Aesthetic Assumptions Research Articles

The End of Pathos and of Youthful Innocence: Schiller, Wedekind, and Schnitzler

The essay reads Schnitzler’s Liebelei and Wedekind’s Frühlings Erwachen as examples of fin-de-siècle responses to the Schillerian concept of pathos and shows how these responses expressed a changing attitude toward love and the mind-body dichotomy. It discusses how the spiritualization and glorification of youth and romantic love became untenable at the end of the nineteenth century, when sexuality was recognized as an instinctual force and bourgeois morality was unmasked as a smokescreen that served to conceal sexual instincts. Reading the late-nineteenth-century dramas as a response to some of Schiller’s aesthetic assumptions reveals that Wedekind’s and Schnitzler’s modernist rebellion against the idealization of youth and nature was also accompanied by a melancholy over the loss of ideals.

Homo (wo)mensura: unpicking the flat pattern-cutting regimes of sartorial culture

This article documents a practice-based research project that interrogated the aesthetic assumptions and material contingencies incorporated into the regime of flat pattern cutting. An introductory section provides a historical overview of the discipline's development, ranging from its antecedents in the courts of medieval Europe to challenges to the system's hegemony authored by contemporary practitioners. The main section documents the development of a methodological approach derived from the gendered rubrics of apparel-sizing regimes and its implementation via the predictive function of a digital design package. Examples of creative outcomes produced by, in effect, ‘unpicking’ the standard design sequence are provided in diagrammatic and photographic form. The conclusion situates the findings within overarching debates surrounding the discipline of fashion – suggesting that in dynamic interactions between the ‘new’ knowledge of design technology and ‘traditional’ knowledge of sartorial culture lie opportunities for reconciling commercial imperatives of the mass market with innovations in design-led creative practice.

Lope de Vega and History on the Stages of the 20th and 21st Centuries

This paper aims to examine, on the one hand, the presence of Lope’s historical dramas on contemporary stage to confirm their continuity; and, on the other, to reflect on the distinctive features of the staging of these dramas from a specific corpus of performances dating from the last decades. The goal is to observe the current relevance of these dramas and performances, to study under what ethical and aesthetic assumptions characters are now represented and the historical episodes that Lope used in the creation of his fictions, as well as to analyze the possible connections between History, Lope and the audience of the 21st century.

Working-Class Writing and the Use Value of the Literary

Formal preoccupations, which is to say specifically literary concerns, appear in small literatures only in a second phase, when an initial stock of literary resources has been accumulated and the first international artists find themselves in a position to challenge the aesthetic assumptions associated with realism and to exploit the revolutionary advances achieved at the Greenwich meridian.—Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters“In our country culture has become so complex, this complexity is reflected in our literature. It takes a certain level of education to understand our novelists. The ordinary man cannot understand them …” … And she reeled off a list of authors, smiling smugly. It never occurred to her that these authors had ceased to be of any value whatsoever to their society—or was it really true that an extreme height of culture and the incomprehensible went hand in hand?—Bessie Head, A Question of Power (first ellipsis in orig.)ON WHAT BASIS ARE SELECT TRADITIONS OF LITERARY INTERNATIONALISM RECOGNIZED AS WORLD LITERATURE AND OTHERS DEEMED MERELY historical, relics of nostalgic Marxism or of resolved debates on aesthetics and politics? According to recent influential formulations, world literature is writing that in original or translated form circulates outside the author's country of origin. But what of traditions of literary internationalism, like those of working-class writing, that reverse and displace practical, utilitarian propositions to ask, instead, in more abstract terms, what is the use value of the literary? Bessie Head's A Question of Power poses a challenge to practical definitions. What of literary texts that have global currency but aren't of “any value whatsoever to their society”?

