scholarly journals From Kerman to Merzbow: Notes on the metamorphoses of music analysis at the turn of the millennium

New Sound ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 23-46
Author(s):  
Jiří Kubíček

This paper aims to delineate changes in the approach to music analysis over the last decades of the nineteenth century and to examine different possibilities in analysing works which have a characteristic that virtually excludes the use of traditional methods. The starting point is Joseph Kerman's criticism of music analysis, formulated in the 1980s, which - together with successive discussions - reflects a tendency towards abandoning the excessively academic and formalizing approach to analysis, moving from an attempt at an objective analysis of a work towards an interpretation that also focuses on the listener. Since the mid-twentieth century, electroacoustic music has been one of the areas where the use of traditional analysis was inconvenient. Since electroacoustic music began to lose its exclusive, academic character in the 1990s in relation with the development of computer technologies, the question of its interpretation and finding suitable listener strategies has kept coming to the fore. This paper shows the possibilities of approach to this music in relation to its specificities. The last part of the paper focuses on a specific example from one fringe genre: noise music, specifically the subgenre japanoise. In its peak period in the 1990s, this sound production was probably the furthest away from what is usually associated with the term music. Based on an analysis of a selected composition, the inadequacy of the traditional approach and certain alternatives to grasping such music will be demonstrated. The very end of the paper features some current results which relate to, or result from, the study's conclusions.

2021 ◽  
pp. 292-304
Author(s):  
Jennifer Walker

Taking the 1903 death of Pope Leo XIII as its starting point, the conclusion extends beyond the legal separation of Church and State (1905) in order to trace the ways in which the processes of transformation that were set in motion during the late nineteenth century continued well into the twentieth century. Pierre Nora’s concept of the lieu de memoire illuminates the numerous ways that the sites of Catholic and French memory that the book explores—whether as opera, popular theatre, or concert—found an extraordinary ally in the Republic as it collectively harnessed the power of memory. From its “origin” in the French medieval era, to its transformations throughout the fin-de-siècle, to the response to the devastating fire at Notre-Dame in 2019, the Catholic Church provided (and continues to provide) a new mode of expression for the French Republic. In effect, the success of the twentieth-century renouveau catholique was set in motion by its nineteenth-century forbear: the path was paved by the Republic’s musical Ralliement and the memorialization of its Catholic past as a fundamental cornerstone of its modern existence.


2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 432-447 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeppe Nevers ◽  
Jesper Lundsby Skov

Drawing on examples from Danish and Norwegian history, this article traces the ideological origins of Nordic democracy. It takes as its starting point the observation that constitutional theories of democracy were rather weak in the Nordic countries until the mid-twentieth century; instead, a certain Nordic tradition of popular constitutionalism rooted in a romantic and organic idea of the people was central to the ideological foundations of Nordic democracy. This tradition developed alongside agrarian mobilization in the nineteenth century, and it remained a powerful ideological reference-point through most of the twentieth century, exercising, for instance, an influence on debates about European integration in the 1960s and 1970s. However, this tradition was gradually overlaid by more institutional understandings of democracy from the mid-twentieth century onwards, with the consequence that the direct importance of this folk’ish heritage declined towards the late twentieth century. Nevertheless, clear echoes of this heritage remain evident in some contemporary Nordic varieties of populism, as well as in references to the concept of folkestyre as the pan-Scandinavian synonym for democracy.


Author(s):  
Malcolm Chase

Though part of what might be termed historians’ ‘mental furniture’, popular politics is an elastic term that evades close definition. This chapter suggests some defining principles and characteristics of popular political activity. It then takes a broadly chronological form and identifies in the first half of the nineteenth century a diminishing resort to violence and the growing importance of memory and commemoration (notably in Scotland and Wales, less so in England). It goes on to examine the content of popular liberalism and the apparent ‘taming’ of popular politics in the twentieth century. It ends by suggesting that the forms popular politics had increasingly taken by the turn of the millennium seem to indicate a revival of older modes of contesting power.


2013 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-91
Author(s):  
Jeffrey DeThorne

If nineteenth-century aesthetics distinguish between distinct, colourful French instrumentation and doubled, equalised German orchestration, this distinction softens when the ‘New German’ orchestration of Wagner and Strauss exploits individual instrumental colours before dissolving them into massive orchestral sonorities. Similarly, if early French electroacoustic music counteracts the meta-serialism of early twentieth-century German electronic music, Pierre Schaeffer's Traité des objets musicaux combines his early anecdotal Noise Studies with a noise-reduction process into a new, rather German aesthetic of electroacoustics. In search of musical objects through a reductive, analytical listening (entendre), Schaeffer's neutralisation of anecdotal noises into musical objects is analogous to New German orchestration's neutralisation of individual orchestral colours in order to synthesise new orchestral combinations. Although this orchestral synthesis is different from the analytical probe for new valeurs involved in entendre, the separation of the noise from its residual signification are fundamental processes within both nineteenth-century orchestrational and twentieth-century electroacoustic musical aesthetics. If our current understanding of electronic music aligns Schaeffer and Pierre Henry wholly with modernity and its putatively radical and self-conscious break with Berlioz, Brahms and historical tradition, this article suggests that an essential underlying continuity in the French-instrumentation/German-orchestration binary persists even in the face of the decline of the musical and cultural traditions that created and sustained them.


