The Phenomena of Minimalism in Hungarian Music: A Historical Overview—Creative Workshops, Composers, and Works

Perhaps the main particular feature of Richard Strauss as a composer is his incomparable gift for musical characterization. He was able to convey literally everything in sounds: both material and concrete things, as well as all sorts of abstract ideas and concepts. An increased attention to the details of the musical text, stage-related situations, and the behavior of various protagonist determines the special mobility and lability of musical presentation in the composer’s opera scores. In his work as a whole, this characteristic feature explains the strong stylistic contrasts between particular musical-theatrical works, depending on the plotline and the chosen mode of its implementation. Taking into account the challenges that arose in each work, Strauss each time created a specific thesaurus of musical means — the particular characteristic figures. The composer himself spoke in this regard about “sound symbols” (Tonsymbole), to which he pertained the design of the melodic line, the characteristic motive, the special rhythmic motion within the confines of a unique timbre, and other elements of musical presentation. At the same time, he could freely turn to already existing musical-historical material containing certain semantic connotations (musical quotations, particular musical styles, topoi, genres, compositional techniques, etc.). Among the characteristic means that Strauss resorted to, the following must be highlighted 1) word-painting (Tonmalerei), 2) leitmotifs, 3) the respective tonality, 4) musical quotations (borrowed from other composers’ works and from his own), 5) genre, 6) the compositional method, 7) style. The article draws an analogy between Strauss’s methods of musical characterization and the use of musical and rhetorical figures in the Baroque era. However, if the rhetorical figures refer to the area of typified content, it follows that Strauss creates an arsenal of special characteristic means for each specific work. The musical “emblems”, which previously possessed a universally significant character, acquire purely authorial traits and require individual decoding.

This article outlines areas of musical processing that may be universal to humans. Music here refers to temporally structured human activities, social and individual, in the production and perception of sound organized in patterns that convey non-linguistic meaning. Music processing refers to the neural contribution in perception, cognition, and production of music. The universal music processes discussed are hypotheses that require investigation and falsification in as many and varied cultural contexts as possible. The discussion begins with processes of grouping and segmentation, then moves on to statistically universal features of musical environments, and ends with more general-purpose psychological processes. It illustrates some processes drawing on examples of production of song from particular Australian Aboriginal cultures.

Wildlife charisma and pro-environmental behaviour：A perspective from self-transcendent emotions theory

