Chapter Four. Avant-Garde and the Thaw: Experimentation in Polish Cinema of the 1950s and 1960s

2014 ◽  
pp. 83-92
Keyword(s):  
2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 140-145
Author(s):  
O. A. Podguzova ◽  

Sergey Borisovich Yakovenko is the People's Artist of Russia, a famous musician, vocal teacher and Doctor of Art History. He entered a bright page in the history of Russian vocal art of the XXth century. Starting from the 1950s, as a vocalist, he was in great demand for chamber vocal performances, with some of them being composed by modern musicians. Yakovenko was able to operate freely with a whole stock of expressive means, inherent for avant-garde music, allowing him to take part in the most difficult performances of the latest vocal and vocal-instrumental compositions, which manifested his inclination to the theater, to the disclosure of the dramaturgy of works. S. B. Yakovenko’s stage talent declared itself in its fullness during the performance of mono- operas, among them "Diary of a Madman" by Yuriy Butsko (1968), which received a great resonance in the theatrical life of Russia. The general content of this article is the analysis of S. B. Yakovenko’s performing skill, which gave birth to a wide range of character images, generated by the protagonist’s imagination. After the analysis of audio and video recordings of the vocalist’s performances, as well as his numerous scientific works and conversations, the author discovers several important features typical for the performing interpretation by S. B. Yakovenko. These are his vocal-dramaturgical principles and vocal-theatrical direction. In Y. Boutsko’s opera "Diary of a Madman" the unique performance palette of S. B. Yakovenko allows the singer to create eight various, rapidly interchanging images, using exclusively the resources of his voice, while being on an empty stage without props and with little or no gesture or mime.


Author(s):  
Eric Drott

Giacinto Scelsi was an Italian avant-garde composer best known for the single-note style he developed during the 1950s and 1960s, which minimizes harmonic and melodic activity in order to allow microtonal fluctuations and subtle transformations in timbre, intonation, dynamics, and articulation to come to the fore. Although his works were little known and infrequently performed during his lifetime, they gained considerable acclaim in the 1980s. Scelsi’s œuvre has proven extremely influential, and is generally regarded as a precursor to the spectral movement. Many of the elements of Scelsi’s biography remain uncertain, due in part to the composer’s penchant for self-mythologization. His family belonged to the southern Italian nobility, and it was in their ancestral chateau in Irpinie that Scelsi’s interest in music first manifested itself. He had little in the way of formal musical training, apart from receiving private piano lessons in his youth. Scelsi spent much of the 1920s and 1930s abroad, principally in France and Switzerland. It was during this period that he composed his first pieces, most notably Rotativa for pianos, strings, brass and percussion (1930). His early music was stylistically eclectic, embracing post-impressionist, neo-classical and twelve-tone idioms at various points in his life.


Author(s):  
Kendall Heitzman

Kinugasa Teinosuke (1 January 1896–26 February 1982) was a Japanese actor and film director, most famous for his experimental films of the 1920s and art-house classics of the 1950s. He started as a specialist in oyama female roles, a tradition carried over from Japanese theater to film, and turned to directing as the convention faded in the 1910s and 1920s. After directing films for the major film studios Nikkatsu and Makino, Kinugasa went independent in 1926 with the New Impressionist Film League, his collaboration with members of the New Impressionist School of modernist writers led by Yokomitsu Riichi and Kawabata Yasunari. Kinugasa produced his most famous film, the experimental, avant-garde Kurutta ichipeiji [A Page of Madness] (1926), from a script by Kawabata and others. Despite its secure location in global film history, A Page of Madness was not a financial success, and Kinugasa began working for Shōchiku, at first producing noteworthy films such as Jujiro [Crossroads] (1928) that, while experimental in nature, never again rose to the same level of high-modernist abstraction. Kinugasa had a long career at Shōchiku and then Daiei as a director of period dramas. His films Yukinojo henge [An Actor’s Revenge] (1935) and Jigokumon [Gate of Hell] (1953)—both starring Kinugasa’s frequent collaborator, Hasegawa Kazuo—are representative of his middle and late career. Gate of Hell won a Palme d’Or at the Cannes International Film Festival and received an Academy Honorary Award, the precursor category to Best Foreign Language Film.


