scholarly journals Dialogues of Cultures

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 71-92
Author(s):  
Adalyat Issiyeva
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Geographical Proximity ◽  
Multiple Perspectives ◽  
Russian Culture ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Direct Study ◽  
French Music ◽  
Russian Literary

The influence of the Saisons Russes, with its utterly Orientalist appeal in defining French modernism and Western avant-garde culture in general, is widely known and discussed by many researchers from multiple perspectives (Schaeffner 1953, Garafola 1989, Davis 2010, Bellow 2013). Less emphasised to date is the fact that Russian Orientalism emerged from European stimuli and, in many respects, its very existence is indebted to French Orientalism. As the famous Russian Orientalist Vasily Bartol’d complained, “The Orient’s neighbour, Russia, despite its geographical proximity, often preferred reading shoddy Western books on the Orient to a direct study of the Orient” (Bartol’d 1925, p. 295). 1 This occurred as a result of the nineteenth-century travels of many Russian literary men, painters, and linguists to Europe (notably to France and Germany) to study with famous Orientalists. This paper contextualizes French Orientalism within nineteenth-century Russian culture and considers how French musical Orientalism was negotiated in Russian writings from the period. Despite the critical views of Russian musicians toward French music with oriental subjects, the music nevertheless resonated with Russian compositional practices and some of its devices were used occasionally to depict not only the Orient, but Russia itself.

The Spanish Reception of Le Sacre du Printemps (1913–1936)

2018 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 48-66
Author(s):  
Idoia Murga Castro
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
Original Work ◽  
Silver Age ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Ballets Russes ◽  
Rite Of Spring ◽  
Le Sacre Du Printemps ◽  
Cultural Expansion

Centenary celebrations are being held between 2016 and 2018 to mark the first consecutive tours of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes in Spain. This study analyses the Spanish reception of Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring) (1913), one of its most avant-garde pieces. Although the original work was never performed in Spain as a complete ballet, its influence was felt deeply in the work of certain Spanish choreographers, composers, painters and intellectuals during the so-called Silver Age, the period of modernisation and cultural expansion which extended from the end of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the Spanish Civil War.

New understanding and old myths. On I. Esaulov’s Russian Classics: New Understanding [Russkaya klassika: novoe ponimanie]

2020 ◽  
pp. 178-191
Author(s):  
E. V. Abdullaev
Keyword(s):  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
Russian Literature ◽  
Eastern Orthodox ◽  
Literary Canon ◽  
Eastern Orthodoxy ◽  
Russian Culture ◽  
Historical Method ◽  
Russian Literary ◽  
Methodological Principles

The article examines methodological principles of studying the Russian literary canon in the cultural context of Eastern Orthodoxy, as demonstrated in I. Esaulov’s book. While acknowledging the importance of the book’s method, the article reviews and criticizes the concepts used by the scholar (the Eastern archetype, the Christmas archetype, the categories of Law and Grace, etc.). In particular, the author challenges the statement that a writer populates his works with archetypes prevailing in his culture (so Eastern Orthodox ones in the case of Russian culture), often against his own religious principles. Also subjected to critical analysis is the thesis about the Easter archetype being more specific to Russian literature, with the Christmas archetype being more typical of Western literature. On the whole, the paper argues that the transhistorical approach declared by the scholar as opposed to the rigorously historical method (M. Gasparov and others) may often lead to strained hypotheses and mythologizing; all in all, it may result in an ahistorical perception of both Eastern Orthodoxy and the literary canon.

Reverie, Schmaltz, and the Modernist Imagination

2021 ◽  
Vol 74 (2) ◽  
pp. 289-363
Author(s):  
Alexandra Kieffer
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Mass Production ◽  
Reference Points ◽  
Stephane Mallarme ◽  
Literary Style ◽  
French Music ◽  
Trace Back ◽  
Harmonic Language

Abstract In a review of 1895, Henry Gauthier-Villars described Claude Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune as “musique de rêve,” a descriptor that has been attached to Debussy’s style ever since. Partly because of the importance of the Prélude within his compositional development, the distinctive sound of Debussy’s “dream music” has often been understood as a response to the hermetic and difficult literary style of French Symbolists, especially that of Stéphane Mallarmé. Yet Gauthier-Villars’s appellation of “musique de rêve” also invoked a specifically sonic (and largely forgotten) set of cultural reference points, an aural backdrop crucial for understanding Debussy’s early style in the 1880s and early 1890s—the widespread cultivation of the topos of reverie in French music in the final two decades of the nineteenth century. Settings of Baudelaire, Verlaine, and Mallarmé by Debussy and his young contemporaries around 1890 were infused with signifiers of dream and reverie that trace back to salon genres of the 1870s and that cross-pollinated with the harmonic language of the newly fashionable valse lente in the early 1880s. Hearing Debussy’s early works in the context of this reverie topos and its aural kinship to the popular valse lente sheds light on the extent to which the radical idiosyncrasy so vaunted by modernists was constantly evolving in tandem with—and could never truly free itself from—an aural culture defined by mass production, repetition, and cliché.