Reviewed by: The Collected Works of Benjamin Hawkins, 1796–1810 Robbie Ethridge (bio) The Collected Works of Benjamin Hawkins, 1796–1810. Edited by Thomas Foster. (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2003. Pp. xxiv, 511. Illustrations, maps. Cloth, $75.00; paper, $34.95.) This volume is one of the most important collections of published primary source material on the southern frontier, the late eighteenth-century [End Page 127] Creek Indians, and the social and physical geography of the area that once comprised the Creek Confederacy. Benjamin Hawkins was U.S. Indian Agent to the Creek Indians of present-day Georgia and Alabama from 1796 until his death in 1816. The volume editor, Thomas Foster, notes in his introduction that much of Hawkins's writings have been available through various earlier publications, but all of these are now out of print. Foster's volume contains facsimile reprints of two of these publications (both of which were originally published in the Collections of the Georgia Historical Society): "A Sketch of the Creek Country, in the Years 1798 and 1799" and the "Letters of Benjamin Hawkins." The volume also contains two previously unpublished "viatories" written by Hawkins. A viatory (or "journal of distances") is the eighteenth-century equivalent of a field notebook. When Hawkins took trips around Creek country, he kept notebooks recording distances traveled and landscape features, both social and natural. Since he considered these only as field notebooks, Hawkins recorded the data in shorthand. In his introduction, Foster gives readers the necessary instructions on how to decipher Hawkins's shorthand. He also reconstructs the routes of the various trips, which is necessary for understanding location in the viatories. The viatories are staggering in their detail. Hawkins recorded geographical features, place names, environmental features, and towns along the routes that he traveled. The remarkable thing about the viatories, however, is that Hawkins, using eighteenth-century measuring conventions, located all of these features. For instance, when Hawkins noted a stand of longleaf pines on a stony ridge made of "curiously variegated- rock, flowered or spotted, of lead colour, white flint stone and dingy red, the red seems to have been spattered on" (9), he also gave a location for this feature. Using Foster's instructions, one can plot this ridge on a modern topographic map. Being able to reconstruct the historical landscape at this local level is very unusual. Even the most detailed historical sources usually do not give enough detail or are not accurate enough to allow one to pinpoint locations of environmental and social features. Yet, as ecologists make clear, to understand a landscape, one must understand the mosaic of local-level systems and their connectedness. Hawkins's viatories, then, may allow us, for the first time, to reconstruct the micro-level intricacies of the late eighteenth-century landscape and geography of what was once Creek country. The viatories are followed by a reprint of the "Sketch of the Creek [End Page 128] Country." Anthropologists and ethnohistorians regard Hawkins's "Sketch" as a reliable account of Creek life. Based on his field notes, Hawkins's "Sketch" contains detailed descriptions of all the Creek towns, local landscapes, people, and tidbits of town histories, followed by discussions of various cultural elements under headings such as "Government," "War," "Marriage," and so on. Hawkins's description of the Green Corn Ceremony, under the headings of "Boos-ke-tau," has long been considered one of the most detailed and important accounts of the late eighteenth-century Creek version of this important Southeastern Indian ceremony. The "Sketch" is followed by Hawkins's letters from 1796 to 1805. Hawkins kept regular communications with federal, state, and local leaders, both American and Creek. These letters, then, describe episodes, problems, solutions, and plans, both big and small, in which Hawkins had some role. He also recorded several "talks" of Creek leaders—a valuable source, since Indian voices are rare in the historical documents. Hawkins's writings also contain many "journals," diaries of his visits with Creek men and women that contain wonderful ethnographic descriptions of Creek towns and daily life. The Georgia Historical Society publications only contain letters through 1805, yet Hawkins remained in Creek country another ten or so years...

Benjamin Britten's (1913-1976) opera ＂A Midsummer Night's Dream＂ (op. 64, 1960) is known for its vivid characters. With distinctive musical elements and compositional techniques, the composer rendered William Shakespeare's (1564- 1616) classic comedy even more dramatic than the original masterpiece. In his 20th century opera version for the Renaissance drama, Britten linked his work to those of his predecessors by using musical quotations, but he also stayed away from the conventions of German Romanticism. Britten’s Dream is unique in that he was fully aware of the connotations implied in Shakespeare's poetic lines and he was able to design the music in a way that can bring out the hidden meanings. This article focuses on the fairy world, which is central to Britten's libretto. Each fairy character is compared and contrasted to his/her counterpart in the original Shakespeare's play through musical and textual analysis. By investigating the different constructions of the drama and opera, the author probes into Britten's interpretation of the magic in Shakespeare's fairy world.

Aleksandr Vustin’s individual technique of composition was fully formed by the 1990s and became a universal way of embodying various concepts. In each new work, the same ideas were reinterpreted. Using the example of the sextet Heroic Lullaby, the author analyzes the composer’s mode of working with three basic principles of his method: the universal tone row, the principle of “twelvefoldness”, and the extended Obikhodnïy scale, first used by Yuriy Butsko. The choice of the work is related to its non-typical nature in the context of Vustin’s oeuvre. In addition to the transformations of the basic principles of his method, Heroic Lullaby attracts attention as one of the few examples of working with musical quotations. The piece is a kind of musical autobiography, the “chapters” of which allude to works by Beethoven, Debussy, Schoenberg, Mahler, and Mussorgsky. All such allusions are intentionally given inaccurately, “from memory”, and are always associated with the development of the tone row. In many ways, the interaction of tonal and serial systems is also innovative: the latter takes over the role of tonality, the tones of the rows take over the functionality, and the composer, as if in a parallel “layer”, introduces an auto-quotation — a tonal fragment from the music to the movie Anna Karamazoff.

