scholarly journals A Narrative of Dreams: Chopin’s Polonaise-Fantaisie

2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael L. Klein

This essay discusses Chopin’s Polonaise-Fantaisie from a narrative point of view, arguing that in addition to considering musical narrative as a study of affective logic, it also requires a consideration of cultural ideas at play in the music. The essay argues that in the Polonaise-Fantaisie one of the cultural oppositions involves dreaming vs. doing. This polonaise has difficulty maintaining the proper military (doing) aspect common to the genre, often falling into sections that signify dreaming. For example, a nocturne appears in the middle of the work, and various interruptions of the polonaise theme pull it away from its significations of action. The essay discusses the double apotheosis of the polonaise and nocturne themes, arguing that the work is making a statement about how dreaming and acting must come together for action to be meaningful. The essay concludes by detailing how the Polonaise-Fantaisie can prompt us to reconsider modern subjectivity, since the sections about dreaming point to a growing sense of our inner life, which was a growing concern in the nineteenth-century.

Author(s):  
Daniel R. Melamed

Every performance of Johann Sebastian Bach’'s Mass in B Minor makes choices. The work’s compositional history and the nature of the sources that transmit it require performers to make decisions about its musical text and about the performing forces used in its realization. The Mass’s editorial history reflects deeply ideological views about Bach’s composition and how it should sound, not just objective reporting on the piece, with consequences for performances that follow specific editions. Things left unspecified by the composer need to be filled in, and every decision—including the choice to add nothing to Bach’s text—represents an interpretation. And the long performance history of the Mass offers a range of possibilities, reflecting a tension between the performance of a work like the Mass in Bach’s time and the tradition inherited from the nineteenth century. Every performance thus represents a point of view about the piece; —there are no neutral performances.


2021 ◽  
pp. 327-349
Author(s):  
Zsófia Kalavszky ◽  

In my essay I trace how – by which means and through what channels – the Ukrainian song «Ĭхав козак за Дунай» (Kozak was riding beyond the Danube) reached Europe at the beginning of the nineteenth-century and then by the means of German mediation, sprang out onto Hungarian territories. In the German language area, it spread essentially as a folk song. Translated (or rather transcribed) into German by Christopher Tidge, the Ukrainian song reached the Kingdom of Hungary most likely together with the troops that took part in the Napoleon wars. At the same time, another version of the song circulated among the Hungarian elite in German culture. The latter was known as Russisches Lied in the translation of Theodor Körner – it was also in vogue and was distributed mainly in print media. The history of this song that in the first decade of the nineteenth century, gained fame in Czech, Polish, and English, has another line that may be interesting from the point of view of Russian and Hungarian literary connections. In 1814, Russian poet Wilhelm Küchelbecker translated the song into German. His translation which remained in the form of the manuscript and was not known to the reading public reveals an amazing similarity and in some places direct coincidences with the poem by the Hungarian poet Count Ferenc Teleki written presumably before 1820.


Antíteses ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (20) ◽  
pp. 979
Author(s):  
Celso Kraemer ◽  
Dominique Santos ◽  
Aniele Crescêncio

RESUMO Ao observar as relações de Nietzsche com seus contemporâneos verifica-se que ele estava ciente das principais discussões relativas à Unificação da Alemanha (1871). Para a unificação era necessário que os 39 estados alemães compartilhassem o sentimento de pertencimento a uma pátria comum. Nesse meandro, os historiadores prussianos do século XIX desempenharam papel fundamental ao produzir um ambiente filosófico nacionalista, uma maneira científica e objetiva de pensar sobre a história. O objetivo deste trabalho é compreender as interações de Nietzsche com estes círculos intelectuais. Para isto, foram selecionados quatro dos chamados fragmentos póstumos de Nietzsche datados entre 1871 e 1873. De acordo com o ponto de vista de Nietzsche, as pretensões dos historiadores, não tinham nenhuma crítica, pois acreditavam, ingenuamente, que a verdade era um alvo tangível. Por outro lado, ele indicou a necessidade de uma história ligada à cultura, que era trabalhada em conjunto com "instintos artísticos".  ABSTRACT By observing the relationship of Nietzsche with his contemporaries one can notice that he was aware of the main discussions related to the unification of Germany (1871). Unification required 39 German states to share the feeling of belonging to a common homeland. Prussian historians of the nineteenth century played a key role in producing such a nationalist philosophical environment, a scientific and objectivist way of thinking about History. This work aim is to understand the interactions between Nietzsche and this intelectual circles. For this purpose, four of the so-called posthumous Nietzsche fragments, dated between 1871 and 1873, were selected. According to Nietzsche's point of view, some historians had a naive pretension to reach the truth, as if it were a tangible target. On another hand, he pointed out the necessity of a link between History and Culture, which should be understood altogether with ‘artistic instincts’. 


Author(s):  
Sarah Blackwood

Between the invention of photography in 1839 and the end of the nineteenth century, portraiture became one of the most popular and common art forms in the United States. In The Portrait's Subject, Sarah Blackwood tells a wide-ranging story about how images of human surfaces came to signal expressions of human depth during this era in paintings, photographs, and illustrations, as well as in literary and cultural representations of portrait making and viewing. Combining visual theory, literary close reading, and archival research, Blackwood examines portraiture's changing symbolic and aesthetic practices, from daguerreotype to X-ray. Portraiture, the book argues, was a provocative art form used by writers, artists, and early psychologists to imagine selfhood as hidden, deep, and in need of revelation, ideas that were then taken up by the developing discipline of psychology. The Portrait’s Subject reveals the underappreciated connections between portraiture's representations of the material human body and developing modern ideas about the human mind. It encouraged figures like Frederick Douglass, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Thomas Eakins, Harriet Jacobs, and Henry James to reimagine how we might see inner life, offering a rich array of metaphors and aesthetic approaches that helped reconfigure the relationship between body and mind, exterior and interior. In the end, Blackwood shows how nineteenth-century psychological discourse developed as much through aesthetic fabulation as through scientific experimentation.


