“In the beginning was rhythm”—and Art!

In the first half of the twentieth century, analytic bibliographers in Britain turned their attention to the systematic study of the nineteenth-century book. Developing their subject, they felt compelled to distance themselves from the Victorian book collector, who touched off a “suspicion . . . deeply ingrained in the mind of scholars and librarians” (Sadleir, “Development” 147). A new generation of bibliographers – Michael Sadleir, John Carter, and Graham Pollard – acknowledged that Victorian collecting had laid the foundations for the bibliographic study of books by “modern” (i.e., nineteenth-century) writers, as opposed to incunabula, the traditional focus of British book collecting. The contribution was regarded as fundamentally flawed, however, owing to a “sentimental element” in Victorian collecting (Carter and Pollard 101).

The French Reception of <i>Adventures of Huckleberry Finn</i>: A Belated Consecration

[1] The Geometry of Musical Rhythm is Godfried Toussaint's first monograph offering to the musicological community. Mathematician-cum-musicologists are increasingly common in theory, but Toussaint is a singular case. With expertise covering information theory, electrical engineering, and computer science, and interests spanning everything from African drumming to evolutionary biology, his stated aim to create an interdisciplinary academic bridge between these fields amounts to a considerable undertaking.[2] Toussaint has found an eminently suitable subject for that goal in the mathematical modelling of musical rhythm as expressed in symbolic form. In turn, the musicological community will discover in Toussaint's work an array of current and historical thought on geometric models, and a substantial contribution to a field that still lags behind the more developed theoretical literature on pitch, notwithstanding a vigorous revival of interest in rhythm and meter during the later twentieth century.(1)[3] Toussaint's list of personal acknowledgments provides general insight into the position of the book within the musicological landscape,(2) while for many readers, the modelling will most readily bring to mind the work of other mathematicians to have graced the field. Jeff Pressing ticks both boxes. His iconic 1983 article on isomorphisms between scales and rhythms from around the world is perhaps the most direct precursor to Toussaint's volume in both tone and for its combination of mathematical relations with ethnographic enquiry. Mathematical formalizations of musical space, such as those in Lewin 1987(3) and Polansky 1996 are relevant precedents, though Toussaint's project differs in its aims and target audiences. Some of the relationships between rhythmic patterns have been explored in recent subfields of theory (such as beat-class modulation in Roeder 2003 and Cohn 1992 after Babbitt 1962), and others parallel models from the pitch literature (such as Clough and Douthett's 1991 formalization of maximal evenness).[4] In many senses, this is a timely book. It is interdisciplinary (a quality openly promoted by the academy today), is concerned with an under-represented musical parameter (Toussaint is suitably condemnatory of the long-standing bias against rhythm as the fundamental property of music (305)), and concomitantly focuses on under-represented repertoires. It is also made available to a wide readership, as Toussaint balances the range of technical content with a writing style that remains suitable to lay readers. No knowledge of or mathematics is assumed, although italicized terms are occasionally introduced without definition and others are used in questionable ways.(4)[5] The disposition of the book reflects aspects of its background. Partly owing to the range of fields and topics drawn upon, the 363-page book is divided into many short chapters. Each introduces a different perspective on the same recurring questions (including the eponymous What makes a 'good' rhythm good), and the same illustrious rhythms, democratically taken to be good on the strength of their preponderant use throughout the world and its history.(5) Chapter 37 reprises many of the relations used, though it serves more as a summary than as the climax of an argument.[6] In short, this book does not read as a work of traditional musicology. That is as true of the content and language as it is of the shape and organization. Tellingly, the publisher focuses on scientific, technical, and medical content, and lists this work under General and Introductory Mathematics. However, General and Introductory Mathematics is exactly what certain branches of musicology need, especially when that introduction includes relevant findings from such a wide range of unfamiliar disciplines. For instance, a principal motivation for Toussaint in writing this book has been to evangelize the merits and utility of phylogenetic analysis, a topic which originated in the field of evolutionary biology: hardly the most immediate cousin of musicology. …

This volume presents a literary and visual overview of the interchange between France and England as experienced by members of the Bloomsbury group of writers and artists, including Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, Clive Bell, Roger Fry, Lytton Strachey, and Dora Carrington during the years 1906-1939, particularly their travels and sojourns in France which shaped much of their thinking, their painting, and to some extent their writing.