The first twenty years of the 20th century were of great transformation to the city of Floriano, considered, at the time, one of the active hubs of the import-export trade in the state of Piauí, in the hinterland of Brazil. In this historical context, journalistic and literary journalism emerged and witnessed the changes in habits of its society, which was witnessing the arrival of modern airs. Favorable to this transformation, the commercial and political conjunctures operated by the Republican Party, especially between the years 1916 and 1924, were responsible for forming in town one of the significant literary circuits of the state and, consequently, as if it had been experienced in newsrooms of newspapers and literary associations, cultural environment such as theater, cinema and clubs – evidence of a relatively active literary life. This article analyzes these changes and their resistance, starting in 1902, when the first periodical was founded in the city, in 1921, the end of the first phase of the most important newspaper of the period, O Popular.

У статті висвітлюється методика формування художньо-виконавської майстерності майбутніх піаністів з КНР. У даному контексті автор розглядає наступні педагогічні умови: усвідомлення суб’єктами освітнього процесу сутності та цінності художньо-виконавської майстерності для професійного розвитку; організація художньо-виконавської діяльності майбутніх піаністів з КНР на основі задачної технології; стимулювання рефлексивно-творчої діяльності піаніста в музично-виконавському процесі. Особлива увага приділена етапам, основним положенням, формам та методам, якими керувались при виборі педагогічних умов.В статье освещается методика формирования художественно-исполнительского мастерства будущих пианистов из КНР. В данном контексте автор рассматривает следующие педагогические условия: осознание субъектами образовательного процесса сущности и ценности художественно-исполнительского мастерства для профессионального развития; организация художественно-исполнительской деятельности будущих пианистов из КНР на основе задачной технологии; стимулирование рефлексивно-творческой деятельности пианиста в музыкально-исполнительском процессе. Особое внимание уделено этапам, основным положениям, формам и методам, которыми руководствовались при выборе педагогических условий.In the article the method of implementation and features in the professional training of future pianists from China pedagogical conditions of formation of artistic and performance skills, understanding educational process subjects the nature and value of artistic and performance skills for professional development; organization of artistic and performance of future pianists from people’s republic of china(PRC) of task-based technologies; stimulate reflexive and creative activities pianist performing in the musical process. The author examines the stages, the basic provisions, forms and methods that are guided in choosing the educational environment. Among them: the course «Fundamentals formation of artistic and performance skills» workshop «Creative Workshop» reflective conversation; visits and analysis of concert performances of their peers and professional musicians; familiarization with best examples of artistic and performance skills; analysis of their own performance and training and so on.

Culture is an important aspect of foreign or second language education as the teaching of foreign languages straddles two languages, the learner’s first language and the target/foreign language, and the different cultures associated with them. Textbooks for the teaching of foreign languages must inevitably orient to cultural elements from at least two cultural practices and environments. In this study, cultural elements in four Mandarin as a second language textbooks written by Malaysian authors were examined using content analysis. The conception of cultural elements proposed by Zhang and Chen and the categorizations of types of culture proposed by Cortazzi and Jin and Chao were employed to investigate the extent to which cultural elements (knowledge-culture or communicative-culture) and types of culture (source, target, international cultures or intercultural interaction) are represented in these textbooks. The analysis found that both knowledge-culture and communicative-culture are embodied in the textbooks. Furthermore, most of the cultural elements identified in the textbooks represent source and target cultures which refer to learners’ own culture and culture of the target language. The presence of international cultures and intercultural interaction, on the other hand, is lower in these textbooks. This study contributes towards a better understanding of how Malaysian authors of Mandarin as a second language textbooks for Malaysian learners incorporate cultural elements in the books they write. It highlights the importance of integrating cultural elements and representing a diversity of cultures in textbooks for teaching Mandarin as a second language.

The article discusses cultural interactions during Ukrainian Baroque (the 17th and 18th centuries), focusing on Europe’s broader spiritual and intellectual context. It aims to explore the role of educational-intellectual centres as essential components of Ukrainian Baroque culture and their involvement in communication with the Orthodox communities in the Balkan region. The theoretical-methodological foundation of the research is a comprehensive philosophical and historical analysis of the Ukrainian Baroque’s universal nature, including the use of cultural history to clarify the activities of Ukraine’s spiritual and intellectual elite. The article reveals that cultural exchanges during this era occurred through spiritual, educational and literary ties among intellectuals, philosophers, Kyiv Academy professors and Orthodox Church leaders, connecting them with like-minded figures from the Balkans, especially Bulgaria and Serbia. The “Kyiv scholarly” centres, as powerful hubs of knowledge and learning in the 17th and 18th centuries, significantly contributed (under the support of the Orthodox Church) to shaping a cultural environment receptive to European education and culture and facilitating their transmission to the South Slavic regions. The article concludes that the Ukrainian Baroque era created a transcultural communication space, enabling cultural interaction between Western Europe, Rus and the southern Balkan countries.

