Creative Vision and Creative Arts: Significations and Metaphors of Keys in Alex Idoko’s Symbolist Arts

Artistic symbols in many ways act as complimentary narrative tools that elevate and define the message from the artist, which can help to generate efficacious consciousness and mood aggregation in the beholders. The purpose of this study is to deepen the appreciation of the embedded significances of keys as symbolic objects in selected symbolist art by Alex Idoko which represents variously, mystical attributions and significations as understood within different worldviews. Through the application of interpretive discuss approach in relating relevant concepts of symbolism, the study elucidates on the symbolical, mythological, mystical and metaphorical denotations and attributions of chains, padlock and keys in line with Victor Turner’s concept of operational, exegetical and positional meanings. In the end, we observe that the selected work by Idoko subsume deep and dense creative vision projecting deliberate effort in using art as a means of sharing cultural ideas, mystifying aesthetics, propelling curiosity, and mood/emotion intensity.

Clara Schumann Studies

Since the 1980s, when she re-emerged from the peripheries into a more central position in music studies, Clara Schumann (1819–1896) has exerted an enduring fascination over the scholarly and popular imagination. Revisionist biographies, the uncovering of primary sources (diaries, letters, memorabilia), and filmic and literary depictions of Schumann have all brought into sharper focus the details and reception of her life, while simultaneously drawing attention to how much there is still to learn about her creativity. This book brings together a team of leading scholars to reappraise Clara Schumann in three particular respects: first, by delving deeper into her social and musical contexts; secondly, by offering fresh analytical perspectives on her songs and instrumental music; and thirdly, by reconsidering her legacy as a pianist and teacher. In doing so, the volume not only contributes to a rounded picture of Schumann's creative vision, but also opens up new pathways in the wider study of women in music.

Victimhood, Health Challenges and Violent Restiveness in Blood and Oil: Music, Characterization and Colours as Metaphors

This study examines the aesthetics, efficacy, and propriety of the embedded metaphors in characterization, music, and colour application as creative vision in projecting victimhood atmosphere around traumatized Niger-Deltans due to many years of deprivation in Blood and Oil. Thus, this study explains how Blood and Oil represents a credible narrative, subsuming polemics of environmental degradation, health misery, massive unemployment, subjugation, and violent restiveness in Niger Delta due to poor political leadership, greed, and corruption. On creative vision, we are discussing how the ingenious application of characterization, music, and colour combined effectively in creating an enduring mood for the scenes in the film as channels of accentuating intended messages. To add relevant scholarly rigor, we applied victimhood theory and interpretive discuss approach to create relevant and lucid insights regarding the inclinations and actions of select characters in the film as well as analysis of relevant secondary texts. In the end, we deduce that the apt portrayal of Niger-Delta oil communities’ extensively degraded and polluted environment validates the reality of anguish and victimhood because of the massively diminished fishing and farming prospects. Lastly, the implication of this scenario is increased unemployment, psychological distress, diseases, and violent restiveness which have reduced enormously the wellbeing of Niger Delta inhabitants.

Nickolas Muray, Environmental Portraiture, Vanity Fair

This thesis is a case study of five environmental portraits made in Europe by New York studio photographer Nickolas Muray (1892-1965) for a 1926 commission by Vanity Fair magazine (1913-1936). The thesis, in the form of a sixty-three page illustrated essay, describes the circumstance of his photographic production, and the magazine's subsequent use of his photographs. Muray produced environmental portraits by photographing his assigned subjects in their workplaces, homes and gardens. He retouched, and then contact-printed the negatives; the prints he surrendered to Vanity Fair. The magazine cropped and otherwise manipulated the images in order to effectively place them in page layouts. From negatives, to prints, to offset-printed reprodutions, the photographic materials bear aesthetically significant images of environmental portraiture that testify to Muray's versatility, technical control, and creative vision.

Nickolas Muray, Environmental Portraiture, Vanity Fair

This thesis is a case study of five environmental portraits made in Europe by New York studio photographer Nickolas Muray (1892-1965) for a 1926 commission by Vanity Fair magazine (1913-1936). The thesis, in the form of a sixty-three page illustrated essay, describes the circumstance of his photographic production, and the magazine's subsequent use of his photographs. Muray produced environmental portraits by photographing his assigned subjects in their workplaces, homes and gardens. He retouched, and then contact-printed the negatives; the prints he surrendered to Vanity Fair. The magazine cropped and otherwise manipulated the images in order to effectively place them in page layouts. From negatives, to prints, to offset-printed reprodutions, the photographic materials bear aesthetically significant images of environmental portraiture that testify to Muray's versatility, technical control, and creative vision.