Katherine Mansfield first met John Middleton Murry in December 1911. In April 1912 she became assistant editor of Rhythm, a quarterly magazine of the arts founded by Murry and Michael Sadleir, which had first appeared in June 1911. Murry and KM wrote the following two articles jointly for Rhythm. Both for Murry as critic and for KM as creative artist, these articles represent a first positive manifesto (KM had satirised writers such as Bennett and Wells for the New Age magazine, but had not suggested any new alternative method or stance for the artist). Murry was very much influenced at this time by the philosophy of Henri Bergson (1859–1941), and, starting from Bergson’s initial descriptions of the artist as possessing pre-eminently the power of intuition, developed a romantic idea of the artist as a ‘seeker’, forging ahead of ordinary men — the artist’s vision is thus ‘a moment’s lifting of the veil’ (‘Art and Philosophy’, Rhythm, no. 1). This romantic view of the artist was substantially that of KM, though her idealism was later qualified by a sharp, ironic wit which seems to have been quite out of Murry’ s range. ‘The Meaning of Rhythm’ (Rhythm, no. 5) and ‘Seriousness in Art’ (Rhythm, no. 6) have a youthful fervour as if KM in particular has been momentarily caught off guard. It is fairly clear that, while the phrasing of the metaphysic of these essays comes largely from Murry, the imagery is KM’s.KeywordsCreative ArtistCritical WritingAreal SenseRomantic IdeaSupreme RealityThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

This paper proposes tο explore the multiple deflections of the mountain motif in a selection of poems, novels and performances by Scottish artists from the first literary renaissance to the present. From Walter Scott’s romantic Highland scenery and Ossian’s blue crests, the mountain has always been a powerful symbol in Scottish literature. But as early as in the 1930s, it became crucial to renew Scotland’s self-image and break from the outdated regional paradigms inherited from the past. For the poets of the first literary renaissance such as Hugh MacDiarmid, Iain Crichton Smith, Sorley MacLean and Norman MacCaig, a piece of "real Scotland" may have survived on the mountain tops. It is the case in the Cuillins of Skye where Scotland’s wild cry or wild poem can sometimes be heard, provided the poet deserve it. Either a vertical frontier or an ontological model, the mountain came to stand as the key to eternal Scotland, the key also to a long-awaited spiritual awakening, as in Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain (1977) or Angus Farquhar’s recent environmental artwork. While looking at the ways in which the mountain stands as the elevated starting point of a new national imagination, the paper will eventually be concerned with the works of several contemporary poet-climbers and performers. Can the mountain, in devolutionary Scotland, remain the same cultural synecdoche it served as throughout the twentieth century?

IN THE FITZWILLIAM MUSEUM in Cambridge, there is a painting by Stanley Spencer, Donne Arriving in (Fig. 1). It is almost his earliest, done in 1911 when Spencer was an eighteen-year-old student at the Slade School of Art. It was exhibited the following year at the Grafton Gallery's Sec ond Post Impressionist exhibition, although not particularly noticed in the hubbub and horror caused by the Cezannes or even by the paintings of the British group—Roger Fry, Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell, and their soon to be nemesis, Wyndham Lewis. There is certainly something of a Cezanesque proto-geometry to the painting's spaces, but in its subject and the generating idea for that subject it was quite unlike the others on those gallery walls. The figures are both their own tombstones and their resurrected bodies. They are at once stationary and in motion, here and there, in prayer and expectation— John Donne just happening by. The painting was prompted by Spencer's re ceiving a copy of Donne's Sermons from his fellow Slade students, Gwen and Jacques Raverat, and in particular by the phrase, to Go to Heaven by which Spencer interpreted as going past Heaven, alongside it, heaven here being Widbrook Common, a place near Cookham, where Spencer spent most of his life, receiving and painting heavenly visitors.1 Suddenly coming upon that painting prompted a series of questions that resulted in this partial inventory of twentieth century Donne signs and sight ings. Among them—where was Donne in the literary/artistic imagination at the start of the century during the years immediately before the 1912 Grierson edition and in the decades that followed? Who read him, painted him, thought about him? What have been the terms of the engagement? And behind those questions—why Donne? This investigation is more exploratory than polemi cal. The cast of characters is so varied, the Donnes invoked so multiple (love poet, dandy, satirist, religious poet, polemicist, priest), and the responses so various, that gathering the materials and making them speak to each other is in itself a useful enterprise. For it is remarkable that a writer so word specific as Donne, so much a figure (even as a composite of many figures) of a time, of

