A Ghost in the Minimalist Machine?: Henryk Górecki and the ‘Symphony of Sorrowful Songs’

Reviewed by: Performing Patriotism: National Identity in the Colonial and Revolutionary American Theater Peter P. Reed (bio) Performing Patriotism: National Identity in the Colonial and Revolutionary American Theater. Jason Shaffer. Philadelphia: The University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007 264 pp. Jason Shaffer’s Performing Patriotism, a study of American theatre’s Atlantic genealogies, returns to the archives to recover the complexities of early American stage and performance practices. By Shaffer’s account, early American theatre—focused on the revivals and influences of traditional British offerings such as Joseph Addison’s Cato, Thomas Otway’s Venice Preserved, and George Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer— looks distinctly and deliberately un-American. Shaffer, however, sees the Anglo-Atlantic tones of early American performance not as evidence of national underdevelopment but as an opportunity to examine the collaborative, constructed, and contingent aspects of American identities. Even before William Dunlap’s 1830 history of American theatre, observers had alternately bemoaned and celebrated the ever delayed-but-inevitable emergence [End Page 734] of American theatre as a national(istic) cultural institution. Less concerned with the origins of an emergent American theatre, Shaffer demonstrates that even at a moment of national political origins, the practices of a national theatrical imaginary happily recycled, revised, and reinvented the materials bequeathed by English theatre. Shaffer formulates national identity as a constantly shifting process of restaging and revising the performative relics of the circum-Atlantic world. Roots matter, but culture’s routes—a concept early American theatre history seems uniquely able to comment upon—emerge as the study’s dominant theme. American theatre, and even Americanness itself, becomes a matter of genre, of the constant repetition and revision of circulating performances. This process continues today, Shaffer contends, and early American theatre remains important not as a static originary point for American culture, but because it transmits forward (even to Mel Gibson’s 2000 blockbuster film The Patriot) the perdurable processes of mythmaking and identity-rehearsal occurring on the northwestern edges of the Anglophone circum-Atlantic world. Shaffer selects his sampling of early American dramas not by their supposed “American” qualities but by their popularity and frequency, avoiding the teleological and tautological problems of earlier American theatre histories. Formal rather than chronological organization foregrounds theatre’s overlapping survivals and substitutions rather than linear historical progressions. Shaffer’s discussion of Addison’s Cato, for example, moves deftly from script to staging to offstage reprisals of the roles, gleaning a powerful sense of “collective improvisation” from multiple and multivalent deployments of the play. Subsequent chapters treat other under-examined forms of performance, including colonial college theatre, revolutionary propaganda plays, and post-Revolutionary comedy. The sequence has its logic, as dramas shifted from cagey analogy to outright propaganda. Although the book rarely relies on easy linear narratives of historical developments, it does leave an impression of American theatre as increasingly engaging its immediate cultural contexts. Performing Patriotism serves at least three masters, contributing to related conversations in Atlantic cultural history, early American literary studies, and theatre and performance history. Shaffer’s study represents the still-debated Atlantic and cultural turns in American history, examining the cultural representations of political expression and national identity. Despite [End Page 735] engaging some polarizing issues in early American history (the possible “Anglicization” of American culture and the nature of early American governance), Shaffer understands that the broad array of evidence indicates multiple, simultaneous, and competing deployments of English performances. To its credit, the study avoids the oversimplification of claiming one simple political or cultural function of theatre. Shaffer’s study, especially its treatment of the relationships among theatrical conventions and print culture, also engages literary scholarship in early American print performance culture such as Jay Fliegelman’s Declaring Independence, Sandra M. Gustafson’s Eloquence Is Power, Christopher Looby’s Voicing America, and Michael Warner’s Letters of the Republic. Shaffer’s study can provide early American literary scholars an expanded picture of the early American relationships between texts, manuscripts, material culture, and ephemeral performances. Performing Patriotism speaks most directly to recent work in performance studies and American theatre history, which shares many of these concerns. Developing the performance-studies notion that the ritualized, scripted, and re-enacted qualities of theatre...