Transmissions: Sonic markers of difference in the sound of Joy Division

Situated within the field of popular musicology, this article sets out to explore the formation of Joy Division’s characteristic sound along three lines of enquiry. Firstly, I investigate the contextual framework through which the tale of Joy Division was shaped focusing specifically on their music’s apparent relation to Manchester. Secondly, building on this contextual framework, I examine various aspects of the band’s production aesthetics. Producer Martin Hannett is often credited with the formation of their sound, and I consider the impact of his use of technology in the studio in relation to the band’s relatively roughshod live performances. Thirdly, I explore how characteristic sonic markers of production and performance can also be identified as performative strategies in Joy Division’s music. Although Hannett played a significant role in shaping the band’s sound, their individual performances as formally untrained instrumentalists who were apparently governed solely by a shared creative vision undoubtedly affects that sound as well. The overall aim of this article, then, is to display the complexity of this particular tale and especially the ways in which sonic markers of difference have played a major role in the formation of one of pop music history’s sturdiest tales.

Running Things

Ethnomusicologists equip themselves to study and understand complex systems of human thought and action, and to build relationships with individuals. Navigating personality and process, ethnomusicologists can listen deeply and act with diplomacy in balancing ambitious and broad creative vision with the smallest of logistical details while fostering cross-disciplinary collaboration and community engagement. This essay touches on the nature of public-facing executive leadership based in a public university and spanning arts and humanities, pointing out resonances with ethnomusicological training and practice such as “language” learning and meaningful communication. Corresponding examples of shortcomings in ethnomusicological training are given, such as needed emphases on conflict management, technological competence, and brevity.

Uglich as a place of memory in Olga Bergholz`s creative vision

The paper is the first to analyze Uglich as a place of memory in a creative thought of Olga Bergholz and reveal individual and collective memorization of the old Russian city. The topos of Uglich, which became a spiritual cornerstone for Leningrad`s poetess, gained some new meanings in the perspective of her statements. In the initial period of her creativity, the city developed as an entirely social space, arena for the struggle of old and new world order. A visit to Uglich in 1953 initiated the theme of preserving the monuments and reviving the crafts in the poetʼs mind. In her mature years, Bergholz hold “the city of childhood” as a blessed though later lost place of absolute happiness and harmony, with an allusion to the legendary Kitezh-grad and Kalyazin bell tower. Based on a cultural collective memory, Uglich was actualized and placed among the most important national topos of Russia (historical spot of the death of Tsarevich Dmitry of Uglich) with a metaphorical image of the root-eared bell — a fighter for justice. Bergholzʼs texts reflect the principles of museum commemoration of the Uglich tragedy that are typical for each historical period. The analysis of the poetessʼs working notes for the second (unwritten) part of the novel “The Day Stars,” according to which she was tending to reflect on the innocent victims of olden days (Tsarevich Dmitry, the exiled Uglich townspeople) and contemporaneity (Stalin's repressions), helped to read anew the screenplay “The Day Stars” written in collaboration with I. Talankin. Creative intentions, unrealized in prose, found their realization in a cinematic project that provided effect of presence of the heroine in the Old Russian city, thanks to which the calamities of exiled Uglich townspeople were associated with the lawlessness against Bergholz herself. The role of poet-the-bell was emphasized by constructed Uglich-Leningrad space, in which the heroine performed a symbolic act, accepting a root-eared bell from a dying bell-ringer. The poetess regarded Uglich as a place of memory in the context of lost spiritual guidelines of the first communards as well (“pervorossiane,” who organized the first Society of communal grain-growers in Altai). Thus, according to her creative vision, the city revealed itself as a national loss in terms of the projection “Uglich — Kitezh — Kalyazin bell tower — Pervorossiysk.”

GOD AND DEVIL IN LANGUAGE AND SPEECH (THE CASE OF MIKHAIL BULGAKOV’S THE MASTER AND MARGARITA AND ITS ENGLISH TRANSLATIONS)

The article studies the specific semantics and pragmatics of the Russian words bog (god) and chert (devil) in Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel The Master and Margarita against the background of their popular use reflected in dictionaries of the Russian literary language; the etymology of the words as well as their various connotations and associations are also considered. Having put the translation strategies of foreignization and domestication to the test, the research reveals that none of them is adequate to convey Bulgakov’s creative vision to English-speaking audiences