Des Pres Research Articles

Francisco Guerrero héritier de la tradition franco-flamande: onze pièces basées sur un ostinato

Dans son œuvre religieuse, Francisco Guerrero exploite à plusieurs reprises un type de composition contrapuntique relativement peu répandu à son époque: l'écriture sur cantus firmus ostinato. Pour les musicologues germaniques, ceci représente une des formes ultimes du motet isorythmique médiéval. Le travail architectural, particulièrement soigné, y est ordonné par une véritable arithmétique musicale, issue de l'ars música mathematica. Guerrero honore ainsi la tradition de ses prédécesseurs, illustrée par le Miserere à 5 voix de Josquin des Prés. Il suit également son maître Cristobal de Morales en lui empruntant, semble-t-il, quelques modèles. Mais son écriture sait se mettre au goût du jour, et confère à l'ostinato un sens et une efficacité oratoires dignes d'un grand rhétoricien. Cet aspect de sa personnalité musicale s'unit harmonieusement à son côté novateur -celui des villancicos et des motets polychorauxpour témoigner de son génie universel.

Integrating the New Psycho-Social Research About Rescuers of Jews into the Teaching of Holocaust Courses

Volume 10, No.2 Winter 1992 FOCUS ON PROGRAMS AND TEACHING 97 We welcome responses, dialogue, and discussions of experiences in this regular column. Teaching the Holocaust The following discussions were presented at the Third Annual Conference of the Midwest Jewish Studies Association in Madison, Wisconsin, October 13, 1991. Integrating the New Psycho-Social Research About Rescuers of Jews into the Teaching of Holocaust Courses Lawrence Baron Director, the Lipinsky Institute for Judaic Studies San Diego State University Psycho-social interpretations of the behavior of the perpetrators and the victims of the Holocaust have long been central to the study and teaching of the Shoah. In reference to SS conduct, Holocaust courses usually refer to the Milgram or similar clinical experiments to provide one possible explanation for why seemingly normal Germans obeyed their murderous orders. When discussing survival in the concentratiOn camps, Bettelheim's or Frankl's analyses of the coping mechanisms employed by camp inmates have been contrasted to the theories advanced by Des Pres or Langer.1 Until recently, there was no body of psycho-social literature on the motivations of Gentiles who saved Jews during the Holocaust. Thus, the rescue of Jews was taught from a comparative national perspective which usually focused on Denmark as the atypical case of collective solidarity with the persecuted Jews.2 Coverage of "righteous gentiles" in class lectures and readings 1For example, see Margot Stern Strom and William S. Parsons, Facing History and Ourselves: Holocaust and Human Behavior (Watertown, MA: International Educations , 1982), pp. 137-157,228-229. 2Strom and Parsons, Facing History, pp. 285-290; Yehuda Bauer,A History ofthe Holocaust (New York: Franklin Watts, 1982), pp. 289-295; Richard L. Rubenstein and John K. Roth,Approaches to Auschwitz: The Holocaust and Its Legacy (Atlanta: John 98 SHOFAR tended to be limited to narratives about their good deeds, but failed to probe further into their backgrounds, beliefs, and personalities.3 Students learned something about rescue activities, but almost nothing about the traits and values of the people engaged in such efforts.4 Philip Hallie's Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed stands out as one early notable exception to this rule precisely because it delves deeply into the prior lives and moral convictions of its protagonists.5 Perry London's 1970 pilot study of "Christians who saved Jews" heralded the beginning of serious sytematic inquiry into the psychological and sociological origins of ethical courage under life-threatening conditions.6 The past decade has witnessed the publication of a spate of significant articles and books that have examined which qualities and experiences distinguished the rescuers from the vast majority of their neighbors who abandoned the Jews to their genocidal fate in Nazi-occupied Europe. The bestknown scholars involved in this research are Eva Fleischner, Eva Fogelman, Knox Press, 1987), pp. 216-223. Much more extensive coverage of comparative national rescue experiences can be found in Leni Yahil, The Holocaust: The Fate ofEuropean Jewry, 1932-1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 573-652. 3Strom and Parsons, Facing History, pp. 290-292; Bauer, History, pp. 286-289, 324--325; Rubenstein and Roth, Approaches, pp. 223-228. Two popular books which exemplify the narrative approaches to rescuers are Philip Friedman, Their Brothers' Keepers (New York: Holocaust Library, 1978), and Peter Hellman, Avenue of the Righteous (New York: Bantam Books, 1981). 4For an earlier review article on this problem, see Lawrence Baron, "The Holocaust and Human Decency: A Review of Research on the Rescue of Jews in Nazi Occupied Europe," Humboldt Journal ofSocial Relations, Vol. 13, No. 1/2 (1986), pp.237-251. 5phillip Hallie, Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed: The Story of Le Chambon and How Goodness Happened There (New York: Harper and Row, 1979). 6perry London, "The Rescuers: Motivational Hypotheses About Christians Who Saved Jews from the Nazis," in Altruism and Helping Behavior, ed. J. Macaulay and L. Berkowitz (New York: Academic Press, 1970), pp. 241-250. For the first study of rescuers based on survey data, see Manfred Wolfson, "Zum Widerstand gegen Hitler: Umriss eines Gruppenportrats deutscher Retter von Juden," Tradition und Neubeginn (Munich, 1975), pp. 391-407. Volume 10, No.2 Winter 1992 99 Douglas Huneke, Mordecai Paldiel, Pearl and Sam...