A selection of letters by the pacifist and noted art critic Clive Bell, expertly annotated by his biographerIllustrates a comprehensive range of Bell's interests and relationshipsOffers a unique record of a transformative time in the cultural and political history of the WestArranged in eight categories to afford readers guidance in how to approach the varied emphases of Bell's life and interests, as well as highlighting what is particularly significant, such as his close lifelong relationship with Virginia WoolfClive Bell was a pivotal member of the Bloomsbury Group. His marriage to Vanessa Bell and his, at times tempestuous, relations with his sister-in-law Virginia Woolf form important strands in the cultural history of modernism. A tireless champion of modernist art, a committed pacifist and conscientious objector, Bell produced a huge body of correspondence with many of the leading artistic and political figures of his time. His lively, witty, highly opinionated letters are a window into the turbulence of the early twentieth century, populated by friends and acquaintances including T. S. Eliot, Katherine Mansfield, Pablo Picasso and Jean Cocteau, as well as his Bloomsbury set, Desmond MacCarthy, Leonard and Virginia Woolf, Duncan Grant, Maynard Keynes, Roger Fry and Vanessa Bell. Arranged in eight categories - Bloomsbury Circles; Virginia; War; Arts and Letters; To the Editor; Francophile; Travels; Love, Gossip, Home - this selection emphasises Bell's enormously varied life and interests. Born in the reign of Queen Victoria and living long enough to have been able to hear the Beatles on the radio, these letters demonstrate that Bell's appetite for art, for love and for peace never flagged

This title was first published in 2000: An investigation of art between 1928 and 1955 to bring into focus the multifaceted project that was modernism. At the core of this work lies the contention that modernism was underpinned by a desire to express a national consciousness. It was this ambition which became the defining feature of radical art, setting the parameters of its relationship with the idea of a coherent and international modern movement. With the foundation of the National Party of Scotland in 1928, intellectuals began to consider the nature of national identity and the characteristics of a national art. The Scottish Renaissance Movement, under the voluble leadership of Hugh MacDiarmid, set out to articulate these interests, developing a vernacular poetry and literature. For artists, the way forward was harder to identify, as they fought to reconcile the demands for a national art with the stylistic revolution of international modernism. Tom Normand examines the competing claims of nationalism and modernism as they affected art. This in-depth analysis of a dynamic episode in visual culture looks at the work of, among others, William Johnstone, William McCance and John Duncan Fergusson.

The aim of this chapter is to widen the compass of Keats’s visual legacy and to refocus attention from the painters of Southern England to the book illustrators and designers of Scotland. What follows seeks to recalibrate our understanding of the reception of Keats’s poems in art by addressing hitherto unexplored aspects of the poet’s afterlives. This chapter is divided into two sections, each focusing on a Scottish city where artists engaged with Keats’s poems within a regional context of cultural and commercial rejuvenation. The first section considers the Scottish Pre-Raphaelites, Joseph Noël Paton (1821–1901) and William Bell Scott (1811–90), both of whom had strong connections with Edinburgh and its surrounding areas. The second section focuses on artist-craftworkers, such as Talwin Morris, who self-consciously identified with a particular Scottish city at a specific historical moment, pioneering and popularizing what is now known as the Glasgow Style of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

As in many other avant-garde contexts in the early years of the twentieth century, little magazines were at the forefront of the modern—and modernist—Scottish literary revival initiated by the poet Hugh MacDiarmid in the years immediately after World War One, as he challenged existing outworn traditions and sought to remove Scotland and its culture from the subservient status of a provincial “North Britain”. While the originating phase of this modernist attempt to redirect the course of Scottish literary (and wider) culture had come to an end by the time of the outbreak of World War Two in 1939, a second phase, again led by little magazines, started up in the early 1940s and lasted into the next decade. The publisher William Maclellan of Glasgow was a key figure here, and as with the earlier MacDiarmid movement, this new phase of renewal was poetry-led by magazines such as Million, Poetry Scotland, and Scottish Art and Letters, which also had a strong visual art input as a result of the involvement of the painter J. D. Fergusson.This proposed paper will therefore explore the interaction between the new poetic voices and their ideological positions in these second-phase magazines and the continuities with the previous MacDiarmid-led revival which still inspired them, despite their differences. The effects of wartime conditions on the production and reception of such little magazines, and the relationship between the magazines and other new work being published in the war years and immediate post-war period will also be considered. Through examination of the extent to which a new generation of writers (and their readers) either followed or departed from the earlier movement’s prescription for renewal, the paper will ultimately attempt to evaluate the legacy of the interwar modernist revival and the extent to which MacDiarmid and his fellow reformers succeeded in transforming pre-1918 cultural expectations, and, consequently, in writing a new chapter in Scotland’s literary and political history.

