From Scratch

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Tenney
Keyword(s):  
Information Theory ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Music Theory ◽  
Computer Music ◽  
The Self ◽  
Computer Assisted ◽  
Harmonic Space ◽  
Just Intonation ◽  
Tuning Systems

One of the twentieth century's most important musical thinkers, the author did pioneering work in multiple fields, including computer music, tuning theory, and algorithmic and computer-assisted compositions. This book is a collection of the author's hard-to-find writings arranged, edited, and revised by the self-described “composer/theorist.” Tenney argued that “a new kind of music theory is needed which deals with the question of what we actually hear when we listen to a piece of music, as well as how or why we hear as we do.” His collection, which spans the years from 1955 to 2006, constitutes one of the most important bodies of music-theoretical thought of the twentieth century. Each article in this volume asks how new and radical musical ideas might emerge from how we hear. Selections focus on his fundamental concerns—“what the ear hears”—and include thoughts and ideas on perception and form, tuning systems and especially just intonation, information theory, theories of harmonic space, and stochastic (chance) procedures of composition.

Just Intonation

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Hasegawa
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Music Theory ◽  
Musical Instruments ◽  
Just Intonation ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Interval Size ◽  
Tuning Systems ◽  
Simultaneous Sounds

Just intonation is a system of tuning musical intervals based on simple ratios between the frequencies of their constituent pitches. For voices and most musical instruments, just intonation minimizes the acoustical interference between simultaneous sounds and leads to the highest degree of blending and consonance. Though its roots are ancient, twentieth-century composers revived just intonation towards new esthetic ends. The idea of using ratios to quantify interval size originated in ancient Greek music theory: In Pythagorean intonation, all intervals are measured with ratios made solely of multiples of the integers 2 and 3. In response to the growing use of thirds and sixths in the fifteenth century, Renaissance theorists expanded Pythagorean intonation to include multiples of 5, replacing the tense Pythagorean major third, 81/64, with the mellifluous just major third, 5/4—in all ratio-based tunings, simpler ratios produce smoother, more consonant intervals. Musicologists typically reserve the term ‘‘just intonation’’ for this Renaissance system, though it is also used metonymically to refer to all ratio-based tuning systems.

‘Out Past / Self-Dramatization’: Maurice Scully's Several Dances

2016 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 105-118
Author(s):  
Romana Huk
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
William Carlos Williams ◽  
The Self ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
George Oppen ◽  
American Poets

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.

Why Phenomenology?

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
George Pattison
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
Alternative Model ◽  
Phenomenological Approach ◽  
Human Existence ◽  
Present Approach ◽  
The Self ◽  
Existence Of God ◽  
Pure Intuition ◽  
The Way

This chapter sets out the rationale for adopting a phenomenological approach to the devout life literature. Distinguishing the present approach from versions of the phenomenology of religion dominant in mid-twentieth-century approaches to religion, an alternative model is found in Heidegger’s early lectures on Paul. These illustrate that alongside its striving to achieve a maximally pure intuition of its subject matter, phenomenology will also be necessarily interpretative and existential. Although phenomenology is limited to what shows itself and therefore cannot pass judgement on the existence of God, it can deal with God insofar as God appears within the activity and passivity of human existence. From Hegel onward, it has also shown itself open to seeing the self as twofold and thus more than a simple subjective agent, opening the way to an understanding of the self as essentially spiritual.

Mock Mockers: Cynicism, Suffering, Irish Modernism

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 177-194
Author(s):  
Ronan McDonald
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The Self ◽  
Philosophical Tradition ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Peter Sloterdijk ◽  
Irish Modernism

Cynicism styles itself as the answer to the mental suffering produced by disillusionment, disappointment, and despair. It seeks to avoid them by exposing to ridicule naive idealism or treacherous hope. Modern cynics avoid the vulnerability produced by high ideals, just as their ancient counterparts eschewed dependence on all but the most essential of material needs. The philosophical tradition of the Cynics begins with the Ancients, including Diogenes and Lucian, but has found contemporary valence in the work of cultural theorists such as Peter Sloterdijk. This article uses theories of cynicism to analyze postcolonial disappointment in Irish modernism. It argues that in the “ambi-colonial” conditions of early-twentieth-century Ireland, the metropolitan surety of and suaveness of a cynical attitude is available but precarious. We therefore find a recursive cynicism that often turns upon itself, finding the self-distancing and critical sure-footedness of modern, urbane cynicism a stance that itself should be treated with cynical scepticism. The essay detects this recursive cynicism in a number of literary works of post-independence Ireland, concluding with an extended consideration of W. B. Yeats’s great poem of civilizational precarity, “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen.”

