Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
David C. Paul
Keyword(s):  
Aaron Copland ◽  
Leonard Bernstein ◽  
Elliott Carter ◽  
Henry Cowell ◽  
American Composer ◽  
History Of ◽  
Musical Modernism ◽  
The Way

This book explores the changing images of American composer and music icon Charles E. Ives across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, paying particular attention to issues of agency (how an idea transfers from one person to another) and constituency (the nature and size of the audience to which a person speaks). Ives has been, at various times, considered a hero, victim, villain—sometimes singly, sometimes simultaneously. He had been portrayed, for example, as a pioneer of American musical modernism and a symbol of American freedom, but at the same time the perpetrator of one of the greatest musical hoaxes of all times. This book examines the way Ives has been imagined by the critics, composers, performers, and scholars who have had the most impact in shaping the various conversations about him, from Leonard Bernstein and Henry Cowell to Aaron Copland and Elliott Carter. It argues that the history of Ives's reception is not only a series of portraits of an unusual composer, but also a series of mirrors that reflect the way Americans have viewed themselves.

Charles Ives in the Mirror

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
David C. Paul
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
American Music ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
Aaron Copland ◽  
Leonard Bernstein ◽  
Charles Ives ◽  
Musical Culture ◽  
Elliott Carter ◽  
Henry Cowell ◽  
Social Anxieties

This book, a sweeping survey of intellectual and musical history, tells the new story of how the music of American composer Charles E. Ives (1874–1954) was shaped by shifting conceptions of American identity within and outside of musical culture. The book focuses on the critics, composers, performers, and scholars whose contributions were most influential in shaping the critical discourse on Ives, many of them marquee names of American musical culture themselves, including Henry Cowell, Aaron Copland, Elliott Carter, and Leonard Bernstein. The book explores both how Ives positioned his music amid changing philosophical and aesthetic currents and how others interpreted his contributions to American music. Although Ives's initial efforts to find a public in the early 1920s attracted a few devotees, the resurgence of interest in the American literary past during the 1930s made a concert staple of his “Concord” Sonata, a work dedicated to nineteenth-century transcendentalist writers. The book shows how Ives was subsequently deployed as an icon of American freedom during the early Cold War period and how he came to be instigated at the head of a line of “American maverick” composers. It also examines why a recent cadre of scholars has beset the composer with Gilded Age social anxieties.

Walter Piston 1894–1976

Tempo ◽  
1977 ◽  
pp. 23-24
Author(s):  
Paul Rapoport
Keyword(s):  
Harvard University ◽  
Leonard Bernstein ◽  
Main Text ◽  
Elliott Carter ◽  
American Composer ◽  
Nadia Boulanger ◽  
Walter Piston ◽  
Academic Study

Walter Piston, the American composer and teacher, died aged 82 on 12 November 1976. As a young amateur he learned to play nearly all the instruments, but he did not begin academic study of music until he was 25 He graduated from Harvard University with highest honours in 1924, studied for two years in France with Nadia Boulanger, and returned to teach at Harvard for over three decades, retiring in 1960. Among his pupils were Leonard Bernstein and Elliott Carter. His three main text books (Harmony, Counterpoint and Orchestration) have been, widely used for many years.

The Problem of Ives's Revisions, 1973–1987

2007 ◽  
Vol 60 (3) ◽  
pp. 599-645
Author(s):  
Drew Massey
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Critical Edition ◽  
Charles Ives ◽  
Executive Editor ◽  
Elliott Carter ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Way