Room 13 is a Scottish primary school art group that is largely pupil managed, where learners have a designated “drop-in” space (Room 13) with artists-in-residence and make art that is engaged with contemporary practices. Using this example, I argue that this is an artist-teacher and artist-learner configuration that represents emerging resistance to the imposition of tightly governed curricula and regulated pedagogies. With the wider public, contemporary art has acquired significantly improved status and popularity; whilst the standing of these practices and their display and dissemination continues to grow, there has not been a similar bestowing of status or even legitimacy upon the production of art in schools. This article examines ways of analyzing classroom art practice as the collaborative art production of artist-teachers with artist-learners, a collaboration that is defined as a learning community of art practitioners, using cultural, community, and pedagogical theorists. The features of this model of learning through contemporary art are explored with reference to the singular methods and features of Room 13. For these practices to become more widespread, and for the radical development of art education, I argue that it is necessary to challenge institutional orthodoxies by developing new methodologies that insist upon the validity of contemporary artist-teacher/learner production.

This chapter looks at the dissemination of Russian aesthetics in the British periodical press, focusing in particular on the example of Rhythm (1911-13), the short-lived but important modernist journal edited by the novelist and critic John Middleton Murry and the art critic Michael Sadleir. Rhythm has been described as Bergsonian in philosophy and Scottish Fauvist in its taste in art—less often noted is the journal’s promotion of Russian art and literature, which included the work of Leonid Andreyev, Natalia Goncharova, Mikhail Larionov and, most significantly, Wassily Kandinsky. The distinctively spiritual aesthetics Rhythm promoted and associated with Russian art stood in contrast to the French-influenced formalist aesthetics of Roger Fry and Clive Bell, which were being developed and publicised simultaneously. This chapter presents Rhythm in the context of competing modernisms in the periodical press and the interpretation of Russian aesthetics in Britain.

