R. Murray Schafer (1933–2021) and the World Soundscape Project

This in memoriam tribute for Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer focuses on his seminal work in establishing soundscape studies and the World Soundscape Project. It discusses his intellectual legacy in terms of emphasising a perceptually based approach and the importance of soundscape design, along with critical responses to his ideas.

Pious Puppets and the Limits of Symbolism

Following the immensely successful premiere of Maurice Bouchor and Paul Vidal’s Noël, ou le Mystère de la Nativité at Paris’s Petit-Théâtre de la Marionnette in 1890, numerous critics observed an increasing fondness for religiously themed theatrical productions on the city’s popular stages. Though these works have received scant musicological attention, scholars often credit the success of these works to the rise of Symbolism during the 1880s, citing the Symbolists’ fondness for the realm of the metaphysical as a step toward a universally spiritual world that could be revealed only through non-representational signs. Contemporaneous reception of these works, however, suggests that audiences understood them not as exemplars of a burgeoning aesthetic movement, replete with idealistic suggestion, but rather as a nostalgic return to the Catholicism of their youth, regardless of—and likely despite—their skepticism of the Church as an institution. This chapter provides new readings of Maurice Bouchor and Casimir Baille’s Tobie and Bouchor and Paul Vidal’s Noël, ou le Mystère de la Nativité that reveals how Symbolism, as an interpretive framework, falls short of the musical and political complexities within these works. Through analyses of poetic texts, musical scores, and critical responses, this chapter examines the roles that such puppet productions played in the enfolding of Catholicism into the “secular” Republican mindset.

Lay Preaching and Living Saints

Chapter 3 explores the hesitant and outright critical responses to new forms of sainthood that developed within and beyond England at the close of the twelfth century and into the thirteenth. This chapter situates orthodox hostility toward these “new saints” in relation both to the gift of prophecy, to which many charismatics aspired, and to debates about preaching. At this chapter’s centre is an Anglo-Latin rule for anchorites, the Regula reclusorum (c.1280), which is examined alongside several twelfth- and thirteenth-century figurations of preachers and prophets. Here a discourse directed against allegedly “false” prophets and preachers owes much to the collaboration between the charismatic voices that emerged through lay-anchoritic communities and the forms of sanctity that were quickly gaining ascendancy in the thirteenth century. Contemporary anchorites often summoned the demonic nightmare of orthodox culture by replicating and thereby obviating clerical work, as well as by encouraging lay preaching.

Feminist Theory

This chapter examines Virginia Woolf’s foundational role in the development of feminist theory, placing her theoretical positions on women’s lives and life-writing, privacy, the body, and self-expression in dialogue with a diverse and actively changing continuum of feminist thought. Focusing on the return of rage to the forefront of feminist discourse and social media’s effect upon feminist politics, the chapter chronicles the changing critical responses to Woolf’s feminisms, in relation to her positions on feminist identities and feminist community. The chapter also investigates the ways in which women of colour feminists disclosed Woolf’s racialized self and racist thinking to assess the place of Woolf’s feminism in contemporary political thought. From issues seeking to reconcile and value difference and diversity with the uses of ambivalence and calls for unity and integration, the chapter places the concepts and vocabulary of feminist theory within the context of Virginia Woolf’s work and example.

Critical Analysis of Nonlinear Base-Isolated Building Considering Soil–Structure Interaction under Impulsive and Long-Duration Ground Motions

Critical responses are investigated for nonlinear base-isolated buildings considering soil–structure interaction under near-fault ground motions and long-duration ground motions. A double impulse and a multi impulse are employed to simulate the nonlinear critical responses of the models under such ground motions. The base-isolation story is assumed to consist of lead rubber bearings and to have a bilinear force–deformation relation. Two types of critical timings for a MDOF building model supported by a swaying-rocking spring-dashpot system are derived: (1) the timing that maximizes the total input energy to the whole system and (2) the timing that maximizes the instantaneous input energy to the base-isolated building excluding the swaying-rocking system. These two types of critical timings are compared through numerical examples. Finally, time-history response analyses were conducted under the critical double impulse, the corresponding one-cycle sine wave, and the critical multi impulse. The effect of the soil–structure interaction on the maximum responses of the nonlinear base-isolated building is clarified.