Childhood as a musical theme – affectivity and instrumental expressiveness in the works of Schumann, Debussy and Enescu

Childhood is a theme that music does not avoid, and through works such as Kinderszenen by Robert Schumann, Children’s Corner by Claude Debussy or Impressions d’enfance (Childhood Impressions) by George Enescu, is illustrated by various compositional means, determined by epochs or trends with which the creators identify, but also by their personal experiences and their expressive intentions. The affectivity of childhood is the key to decipher the musical message, pursuing the connection between the universe and the way in which the composers chose to lead the sound discourse through instruments, exploring so diversily the possibilities presented by them. The image, the symbol or the instrumental timbre, understood as processes of transmitting the expression, are the elements that the study seeks to define in correlation with the programmatism and the musical specificity of each previously mentioned work. This analytical incursion belongs to the contemporary performer, who, in order to understand and render this theme, uses not only the knowledge in the field, but also the extra-musical insight, belonging to literature or psychology.

O sucesso do inacabado: Clarice Lispector e sua “Children’s Corner” na revista Senhor

In 1959, when the sophisticated magazine Senhor was launched in Rio de Janeiro, the renowned writer Clarice Lispector was invited to join this new publishing venture targeted at educated upper-class men. As a separated woman in need of an income to support herself and her two children, Lispector accepted the offer, regularly contributing with chronicles/stories, and starting at the end of 1961 a column that she named “Children's Corner” in the section “Sr. & Cía.” These contributions are fragmentary, exploratory, somewhat hinting at failure. This article reads Lispestor’s texts for Senhor as interventions that enact a rupture in a narrative of growth, progress, and development geared towards a heteroreproductive future. As it unsettles this ideology, Lispector’s “Children’s Corner” also stages new modes of relationality that defy the ideas of human exceptionalism and human mastery over matter and nature.

‘Uncle Sam’s Letterbag’: Children’s involvement in newspaper propaganda in the First World War

This paper draws on letters published weekly in ‘Uncle Sam’s Corner’, in Rockhampton’s Morning Bulletin and Central Queensland Herald between 1915 and 1918 to explore the role of journalists in disseminating popular narratives during the First World War. Through the children’s own words their understanding of unfolding events is exposed as is the role of journalist ‘Uncle Sam’ in shaping children’s wartime responses. Using his adjoining children’s corner and the responses given to the children’s letters, Uncle Sam inculcates the values of duty, service and sacrifice; the qualities demanded of the Empire’s civilians in wartime to aid military success. An examination of a specific children’s column reveals how media can overtly manipulate public perceptions to shape dominant societal narratives and highlights how children unwittingly participate in wartime propaganda.

The human and the physical in Debussy’s depictions of snow

This article explores Debussy’s musical engagement of the topic of snow in two representative works for piano, “Des pas sur la neige” from Préludes, Book I and “The Snow is Dancing” from Children’s Corner. In the analysis of “Des pas,” a narrative is put forth based on the interpretation of the work’s opening short-long rhythmic figure as a representation of contact with a frozen, encrusted surface followed by an immediate collapse of that frozen surface and contact with the ground underneath. As the work’s protagonist engages in walking meditation to confront a troubling memory, a state of contemplation is achieved whereby the musical portrayal of the footsteps are momentarily suppressed in strategic portions of the work designed to portray recollection, as Steven Rings (2008) has noted. In my analysis, I argue that the closing measures’ portrayal of footsteps is shifted into binary alterations of two notes, D and G, in steady quarter notes, so as to illustrate the protagonist’s emergence from an off beaten path to a more trodden one. In “The Snow is Dancing,” Debussy shifts focus from that of human emotion to the actual physical properties of snow. Interestingly, the snow is anthropomorphized nonetheless into dancers. I trace shifts in rhythm, line and register, and engage gestures of motion to illustrate Debussy’s compositional approach to both gravitationally suspending and animating wind-driven snowflakes.

Crossing the Rubicon: Debussy and the Eternal Present of the Past

This paper proposes that Mikhail Bakhtin's heteroglossia—the process of coming to know one's own language in the language of others—is evident in two of Debussy's compositions from Children's Corner, most directly in "Golliwogg's Cake-Walk" and more subtly in "Serenade for the Doll." In particular, "Serenade" collapses a number of historical horizons—some of these Wagnerian—as Debussy finds his own compositional path. Debussy's approach reflects the obsession La belle Époque had with the past, and moreover with its need to keep the past alive while fashioning a future through the blending of multiple voices.

Debussy and Recollection: trois aperçu

I take the position that Debussy’s treatment of the past is strategically significant in each of the three works considered in the article. Textual and musical concerns mesh in the song “De rêve,” from Proses lyriques, when a state of recall colors the condition of the present. In Pour le piano overt references to Baroque- and Classical-era compositional procedures mask temporal play of an entirely different kind. In “Golliwogg’s Cakewalk,” from Children’s Corner, the allusion to a comedic effect deflects attention from the scathing critique that represents the central message of the work.