Betraying the genre's heritage in European influences, one of the most frequently recorded songs within the Texas-Mexican conjunto tradition is the “Beer Barrel Polka,” translated into Spanish as “El Barrilito.” Composed by Czech musician Jaromír Vejvoda and popular worldwide during World War II, the tune has been recorded by a variety of conjunto artists, including the so-called “father of conjunto music” Narciso Martínez; other eminent early stars like Tony De La Rosa, Valerio Longoria, and Ruben Vela; more stylistically innovative musicians like Flaco Jiménez; and even members of the subsequent generation like Max Baca. However, contemporary Texas-Mexican musicians like Juanito Castillo, Piñata Protest, and Sunny Sauceda have not recorded the classic song. This first group of artists represents a collective tradition comprising a common repertory passed down through oral tradition. Meanwhile, recent musicians like Castillo, Piñata Protest, and Sauceda instead create original repertory alongside borrowed songs and stylistic traits from rock, country, and the blues (among others). In addition, while conjunto itself and many of its early artists initiated in rural communities along the Texas-Mexican border in the Rio Grande Valley, this “modernist” group of musicians (my term) emanates from the urban center of San Antonio. The quantitative methods in this article then highlight two divergent versions of the genre, both characterized as “conjunto.” The “classic” version of the genre represents a rural, working-class, shared tradition. Meanwhile, the modernist version of the genre has increasingly become an urban, middle-class, autonomous art form.Furthermore, a number of inter/national musicians have recently started participating in the regional conjunto tradition. Although these artists might be expected to insert elements of their own geographic and/or cultural heritages into the music, they instead closely follow classic practices. For example, “Ay Te Dejo En San Antonio” was written by Santiago Jiménez Sr., the father of Flaco and a pioneer of the conventional conjunto sound. The song has been recorded by a range of local artists, international conjunto participants, and nationally oriented musicians like the Texas Tornados and Los Lobos. However, it has not been recorded by the modernist group of local conjunto artists—a network of musicians who, secure in their cultural positionality, largely eschew classical repertory for independent song choices and connections to genres like rock and country.1In recent practices, shared songs represent the role of either classicism or modernism in each musician's interpretation of conjunto. Quantitative methods demonstrate that inter/national artists join with an older generation of regional musicians to maintain a shared repertory, consistent structures, and expected sounds; in short, a classical style. Younger artists in the Texas-Mexican community instead modernize the music through new stylistic traits and original songs. Furthermore, while both versions of the music are subsumed under a categorization of “conjunto,” each represents a distinctive repertory and associated group of people. As such, the tradition complicates analytical links between genre and sociocultural identity. The historical notion of genre—as cultivated most prominently as a marketing device in popular music throughout the twentieth century—sets up a homologous system of categorization that connects musical traits to demographics. As David Brackett describes, in historical practices, “a race record finds an African American audience; an old-time record finds a rural, white, Southern audience; a mainstream record finds a white, bourgeois, Northern, urban audience; and a foreign record finds a foreigner.”2 As this article will explore, despite these essentializing connections (i.e., conjunto as idiomatically Texas-Mexican; the music and associated community inextricably linked as simplistic and old-fashioned), such systems often remain stubbornly in place. While such categorizations do not seem to indicate any purposeful exclusions, the conjunto genre remains linked to intrinsic understandings of identity, beyond interpretation or intent.Throughout this analysis, I use the term classical to refer to music that maintains a shared repertory among a wide range of musical participants, considers individual songs as belonging to the community rather than a single artist, and does not address a national, mainstream audience or use monetary incentive as a primary method of stylistic continuation. As with earlier usages of the term, classicism implies devotion to a long-established art form. In contrast, the term modernist indicates music that produces new and original repertory, stylistic distinctions between individual artists, consideration of songs as “belonging” to the original composer rather than the group as a whole, and intended association with an inter/national, mainstream, and/or money-oriented audience (regardless of actual participation with the mainstream community or total money earned). As with earlier usages of the term, modernism implies a conscious break from the past, leading to new forms, urbanism, and engagement with social issues. That being said, what is now considered “classic” was once new, and certain elements of the older historical tradition—here categorized as classical—display characteristics more in line with modernist impulses (original repertory, individualism of style, and commercialization, to start). For our purposes, the characterization of conjunto as “classical” thus refers to connections between these historical practices and younger artists who maintain the repertory and creative techniques of the tradition. In contrast, modernist pursuits comprise contemporary artists who push the boundaries of the classical understanding. In short, these characterizations refer to a recent snapshot of musical practices, rather than a full analysis of the role of “classical” musicians within their own eras.Beginning with a brief history and sociocultural analysis of the Texas-Mexican conjunto tradition, this article theorizes the connection between genre and identity to explore musical category as it relates to repertory. In particular, it uses quantitative evidence to examine song choice across the range of accordion-based ensembles situated in or influenced by the conjunto genre in South Texas during the long twentieth century. These inclusions are purposefully broad, striving to categorize musicians who fall neatly within historical conjunto characterizations, but