Lutos ławski’s artistic thinking always contained a substantial element of classicism. He valued highly such qualities in a musical work as a clear formal plan, well-proportioned design, logic in the musical process, and balance of expressive devices. Yet although he placed a greater emphasis on classical values, he did not hesitate to apply modern methods in his compositional technique. Thus, the classical aspect of his music does not merely rely on the presence of traits stemming from the classical tradition (this issue would also be worthy of consideration), but is founded above all on the excellent structure of his works, which results from his creative discipline and deliberate adherence to the rules of form.

The aim of this article is to describe the definition of a “cultural element” and to provide an analysis of the methods used in the translation of Yurii Andrukhovych’s autobiographical text The Secret. Instead of a Novel. The work was published in 2007 by the publishing house Folio in Kharkiv (Ukraine), and it was translated into the Polish language by Michał Petryk. “Cultural elements” mean here those elements of the text that are a part of the culture of a given country. These include such elements as personal and generic titles, phrases, fragments of texts from a country’s literature, statements by famous people related to the important events that happened in the country. They also include the social, political, scientific, and cultural environment, including music, cinematography, and more. Yurii Andrukhovych outlines many of the details that were characteristic for the USSR and tries not to distort the facts. The Secret is an autobiographical novel; therefore, it contains many reminiscences about the Soviet Union, Ukrainian culture, and literature. An autobiography becomes a kind of time machine for him, an attempt to reconstruct the past. Therefore, he pays a lot of attention to the smaller things and tries to convey the details of the atmosphere of the time described. Because of this, the work is saturated with cultural elements that may cause untranslatability. The cultural elements mentioned in Yurii Andrukhovych’s text and the correlation of translation have not been often analysed in the past scientific studies; hence, this creates a need for scientific research. The scope of this study is limited to the group of literary-political cultural elements. The article analyses the methods chosen by the translator and compares the level of equivalence of the translated text to the original; also, it finds the causes of untranslatability of the novel.