Some Overlooked Modulations in the Works of Josquin Des Pres?

Some Overlooked Modulations in the Works of Josquin Des Pres?

Differences Between Blacks and Whites, Women and Men, in Reasons for Living

Most research has shown that there are race differences in suicide rates (deCatanzaro, 1981), with Blacks being about half as likely to die by suicide as Whites (4.6 versus 11.3 per 100,000, annually). Among teenagers, a particularly high-risk group, there was a ratio of nearly one non-White suicide to two White suicides in 1981 (National Center for Health Statistics, 1984). There are also gender differences in suicide rates. Depending on age, the suicide rate for women in the United States is one-eighth to one-third that of men (McGinnis, 1987). The ratio of suicides by 20 to 24 year old men and women was nearly 5:1 in 1980 (Mercy, Tolsma, Smith, & Conn, 1984). The majority of research in the field of suicide has been directed at identifying maladaptive characteristics of suicidal persons. Adaptive, life-maintaining characteristics may be just as importantthey prevent suicide -but have received little research attention. There are also theoretical and clinical reasons for focusing on adaptive characteristics. From a theoretical perspective, Des Pres (1976) and Frankl (1959) independently proposed a model to investigate adaptive, life-maintaining characteristics in their studies of the survivors of the Nazi concentration camps. From a clinical perspective, for every person who commits suicide when faced with realistically difficult problems, there are many others who find

The Public and Private Realms of Hill's Mercian Hymns

In his essay Poetry and Politics-the lead piece of a recent TriQuarterly special issue-Terrence Des Pres makes a call for poets to produce writing strong enough to handle history and stay cowed within the world of self. Des Pres values poetry not so much grounded in ideology as in the concrete reactions of men and women who find themselves in history's path.' Since the 1970s a number of British poets have begun producing works growing out of rootedness in a particular locality's history, topography, and mythology. Dissatisfied with discrete lyrics bounded by Des Pres' halting world of self, these poets-including Irishman Seamus Heaney, Scotsman George MacKay Brown, Welshman R. S. Thompson, and Englishman Jeremy Hookerhave been working on extended structures: sequences and narratives focusing on history, culture, and politics. Among English poets today, Geoffrey Hill, in his sequence Mercian Hymns, has gone furthest toward placing the self within the historical and political life of his or her culture.2 Even though Mercian Hymns weaves in material from Hill's personal experience, the self does exist in isolation in the sequence. Instead, the various speakers of these hymns3 interact with past and present elements of English culture. Hill achieves this interaction by creating an idiom that allows a public voice to take on the intensity and immediacy of a private consciousness, and a private voice to gain the breadth, resonance, and authority of a public persona. Mercian Hymns is a record of the growth of a poet's mind4 and of the development of a culture. It is a self-portrait, particularly of Hill as a child growing up in England in the 1940s; but it is also a portrait of a potent British myth: Offa, the king who stands at the beginnings of