also those who do not. In including artists typically grouped under designations of Tejano, norteño, popular, orchestral, or progressive—genres closely related but considered separately from conjunto in local and commercialized performance spaces—I anticipate a distinction between these musicians and those more closely tied to traditional understandings of conjunto. I recognize that song choice alone cannot account for all—or even most—musical connections. However, in this case, the invocation of particular songs (in a recorded capacity) creates groupings of artists that closely correspond to categorizations in performance structures and awards-based recognitions, as corroborated by the regional community. I then compare the repertories of these musicians with geographic location, noting the creation of contrasting musical communities as connected to point of origin. I explore commonalities between groupings of song choice with artist designations in community-based festivals and other recognitions. I drill deeper into the data to uncover more complicated musical connections through social network analysis and conclude with further consideration of meaning and identity in music.A surface-level analysis demonstrates a range of musical characteristics and sociocultural backgrounds included under the contemporary categorization of conjunto. It would seem that characterizations of the genre as strictly related to either aesthetic traits or groups of people are no longer relevant. At the same time, closely related genres like Tejano or norteño encompass similar musical elements and/or demographics as conjunto while in no way gaining admittance into the alternate generic classification. In both of these regards, contemporary conjunto seems to have been disconnected from older connections between genre and identity. Yet the separation of conjunto into subcategories based on musical repertory and artistic points of origin—as detailed throughout this essay—suggests that homologous notions of genre are more prevalent than might be expected. This article analyzes the recorded song choices of a variety of regional and inter/national conjunto artists, using social network visualizations to demonstrate an inverse relationship between location and techniques of modernism. In other words, the further artists emanate from the historical Texas-Mexican community, the more “classical” their choice of repertory; conversely, artists more closely situated within stereotypical understandings of Texas-Mexican identity tend to experiment with new songs, thus creating a “modernist” interpretation of the traditional music. The commercialized classification of contemporary recordings as “conjunto” then demonstrates the societal obstinance of essentialist stereotypes according to demographic characteristics. Despite narratives of increasing inclusivity in music and culture—in scholarship, in the popular US “melting pot” mythology, and in promotional materials for regional events like the Tejano Conjunto Festival—such generic depictions indicate the persistence of participatory limitations for music based on ethnicity, class, location, and power. Inter/national musicians can participate in the Texas-Mexican genre, but only according to strict limitations of repertory.Texas-Mexican conjunto music began with the adoption of the button accordion in the early years of the twentieth century by the working-class community in South Texas. Taking influence and early repertory from German polka music—brought, along with the railroad, to urban centers in Texas and Mexico—the genre idiosyncratically blends the sound of the accordion with bajo sexto, a twelve-string Mexican bass guitar. By the middle of the twentieth century, the music had settled into a relatively standard instrumentation, repertory, and sound. As Manuel Peña describes, following a period of stylistic formation corresponding to an initial commercialization from the 1920s through the end of World War II, conjunto achieved a “classic” era from the late 1940s through about 1970. Although regional performers like Flaco, Steve Jordan, and Mingo Saldívar challenged traditional stylistic boundaries, in general the remaining years of the twentieth century brought “a period of consolidation and decline, as many of the stylistic elements of the classic era—now considered ‘the tradition’—were worked and reworked into a less and less dynamic style.”3 From this point, the music became, in essence, a “folkloric” tradition, celebrated as a symbol of Texas-Mexican culture and historical struggles, but largely devoid of continuing musical evolution. While many among the regional community took pride in this continued cultural significance (in fact, Cathy Ragland attests that conjunto has maintained its lengthy local popularity primarily due to this perseverance of style), the lack of innovation within the genre at the middle of the century failed to attract the younger, increasingly urbanized and Americanized ethnic constituency, and local conjunto was threatened by alternate styles.4Although the music stagnated stylistically in the second half of the twentieth century, a new form of social relevance and national recognition for the working-class cultural tradition came with the Chicano rights movement in the 1960s and 1970s. While the traditional music had historically provided a symbol of cultural identity within the local, working-class Texas-Mexican constituency, the representative recognition of the genre among the broader Chicano community served as an important revitalizing force for the contemporary regional sound. At this point, the working-class music became separated from its humble socioeconomic beginnings, and, corresponding to many of its original, increasingly upwardly mobile constituents, gained meaning among an educated, middle-class population. It is within this atmosphere that regional artists like Castillo, Piñata Protest, and Sauceda (among many others) started producing music. Rather than remaining tied to the relative stagnation of the conjunto tradition, these musicians write new music and insert interesting, cross-cultural hybridizations into the Texas-Mexican form. It is also within this atmosphere that inter/national artists have started including conjunto elements in their own performances. While these inter/national artists might be expected to insert external characteristics emanating from their own cultural heritages into the conjunto tradition, it is the younger regional musicians who actually stray furthest from conventional practices. Inter/national