EPISTEMOLOGY OF TONE: AN OBITUARY FOR JULIEN JALÂL ED-DINE WEISS

Tempo ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 71 (281) ◽  
pp. 71-79
Author(s):  
Stefan Pohlit
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Just Intonation ◽  
Modal System ◽  
Helpful Tool ◽  
Near Eastern ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
History Of ◽  
Major Discrepancy

AbstractDuring the 1980s, Julien Jalâl Ed-Dine Weiss, founder of the Al-Kindi ensemble of Aleppo, invented a qānūn in just intonation with which he attempted to solve a major discrepancy between the theory and practice of maqām-scales. Weiss objected to the introduction of Western standards, observing that they distort the significance of interval ratios and prevent a comparative understanding of the modal system as a transnational phenomenon. In the twentieth century, the implementation of equal-semitone temperament emerged simultaneously with a notable invasion of sociological criteria into musical inquiry. The polarity observed between westernisation and tradition can be seen most visibly in the present search for identity amongst Middle- and Near-Eastern musicians, but this schismogenic process can also be observed in the history of the Western avant-garde, where microtonal explorations have been halted in favour of extra-musical conceptuality. While cross-cultural musicians are faced with a new climate of distrust, it seems most likely that the principles that draw us apart may originate in the very patterns of thought in which our notion of culture operates. Weiss's tuning system may serve as a helpful tool to foster a new and universal epistemology of tone, bridging and transcending the apparent contradictions between the two spheres.

Langdell Laughs

1999 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 141-144
Author(s):  
William P. LaPiana
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Critical Role ◽  
Teaching Profession ◽  
The Self ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
Christopher Columbus ◽  
Self Image ◽  
American Law

The amount of ink spilled in consideration of the life, thought, accomplishments, and legacy of Christopher Columbus Langdell is eloquent testimony to the critical role he plays in the self-image of the American law teaching profession. It is both wonderful and astounding, therefore, to find that critical primary sources remained unread and unused at the very end of the twentieth century. Now that Bruce Kimball has brought them to light, we have a more complete view of the man and his thought, one that, not surprisingly, reveals to us someone quite different from the cruelly and crudely caricatured inventor of those twin devices for stifling young minds, the case and Socratic methods.

scholarly journals Duration Perception Versus Perception Duration: A Proposed Model for the Consciously Experienced Moment

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-14 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lachlan Kent
Keyword(s):  
Information Theory ◽  
Prediction Error ◽  
Intermediate Stage ◽  
The Self ◽  
Global Integration ◽  
Candidate Model ◽  
Time Space ◽  
Proposed Model ◽  
Concrete Objects ◽  
Integrated Information Theory

Duration perception is not the same as perception duration. Time is an object of perception in its own right and is qualitatively different to exteroceptive or interoceptive perception of concrete objects or sensations originating within the self. In reviewing evidence for and against the experienced moment, White (2017, Psychol. Bull., 143, 735–756) proposed a model of global integration of information dense envelopes of integration. This is a valuable addition to the literature because it supposes that, like Tononi’s (2004, BMC Neurosci., 5, 42) Integrated Information Theory, consciousness is an integral step above perception of objects or the self. Consciousness includes the perception of abstract contents such as time, space, and magnitude, as well as post-perceptual contents drawn from memory. The present review takes this logic a step further and sketches a potential neurobiological pathway through the salience, default mode, and central executive networks that culminates in a candidate model of how duration perception and consciousness arises. Global integration is viewed as a process of Bayesian Prediction Error Minimisation according to a model put forward by Hohwy, Paton and Palmer (2016, Phenomenol. Cogn. Sci., 15, 315–335) called ‘distrusting the present’. The proposed model also expresses global integration as an intermediate stage between perception and memory that spans an approximate one second duration, an analogue of Wittmann’s (2011, Front. Integr. Neurosci., 5, 66) experienced moment.

Embodying the Self: Gestures and Dictatorship in Twentieth-Century Germany

2009 ◽  
Vol 203 (Supplement 4) ◽  
pp. 257-279
Author(s):  
M. Fulbrook
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The Self
Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document