Artistic Diversity Research Articles

HUMOROUS DISCOURSE OF MODERN UKRAINIAN COMBATANT PROSE

During the last few years a significant number of texts covering a huge range of genres have been appeared within the Ukrainian literary community with a purpose to depict the recent wartime events in the east of the country. The prose, written by the combatants, is an important and interesting phenomenon of modern Ukrainian literary process. The use of comic varieties is an integral part of military prose and prose of the combatants, for mocking at the enemy and joking about (making fun of) own problems provides psychological support and helps to hold on in the fight. The ways of using comic varieties in modern Ukrainian prose of the combatants were analysed in the article. The study tested the role of comic elements in these texts. There are a lot of comic varieties in structure of prose of the combatants. Soldiers often describe the military weekdays with humour, especially the funny situations in which they or their brethren-in-arms got. The use of Ukrainian, Russian words, surzhyk and profanity in dialogues is a most popular way to depict comic situations in their prose. This method is used by Martin Brest and K. Mashovec. Combatants use satire and the grotesque too (e.g. the novel by W. Zapeka). In this case, harsh criticism of wartime realities is transmitted using a character-resonator. This reception deepens and contributes artistic diversity to text about the war, helping to avoid banality of presentation. Combatants are also using self-irony (O. Tereshchenko). This way of writing texts allows Combatants to tell about difficult things in a lightweight form. When this happens, the reader should work closely with a text to separate the «joking narrator’s» mask from the real author, whose life is easy only at first glance. Therefore, a text becomes a complex narrative structure.

Pedagogical system of piano technique evolution in the works of M. Moszkowski

Statement of the problem. The paper is devoted to the analysis of the pedagogical system of piano technique evolution which developed in the works of an outstanding Polish composer, pianist, teacher and conductor M. Moszkowski. Under consideration are pedagogical principles of the musician, his extensive editing work. Under analysis is the instructive pedagogical repertoire of Moszkowski: “School of double notes” op. 64, “A Book of Scales”, which outlines the fingering principles of the musician, etudes op. 72, 78, 91, 92, a collection of compositions “The Master and His Pupil” op. 96 and “Technical sketches” op. 97. The arsenal of techniques used in these works is rich and diverse, which emphasizes the artistic advantages of these compositions. The value of M. Moszkowski’s pedagogical system in the evolution of piano technique and development of a young pianist is defined, since the pedagogical works of the composer can still serve as a good help for middle and high school students of music schools and colleges. The purpose of the article is to reveal the value of M. Moszkowski’s pedagogical system in the evolution of piano technique and development of a young pianist. Methods. The methodological basis of the study is the unity of scientific approaches, among which the most important is a functional one, associated with the analysis of the genre as a typical structure. Results. The study of M. M. Moszkowski’s piano etudes became a significant contribution to the development of West-European art of the second half of the 19th and early 20th centuries. The analysis of etudes allowed highlighting a free choice of figurative and stylistic priorities, tendency towards small size, focus on a certain type of technique, expressiveness of technically virtuoso tasks, use of simple forms, artistic diversity, prevelance of light mood and moving pace. These piano exercises are clearly presented as an integral part of Moszkowski’s pedagogical method, as well as the specifics of the author’s performance style. Moszkowski’s etudes are a kind of bridge between virtuosity skills and bright images, they help not only improve the technique but also develop student’s musicality. Undoubtedly, this approach provides a solid foundation in all areas of piano performance. Moszkowski’s etudes are less difficult to study, they have technical value that can be quickly acquired, but at the same time they are sustainable and program. Sometimes Moszkowski treats the etude genre very freely: as a substitute for another genre (Two miniatures op 67) as part of the dilogy cycle (Caprice-etude and Improvisation op. 70) and others. These works are little used in modern performing practice. At the same time, they represent a very interesting material that clearly reflects the distinctiveness of musical language of late romantic pianists, to which Moszkowski belonged. Conclusions. Special attention should be paid to the composter’s great contribution to the enrichment of the instructive piano repertoire. Unfortunately, pedagogically orientated works are not so often performed in today’s educational practice. Only 15 virtuoso etudes from op. 72. are widely used. It would be very useful for young musicians to get acquainted with numerous etudes of the composer, since they are of unquestionable interest from the viewpoint of the development of both technical skills and figurative thinking of students. This publication is intended to attract the attention of teachers and performers to wider mastering of piano etudes by M. Moszkowski, which would greatly enrich modern piano repertoire. Unfortunately, many piano compositions of the composer, which were created with a pedagogical purpose, are not used widely enough in educational practice today. Many of them are aimed at the development of elementary piano skills necessary for the development of a young performer: five-finger position, scale sequences, and chords. They are very important, that is why they are described in easy etudes, systematizing the basic forms of virtuosity. Such compositions of Moszkowski take the performer from the basics to the tasks of the highest virtuoso difficulty. His pedagogical system allows us to gradually and systematically improve pianism. The piece must be learnt in a certain sequence: mastering the musical text; playing in the tempo specified by the composer; analysis of the content of the work. Indeed, the performer should be able to divide the work into certain stages, especially if it concerns etudes – to strive for the maximum clear statement of the technical task, excluding anything that could hinder its accomplishment.