artists instead maintain the classical style of the older generation of local conjunto stars. In this way, in contemporary practices, two separate networks of conjunto musicians exist. Common repertories connect older generations of local artists with more culturally precarious participants, while a younger generation of local musicians instead challenges historical boundaries of interpretation. Both methods challenge generic links between musical characteristics—here determined by repertory—and stereotypical associations of ethnicity, class, and location.From a theoretical perspective, generic characterization invokes a formalistic system of meaning by way of certain indicators. As John Frow explains, a specific text (a word I use to include a specific song) uses a “compressed form” to establish “a set of knowledges.”5 In other words, certain salient characteristics of a work combine to invoke a genre of (in this case) music; the suggestion of such genre then constructs knowledge of the piece based on experiential understandings of generic significance. As Frow explains, this process allows a listener to “infer the whole from the part”; to determine “the kind of thing this is from the representation of a few of its scattered features.”6 In the case of Texas-Mexican conjunto, surface-level indicators—local performance spaces, historic instrumentation, classical song choices, or expected sociocultural identity—mark the music as “conjunto,” allowing audiences to construct a schematic world that provides the framework for musical understanding. Among local artists, sociocultural identity allows for immediate association with “conjunto,” regardless of strict correspondence to historical elements of the genre (assuming some broad categorization based on instrumentation or the like). Audiences recognize the music as such and activate understanding according to this generic framework. They create patterns of meaning based on a “broader frame of background knowledge” that “lies latent in a shadowy region from which we draw it as we need it”; a frame of significance that “we may not know we know and that is not directly available for scrutiny.”7As such, the characterization of conjunto relies on cursory decisions by the subconscious. Certain indicators allow an audience to classify a piece of music according to more generalized interpretations and thus attribute significance (or acceptance) through this broader framework. Such generic “clues” are immediate and therefore superficial: a performer who presents as “conjunto” based on stereotypical notions of ethnicity, gender, clothing, instrumentation, and performance context is interpreted as such, even if less immediately apparent characteristics of the music (song choice, structure, harmonies) contrast with historical expectations. As such, local conjunto musicians read as “conjunto” and continue to receive interpretation as such, even when repertory and other musical elements stray from convention. As Eric Drott explains (theorizing the functionality of titles), “by signaling to listeners the genre to which a piece belongs,” these indicators serve “a ‘rhetorical’ or communicative function, in addition to a taxonomic one.”8 In this regard, surface-level signifiers—such as visual cues of sociocultural identity—signal to an audience that a performer should be classified as “conjunto,” allowing the listener to then access the range of interpretations based on prior knowledge of the genre. Conversely, lacking cultural indicators of belonging, inter/national conjunto musicians must harness this generic framework via alternative methods. As explored below, one such signal is the classical conjunto repertory.Over time, the categorization of conjunto has arguably remained more closely related to elements of sociocultural identity than individual musical traits. In this regard, the tradition functions according to analytical conceptions that characterize genre not “as a stable class of objects, defined by possession of some discrete set of fixed characteristics,” but “as a dynamic ensemble of correlations, linking together a variety of material, institutional, social, and symbolic resources: repertories, performance practices, distinctive formal and stylistic traits, aesthetic discourses, forms of self-presentation, institutions, specific modes of technological mediation, social identities, and so forth.”9 Participation within conjunto historically implied a particular identity: conjunto musicians as inherently working class, ethnically Mexican, and emanating from a rural community in South Texas. At the same time, identification according to these traits suggested a stereotypical affinity for conjunto—Texas-Mexican musicians as “naturally” attracted to the genre, evidence of alternative pursuits and artists like Flaco absorbing many musical styles notwithstanding. Christabel Stirling dismantles similar essentializations in the gendering of electronic/dance music, confronting the perceived “‘maleness’ of extreme volume, sonic complexity and heavy bass, or the ‘femaleness’ of vocals and danceable tempos” to consider the ways such stereotypical associations “reproduce social differences and inequalities.”10 Genre and identity have thus been inextricably linked, regardless of the veracity of such characterizations.These connections play into persistent representations—among politicians, the mainstream media, and even scholars—of the Texas-Mexican community as old-fashioned and fundamentally working class, despite a range of sociocultural identities actually present across the region. For example, Flaco recalls the difficulties of his father's generation in gaining support from record companies: “They considered [conjunto] low-class, cantina music, Mexican hillbilly music.”11 Likewise, in initiating the collaborations that would jumpstart Flaco's career and bring global attention to the genre, Ry Cooder conveys similar stereotypes of the music and associated community as low class and simplistic: “The records are made on obscure labels in trashy little studios on the Texas-Mexican border, but they still sound great. Of course, the music was even better back in the ’50s, before commercialism started affecting everything, but it's still some of the best stuff I've heard.”12 Journalists like Travis Buffkin compliment Flaco through analogous characterizations: “I don't respect Flaco Jiménez because the Grammys gave him a Lifetime Achievement Award after 67 years of playing masterful accordion, but because he spent those 67 years in relative obscurity, as a