarum’ upon the Story of Creation as manifest in the ‘Book of Genesis’, the Latin ‘Vulgate’. The novelty of the research lies in deciphering the ‘enarratio poetarum’ in Cædmon’s ‘Hymn of Creation’ as a transformation from rhetorical poetics to hermeneutics, from the ‘modus inveniendi’ to the ‘modus interpretandi’, so that the Cædmonian ‘artes poetriae’ becomes inseparable from exegesis. Most previous research1 focused on the poetic vocabulary, viz., the fusion of heroic Germanic idiom and Christian lore in the context of Anglo–Latin literature. Cædmon rendered the thirty one line of Genesis, the Act of Creation, into the nine–line ‘Hymn of Creation’, which embraces not only the Act of Creation, but adores the Creator by giving Him a variety of poetic names. By re–creating the text of the Scriptures Cædmon is becoming the ‘fidus interpres’ in the sense of faithful exegete.


1997 ◽  
Vol 50 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 387-420 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Evan Bonds

The growing aesthetic prestige of instrumental music in the last decades of the eighteenth century was driven not so much by changes in the musical repertory as by the resurgence of idealism as an aesthetic principle applicable to all the arts. This new outlook, as articulated by such writers as Winckelmann, Moritz, Kant, Schiller, Herder, Fichte, and Schelling, posited the work of art as a reflection of an abstract ideal, rather than as a means by which a beholder could be moved. Through idealism, the work of art became a vehicle by which to sense the realm of the spiritual and the infinite, and the inherently abstract nature of instrumental music allowed this art to offer a particularly powerful glimpse of that realm. Idealism thus provided the essential framework for the revaluation of instrumental music in the writings of Wackenroder, Tieck, E. T. A. Hoffmann, and others around the turn of the century. While this new approach to instrumental music has certain points of similarity with the later concept of "absolute" music, it is significant that Eduard Hanslick expunged several key passages advocating idealist thought when he revised both the first and second editions of his treatise Vom Musikalisch-Schönen. The concept of "absolute" music, although real enough in the mid-nineteenth century, is fundamentally anachronistic when applied to the musical thought and works of the decades around 1800.


2020 ◽  
pp. 147402222096694
Author(s):  
Theron Schmidt

This article brings into relation critical perspectives and practical tactics from a range of different fields—performance studies, visual art practice, pedagogy and educational theory, and activism and community organising—in order to create some space for re-imagining what might be possible within the dynamics of the Higher Education classroom. It proceeds through a series of speculative modes: ‘what if we think of the classroom as a market?’, which for many is the currently dominant metaphor under neoliberalist economies; ‘what if we think of the work of art as a classroom?’, which traces the recent ‘pedagogical’ or ‘educational’ turn in visual art practice; and finally, ‘what if we think of the classroom as a work of art?’, in which the creative impulses and tactics drawn from performance practices, activism and community organising, and socially engaged art are speculatively applied to the arts and humanities classroom.


1928 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 121-134
Author(s):  
J. B. Shaw

It may not have occurred to the student that mathematics is one of the fine arts, and exhibits the same characters as those we find in poetry, music, painting, and sculpture. The material or medium of mathematics is of a more subtle stuff than that used in the arts mentioned, for it is dealing with purely ideal or non-material objects. But it takes little reflection on the problem to see that we may find in every part of mathematics instances of the qualities that determine a work of art. The object of this chapter is to bring some of these to the notice of the student.


PMLA ◽  
1971 ◽  
Vol 86 (4) ◽  
pp. 587-589 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew J. Bruccoli

Ernest Hemingway said it:—“A country, finally, erodes and the dust blows away, the people all die and none of them were of any importance permanently, except those who practised the arts. ... A thousand years makes economics silly and a work of art endures forever.” But works of literature endure in printed texts that become cumulatively corrupt. The definitive editions of the Center for Editions of American Authors restore and preserve the purity of the author's work.


Author(s):  
Bárbara Dos Santos Coutinho ◽  
Ana Cristina Dos Santos Tostões

While recognising the part that digital media play in bringing about greater accessibility to artworks display and ensuring that they are more visible, this paper argues that the physical exhibition continues to be the primary place for the public to encounter the arts, as it can offer an engaging and meaningful aesthetic experience through which people can transcend their own existence. As such, it is essential to rethink now, in the scope of an increasing digital world, the exhibition in conceptual and methodological terms. For this purpose, the exhibition space must be considered as content rather than container and the exhibition as a work, often with the intentionality of a “total work of art”, rather than just a vehicle for exhibiting artworks and objects. Having the former purpose in mind, this paper proposes a re-reading of the exhibition designs of Frederick Kiesler (1890–1965), Franco Albini (1905–1977) and Lina Bo Bardi (1914–1992) in order to evaluate how their theory and practice can provide useful lessons for our contemporary thinking. The three architects, assuming the role of curators, use only the specific language of an exhibition and remix conventional modes of communication and architectural vocabulary, exploring the natural and artificial light, materials, layouts, surfaces and geometries in innovative ways. They considered the exhibition to be a work of art, overcoming the container/content dichotomy and trigging an intersubjective and self-reflective participation. Kiesler, Albini and Bo Bardi may all be considered visionaries of our time, as they offer a landscape that stimulates our curiosity through a multiplicity of information arranged in a multisensory way, allowing each visitor to discover associations between himself and his surroundings. None of them simply created an opportunity for distraction or entertainment. This perspective is all the more pertinent nowadays, as the processes of digitalising information and virtualising the real may well lead to the dematerialization of the physical experience of art. By drawing upon these historical examples, this paper seeks to contribute to current study on how an exhibition can stimulate the cognitive, emotional and spiritual intelligence of each visitor and clarify the importance of this effect in 21st century museums and society at large.


2021 ◽  
pp. 63-78
Author(s):  
Natalia Bragina ◽  
Wang Jie

The article attempts to systematize the processes taking place in Chinese musical culture in the first half of the XX century. The main direction of European art, manifested in this period in China – Romanticism. Using the example of the development of chamber vocal gen-res, it is shown how the aesthetic attitudes of Romanticism-the reliance on national traditions and the desire to synthesize the arts – were manifested in the works of Chinese composers. The methods of musical and poetic analysis, as well as the method of comparative analysis, are used to identify common trends between the formation of new music in China and the pro-cesses of formation of «young» European music schools in the first half of the XIX century. The reasons for the lag in the development of some na-tional cultures and the regularities of their accelerated development and overcoming the time distance are revealed. The most typical works of chamber-vocal genres of Chinese music of the specified period are used as the material for analysis.


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