The Processualism of the Creative Approach in an Artistic Context

Abstract The following article attempts a discussion concerning the issue of creativity in the context of artistic approaches, by taking into consideration the central concepts: creative personality, creative process, and creative product/ creative performance. Our analysis is based on two questions that concern the extent to which we can speak of flexibility and creativity in contemporary artistic activities. Our conclusion is that creative artistic activities are not disorderly/ unorganised, they are realised according to artistic rules and principles that relate to the forms of expression that can be used in creative artistic approaches. Furthermore, in the context of the cultural hybridization phenomenon, the merging of the traditional with the postmodern allows the manifestation of cultural and artistic diversity, as well as the revaluation, redefinition and update of the traditional forms of expression and of cultural forms in a creative manner, by means of a creative exploitation of their spectacular artistic potential.

Diversity of artists in major U.S. museums.

The U.S. art museum sector is grappling with diversity. While previous work has investigated the demographic diversity of museum staffs and visitors, the diversity of artists in their collections has remained unreported. We conduct the first large-scale study of artist diversity in museums. By scraping the public online catalogs of 18 major U.S. museums, deploying a sample of 10,000 artist records comprising over 9,000 unique artists to crowdsourcing, and analyzing 45,000 responses, we infer artist genders, ethnicities, geographic origins, and birth decades. Our results are threefold. First, we provide estimates of gender and ethnic diversity at each museum, and overall, we find that 85% of artists are white and 87% are men. Second, we identify museums that are outliers, having significantly higher or lower representation of certain demographic groups than the rest of the pool. Third, we find that the relationship between museum collection mission and artist diversity is weak, suggesting that a museum wishing to increase diversity might do so without changing its emphases on specific time periods and regions. Our methodology can be used to broadly and efficiently assess diversity in other fields.

Illuminating the Carolingian era: new discoveries as a result of scientific analyses

Comparing information from the ancient texts about the illumination of the manuscripts to the analysis of the components used to create colour in illuminations sheds interesting light. Our research team studied several manuscripts from the Carolingian era issued from different sources including: the Gospels of St Riquier kept in the library of Abbeville (ms. 4), two Theodulphe’s Bibles, (Orléans-Fleury, BnF lat.11937 and BnF lat.9380), the Godescalc Evangelistary (BnF NAL 1203), the Gospels of St Denis (BnF lat.9387) and the Gospels of St Médard de Soissons (BnF lat.8850), the last three from the court of Charlemagne, and all preserved at the French National Library. These most luxurious manuscripts were written and illuminated between the late eighth century and the first quarter of the ninth century. Through non-destructive portable visual and spectrometric analysis, our research team was able to identify the palette of materials used in scripts and illuminations and especially highlighted the amazing use of Egyptian blue in a very specific part of the illumination in the Godescalc Evangelistary. Our team also found that some substitutes including folium had been used instead of Tyrian purple for the decoration and to dye the parchment. These manuscripts, produced at the initiative of various patrons during Charlemagne’s reign, reveal in the light of the material analysis and the reconstitutions’ experiments by professional illuminators their differences and, beyond, the artistic diversity of this very particular period called the Carolingian Renaissance.