Reviewed by: Exploring Bach’s B-Minor Mass ed. by Yo Tomita, Robin A. Leaver, and Jan Smaczny Mark A. Peters Exploring Bach’s B-Minor Mass. Edited by Yo Tomita, Robin A. Leaver, and Jan Smaczny. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. [xxix, 314 p. ISBN 9781107007901 (hardcover), $99; ISBN 9781107453555 (e-book), $79.] Music examples, illustrations, tables, appendices, bibliographic references, indexes. In reflecting on the state of research on Johann Sebastian Bach’s B-Minor Mass in 1985, the tercentenary year of Bach’s birth, Hans-Joachim Schulze dubbed the work the “perpetual touchstone for Bach research” (in Bach, Handel, Scarlatti: Tercentenary Essays, ed. Peter Williams [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985], 311–20). That Schulze’s characterization of the B-Minor Mass is no less true now than it was in 1985 is demonstrated by an impressive new collection of essays published as Exploring Bach’s B-Minor Mass and edited by Yo Tomita, Robin A. Leaver, and Jan Smaczny. The fourteen essays, by Bach scholars across Europe and the United States, engage the B-Minor Mass from the perspectives of historical and cultural contexts, analysis, source study, and reception, providing new insights into one of the best-known and best-loved of Bach’s works. As explained in the preface, the volume grew out of the symposium “Understanding Bach’s B-minor Mass” held at Queens University Belfast in November 2007. The essays in Exploring Bach’s B-Minor Mass were selected from those presented at the symposium and were revised for publication in 2013. The essays engage past research on the B-Minor Mass while contributing significantly to the body of scholarship on the work. In addition, the volume is carefully edited both for content and readability, and is a valuable contribution for scholars and also for performers or audience members looking for insights into the Mass. Any volume that engages with Bach’s B-Minor Mass must do so within the vast body of research on the work. In addition to a wealth of articles and essays, recent monographs dedicated to the B-Minor Mass include John Butt, Bach: Mass in B Minor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); George B. Stauffer, Bach, The Mass in B Minor: The Great Catholic Mass (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003); and Christoph Wolff, Johann Sebastian Bach: Messe in h-Moll (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2009). Exploring Bach’s B-Minor Mass not only engages such scholarship throughout its chapters, but also particularly frames our understanding of the Mass within its history of performance, scholarship, and reception in its two opening essays. Christoph Wolff’s “Past, present and future perspectives on Bach’s B-minor Mass” (chapter 1) provides a lucid and accessible introduction to the Mass, its history, and the research questions surrounding it, while Robin A. Leaver’s “Bach’s Mass: ‘Catholic’ or ‘Lutheran’?” (chapter 2) provides an excellent introduction to the Mass from the perspective of historical theology. Chapters 3 and 4 likewise complement each other, providing readers with a context for understanding Bach’s 1733 Missa (the Kyrie and Gloria of what would become the B-Minor Mass) within the wider framework of Mass settings in eighteenth-century Germany and particularly at the Dresden court. Janice B. Stockigt’s “Bach’s Missa BWV 232I in the context of Catholic Mass settings in Dresden, 1729–1733” (chapter 3) focuses on musical style, framing Bach’s compositional choices in relation to other Missa settings extant at the Dresden court. Szymon Paczkowski’s “The role and significance of the polonaise in the ‘Quoniam’ of the B-minor Mass” (chapter 4) complements Stockigt’s essay well by [End Page 173] exploring the cultural, political, and musical context for the Missa in Dresden. In fact, the chapter’s title is misleading and does not do it justice, for while Paczkowski does address the polonaise in the “Quoniam,” his goals for the chapter are much broader. As he states in his introduction, “this essay intends to show that the politics and culture of eighteenth-century Dresden provide a useful context for opening up to fresh enquiry some of Bach’s creative intentions in the B-minor Mass” (p. 54), and Paczkowski...

This article considers the light the scripts of the Prague Sacramentary throw on its place of production and early cultural and historical context. While various suggestions have been made about both its production and its early history, Bavaria and north Italy have been the generally agreed principal visible influences in its production, and the book's early history is associated with Carolingian Bavaria. The limitations of palaeographical evidence, in terms of using it to try and resolve issues of origin or place of production, are addressed first. The palaeography of the manuscript can tell us only the probable place where the scribes were trained and this cannot necessarily be equated with the origin of the book. These scribes were clearly open to Insular, Frankish and Italian influences, whether directly through the training and teaching process or indirectly through exemplars. The article concludes that the scribes of this codex had been trained to write in south‐east Bavaria.