'Comparisons are Odious'? Revisiting the Metaphysical Conceit in Donne

This article seeks to locate the metaphysical conceit in its original contexts in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century arts of discourse: rhetorical elocutio and inventio, and the language of place logic that supplies material for poetic comparisons. I begin by analysing the cultural and aesthetic assumptions that underpin two foundational responses to the metaphysicals, those of Hazlitt and Johnson. Both discussions depend upon a model of literary topography that classifies the metaphysical conceit as stylistically and affectively remote: it is associated with foreign poetic tastes and recondite analogies too distant from the reader’s horizons of expectation. I then turn to early modern taxonomies, which have no place for the term conceit, but instead deal with exotic similitudes through the figure of catachresis, a stylistic transgression consisting of ‘far-fetched, incongruous speeches’ (Prideaux). Catachresis is evidence of a mind ‘that must wander into the confines’ (Hoskins) and gravitates towards remote corners of the poetic map. The topographical dimensions of early modern comparisons also emerge in Renaissance logic manuals, which cast the process of invention as a journey of exploration to distant topoi or places. I conclude by mapping the discourse of far-fetched comparisons on to Donne’s valediction poems. These lyrics work by imagining the two lovers in different places, and in extreme states of feeling. Catachresis, characterized by Hoskins as ‘somewhat more desperate then a Metaphore’, uniquely captures this register of grief and longing, but also provides a temporary fiction of connectivity, as the lovers’ minds converge in the remote logical places that constitute Donne’s conceits.

The Heart, Not the Face: A Civil-War-Era Tale and the Persistent Challenge of Race in Religious Education

This article analyzes the 1863 pseudo slave narrative entitled Black and White; Or, the Heart, Not the Face by white Northerner Jane Dunbar Chaplin. The article sets this tale within the historical and literary context of “domestic abolitionism.” The logic behind the story is described as “sympathetic identification,” a perspective that, although elevating the slave protagonist, leaves unexamined white religious, aesthetic, cultural, and political assumptions. The article concludes with a reflection on the persistence of this logic in current Religious Education settings and offers advice for practitioners who desire to expand interracial and intercultural understanding.

Problematising the ‘Orderly’ Aesthetic Assumptions of Forecasts of East–West Migration in the European Union

This paper critically examines migration forecasts: numerical guesstimates of future patterns of migration flows. In the enlarging European Union, migration forecasts are often carried out upon requests from mass-migration-fearing policy makers. Most forecasts are based on key principles and working practices adhered to in neoclassical economics and spatial science—notably, equilibrium and place. Offering apparent numerical certainty, migration forecasts speak to a latent desire for aesthetic sociospatial order. Migration is considered a disequilibrium phenomenon, and linear movements and final destinations are presupposed. However, it is argued that these ‘orderly’ aesthetic assumptions do not correspond with ‘messy’ real East–West migration dynamics in the EU, which are foremost temporary and circulatory in nature. Drawing on evidence from the Netherlands, the paper concludes by suggesting that migration forecasts may indirectly strengthen claims for restrictive migration policy.

William Glock and the British Broadcasting Corporation's Music Policy, 1959–73

This article examines the British Broadcasting Corporation's broadcasting of contemporary art music during the 1960s and early 1970s. Particular reference is made to the ideas and activities of William Glock, controller of music at the BBC from 1959 to 1973, contemporary composers whose music the BBC either neglected or championed during this period because of the idiom in which they composed, and Glock's controversial legacy. Setting Glock's ideas and activities in a historical and philosophical context provokes reflection on aspects of music and broadcasting history, and provides a case study in two aesthetic assumptions which dominated the three decades after the Second World War: change is preferable to stability, and novelty guarantees value. Doing so also helps explain why the labels ‘contemporary’ and ‘avant-garde’ became indistinguishable during the 1960s, and the logic by which more traditional but still contemporary works were excluded from programmes devoted to twentieth century music.