The unfashionable cultural worker? Considering the demography and practice of artists in Greater Western Sydney

Urban cultural policy is increasingly focused on economic development and city reimaging rather than the priorities and experiences of local artists and cultural workers, while those approaches embedded in creative industries/creative cities frameworks, implicitly imagine creative workers to be young, ‘hip’, male, urban, and geographically mobile. Drawing on the findings of a major study of creative practice in Australia’s most culturally and demographically diverse urban area, Greater Western Sydney, this paper considers the creative, biographical and social profile of local cultural workers. Respondents were older, predominantly female, highly educated, and not particularly mobile. And although actively involved with local creative communities and networks, they do not fit established community arts and cultural development paradigms any more than those of the creative industries. These findings suggest that the typical cultural worker may not be the imagined artist of creative industries-informed cultural planning, nor those generally considered in accounts of creative work. The paper argues that in order to support the work of a diversity of local artists and cultural workers, including those who may be ‘unfashionable’, what is required are inclusive explanatory frameworks of cultural labour, and cultural planning and urban cultural policy approaches informed by community consultation and engagement.

Educación artística y género como herramienta de integración e inclusión para personas con demencia temprana y alzheimer.

En el presente artículo se expone una experiencia de educación artística, género y diversidad sexual con participantes con Demencia temprana y Alzhéimer, bajo el título Flores con nombre. Este proyecto se diseña con la intención de abrir una nueva ventana al conocimiento de este perfil de participantes, cuya educación ha sido predominantemente patriarcal, donde la figura femenina y su representación como artista ha sido prácticamente invisible y desconocida. Nos apoyaremos en obras creadas por artistas mujeres , permitiéndonos analizar cómo formalizan diferentes proyectos artísticos girando alrededor de su postura como mujer dentro del mundo del arte, además de poder tratar temas transversales y establecer vínculos y atribuciones empleando diferentes flores como metáfora asociada a la mujer. Este proyecto centrado en el simil y juego análogo, mujer artista equivalente a una flor, se diseñó e implemento en la Asociación Afal Contigo de Madrid.

Counterculture and Its Impact upon American Rock Music Documentaries in 1960-1970s

The author focuses on the most significant documentaries and TV-movies employing rock music of the 1960s-1970s, and highlights the aesthetic modes of their social correlation with mass culture. Special attention is drawn to the creative synthesis of the aesthetics of direct cinema, exemplified by the group R. Drew (B. Leacock, D. Pennebaker, A. Maizels, D. Maizels, etc.) as well as individual filmmakers and rock music in the intense socio-cultural context associated with it. Rock music greatly differs in its interaction of a performer and audience: there is often a systematic violation of the boundaries between audience space and scene. Direct cinema uses different strategies for presenting the character in the frame. Long-term observation, usage of atypical size and angles in the established television and cinematic tradition of documentary in many ways made the traditional essays and reports specifically spectacular. Within this strategy fans become being represented and perceived as a collective character, that is, public with all the features of its ethos becomes an integral part of the image of the artist, inseparable from it. The general decline of the artistic diversity of documentaries about rock music is largely the result of the active integration of this subgenre into the commercial sphere of TV and film industry, characteristic for the style emerged within the television. Creative pursuits of the group drew were directed not so much against the revolution in screen arts, but for modernization of the outdated artistic approaches to documentary filmmaking. Anyhow rock music as well as rock culture expressed through the means of direct cinema testify to the efficiency of the basic methodological goals.