In A Troubled Marriage, Sean F. McEnroe highlights a consequential yet often overlooked undercurrent of early modern American history: the profoundly transcultural lives of some Indigenous leaders, mestizos, and Europeans who, by chance or design, found it necessary to straddle colonial cultural divisions, form alliances, and learn from one another. This included Native intermediaries who pursued the interests of their home communities within the diplomatic and commercial structures of European empires, Indigenous Christians who transformed the aesthetics and theological emphases of the colonizers' religion, and individual Europeans who found themselves beyond the reach of colonial hegemony and compelled to engage Indigenous peoples on equal, or even disadvantageous, terms. In a vivid and well-curated series of minibiographies, McEnroe highlights and juxtaposes dozens of individuals whose lives exemplified such cross-cultural “marriages.” In doing so, he illuminates a dimension of the fraught, centuries-long Columbian encounter that contemporary disciplinary tools sometimes struggle to recognize and comprehend, as it was defined less by overt violence and coercion than by mundane dealmaking and pragmatic adaptation.The Native elites, educated mestizos, and marginal Europeans highlighted in A Troubled Marriage are unrepresentative of the colonial population writ large. Nonetheless, their stories help explain the long-term evolution of American regional and national cultures as novel developments rather than mere satellites of Europeanism. They demonstrate that transculturation, syncretism, mutual cultural appropriation, negotiation, and reciprocity were, alongside violence and hegemony, fundamental and perennial factors within American cultural development. Many of the intercultural individuals addressed in the book won renown in their own time, including Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, Antonio Valeriano, Pocahontas / Rebecca Rolfe, Catherine Tekakwitha, Tupac Amaru II, and Louis Riel, to name only a few. McEnroe offers synthetic treatments of these well-documented lives supplemented with a handful of complementary examples drawn from archival research. As transculturation often lies in the small details, the author foregrounds the lived complexities and contradictions of those who existed along the seams of colonialism. This tactic is very effective when biographical data are plentiful, but it also highlights the unfortunate lack of such detail in the cases drawn from archives, which were certainly no less rich.A Troubled Marriage builds on recent scholarship emphasizing Native agency. Its most ambitious and definitive historiographical aim, however, is to achieve a fully continental perspective on early modern American history. In linking and analogizing the experiences of Native leaders from North, Central, and South America, McEnroe intentionally disregards artificial and misleading distinctions imposed retroactively by linguistic and national borders—including the hoary specter of US exceptionalism—that have long obscured the broader unity of American history from Canada to Chile. And he largely succeeds, drawing information in multiple languages from almost two dozen archives on both sides of the Atlantic as well as from digital and published sources from the English, French, and Spanish empires. The Iroquois, Aymara, Nahua, Cherokee, and Guaraní all share in a large-scale story, even if archives and historical subfields often obscure it.Interestingly, in overcoming such obstacles, the book runs against yet another challenge: the very diversity of Native America itself. As a story of European empires, a hemispheric view is perhaps easier to achieve; but a holistic account centered on Native perspectives is inherently more difficult by an order of magnitude. The author handles this challenge well, however, because while the book's scope is sweeping, its interpretive goals remain quite modest. Rather than precisely theorize or define the shared experiences of Native elites across the continent—which would be methodologically and empirically unwarranted—McEnroe simply details illustrative cases, clarifies their defining idiosyncrasies, and provides relevant regional and cultural context. The book's overall interpretation of Indigenous elites, then, lies primarily in the conceptual organization of the volume itself—not by region or period but by the particular mode of transcultural “marriage” that each individual embodied or participated in: religious, artistic, intellectual, political, or literal (i.e., intermarriage).Lively and highly readable, the book will refine and elevate undergraduate perspectives of early modern America and mestizaje beyond simplistic or teleological story lines inherited from nationalistic or essentializing histories. Yet its continental perspective is an important historiographical intervention as well, one that will benefit advanced scholars examining analogous experiences within Portuguese America and the Caribbean as well as African-descended populations throughout the hemisphere. McEnroe's vivid and even loving prose reveals a deep appreciation for America's subtle transcultural heritages and empathy toward the individuals who embodied them. The book's emphasis on marginal case studies is not celebratory and largely complements today's reigning narratives of colonialism but also reminds us that individual lives are inclined to transcend and resist the caricatures and classifications assigned to them, whether by haughty contemporaries or later scholars brandishing theories. A Troubled Marriage effectively encourages scholars to account for and integrate such underlying complexity in their own work.