Music in Other Words: Victorian Conversations, and: The Idea of Music in Victorian Fiction (review)

Music in Other Words: Victorian Conversations. By Ruth A. Solie. (California Studies in 19th-century Music.) Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. [223 p. ISBN 0-520-23845-1. $39.95.] Illustrations, index. Idea of Music in Victorian Fiction. Edited by Sophie Fuller and Nicky Losseff. (Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain.) Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004. [xx, 297 p. ISBN 0-7546-0577-9. $109.95.] Index, bibliography. Both these books are volumes in nineteenth-century series but only Solie's earned ML780 classification status at C-I-P stage of production, Fuller/ Losseff being properly assessed as literary criticism (PR823). Solie's prize-winning book (a finalist for 2005 American Musicological Society Kinkeldey Award) collects and refreshes four essays published earlier and adds two that are new. Fuller and Losseff bring together essays by eleven academic specialists in literature and musicology, some of which rework conference papers. Both books are fully indexed and carry welcome footnotes as both documentation and commentary. Fuller/Losseff collects bibliographic information from those citations into a bibliography of whole, helpfully divided into categories of primary and secondary literature. Both books begin with essays that serve as overviews, Solie's eloquently stating her interest in investigating what Leo Treitler called cardinal importance of 'what goes without saying' (p. 1) in a given culture's texts-all that is taken for granted or assumed be obvious. Solie explains that she took a casual comment by Leonard Meyer regarding cultural scuttlebutt as a definition of texts pursue help her make explicit the degree which Victorian world was saturated with music (p. 1). Edward Burne-Jones's painting Golden Stairs is given in color reproduction on dust jacket and in graytone as frontispiece her book and Solie says she found it helpful to look away from professional discourse of musicians and use sources as disparate and unlikely as journalism, novels, and teenagers' diaries unearth conversations that reveal music's place in nineteenth-century European and North American culture (p. 2). Fuller and Losseff's introduction comments on all essays in their book. Their purpose is interdisciplinary (musicology and literary criticism) but limited exploring British works of fiction, sufficient sources for myriad themes: reception, practice, societal issues, aesthetic assumptions and urgent late-nineteenth-century matter of personal and national identity. Unifying care was taken in both books refer chapters ahead and behind, as appropriate. Neither book has a sewn binding. UC Press product is printed on minimally permanent paper with a gluedon headband, and inner margins wide enough for eventual rebinding, while bare-bones Ashgate book, which opens easily enough, makes no claim permanence but could also withstand one rebinding. Fuller and Losseff, only slightly longer but nearly three times as expensive as Solie's book, and more limited in scope, is also generally cast in far more formidable academic language. Nicky Losseff, both a Lecturer in Music at University of York and a pianist specializing in contemporary music, offers chapter one: The Voice, Breath and Soul: Song and Poverty in Thyrta, Mary Barton, Alton Locke and A Child of Jago. Its twice-footnoted first sentence challenges readers know what sage writers are, tolerate notion yet again, and later withstand problematized (p. 3). novels Losseff examines originally had a working class audience and their singing characters were set in economically poor environments where air was foul. They dreamt of freedom of breath such as came on a rare fresh-air day, kind that London sees but once in half a dozen winters as one author put it (p. 15). Spirituality and religion (pointedly not same thing) and sacrifice are also treated in these novels and Losseff digs deeply into authors' research, their personal experience with poverty, and social, spiritual, and individual meanings they projected on singing in their works. …

It Could Be Verse: The 2005 Lion and the Unicorn Award for Excellence in North American Poetry