Modern Italy ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 257-274 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kjetil Fallan

In the course of the 1950s, Italian industrial design underwent a period of professionalisation and rose to international fame under the banners of ‘Made in Italy’ and ‘la linea italiana’. Seen in retrospect, Italian design retained this position during the 1960s, with the onset of avant-garde ‘pop-design’ and ‘anti-design’. Yet this future development was by no means a given in the Italian design community at the turn of the decade. At this crucial moment, between the rationality of the first postwar period and the playfulness of the second, allegations of a ‘crisis’ in Italian industrial design raised a storm in the professional community for a brief period around 1960. This article analyses this heated debate, focusing on its most pronounced manifestation: the discussions in the Associazione per il Disegno Industriale (ADI) and the design magazine Stile Industria following the jury's decision to withhold the Gran Premio Nazionale Compasso d'Oro for 1959.


2006 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 255-275 ◽  
Author(s):  
MARTIN IDDON

AbstractIn the historiography of the Darmstadt Ferienkurse, the 1970s, when they are examined at all, are generally regarded as a period of stagnation, between the fervour of serial activity in the 1950s and the resurgence of the courses in the 1980s under the banner of various inflections of New Complexity. Yet, in a period of political upheaval after 1968, dissent was felt at Darmstadt too, and protests in 1970 and 1972 saw the institution at its most politically volatile. These protest movements caused the courses’ director, Ernst Thomas, to institute wide-scale changes in their structure and content. Key roles in these protests were taken by journalists: indeed, clear parallels can be drawn between the seemingly egalitarian calls from journalists for Mitbestimmung (co-determination) at Darmstadt and the similar demands being made by their trade unions in the West German federation. Thomas’s failure to deal with journalistic pressure and his heavy-handed treatment of individual protesters (notably Reinhard Oehlschlägel) meant that, shrewd and durable though his reinvention of the courses was, it would be only in 1982, with the accession of a new director, that the press would begin to speak positively about the Darmstadt courses once more. A close reading of these two protests shows the sometime ‘citadel of the avant-garde’ at a distinctly precarious moment in its history. At the time, some felt that such protests could lead to the demise of the courses, and it was far from clear whether Thomas’s reforms would be successful. But, even within this period of uncertainty, the Darmstadt Ferienkurse were anything but stagnant.


Tempo ◽  
1992 ◽  
pp. 25-30 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Warnaby

Among composers born in the 1950s, who witnessed the decline of the post-war avant-garde – together with its most cherished principle, integral serialism – the Finn Magnus Lindberg has produced some of the most challenging responses. It is tempting to attach considerable significance to Lindberg's national origins. Born in 1958, he belongs to a particularly vital generation of Finnish composers whose output extends from traditional symphonic forms to experimental creations involving electroacoustic and computer technology. On the one hand, they have benefitted from the example of composers (such as Aulis Sallinen) who emerged from Sibelius's shadow not only by founding a strong operatic tradition, but also by generating their own brand of orchestral music. On the other, several of the younger generation have continued the practice of studying abroad, though without sacrificing their independence from the European mainstream.


2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (86) ◽  

The focus of this study is on the history of jazz music between 1959 and 1967. The 1950s was a period of intense creativity in jazz, defined by emerging styles such as third stream, cool jazz and hard bop. The end of that decade, 1959, is considered to be a watershed year in which some of jazz’s most influential recordings were made and also effected the free jazz movement, which dominated until 1967, known as the "year that jazz music died". Therefore, 1959 becomes a bridge between the stylistic homogeneity of first half of the century and an outpouring of creativity in the second half. The echoes of the pre-fusion period 1959-1967 are still influential on the musical output of jazz in the twenty first century. This study aims to convey the variety of jazz styles between 1950 and 1967 by looking at the foundational elements that create the musical understanding of these styles by means of a descriptive methodology. Keywords: Jazz, Free Jazz, Hard Bop, 1959, Third Stream, Cool Jazz, Avant-Garde


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