master, playing for beer, tacos, pretty women and some spending money.”13 While more recent manifestations of conjunto superficially demonstrate a separation from homologous notions of genre as identity,14 as evidenced by the local incorporation of traits and inter/national participation in the analysis instead indicates that between musical sociocultural and generic characterization such, the of genre in Texas-Mexican conjunto of musical genre as “a set of musical events or is by a set of to this framework of and In this regard, the of musical genre a of more closely with the historical conjunto community sociocultural generic categorization through a on of social and with less to expected formal In to analysis as “conjunto,” performers less closely connected to historical interpretations of Texas-Mexican identity must instead on formal and structure, repertory, In this way, local performers are characterized as “conjunto” despite using a range of Inter/national artists these elements (song choice, in particular, as to signal a classification of “conjunto” to audiences to create groupings based on thus remains linked to some understandings of genre, but not categorization is a tied to according to a variety of prior understandings and As to generic through formal and the point genre, style, and form become instead the of in such categorization to genre from and and the between by and by in the of example, while regional artists like Flaco stylistic and the modernist group of musicians characterized distinctive repertory, among other a range of musical characteristics emanating from a variety of they remain stubbornly characterized among the mainstream (i.e., in and marketing as idiosyncratically “conjunto.” In contrast, Tejano and norteño with musical techniques often more closely connected to classical conjunto than many modernist conjunto artists but with sociocultural identities disconnected from historical of conjunto in of class and location, remain separate from the conjunto for inter/national disconnected from historical notions of Texas-Mexican within the conjunto genre, they must closely the classical repertory, structure, and sound of the most traditional interpretations of the music. While these of characterizations are not to the Texas-Mexican community, as by the of genre detailed by the for musicians to These represent systems of and the of the mainstream music to use sociocultural distinctions to characterize local musicians as “conjunto,” for example, despite musical elements with alternate the for such artists in more ways than in the classification of As musicians and music use stereotypes about gender, and class as to and genre boundaries, and to the of styles and of international participation in conjunto music creates a of disconnected from actual inclusions of music or people. For example, for the San in refers to the of from and at that Tejano Conjunto as “the noting in the from the while (in that international participation in the is one would he Los as “the of the Likewise, for the San in that the by of classic Flaco in for the in refers to as to the and for an invocation of the artist conjunto is or a regional As and of the Tejano Conjunto international conjunto artists are the repertory or the instead conjunto music the way we play that is the form of local audiences that these are music the However, despite a of music as the of characteristics and musicians from of the primary cultural genre of conjunto remains tied to Texas-Mexican the of essentialist in symbolic connections between music and identity but also the persistent role of race in designations of particular of generic categorize groups of people more than specific musical As Brackett describes, these are most in music from the 1920s like and However, I would such designations in genres like conjunto that initiated in connection to a certain sociocultural identity. Certain musical elements the the case of conjunto, the distinctive sound of button accordion with bajo sexto, to the boundaries of interpretation within a particular distinction fundamentally correspond to societal designations between people who or from each or not we to that In for inter/national conjunto musicians to within the genre, they must remain closely tied to classical characteristics of the music; to do these external identities from In contrast, local conjunto musicians like Castillo, Piñata Protest, and Sauceda remain categorized as “conjunto” artists among local events like the Tejano Conjunto and nationally oriented like the regardless of any number of musical elements of classical interpretations of the this way, the apparent inclusivity of practices in way to distinctive of the music based on strict demographics. As Brackett rather than a set of based stylistic genres indicate “a and collective about the for of music and the social groups most associated with of defined musical the designations of certain those historically tied to demonstrate a of symbolic in a lengthy history of history as an to as Peña maintains a of for musicians associated with systems of It is within this context that we more into recent conjunto this I have the recorded repertories of These include members of the Texas-Mexican generation of conjunto local members of subsequent national and international artists who play conjunto or use conjunto and regional Tejano and norteño In which artists to I have to represent the conjunto artists, both within the Texas-Mexican community and across a more mainstream as by of and In this the Tejano and norteño artists serve a they are expected to of standard conjunto practices This analysis demonstrates two contrasting musical those who maintain the classical heritage of conjunto through traditional song choices and those who the genre into a more modernist through a variety of original songs. the musicians in this The is not but to a range of and styles Tejano, norteño, and popular for analytical

A very important exhibition of Russian art was held in Berlin in 1922. In it were shown the works of all the different groups of artists who influenced the development of Russian art. Of special interest, quite naturally, were the works of those artists who came to the fore after the revolution. Along with artists already world-renowned, like Wassily Kandinsky, Marc Chagall and Alexander Archipenko, new and hitherto unknown artists appeared. The most important of these were the Constructirist, Vladimir Tatlin and the Suprematist, Kasimir Malevich. Their works attracted widespread attention and gained more and more influence.