Winner: Marilyn Nelson. Fortune's Bones: The Manumission Requiem. Asheville, NC: Front Street Books, 2004. Honor Books: Helen Frost. Spinning Through the Universe: A Novel in Poems from Room 214. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2004. JonArno Lawson. The Man in the Moon-Fixer's Mask. Toronto: Pedlar Press, 2004. Walter Dean Myers. Here in Harlem: Poems in Many Voices. New York: Holiday House, 2004. Allan Wolf. New Found Land: Lewis and Clark's Voyage of Discovery. Cambridge, MA: Candlewick Press, 2004. In her introduction to the 2004 edition of The Best American Poetry, Lyn Hejinian makes clear that she doesn't "believe in 'bestness.'" She initially resisted editing the collection, only agreeing after she had come to see her job as a cartographer of sorts, one responsible for giving readers a taste of the "dynamic, ever-changing" terrain of poetry as "a site of perpetual transitions and unpredictable metamorphoses." She writes, "there is no end point in poetry. Indeed, American poetry has always been so full of energy and inventive that it is impossible to define poetry once and for all or to delimit its space. What is or isn't a poem? What makes something poetic? These questions remain open" (9). Her anthology—like all the collections in the Best American series—completely ignores children's poetry. Even the most radically inclusive poets and critics of poetry tend to ignore children's poetry and leave it outside [End Page 427] the world of "real" poetry, that is, poetry for adults. So it is especially heartening—and crucial—that 2004 marks the inauguration of The Lion and the Unicorn Award for Excellence in North American Poetry, a continuation of Signal's venerable award, which, sadly, ended in 2001 shortly before the journalceased publication with its one hundredth issue in 2003. Unlike Signal, which considered only books of poetry published in Great Britain, The Lion and the Unicorn Award focuses on North American poetry. But like Hejinian's anthology and the Signal poetry award, this new award similarly resists the idea of "bestness" and focuses instead on excellence in children's poetry. We are not choosing the "best" book of poetry for children. We would find it hard to choose between Karen Hesse's Out of the Dust (1997) and Stephen Mitchell's The Wishing Bone (2003) had they had been published the same year. Both are excellent, but which is best? In reading the North American poetry for children published in 2004, we were faced with similar questions, though we did arrive at a winner: Marilyn Nelson's Fortune's Bones: The Manumission Requiem, a moving collection that we unanimously selected as the most interesting and complex of the books we received from publishers. The four honor books are not ranked, for they are all so different, so satisfying and impressive that ranking was impossible. These books suggest how diverse and multiple poetic expression can be as they participate in an array of poetic modes and traditions, each working from quite different aesthetic assumptions: there are lyrics, elegies, narratives (two call themselves "novels"), historical narratives, literary nursery rhymes, and, of course, light verse. We did wish there were more formally experimental works. The one collection of concrete poetry (Technically, It's Not My Fault, by book and magazine designer John Grandits) wasn't an especially interesting example of the form. Our list of finalists is heartening, nonetheless. The state of children's poetry in North America isn't as depressingly limited as most of the seventy-seven books we received might lead one to believe. However, while we resist easy notions of "best," we still find pretty useful the notion of "bad." Our winner, Fortune's Bones, and our four honor books forecast a promising and stylistically...

Christina Rossetti and Illustration: A Publishing History (review)