Lou Harrison’s Music for Western Instruments and Gamelan: Even More Western than It Sounds Henry Spiller (bio) “. . . West and East, both in Harrison’s idiosyncratic style, meet in a ravishingly beautiful, unselfconscious and unforced way” —Neil Sorrell (1992) “Through his gamelan works Harrison completed his long-sought goal of uniting East and West” —Leta E. Miller and Fredric Lieberman (1998, 173) “So far I’m the first one, they keep saying, who has made—what is it?—a useful marriage between East and West” —Lou Harrison to Richard Kostelanetz (1992, 398) Critics and musicologists widely acknowledge composer Lou Harrison (1917–2003) as a pioneer in forging successful fusions between Eastern and Western music. Toward the end of his career, he focused much of his attention on composing music for gamelan, and among the most highly regarded of these fusion works are pieces that combine solo Western instruments and gamelan.1 Nobody—least of all Harrison himself—would characterize these fusion works as “authentic,” and Harrison’s own goals in composing for gamelan were not to reproduce or even imitate traditional gamelan music. Yet Harrison relied extensively on traditional Javanese instrumental idioms, and on the competence of his musicians to fill in the details of their individual parts according to Javanese musical processes; the result was a musical surface with an exotic patina that many listeners perceived to represent authentic Javanese music. That Harrison seemed to put the Javanese elements of his music on the same footing as the Western elements led to assessments that the fusions were genuinely equitable blendings of East and West.2 Jonathan Bernard attributes the appeal of Harrison’s music to mainstream Western audiences to its ability to be “exotic and familiar at the same time” (Bernard 1998, 544). Much of what is familiar is rooted in Harrison’s compositional process, and the contexts in which his music are performed, which, as Dwight Thomas argues, are “strongly grounded in the Western art music [End Page 31] tradition” (Thomas 1983, 100). What many hear as exotic—as Eastern—resides in the pieces’ soundscapes: the unfamiliar instrumental timbres, tunings, and compositional forms and techniques that Harrison deploys in his work. But do these exotic sounds really come from somewhere else? Much attention has been paid, for example, to Harrison’s predilection for rational tuning systems (e.g., just intonations). In a brilliant analysis, Marc Perlman demonstrates how Harrison’s superposition of just intonation onto gamelan tunings is a clear continuation of a Western discourse about tuning that has little, if anything, to do with Javanese musical aesthetics; Perlman demonstrates that Javanese gamelan tuners apply their own approaches to temperament to accommodate various Javanese vocal modes and individual musicians’ personal interpretations (embat) of them (Perlman 1994). Harrison’s reputation as a gamelan pioneer, however, has led some critics to take at face value the utterly false implication that traditional gamelan music is justly intoned.3 Tuning, then, is one musical arena in which Harrison’s gamelan music makes the exotic seem familiar by masking non-Western approaches to music-making with existing Western discourses—a practice which has the potential to mislead its listeners into believing they are engaging with a non-Western musical aesthetic when, in fact, they are not. In this article, I focus on another such musical arena: Harrison’s treatment of gamelan rhythm. First I describe some fundamental differences between Western rhythmic sensibilities and the treatment of time in gamelan music. Next, I discuss how Harrison treats this rhythmic sensibility in two of his pieces for solo Western instruments and gamelan to favor the Western rhythmic sensibility. Finally, I examine the significance of this Westernization of gamelan musical processes such as tuning and rhythm; I contend that it misleads many listeners to attribute a quality of authenticity to Harrison’s gamelan music that overstates the equity of the works’ fusion of West and East. Simply put: even the parts that Western audiences hear as authentic gamelan music are more Western than they sound. End-Weighted Rhythmic Groupings Many well-read Western musicians have learned that the complex layers of polyphony in gamelan music arise from the simultaneous playing of many elaborations on a slow...

Biophilic design is developed in urban planning concepts for cities—in line with sustainable development. A case study of converting a former paper mill in Nanterre into a university campus showed what factors influence the emergence of the biophilic form. The research informs the planning and design mechanisms and directs attention to the process. As a result, the study demonstrates that biophilic elements from the place-based pattern group are directly related to in-depth environmental analysis—similar to elements from the nature-based and element-based pattern groups. Together they result in a biophilic form. The element of creation is also present in the design process but is not the primary determinant of the choice of a design approach. In part, the form is adapted to the area’s environmental characteristics, which result from their interaction with objective determinants. Nevertheless, the implementation is not devoid of compositional, creative, and cultural elements—that is, it assumes the features of biophilic architecture. This fact proves that the environment can influence the creative potential in architecture and urban studies.

The increasing density of cities poses a huge threat to public health, so pocket parks with high accessibility and flexibility have become potential resources to promote public health. In this context, the ways in which pocket parks can improve public health have become the focus and challenge of current research. This study selected 10 different types of pocket parks in Fuzhou, China, as the research subjects and collected real-time psychological and physiological data of participants by watching videos of the sample plots. The aim was to explore the impact of the environmental characteristics of pocket parks on the psychological and physiological responses of recreational users. The results of the study showed that: (1) the environmental characteristics of pocket parks significantly affect the psychological and physiological responses of recreationists. Different environmental characteristics can affect recreationists’ emotional state, attention recovery, environmental preferences, and the indicators of IBI, HR, SDNN, RMSSD, pNN50, SCL, and EMG to varying degrees. (2) The environment of pocket parks may encourage recreationists to generate positive psychological benefits when the site is larger and has a higher degree of scenic beauty, and when the space is not effectively confined. A pocket park environment with a low paving ratio, open view, cultural elements, topographic changes, special vegetation and distributing space can also have a positive effect on the psychological benefits of recreationists to a certain extent. Low canopy density and high green visibility can also play a role in suppressing negative emotions. (3) Pocket parks with high levels of depression and off-site disturbance are not conducive to positive physiological responses from recreationists, while pocket parks with high levels of green visibility and beauty and specialized vegetation are more likely to provide health benefits to them.