Author(s):  
Graham Coatman

In his masterful exposé, The Modern Invention of Medieval Music, Daniel Leech-Wilkinson deliciously debunks much traditional thinking about medieval music, arguing that changing perspectives on this increasingly re-discovered and available body of work may be more dependent on the personality of the scholars and performers involved in its dissemination than the findings of new research. In this chapter, writing from the point of view of a composer and musician equally involved in the performance of both new and early music, Graham Coatman examines the work of contemporary composers who have chosen medieval models as their starting point. Is their use of medieval material a means to establish identity and authenticity, or a reaction against the harmonic and formal legacy of the nineteenth century? How is the use of pre-existent material integrated into the contemporary creative process? With reference to selective case studies, Coatman finds parallels with their medieval counterparts that make their work all the more compelling.


Author(s):  
Sarah Blackwood

This chapter traces a new visual genealogy of inner life as it appears in canonical late-nineteenth-century painter and portraitist Thomas Eakins’s work. It situates Eakins’s lauded portraits alongside the complex political and racialized questions about mind and body that emerged in the U.S. after the Civil War. It centers a reading of a marginal Eakins painting—Whistling for Plover—that Eakins gave as a gift to neurologist S. Weir Mitchell. This painting is a part of a web of inventive thinking about mind and body in the postbellum U.S., evincing the deep anxiety felt nationally over the bodily scars left by the Civil War’s racial violence, an anxiety that is essential to the development of the New Psychology as a discipline.


Literator ◽  
2000 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-98
Author(s):  
H. Roos

As has now become a familiar image in Hope’s writings, once again ttie idea of looking at a society from the position of an outsider and an exile forms the central theme of Darkest England (1996). In this satirical novel, the tradition of nineteenth-century travel writings set in a colonial context is reversed, undermined, and then remarkably recreated to portray the present-day manifestation of encounters and relations between (black) Africa and the (white) West. Presenting the (fictional) journals of a Khoisan leader, David Mungo Booi, within a dynamic frame of reference to classical colonial texts by, among others, Livingstone and Stanley. Hope writes a new travel report. This essay discusses how, by the reversal of point of view, a change in time and space, and creating a satirical mood, the colonizer and the colonized are interchanged and the original texts are evoked to be rewritten. The notions of Self/Other, colonial /(post-)colonial and primitive/civilized are placed in new and disturbing contexts, adding to the complex structure of this fascinating text.


1946 ◽  
Vol 8 (03) ◽  
pp. 166-178 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henry Dale

I have been asked to speak about the history of the experimental method in medicine, with particular reference to the nineteenth century. This indication, though I do not propose to regard it as setting a limit, seems to have a special fitness, since it is to the nineteenth century, and especially to its latter half, that we must look for the effective beginning and astonishingly rapid development, the veritable outburst, indeed, of activity in the application of the experimental method to medicine, which opened the new era of medical progress in which we are living today. It is curious, perhaps, that this should have come so late in the history of science. For medicine had figured early in man's attempts to understand nature and his relation to it, and many departments of science which have long ago achieved recognition as independent bodies of knowledge originated as aspects of the physician's equipment—botany, for example, zoology and chemistry, as well as human anatomy and physiology, which still retain their attachment to the medical group of the scientific disciplines. From this point of view, then, it is not surprising to find two physicians, William Gilbert and William Harvey, as the leaders in this country of the scientific revolution which had begun in Europe in 1543 with the publication, within a few weeks of one another, of two books—one by Copernicus of Cracow,De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium, and the other by Vesalius of Padua,De Humani Corporis Fabrica. Both Gilbert and Harvey, we may be proud to remember, studied and first graduated in Medicine here, in Cambridge.


2018 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 348-362
Author(s):  
Rodrigo de SALES ◽  
Daniel MARTÍNEZ-ÁVILA ◽  
José Augusto GUIMARÃES

Abstract In this paper, we study the theoretical intersections and dialogues between some foundational authors on classification and indexing of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that helped developing the theoretical-methodological framework of knowledge organization. More specifically, we highlight and analyze the theoretical convergences of Harris, Dewey, Cutter, Otlet, Kaiser, and Ranganathan as they can provide a clearer picture of the historical and theoretical contributions to the epistemological foundations of knowledge organization. Our methodology follows a critical-descriptive approach to the analysis of the main contributions of the authors and the critical reflections of some specialists and biographers. We continue with a discussion of the links between bibliographic classifications and knowledge organization drawing on the ideas of Bliss; then, we divide our historical narrative between the theoretical contributions during the nineteenth-century (Harris, Dewey, and Cutter) and the twentieth century (Otlet, Kaiser, and Ranganathan); and finally, we present a discussion of the history of knowledge organization from the point of view of the theoretical and methodological development of classification and indexing at the turn of the nineteenth century to the twentieth century. We conclude with some remarks on their main contributions to the development of the knowledge organization field.


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