Reviewed by: Christina Rossetti and Illustration: A Publishing History Elizabeth Gargano (bio) Christina Rossetti and Illustration: A Publishing History. By Lorraine Janzen Kooistra. Athens: Ohio UP2002 In 1979, R. W. Crump published the first installment of the three-volume Complete Poems of Christina Rossetti, ultimately completed in 1990. Along with The Letters of Christina Rossetti (the first volume of which appeared in 1997), this impressive work signaled a new era in Rossetti studies. While her flamboyantly controversial poem Goblin Market never ceased to attract readers both inside and outside the academy, Rossetti's literary reputation had suffered from years of critical neglect. Once overshadowed by her illustrious brother, the poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti, this neglected female "pre-Raphaelite" has emerged as a talented writer for children and adults, a shrewd critic of the gender roles and class assumptions of her day, and a versatile figure who bridges gaps between "popular" and "literary" modes of writing. In her comprehensive Christina Rossetti and Illustration, Lorraine Janzen Kooistra traces the history of Rossetti's changing literary fortunes over the last two centuries, offering a fascinating portrait of Rossetti's career, as well as the economic realities and aesthetic assumptions that have fostered changing attitudes toward her work. Kooistra describes her book as "a case study" of Rossetti's writing within the context of Victorian and twentieth-century publishing practices (2). She also details the impact of such practices on our assumptions about texts and textuality. Kooistra's analysis offers an additional focus, investigating Rossetti's texts as visual objects whose perceived meaning may be altered by their design and illustrations. The "premise" of her exploration, she emphasizes, "is that...image, text, and book...must be studied relationally" (7). Examining Rossetti's writings through the lens of her "materialist aesthetic"(8), Kooistra acknowledges her debt to Jerome McGann's 1991 work, The Textual Condition. McGann's seminal analysis challenged the once traditional view of literary texts as fixed entities whose "content" is determined solely by the "best" version of an author's work. His argument typified a changing critical climate, as scholars moved away from the notion of a single definitive text toward an acceptance of multiple "variants" reflecting the historical and material conditions that produced them. Kooistra's methodology illuminates in previously unexplored ways the complexity and range of Rossetti's achievement. Rossetti's highly cultivated visual imagination led her to plan her books as exquisite artifacts. For more than a year, Kooistra notes, she delayed the initial publication of her narrative poem, The Prince's Progress, in order to include the woodcut illustrations promised by her brother, Dante Gabriel. Whenever possible, Rossetti selected and collaborated with her illustrators in order to shape her books' final appearance. Foregrounding links between Rossetti's publications over the course of two centuries, Kooistra organizes her subject matter into two parallel sections. "Victorian Productions" details the creation, publication, and reception of Rossetti's works in the nineteenth century. "Twentieth-Century Reproductions" tracks later incarnations of Rossetti's writings—most notably Goblin Market—not only in illustrated editions, but also in theatrical productions that Kooistra sees as "a new form of illustration operating live in three dimensions" (270). She also devotes her attention to the digital images that create a "Virtual Christina" on numerous Rossetti websites (252). Each section of her book examines three major categories of Rossetti's work: volumes of poetry for adults (often collectors' items featuring beautifully produced artwork), children's books, and devotional writing. This categorical approach is undoubtedly useful to readers with a special interest in one aspect of Rossetti's varied oeuvre. It does, however, necessitate a certain amount of repetition, as some genre-straddling works appear in more than one section. Kooistra's analysis of two works for younger audiences, Sing-Song: A Nursery Rhyme Book and Speaking Likenesses, is of special interest to students of children's literature. While both works were illustrated by the talented Arthur Hughes, the resulting books differed dramatically. When composing poems for Sing-Song, Rossetti had sketched rough illustrations that contextualized her brief and sometimes cryptic rhymes; her sketches later served as the basis for Hughes' evocative and amusing illustrations. Pleased by the...

The loudspeaker as musical instrument: An examination of the issues surrounding loudspeaker performance of music in typical rooms

The loudspeaker is the most important and one of the most variable elements in the electroacoustic music performance process. Nonetheless, its performance is subject to a ‘‘willing suspension of disbelief’’ by listeners and its behavior and variability are usually not accounted for in assessments of the quality of music reproduction or music instrument synthesis, especially as they occur in small rooms. This paper will examine the aesthetic assumptions underlying loudspeaker usage, the general timbral qualities and sonic characteristics of loudspeakers and some of the issues and problems inherent in loudspeakers interactions with small rooms and listeners.

Representation in India's sacred images: objective vs. metaphysical reference

Coomaraswamy and other art interpreters have read into Indian images metaphysical meanings extrapolated from scriptural sources. In this article it is argued that such meanings, with which image-making was doubtless invested, were intended for purposes of meditation and cannot be admitted as part of the objective representation of the images, except where they figure as iconographical features. The images were also not conceived as yantras, but as full-bodied representations conforming to objective norms. The metaphysical excursions are largely extraneous to the aesthetic assumptions of Indian art and detract from its rich mythical content.