2020 ◽  
Vol 53 (2) ◽  
pp. 105-118
Author(s):  
Marzenna Jakubczak

This paper discusses the phenomenon of Kāpil Maṭh (Madhupur, India), a Sāṃkhyayoga āśrama founded in the early twentieth century by the charismatic Bengali scholar-monk Swāmi Hariharānanda Ᾱraṇya (1869–1947). While referring to Hariharānanda’s writings I will consider the idea of the re-establishment of an extinct spiritual lineage. I shall specify the criteria for identity of this revived Sāṃkhyayoga tradition by explaining why and on what assumptions the modern reinterpretation of this school can be perceived as continuation of the thought of Patañjali and Īśvarakṛṣṇa. The starting point is, however, the question whether it is possible at all to re-establish a philosophical tradition which had once broken down and disappeared for centuries. In this context, one ought to ponder if it is likely to revitalise the same line of thinking, viewing, philosophy-making and practice in accordance with the theoretical exposition of the right insight achieved by an accomplished teacher, a master, the founder of a “new”revived tradition declared to maintain a particular school identity. Moreover, I refer to a monograph of Knut A. Jacobsen (2018) devoted to the tradition of Kāpil Maṭh interpreted as a typical product of the nineteenth-century Bengali renaissance.


1950 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 34-47 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ralph H. Gabriel

Arnold Toynbee has described our western civilization in the twentieth century as a rationalistic and secular culture. In the sense that an awareness of the importance of science is the starting point of the thinking of our day the generalization seems true. We prize the realism of the objective, analytical approach of science. In a turbulent and swiftly moving age we have substituted relativism for older values once confidently assumed to have universal validity. We have seen scepticism, born of twentieth-century events, erode an old and dynamic belief in progress. We observe Protestantism, its old orthodoxy shaken, striving to make the Christian tradition meaningful and significant for a materialistic generation. We watch the protagonists of democracy striving to hold fast to essential human values and to protect basic freedoms in an age of fear and power.


2019 ◽  
pp. 106-127
Author(s):  
Haun Saussy

Nineteenth-century origin stories about culture and poetry assume a pattern of development and diversification from a single starting point—be that a primitive language or a single ethnic community. But according to twentieth-century models, the development of culture depends on the clash of different patterns of activity that disrupt the forward movement of simple rhythms. Marcel Mauss’s account of the techniques of the body and Ezra Pound’s practices of translation supply two examples of the breaking of rhythm and the creation of new cultural patterns, sometimes in response to the destruction of European ideals in the Great War.


2015 ◽  
Vol 46 ◽  
pp. 83-102
Author(s):  
Beata Raszewska-Żurek

Feminine virtue. An attempt at understanding the evolution of the meaning of cnota (virtue) over the centuriesThe article is devoted to the evolution of the meaning of the Polish lexeme cnota (virtue) starting from the Old Polish to the present time. The starting point is the change in the meaning of the lexeme virtue from the ‘complex of ethical qualities’ in the Old Polish language to the ‘hymen’ in the twentieth century. From the beginning of the Polish language, the lexeme virtue contained a different catalogue of values in relation to men and women. Analysis concerned these meanings which referred to a woman and were related to the valuation not only of the virtue, but also of a woman in general, taking into consideration non-linguistic, social and cultural determinants. The material comes from historical and contemporary Polish language dictionaries. The studies also included the use of lexemes related to the lexem cnota (virtue), such as an adjective cnotliwy (virtuous) or a noun cnotka (would-be virgin, goody-goody), if they concerned the woman‘s virtue. The meaning of the lexeme virtue in relation to a woman was associated with virginity, chastity, considered as a key factor for determining the value of a woman. Such meaning, associated with a positive valuation of virtue persisted until the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century, the broad importance of the lexeme virtue has fallen into disuse, the meaning has been narrowed to ‘virginity’. Following this, in connection with social and customary changes, the virtue, already as ‘virginity’, lost its traditional high rating in the category of moral values.


2011 ◽  
Vol 161 (3) ◽  
pp. 204-217
Author(s):  
Paweł DREMBKOWSKI

While the nineteenth century was the century of ‘gold nuggets’, the twentieth century of ‘black gold’, the twenty-first century will be the century of wars for ‘bread’ and ‘blue gold’ and related crises. Approximately eighteen thousand children die every day from hunger or malnutrition as 850 million people go to bed with an empty stomach. Mozambique, Eritrea, Afghanistan are just a few countries whose instability result from hunger and water shortages. C. Clausewitz argued that each era has its own war. So do our times. They will have their war too. Deficiencies related to the insufficiency of life is a key category of internal security of each country and region. Therefore, to determine their contemporary character is the starting point for local but also global safety. Today, more and more domestic security is related to the global security situation and vice versa. Risks associated with lack of basic life-giving ‘materials’, which is food and water, could become a potential situation that might affect values and national interests, posing a threat to the life, health and living conditions of hundreds of thousands or millions of peo-ple.


1981 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-61 ◽  
Author(s):  
I. B. Sutton

Salt has been produced in Ghana since at least the sixteenth century at many coastal sites. By the nineteenth century commercial production was concentrated in the lagoons east of Accra, and especially at Songor Lagoon just west of Ada. Here the Ada Manche and the priesthood controlled production. Much salt consumed in Asante and further north came from Accra, Ningo and Songor, and an increasing proportion went up the Volta River by canoe. The share of salt trade in the hands of the Ada traders is reflected in their virtual monopoly of the river traffic and their settlement in trading communities along the river. The British attempted to regulate and tax the trade, but market forces were more important in determining price. Salt from Ada was generally preferred to imported salt and to salt from other local sources, but the alternative of imported salt helped regulate the local prices. The importance of Daboya as a source of salt seems to have been somewhat exaggerated. Salt from Ada continued to predominate in much of Ghana in the twentieth century, but the river traffic was gradually replaced by motor transport, and the hold of the Adas on the distributive network broken. Salt continued to be produced by traditional methods at Songor until quite recently. It is still produced by traditional means for a fairly wide sale at Keta Lagoon, east of the Volta.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document