Deborah R. Geis, ed., Beat Drama: Playwrights and Performances of the “Howl” Generation

Deborah R. Geis’s expansive essay collection, Beat Drama, takes a generous and inclusive approach to its analysis of Beat plays and performances. A key benefit of the book is the range and diversity of artists covered, yet it also reproduces a sense of canonical precedence for certain figures in the Beat movement.

Isomorphism in Provision of Culture: The Case of Municipalities in Istanbul and Their Cultural Centers

Regardless of the diminishing budgets for investment in the cultural sphere, especially at the municipality level. Since 2000, 61 cultural centers have been opened in Istanbul alone. In spite of the growing cultural and artistic diversity and Turkish society's various demands in cultural services, of Turkish cultural policies on a local, city, and national level serves as a starting point for investigating how isomorphism transpires to the provision of cultural services on the level of Istanbul's district municipalities. This study not only explains the role of district municipalities in the cultural field of Istanbul, but also argues that three interconnected concepts—democratization, professionalization, and marketization—promote cultural convergence.

O rádio na educação: explorando a linguagem radiofônica no estudo das artes

A experiência brasileira revela que, apesar da presença do rádio nas escolasbásicas, seu potencial é subaproveitado por educadores que não detêm conhecimento aprofundado sobre a estrutura de sua linguagem, composta por palavra, músicas, efeitos sonoros e silêncio, sobretudo no que diz respeito a três aspectos centrais: a oralidade, a interatividade e a mídia‑educação. Assim, com base no conhecimento empírico das autoras e em literatura especializada, analisa‑se o potencial da linguagem radiofônica, considerada o alicerce para o uso educativo do rádio, tanto em suporte analógico quanto em digital. Contando com apoio de ambiente virtual, delineia‑se uma proposta para o ensino de artes, alinhada aos Parâmetros Curriculares Nacionais, que solicitam o despertamento da sensibilidade, da criatividade e o enfoque da diversidade de manifestações artísticas e culturais nas escolas básicas.

Meaning in (Translated) Popular Fiction: An Analysis of Hyper-Literal Translation in Clive Barker’s Le Royaume des Devins

Most translation theorists agree that source text fidelity results in a translation that aptly transmits the foreign cultural values and meaning embedded within the source language to a target culture. While the preservation of foreignness might be beneficial for the propagation of international artistic diversity, when translating works of popular fiction, domestication is key to a novel’s successful incorporation into the target literary system. In popular fiction translation, the goal is accessibility rather than artistic influence or cultural exchange, yet the necessary domestication can be problematic. This article examines the reception of the English-to-French translation of an epic fantasy novel by Clive Barker. Online reviews written by the French-speaking readership describe the translated text as aberrant of Barker’s oeuvre and incomprehensible. While it may be easy to dismiss this translation as yet another example of poor translation practices, knowing that the translator, Jean-Daniel Brèque, is an award-winning translator and that he has translated many works by other popular artists such as Stephen King and Dan Simmons points the blame elsewhere. An analysis of Jean-Daniel Brèque’s translation of Weaveworld reveals the detrimental effect that strict adherence to the source text can have on the reception of popular literature in translation and affirms that domestication is necessary to transform the source text into a version digestible and understandable by the target audience.

It’s All in the Name: Hip Hop, Sexuality, and Black Women’s Identity in Breakin’ In: The Making of a Hip Hop Dancer