"Tell Tchaikovsky the News": Postmodernism, Popular Culture, and the Emergence of Rock 'N' Roll

The contemporary notion of the postmodern, developed in the early 1970s and being argued almost to meaninglessness today, arose in the context of pop in the broadest sense of the term (Huyssen 1984). In its most significant manifestations, postmodernism has challenged the official culture of modernism and its underlying aesthetic categories and assumptions. One of the original inspirations for that challenge came from early rock 'n' roll performers, most notably Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley, Little Richard, and Jerry Lee Lewis, all of whom first appeared when modernism, having lost its original adversarial character, had become the basis of mainstream cultural authority in America. I want to argue that postmodernism, though a problematical concept, gives us a way of better understanding those early musicians and that those early musicians are our culture's proto-postmodernists. This will require a brief excursion into the history of modernism and its place in postwar America, a definition of the highly controversial notion of the postmodern, and a discussion of each of these early rock 'n' rollers in terms of one aspect of their postmodernism-their trafficking in significations of the Other and of marginality. As these terms suggest, I will be calling on a number of poststructuralist critical discourses to help unfold the postmodernist nature of some early rock 'n' roll, though I do not for a moment assume that poststructuralism and postmodernism are synonymous, that the former is merely the critical voice of the artistic practices of the latter. Finally, I will suggest some general ways in which a rereading of early rock 'n' roll in light of postmodernism may help unsnarl some of the conceptual tanglesthemselves rooted in modernist assumptions-that impede black music research.

Introduction: Modernism and Anti-theatricality

Twenty years ago, Jonas Barish identified a disposition within Western culture that he termed the anti-theatrical prejudice. From the Greeks to the present, he cites instances of a bias against the expressive, the imitative, the deceptive, the spectacular, and the subject that arouses, or even acknowledges, an audience. Exposing the philosophical, moral, and aesthetic assumptions made by the enemies of the theatre throughout the centuries, his Antitheatrical Prejudice sought to fortify theatre's defenses against its detractors. This special issue of Modern Dramo offers a critical appraisal of Barish's seminal study. While indebted to him, the collection argues that Barish's trans-historical notion both of anti-theatricalism and, by extension, of the theatre itself is in need of a number of revisions. By focusing on aspects of modem drama (including its intersections with other cultural forms), the articles that follow insist on a historical grounding of any understanding of anti-theatricalism and therefore explore various forms of a specifically modernist critique of theatre. In doing so, the collection moves beyond Barish's monolithic understanding of "the theatre" and proposes to see modem theatre as a field marked by competing, and often contradictory, impulses and developments, a field in which different theatres are engaged in a contentious struggle with one another.

More than a reader and less than a critic: Literary authority and women's book-discussion groups

The phenomenon of women reading books collaboratively is largely invisible, and certainly under-researched. This study, based on extensive circulation figures and on a small sample of members of four Council of Adult Education reading groups in metropolitan Melbourne, argues that such groups have a reading repertoire which is seriously middlebrow, far removed from the “wish-fulfillment” or “lazy reader” stereotypes purveyed by some who would scorn such groups. The study finds that such groups are sensitively served by the institution which hosts them. While such groups do not question the aesthetic assumptions that underlie their practice, they are combative with some manifestations of the literary establishment. Their powerful preferences for contemporary Australian women's fiction and their participation in global debates via identity politics suggests they warrant closer examination, both within Australian culture, and to find out if such groups have counterparts in other cultures.