The internationalization of musical life at the end of the nineteenth century in modernized Paris and Rome

Urban History ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 40 (4) ◽  
pp. 663-680
Author(s):  
GESA ZUR NIEDEN
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Musical Theatre ◽  
Musical Life ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Limited Availability ◽  
Urban Renovation ◽  
The Relationship

ABSTRACT:This article examines the relationship between the processes of urban renovation in European capitals and the internationalization of musical theatre productions, using the example of theatres constructed in Paris and Rome at the end of the nineteenth century. Due to the limited availability of governmental and municipal funding, the more popular theatres in both capitals came to provide an important space for musical productions on an avant-garde level, with international repertoires and casts.

The Artist’s Experience of Migration

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sharon Hecker
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Modern Art ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Transnational Mobility ◽  
Art Scene

This chapter looks at the shift in Medardo Rosso's position from an outsider in his own country to a foreigner in France. Rosso's move to Paris belongs to the wider phenomenon of increased migration by artists to the principal metropolis of modern art toward the end of the century. It also confirms his awareness of a new kind of transnational mobility. Tracing Rosso's trajectory as a form of self-exile characteristic of cultural anarchists, the chapter examines his hopeful but obstacle-ridden expatriation and his struggle to make avant-garde sculpture in the epoch and city dominated by Rodin. Paris at the end of the nineteenth-century offered Rosso new opportunities, such as a vibrant art scene, a burgeoning market for serial sculpture, and a network of sophisticated artists, collectors, and critics.

Is Medieval Music the New Avant-Garde? The Wilful, the Wayward and the Playful

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Graham Coatman
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Creative Process ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Early Music ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Medieval Music ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
New Research

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.

Avant-garde

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Irene Gammel
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Radical Innovation ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Early American ◽  
Dialectical Relationship ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Different Cultures

The term "avant-garde" has a double meaning, denoting first, the historical movements that started in the late nineteenth century and ended in the 1920s and 1930s, and second, the ongoing practices of radical innovation in art, literature, and fashion in the later twentieth century (often inspired by the historical avant-garde and referred to as the neo-avant-garde). Within the context of modernism, historical avant-garde movements (such as Dada, Futurism, Vorticism, Anarchism, and Constructivism) radicalized innovations in aesthetic forms and content, while also engaging viewers and readers in deliberately shocking new ways. Locked in a dialectical relationship between the avant-garde and modernism, as Richard Murphy has written (1999: 3), the historical avant-garde accelerated the advent of modernism, which routinely appropriated and repackaged avant-garde experimentation in tamer forms. As the Latinate term "avant-garde" took root first France and Italy, and later in Germany and English-speaking countries, the trajectory of the avant-garde’s relationship with, or opposition to, modernism has been theorized in a myriad of different, even conflicting, ways across different cultures. Is the avant-garde an extension of, or a synonym for, modernism (as suggested in some early American criticism) or are the two concepts in opposition to each other (as proposed in Italian and Spanish criticism)?

3. Critical theory and modernism

2017 ◽  
pp. 30-38
Author(s):  
Stephen Eric Bronner
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Critical Theory ◽  
Social Norms ◽  
Mass Culture ◽  
Frankfurt School ◽  
Cultural Resistance ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Experimental Art ◽  
Mass Society ◽  
The Individual

The end of the nineteenth century witnessed the birth of an international avant-garde that focused upon alienation, standardization, and the liberation of the individual from constrictive social norms. Impressionists, Cubists, Expressionists, Futurists, Dadaists, Surrealists, and representatives from many other styles provided a blizzard of philosophical–aesthetic manifestos that blended political with cultural resistance to mass society. The Frankfurt School’s inner circle was sympathetic from the start; modernism provided a response to the ontology of false conditions and, indeed, an avant-garde opposition to mass culture provided inspiration and cohesion. ‘Critical theory and modernism’ explains how the unflinching support of modernism and experimental art by the Frankfurt School confirmed both its cultural radicalism and contempt for totalitarianism.

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