It’s All in the NameHip Hop, Sexuality, and Black Women’s Identity in Breakin’ In: The Making of a Hip Hop Dancer Carol E. Henderson (bio) [A]s evidenced by the zombie-like stare in my neighbor’s eyes, the ghetto’s dues for emotional immunity is high. —Joan Morgan, When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost Despite the diversity of fans and artists on the commercial margins, then, the public struggle over hip hop is waged over the images, stories, and market power associated with black male and black female bodies. —Tricia Rose, The Hip Hop Wars Hip hop has long been a lightning rod for discussions of black womanhood and sexuality. Such conversations were more cordial in the 1980s and 1990s when the landscape of hip hop included the voices of female MCs and deejays who, in the words of the Queen and Monie Love, “[were] the ones to give birth/To the new generation of prophets because it’s Ladies First.”1 These affirmations of black femininity, self-respect, and self-love were echoed by rap artists such as MC Lyte, Lauryn Hill, neo-soul psalmists Erykah Badu, Jill Scott, among others, who proclaim, as Hill does in “Everything is Everything”—“From the beginning/My practice extending across the atlas/ I begat this/flippin’ in the ghetto on a dirty mattress/You can’t match this [End Page 47] rapper/actress/More powerful than two Cleopatras/MCs ain’t ready to take it to the Serengeti/My rhymes is heavy like the mind of Sister Betty [Shabazz].”2 Hill’s nod to African history—her allegiance to the cultural strength and regal dignity of African women such as Cleopatra and Sister Betty Shabazz—her reference to “dirty mattresses” and “the ghetto” encapsulates in rhythmic cadence the complex and creative journey of “spitting rhymes” in unladylike spaces. More to the point, Hill—and likewise her contemporaries—draws on the strength of those who came before her to exhibit a gracefulness fashioned from challenging situations—a self-assurance that turns a negative into a positive—a self-confidence that allows a “rose” to grow from concrete.3 However, in recent years, a changeling has appeared. Instead of ladies first, it is skeezas, gold diggers, sac chasers, and chicken heads at the front of the line. The very change in the ascriptive language afforded to many a young sistah—language deemed acceptable and socially relevant in certain circles—directs attention to the politics of naming, and how rewrapping the black female body in the cloak of raunchy liberalism has caused a stutter in the very ways in which we collectively dialogue about our personhood. But, of course, these conversations aren’t new. Even in the nirvana of hip hop bliss, there were rumblings and eruptions of the nasty girl—that rapper that uses her sexual wiles and feminine flesh—her brash bravado—to gain an upper hand on her male nemesis and/or female rival. Rappers like Lil’ Kim, Trina, Foxy Brown, and Missy Elliott extol the “virtues” of “punanny power”—that unbridled capacity to, in the words of Missy “Misdemeanor” Elliott, “work it” standing up, lying down, or on all fours. Sex becomes, in this instance, the instrument of choice—a mechanism that unveils the Achilles heels of men who are “hard” in public, but behind closed doors, succumb to the skilled exploits of women “gifted” to perform sexual fantasies that border on the sadomasochistic and pornographic. Likewise, this same sexual power can expose the weakness of female rivals who are not willing to engage in such acts or take it to the next level in an effort to “one up” their competition. Both maneuvers are performed in an effort to “procure the capital and currency represented by the fame, power, and riches of the hip hop star,” as T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting points out. This currency is then “consumed, collected, and cosseted between [the] thighs and lips” of women driven to negotiate and renegotiate in the landmine of polemical and contradictory impulses.4 These reinscriptions of the identity markers that determine how “around-the-way” girls or “ghetto chicks” will be viewed and positioned in the...