The Aesthetics of Interactive Computer Music

This article describes the aesthetics of interactive computer music and contrasts these with aesthetic assumptions of other genres of computer music. Interactive computer music is a sub-genre of what might be called performance-oriented computer music-that is, any computer music that includes a strong performance component. This broader category requires at least one live performer joined with computer-generated or electronically produced or modified music. The genre thus incorporates both the traditional tape-plusinstrument medium (Mario Davidovsky's series of Synchronisms [e.g., Davidovsky 1988] are paradigmatic) and more recent interactive computer music-whether precomposed, improvised, randomly generated, or a mixture of these. I will narrow the focus of this article to just those works that are interactive: works wherein the performer in some way controls the electronics or the electronics affect the performer's sounds. The conceptual implications of this genre are rarely discussed. Even in works that purport to treat of the aesthetics of computer music in a general fashion, such as Keane (1986) and many essays in Heifetz (1989), the issues addressed fall short of those that are implied in addressing interactive computer music. Rather than merely creating a typology or presenting the more problematic aspects of its ontology, my aim will be to show what aesthetic qualities this music has that distinguish it from other genres of electronic and electroacoustic music as well as from other forms of music generally. Since aesthetic issues are intimately intertwined with value judgements, I also make some claims about the relative value of various approaches to computer-extended performance and their possibilities. After a brief discussion of some definitional and ontological issues (simply to set the boundaries of discussion), I turn to the main points of the article. These are considered under two broad, complementary headings: (1) the human performer's contribution to computer music, and (2) the computer's contribution to human performance. Within these broad sections, there is a background theme involving the nature and relationship of the human element to the machine element. In a great deal of music since the advent of electronic sound production, the electronic elements have been used to imply the non-human; this is one reason electronic music has been so often used in science fiction films. This is some-

Techniques of appropriation in music of John Cage

Artists in the second half of the twentieth century, explained John Cage in 1965, have a unique opportunity to “think of past literature as material rather than art.” It is not surprising that Cage would welcome “borrowings” from the past, since he consistently advocated using the “entire field of sound.” Moreover, it is noteworthy that, in the 1960s, creative artists from a variety of disciplines began to work under similar aesthetic assumptions. During the same period, for example, Robert Rauschenberg created a series of paintings incorporating a vast array of contemporary images with photographic reproductions of classic works. Today such appropriations are a recurrent feature of much late twentieth-century art, music, film, and literature. Appropriation and its allied techniques of quotation, parody, and pastiche have also been a focus of postmodernist cultural theory. This paper places Cage's musical appropriations within this larger artistic and intellectual context. Through a study of Cheap Imitation (1969), the Songbooks (1970), Apartment House 1776 (1976), and his Europeras (1987–1991), it shows how appropriation played a crucial role in the development of Cage's musical style. Finally it suggests that the appropriation of music from the past allowed Cage to return to writing “expressive” music, a practice he had abandoned since the early 1950s.

La España de posguerra y la poesía Anglófona

The main aim of this essay is to analyse the translations and reviews of English poetry that appeared in three representative literary journals of post-Civil War Spain: Escorial (1940-1947), Espadaña (1944-1950) and Cántico (1947-1949;1954-1957). The proportion of articles and translations, characteristics and scholarly seriousness of the sections devoted to this topic will give evidence of the ideological background of each of the three publications. We will study the reasons that led to the various choices of both poets and translators and this will also be an aid to our inquiry into the political and aesthetic assumptions of these journals. During the 1940’ś and 50’ś, literary reviews were the place where many Spanish intellectuals and scholars could more or less openly express their different reactions towards Franco ś dictatorship. And — as professor Rubio (1976) has pointed out — as far as ideological involvement was concerned, there were two main types of journals: the “eclectic” and the “confessional”. Within the “confessional” type, Escorial would voice the official dogma whereas Espadaña would stand for the impatient detractors of the règime, the so called “tremendistas”. As for Cántico, this journal was an example of the “eclectic” position, since it welcomed all kinds of aesthetic and political creeds. The three reviews will be examined altogether as a paradigm of the literary situation in Spain, during the years of ideological censorship and intellectual involution that followed the Civil War.

The Articulation of National Identity Through Film Music

This article examines the use of music in narrative film as code for geographical location as well as racial and ethnic characterisations. The aesthetic assumptions and mechanisms deployed in film music are explored and their historic precedents identified. Different approaches are considered and their virtues and limitations evaluated in tenns of dramatic function, with particular reference to: contrasting approaches to the representation of Native American Indians; attempts to use ethnically authentic music; the representation of Hispanicity and Englishness; tribal anthems and shared experience.