Dimension and Authority

DIMENSION AND AUTHORITY / Rodney Jones Archaic Figure, by Amy Clampitt, Knopf. $8.95 paper. Lovesick, by Gerald Stern, Harper & Row. $9.95 paper. Flesh and Blood, by C. K. Williams, Farrar/Straus/Giroux. $12.95 cloth. The Sunset Maker, by Donald Justice, Atheneum. $8.95 paper. ANY ATTEMPT TO COMPARE POETS as accomplished as Amy Clampitt, Gerald Stern, C. K. Williams, and Donald Justice poses an ethical problem, for each has created work that demands a distinctive reading. It would be absurd to measure Justice, for instance, by Clampitt, or Stern by WilUams. Nor is there space here to link the poets by common historical affiliations. Certainly, Justice and Clampitt are heirs of Wallace Stevens, just as Stern and Williams are heirs of William Carlos Williams, but the Stevens modes that Justice and Clampitt employ are not the same, and Stern and Williams have learned different lessons from Dr. Williams. Nevertheless, I would like to approach these new books by discussing them within the framework of a common issue: how a poet of the first order achieves, in our time, a dimension sufficient to make poetry that will matter. Two recent essays, Donald Hall's "Poetry and Ambition" and Terence Des Pres' "Self/Landscape/Grid," have questioned the scope of contemporary poetry. Hall complains of a "modesty of ambition"; Des Pres laments the failure of poets to deal with large social issues such as nuclear proliferation. And whUe Hall is primarily concerned with the poet's responsibility to poetry, and Des Pres with the poet's responsibility to society, both specify a poetry that fails in conception more than in craft. For me, however, the more frightening indictment is that much of our poetry honors an imaginative and musical focus of such narrow range that the resultant poetry is, almost by default, minor. As a seventy-five year old Wallace Stevens said, "we can never have great poetry unless we believe that poetry serves great ends. We must recognize this from the beginning so that it will affect everything that we do. Our belief in the greatness of poetry is a vital part of its greatness, an implicit part of the belief of others in its greatness." And yet if we take Stevens' maxim seriously, then we must distinguish between the belief in poetry and the belief in the ends that poetry serves. The desire to create an original and compelling musical phrase, for instance, differs considerably from Milton's ambition to "justify God's ways to man." But if the latter strikes some 262 · The Missouri Review as more laudable, to others it will seem inconsistent with the temper of an age in which icons have been reduced to artifacts, and kings and queens to emblems of defunct monarchies. This is not to say that the icons have been completely overturned; one has only to read Seamus Heaney's "Station Island" or Derek Walcott's "The Spoiler's Return" to feel the power—in the old sense of "dominance," of speaking from the other side—that these artifacts contain. But the more common concerns of poems of the last thirty years have not been social, political, or religious so much as refinements of individual human consciousness, the major consequence, perhaps, of imagisme. Clampitt, Stern, WUUams, and Justice, while they are each interested in such refinements, go far beyond the history-and-abstractionpurged consciousness of so many of the heirs of imagisme. Though Williams, for example, seems to be a poet of the immediate moment, he elaborates, in that brief frame, a historical dimension which extends our notion of what a moment can contain, as in this ninth section of "La Petit Salvie": How ambiguous the triumphs of our time, the releasing of the intellect from myth and magic. We've gained much, we think, from having torn away corrupted modes of aggrandizement and giantism, those infected and infecting errors that so long held sway and so bloated our complacencies that we would willingly inflict even on our own flesh the crippling implications of our metaphysic. Clearly, this is poetry that aspires to breadth. The same might be said of Justice's "St. Michael's Cemetery, Charleston." One may depend on...

The Drama of the Holocaust: Issues of Choice and Survival

One of the ways in which Jews and others have sought somehow to assimilate the knowledge of the Nazi Holocaust has been through the theatrical expression of the appalling dilemmas it posed. Implicitly or explicitly, however, the process of ‘shaping’ that this involves forces an attitude to be taken by the dramatist towards the meaning of ‘choice’ in such circumstances, and the ‘acceptable’ price of possible survival. In his anthology The Theatre of the Holocaust (1982), Robert Skloot assembled four plays which exemplified the possible ‘attitudes to survival’, and here he relates them to the ideas of Bruno Bettelheim, Terrence Des Pres, and other writers on the subject, in an attempt to assess how fully and honestly theatre is able to reflect the issues involved. Robert Skloot is Professor of Theatre and Drama at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and was Fulbright Lecturer in Israel in 1980–81. He has also edited a collection of essays, ‘The Darkness We Carry’: the Drama of the Holocaust, due for publication in the spring of 1988.

Comments on Des Pres' "Terror and the Sublime"

As I first read Terrence Des Pres' relevant and moving paper, what played in back of my mind was not image he ends with of that majestic fire cloud brighter than a thousand suns, but rather images of that great terror of twentieth century, Nazism and its horrible culmination in Holocaust. It may have been my knowledge of his previous work on survivors of death camps that brought those fitful images to my mind. More likely it was poignant human quality that informed his paper. When I read his unfolding definition of terror including the forms of power which cause danger or pain and threaten self-preservation, and which aim particularly at diminishment, disfiguration, mutilation and finally annihilation of human image,' I could only think of a human demonic power and not a natural, albeit sublime, one. The mirror of our terror somehow reflects a human face-or did for me, at least. This was a small point, more an observation than an argument. But I came to write up my comments on paper, it took on a larger and larger significance. I recalled a remark by Simone Weil. On seeing a newsreel of one of Nazi's massive theatrical and military displays that became familiar to us in thirties, she confessed that, in midst of her disgust and hatred, she felt something attract her. I don't recall if she spoke of sublime, but awe she felt seemed to come from sense of power shared, luxury of giving oneself up to it. This is very close, I think, to what Des Pres is describing when he speaks of how power which threatens our disfigurement or annihilation becomes sublime-or is, it were, sublimated by feeling as if we ourselves were source of power we behold. In this essential sense, I think we can agree that source of terror will bear a human face, even if only our own.