“This Long Looked For Event”:Retrieving Early Contact History from Penobscot Oral Traditions Annette Kolodny (bio) WHEN JOSEPH NICOLAR TOOK UP THE TASK of telling the story of his people from the first moments of the creation of the world by the Great Spirit through the several arrivals and eventual permanent settlement of the white man in “the red man’s world,” he made clear at the outset that his was no act of colonial mimicry (2007, 95). First published in 1893, The Life and Traditions of the Red Man neither replicated nor followed the history Nicolar had been taught in the white man’s schools (95).1 As he emphatically declared in the first sentence of his preface, “there have been no historical works of the white man, nor any other written history from any source quoted” (95). In Nicolar’s experience, even after more than two centuries of contact and colonialism, the world of the red man remained for the white man “as hidden things” (95). Therefore, “all prophecies, theories and ideas of the educated and intelligent of all races have been laid aside,” Nicolar explained. The authority for his work rested in “the traditions as I have gathered them from my people” after “forty years of search and study” (95, 96). As a descendant of “that once numerous and most powerful race, … my life having been spent in the researches of my people’s past life,” Nicolar saw himself as ensuring that the story of the red man would not “pass away unwritten” (95). But how shall we understand his rendering of his “people’s past life”? Is there any sense in which that “past life,” so obviously anchored in Penobscot oral storytelling practices, can also be read as history? Or, to put it another way, does Nicolar’s retelling of Penobscot traditions offer us any new understanding of the long and complex realities of the Penobscot past? And, more specifically, can these Penobscot oral traditions contribute to a history of early Native and European contacts that is at once more accurate and also more ethical than the mythology of a Columbian “first discovery” still so prevalent in too many of our schools and schoolbooks? In a thoughtful and probing essay on “merging European and Native views of early contact,” published in 2001, Canadian anthropologist Toby Morantz posed similar questions: “Can there be a single history that reflects both perspectives? The one draws on a rich, ancient oral tradition, and the other on [End Page 90] an equally rich, relatively ancient recorded one, but each is embedded in radically different cultural contexts” (49). After examining both Innu/Cree and Euro-Canadian materials, Morantz finally concluded “that it is impossible” (64). This essay challenges that conclusion. By focusing on both Native and European narratives about early encounters along the coast of Maine, I hope to gesture toward a new kind of history that honors what I call the experiential knowledge embedded in Indigenous traditions. This leads inevitably to the decoupling of the concepts of “contact” and “discovery” as one and the same thing. And this approach also effectively deconstructs the by-now oversimplified construction of “contact” as always and everywhere a first contact, that is, an event singular and unprecedented. Finally, I will point to the experiential knowledge embedded in Indigenous oral historiography as additional evidence that the fifteenth-century Doctrine of Discovery, as applied in the Americas, was often no more than a fiction dressed in legal costume. Lands Where No “Christian Had Been Before” In 1605, at the behest of a group of Catholic investors in England, Captain George Waymouth explored the islands and coastal waterways of Maine in search of a suitable location to plant a new colony. On board Waymouth’s ship was James Rosier, a Catholic priest who recorded a dated running narrative of their journey which was published that same year in London under the title A True Relation. According to Rosier, as they explored the Penobscot Bay area, Waymouth’s company “diligently observed, that in no place, about either the Islands, or up in the Maine, or alongst the river, we could not discerne any token or signe, that ever any...

This book highlights the unique insights that Jean Sibelius’s Violin Concerto in D Minor (op. 47) offers into the composer’s musical imagination, violin virtuosity, and connections between violin-playing traditions. It discusses the concerto’s cultural contexts, performers who are connected with its early history, and recordings of the work. Beginning with Sibelius’s early training as a violinist and his aspirations to be a virtuoso player, the book traces the composition of the concerto at a dramatic political moment in Finnish history. This concerto was composed when Finland, as an autonomous Grand Duchy within the Russian Empire, was going through a period of intense struggle for self-determination and protest against Russian imperial policies. Taking the concerto’s historical context into consideration leads to a new paradigm of the twentieth-century virtuoso as a political figure, which replaces nineteenth-century representations of the virtuoso as a magical figure. The book explores this paradigm by analyzing twentieth-century violin virtuosity in terms of labor, recording technology, and gender politics, especially the new possibilities for women aiming to develop musical careers. Ultimately, the book moves away from the compositional context of the concerto and a reading of the virtuoso as a political figure to reveal how Sibelius’s musical imagination prompts thinking about the long ecological histories of musical transmission and virtuosity.

Pesantren and the kitab kuning are two inseparable sides of Islamic education in Indonesia. Since its early history, pesantren could not be separated from the literature of the book of thoughts of the salaf scholars which began around the 9th century. It could be said that without the existence and teaching of the yellow book, an educational institution would not legally be called a pesantren. Those are the facts that surfaced in the field. Contextual learning is a holistic educational process and aims to motivate students to understand the meaning of the subject matter they are learning by linking the material to the context of their daily life (personal, social, and cultural context) so that students have knowledge or skills that can be flexibly applied from one problem to another. The most basic idea of this model is that students need to get used to solving problems, find something useful for themselves, and wrestle with the ideas they get from the learning material.

