Pontormo and the Art of Devotion in Renaissance Italy

Both lauded and criticized for his pictorial eclecticism, the Florentine artist Jacopo Carrucci, known as Pontormo, created some of the most visually striking religious images of the Renaissance. These paintings, which challenged prevailing illusionistic conventions, mark a unique contribution into the complex relationship between artistic innovation and Christian traditions in the first half of the sixteenth century. Pontormo's sacred works are generally interpreted as objects that reflect either pure aesthetic experimentation, or personal and cultural anxiety. Jessica Maratsos, however, argues that Pontormo employed stylistic change deliberately for novel devotional purposes. As a painter, he was interested in the various modes of expression and communication - direct address, tactile evocation, affective incitement - as deployed in a wide spectrum of devotional culture, from sacri monti, to Michelangelo's marble sculptures, to evangelical lectures delivered at the Accademia Fiorentina. Maratsos shows how Pontormo translated these modes in ways that prompt a critical rethinking of Renaissance devotional art.

Commentary on Harrison: "Social Mechanisms of Stylistic Change"

This is a review of Harrison's (2021) paper "Social Mechanisms of Stylistic Change: A Case Study from Early 20th-Century France." In this study, Harrison found that the Apaches, a group of composers known for pushing stylistic boundaries in 20th-century France, employed slightly more instances of notated meter change in their music than a control group of their peers, but that the use of notated meter change also depended on other factors such as composers' generational membership. This commentary primarily explores Harrison's methodologies: while the stringent definitions Harrison defines for each variable in her studies allow for specificity in the statistical analyses, they leave out a large portion of perceptually relevant data that would lend greater musicological generalizability to the results presented.

Social Mechanisms of Musical Stylistic Change: A Case Study from Early 20th-Century France

This study examined notated meter changes in scores by French composers to probe the role of sociological mechanisms in musical stylistic change. The stylistic feature of notated meter changes, which indexed metrical complexity, was conducive to empirical observation and functioned as a salient innovation in France around 1900. The principal sociological variable was membership in the Apaches artistic club, known for its avant-garde identity. A hypothesis that the Apaches would use significantly more meter changes than their peers was supported. Additional explanatory variables were derived from previous historical research on French composers and from theories about stylistic change. A complex relationship between the stylistic feature and social mechanisms emerged, involving multiple, overlapping social structures. The Labovian sociolinguistic approach was especially resonant in this data, as a composer's proximity to certain individuals, groups, and institutions in the social space related to their degree of enthusiasm for metric innovation. In addition, sociolinguistic theories about stylistic variation in human languages were consistent with patterns in this data set. Finally, a descriptive title was also a significant explanatory variable, which implicates the Labovian notion of register and the importance that Meyer gave to aesthetic goals in musical stylistic change.

Vernacularisation of media: stylistic change in Basque youth media

Vernaculars are increasingly used in media. They are considered to be stylistic resources to attract audiences and to construct media identities. That increase seems to be particularly significant in the case of youth media, which is also the case of Gaztea, a youth webradio station within the Basque public EITB group that we analyse in this work. Gaztea was created in the 90’s and, at that time, its whole production was in Standard Basque. In fact, promoting the newly created Standard Basque was considered to be Gaztea’s principal public service remit. Nowadays, however, the hegemony of that standard in Gaztea has been challenged by a more heteroglossic model in which vernacular speech is strategically used to empathize with the young Basque audience and to construct media identities. At the same time, though, the dominance of Standard Basque persists in Gaztea’s general stylistic design and practice: Vernaculars are excluded from writing, as well as from informative genres and serious and leading voices. Those are some of the conclusions of the research we have carried out on the distribution of vernaculars and Standard Basque across modes, genres and voices in Gaztea, and also from the information we have drawn from interviews with the managers of the media in question. Results from both data sources are important to understand the current ideological views Gaztea shares with young Basque people, as well as how Gaztea positions itself as a stylizer in the language ideological world of Basque youth.

Revolutionary songs in a gentrifying city: stylistic change and the economics of salvage in southern Mexico

This article explores the case of a musician performing pro-Zapatista revolutionary songs in a restaurant in a city in southern Mexico which has undergone rapid gentrification since the turn of the century. It highlights the particular set of constraints on, and possibilities for, musical creativity that emerged in an urban setting in which space was increasingly ordered around the accumulation of rents. Exploring relationships between commercial strategy and musical detail, it examines tensions arising around the performance of a revolutionary body of song in such a setting. To conclude, and drawing on the recent work of Anna Tsing, it introduces the notion of musical ‘salvage’ to make sense of the relationship between protest and commerce. Recognizing the incompleteness of revolutionary songs’ translation into the rapidly gentrifying context of San Cristóbal, it is argued here, may help to underline performer agency and creativity.

Pärt, Arvo (1934–)

Arvo Pärt is an Estonian composer whose music has had phenomenal success worldwide since his radical stylistic change from an overtly modernistic aesthetic to a radically simplified, post-tonal idiom. While still a student under Heino Eller, he caused a sensation in Moscow and Leningrad with the première of Nekrolog (1960), the first dodecaphonic work to be written in Estonia. In 1962, however, Pärt received the first prize in the Competition for Young Composers held in Moscow for Meie aed (Our Garden, 1959), a tonal work, and for the oratorio Maailmaa samm (1961). Between 1958 and 1967, he worked as an engineer at Estonian Radio, afterwards working in Tallinn as a freelance composer.