Although scholars already understand that the issue of revisions in the music of Charles Ives is fraught paleographically, the intellectual history of attitudes towards Ives's revisions has remained underexplored. This essay examines the major voices in the debate about Ives's revisions between the activation of the Charles Ives Society in 1973 and the publication of Maynard Solomon's 1987 article “Charles Ives: Some Questions of Veracity.” Unpublished letters by John Kirkpatrick and Elliott Carter, which shed crucial light on the issue, are discussed and are reproduced here in their entirety. This debate influenced the way the Ives Society approached their complete critical edition. The Society, which sought to represent “the composer that Ives was at the time of composition,” disregarded later versions of Ives's music in approximately one fifth of the editions issued during Kirkpatrick's tenure as Executive Editor. Taken as a whole, what emerges is a discussion that was much more active than existing scholarship has acknowledged. By approaching Ives's revisions from a historiographic standpoint, future Ives scholarship, which includes editorial projects, has the opportunity to assess more fully its own assumptions about the composer as he has come to be known.

Carlos Chávez’s Polysemic Style:

2015 ◽  
Vol 68 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-150 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leonora Saavedra
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
Aaron Copland ◽  
Edgard Varese ◽  
Henry Cowell ◽  
Do So ◽  
The Way ◽  
At Home

The critical discourse on Carlos Chávez’s music is full of contradictions regarding the presence within it of signifiers of the Mexican, the pre-Columbian, and the indigenous. Between 1918 and 1928 Chávez in fact developed, from stylistic preferences that appeared early in his compositions, a polysemic language that he could use equally well to address the very modern or the primitive, the pre-Columbian or the contemporary mestizo, in and only in those works in which he chose to do so. Chávez’s referents emerged in dialogue with the cultural and political contexts in which he worked, those of post-revolutionary Mexico and modern New York. But he was attracted above all to modernism and modernity, and was impacted by cosmopolitan forces at home and abroad. By the end of the decade he had earned a position within the modern musical field’s network of social relations, and had drawn the attention of agents of recognition such as Edgard Varèse, Paul Rosenfeld, Aaron Copland, and Henry Cowell. These composers and critics added Chávez’s constructed difference to their much-sought collective difference as Americans within a European art. Chávez’s own use of explicit Mexican referents in some of his works shaped the early reception of his music as quintessentially American/Mexican, eventually influencing the way we understand it today.

scholarly journals Colin McPhee: a composer turned explorer

Tempo ◽  
1984 ◽  
pp. 2-7 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carol J. Oja
Keyword(s):  
Aaron Copland ◽  
The West ◽  
Henry Cowell ◽  
Balinese Gamelan ◽  
American Composer ◽  
The Rich

Prophetic words written by the Canadian-American composer Colin McPhee to his friend Aaron Copland, after McPhee had returned to Bali in 1937 from a hiatus in his eight-year stay there. The Balinese gamelan, with its shimmering sounds and supple swing, became the center of Colin McPhee's life long before the study of musical exotica came into fashion for Western composers. McPhee's work in the East was pioneering, not just in the considerable substance of his Bali-inspired research, writings, and compositions, but in the ecumenical attitude that it helped to inspire about Asian musics and the rich potential they hold for the West. McPhee, together with Henry Cowell, Henry Eichheim, Harry Partch, and a few other Americans of his generation, took decisive steps across Western boundaries and into the whole world of music.

Rorschach Assessment of Complex Trauma in Youth

2020 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-41
Author(s):  
David Ephraim
Keyword(s):  
Psychological Assessment ◽  
Complex Trauma ◽  
Personality Development ◽  
Traumatic Events ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Way

Abstract. A history of complex trauma or exposure to multiple traumatic events of an interpersonal nature, such as abuse, neglect, and/or major attachment disruptions, is unfortunately common in youth referred for psychological assessment. The way these adolescents approach the Rorschach task and thematic contents they provide often reflect how such experiences have deeply affected their personality development. This article proposes a shift in perspective in the interpretation of protocols of adolescents who suffered complex trauma with reference to two aspects: (a) the diagnostic relevance of avoidant or emotionally constricted Rorschach protocols that may otherwise appear of little use, and (b) the importance of danger-related thematic contents reflecting the youth’s sense of threat, harm, and vulnerability. Regarding this last aspect, the article reintroduces the Preoccupation with Danger Index ( DI). Two cases are presented to illustrate the approach.