This chapter attempts to bring that signature into sharper focus by offering responses to the following sorts of questions. The first part of this chapter attempts to paint a picture of Lecoq’s life in France and Italy from the end of the Second World War, tracing his development as actor, director, movement choreographer and theatre teacher. Following this early history, the authors examine the foundations of the Paris school and consider its organisation and structure. The rest of this chapter considers the broader historical and cultural context into which Lecoq’s life and work may helpfully be placed and understood. Conventional wisdom suggests that, historically, Lecoq’s legacy from Jacques Copeau was the definitive influence that most shaped and framed his work. In this chapter, they attempt to map out the defining features of Jacques Lecoq's life and work in theatre, and to place it historically and culturally within a larger context.

Introduces the social, political, cultural and religious position of Muslims living in contemporary Europe This introduction to the story of Muslims in Western Europe describes their early history and outlines the causes and courses of modern Muslim immigration. It explains how Muslim communities have developed in individual countries, their origins, present-day ethnic composition, distribution and organisational patterns, and the political, legal and cultural contexts in which they exist are explored. There is also a comparative consideration of issues common to Muslims in all Western European countries including the role of the family, and the questions of worship, education and religious thought. New to this edition: All six country-related chapters (France, Germany, the UK, the Netherlands and Belgium, Scandinavia, Southern Europe ) are substantially updated The chapter on family, law and culture is revised to include the work from recent studies The chapter on Muslim organisations now covers groups and movements that have developed in the last decade The chapter on European Muslims in a new Europe now covers the cartoon crisis, Eurabia-Islamophobia and new radical nationalism All statistics are updated

Anthropological linguistics is the subfield of linguistics (and anthropology) concerned with the place of language in its wider social and cultural context, its role in forging and sustaining cultural practices and social structures. While Duranti (2001) denies that a true field of anthropological linguistics exists, preferring the term linguistic anthropology to cover this subfield, I regard the two terms as interchangeable. With some cogency, Duranti (2001) argues that due to current concerns of mainstream linguistics with the explicit analysis of the formal structures of language in contrast to anthropology's broader approach of looking at how humans make meaning through semiotic systems in cultural practices, this subfield is properly included within anthropology rather than linguistics. However, I beg to differ, believing that the current historical divisions of academic turf are just that—historical and contingent—and subject to change, and I would be loath to institutionalize such divisions by insisting on rigidly labeled compartments. The current disciplinary concerns of linguistics do not reflect its earlier history in which it was firmly enjoined to anthropology (Boas, 1940; Sapir, 1949; Haas, 1977, 1978). It is my firm hope that, over time, this more inclusive view will reassert itself, and hence my preference is to use both terms to cover this subfield, although, as titled, I will stick with the label anthropological linguistics in this article.

Notes on Contributors

In his work Nomadic Text: A Theory of Biblical Reception History, Brennan Breed argues that texts are nomads which – existing without original form and without original context – have no homeland to claim as their own. Their entire history has been marked by unpredictable movement and variation. He therefore proposes that the study of reception history should primarily be an exploration of the potentiality of textual meanings. The suggestion that meaning progresses without relationship to hermeneutical antecedents, however, runs contrary to Gadamer’s assertion that the contemporary effect (Wirkung) of a text always exists in unity with its historical effects. Following Gadamer, the reception historian may still explore hermeneutical potentiality – but does so with a sense of historical consciousness. In this light, the nature of a biblical text may be more suitably characterized by the metaphor of an emigrant rather than that of a nomad. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the usefulness of these divergent metaphors in our attempt to define both the nature of biblical texts and the task of the reception historian. Our test case will be the early interpretation history of the Lord’s Prayer. Given that the original form and context of this prayer are irretrievable, Breed’s theory is applicable in many respects. Yet it will also be seen that in the early reception history of the Lord’s Prayer there are also patterns of synchronic continuity. Amidst diverse agendas of theology and praxis, we find that interpretations of the Lord’s Prayer were consistently rooted in an inherited conceptualization of Jesus Christ – what we will call a canonical remembrance of his life and proclamation.

This article examines the place of tragic poetry within the early history and development of ancient literary criticism. It concentrates on Euripides, both because his works contain many more literary-critical reflections than those of the other tragedians and because he has been thought to possess an unusually ‘critical’ outlook. Euripidean characters and choruses talk about such matters as poetic skill and inspiration, the social function of poetry, contexts for performance, literary and rhetorical culture, and novelty as an implied criterion for judging literary excellence. It is argued that the implied view of literature which emerges from Euripidean tragedy is both coherent and conventional. As a critic, Euripides, far from being a radical or aggressively modern figure (as he is often portrayed), is in fact distinctly conservative, looking back in every respect to the earlier Greek poetic tradition.

Levinas and Twentieth-Century Literature: Ethics and the Reconstitution of Subjectivity

Mark Twain in Context