Life as a Raw Material: Illusions of Control

Somatechnics ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 250-262 ◽  
Author(s):  
Oron Catts ◽  
Ionat Zurr
Keyword(s):  
Synthetic Biology ◽  
Cognitive Engineering ◽  
Raw Material ◽  
Future Scenarios ◽  
Short History ◽  
Know How ◽  
Political Forces ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Way

The paper discusses and critiques the concept of the single engineering paradigm. This concepts allude to a future in which the control of matter and life, and life as matter, will be achieved by applying engineering principles; through nanotechnology, synthetic biology and, as some suggest, geo-engineering, cognitive engineering and neuro-engineering. We outline some issues in the short history of the field labelled as Synthetic Biology. Furthermore; we examine the way engineers, scientists, designers and artists are positioned and articulating the use of the tools of Synthetic Biology to expose some of the philosophical, ethical and political forces and considerations of today as well as some future scenarios. We suggest that one way to enable the possibilities of alternative frames of thought is to open up the know-how and the access to these technologies to other disciplines, including artistic.

FBI and Religion

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Religious Orientation ◽  
Religious Communities ◽  
Academic Scholarship ◽  
History Of ◽  
Interdisciplinary Assessment ◽  
Civic Religion ◽  
New Research ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Way

This volume is an interdisciplinary assessment of the relationship between religion and the FBI. We recount the history of the FBI’s engagement with multiple religious communities and with aspects of public or “civic” religion such as morality and respectability. The book presents new research to explain roughly the history of the FBI’s interaction with religion over approximately one century, from the pre-Hoover period to the post-9/11 era. Along the way, the book explores vexed issues that go beyond the particulars of the FBI’s history—the juxtaposition of “religion” and “cult,” the ways in which race can shape the public’s perceptions of religion (and vica versa), the challenges of mediating between a religious orientation and a secular one, and the role and limits of academic scholarship as a way of addressing the differing worldviews of the FBI and some of the religious communities it encounters.

The Beginnings of Islam in Afghanistan

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arezou Azad
Keyword(s):  
Paradigm Shift ◽  
Political System ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Eighth Century ◽  
Religious Context ◽  
Early Islam ◽  
History Of ◽  
Initial Conversion ◽  
The Way

Covering the period from 709 to 871, this chapter traces the initial conversion of Afghanistan from Zoroastrianism and Buddhism to Islam. Highlighting the differential developments in four regions of Afghanistan, it discusses the very earliest history of Afghan Islam both as a religion and as a political system in the form of a caliphate.  The chapter draws on under-utilized sources, such as fourth to eighth century Bactrian documents from Tukharistan and medieval Arabic and Persian histories of Balkh, Herat and Sistan. In so doing, it offers a paradigm shift in the way early Islam is understood by arguing that it did not arrive in Afghanistan as a finished product, but instead grew out of Afghanistan’s multi-religious context. Through fusions with Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, early Abrahamic traditions, and local cult practices, the Islam that resulted was less an Arab Islam that was imported wholesale than a patchwork of various cultural practices.

On Purpose

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Ruse
Keyword(s):  
Intelligent Design ◽  
Ancient Greece ◽  
Western Thought ◽  
History Of ◽  
Historical Thought ◽  
The Way

Can we live without the idea of purpose? Should we even try to? Kant thought we were stuck with it, and even Darwin, who profoundly shook the idea, was unable to kill it. Indeed, purpose seems to be making a comeback today, as both religious advocates of intelligent design and some prominent secular philosophers argue that any explanation of life without the idea of purpose is missing something essential. This book explores the history of purpose in philosophical, religious, scientific, and historical thought, from ancient Greece to the present. The book traces how Platonic, Aristotelian, and Kantian ideas of purpose continue to shape Western thought. Along the way, it also takes up tough questions about the purpose of life—and whether it's possible to have meaning without purpose.

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