Art and Visual Culture on the French Riviera, 1956-1971: The Ecole de Nice

The École de Nice, which burgeoned as a modern art movement in the 1950s and 1960s, challenged the institutional hegemony of the largely abstractionist École de Paris at a time when the Riviera was growing into a major tourist destination and, in the wake of the iconic Picasso and Matisse, a vibrant centre for the visual arts. What emerged, essentially in Nice, in a period of post-war national cultural and societal change, was a burst of artistic innovation led by indigenous artists inspired by the geographic beauty of the Mediterranean and, inextricably, by the spirit of a new consumerist age. In her excellent study of what was, arguably, a southern artistic revolution, Rosemary O'Neill offers a detailed history of how the École de Nice evolved. In doing so she adopts a ‘case-study approach’ (p. 11), paying particular attention to the movement's seminal contributors, in monographic chapters that show the artistic diversity of these various figures to be richly illustrative of shared aesthetic ideals. Indeed, an overarching theme of the book is the solidarity of the artists' opposition to the formalist establishment art of the École de Paris. Espousing appropriative methods and theatrical modes of presentation that ran counter to the pervasive and nationally sanctioned art formel of the time, they opted for a predominantly conceptualist and locally inspired art actuel. After a historical background chapter that establishes the intersection of art, mass culture, and tourism as an early twentieth-century southern artistic trend, O'Neill goes on to examine the defining and broadly sequentially formed movements of the École de Nice: Nouveau Réalisme, Fluxus, and Supports/Surfaces. Here she really comes into her own, offering detailed analyses of group differences and commonalities via close studies of individuals. From this chronology, subtle ideological and artistic shifts are ascertained as the author points up the originality of the artists and the range of experimentation achieved. Consider, for example, Yves Klein's purist sea and sky-blue monochromes, Arman's haunting assemblages of used and discarded things, and Martial Raysse's frozen bathing-beauty mannequins (Chapter 1). In many cases the movement away from painting is extreme, as in Ben Vautier's ‘total art’ street happenings, George Brecht's word-game poems (Chapter 4), and Claude Gilli's collages of fragments of fairground machines (Chapter 5). Even with a return to painting in the late 1960s, a matter that split the school's allegiances and contributed to its demise in 1971, the artists concerned (notably Claude Viallat and Noël Dolla) remained conceptually motivated and committed to a social and geographic engagement with the land. To her credit, O'Neill draws on a vast range of primary sources, many not readily accessible to today's readers: contemporary newspaper and magazine articles, private correspondence, catalogues, archival materials, manifestos, and recorded interviews. In addition, the work is enhanced by the inclusion of interspersed black and white photographs and an inset of thirteen colour plates. While it is regrettable that the book's presentation is significantly marred by typographical errors and inaccuracies (abundant in the footnotes), the author has produced a comprehensive overview of an important, previously somewhat overlooked, period in French art history.

Valuing Independence: Esteem Value and Its Role in the Independent Music Scene

This article reports on a qualitative study investigating the characteristics, motivations, and organization of a sample of self-identified “Indies.” It identifies three characteristic dimensions of life for the Independent musician in the digital age: the “intrinsic motivation for extrinsic value” dimension; the “independence as network” dimension; and the “artist as business” dimension. The author argues that these dimensions are linked by their relevance to the esteem that musicians must generate in pursuit of a sustainable career. They also characterize levels of artistic control, network diversity, and business intimacy within a musician's relationships. These dimensions are rarely occupied at their extremes; rather, a wide variety of positions are taken up between totally independent and totally “indentured” musicians. Seeing relative “independence” as a combination of these three dimensions helps us more clearly understand the dynamics of emergent new music industries.

Bruce Barton, ed. Collective Creation, Collaboration and Devising

BRUCE BARTON, ed. Collective Creation, Collaboration and Devising. Critical Perspectives on Canadian Theatre English. Vol. 12. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 2008. xliii + 269pp. RIC KNOWLES and INGRID MUNDEL, eds. Ethnic, Multicultural, and Intercultural Theatre. Critical Perspectives on Canadian Theatre English. Vol. 14. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 2009. xxvi + 206pp. The range and diversity of artists, works, practices, and critical analyses these two volumes hold common oft-recurring themes and specific examples of purposefulness, agency and control, hybridity, limits of representation, and material circumstances of production. Both also exhibit attentiveness to creation processes and audience as integral to efficacy. Through these valuable collections readers will encounter multiplicities of forms, approaches, and scholarship that inherently, and often explicitly, challenge dominant, institutionalized modes of theatre production. Interestingly, number of contributions each collection could easily also have been considered for inclusion other. It is heartening to note relative prominence of cultural diversity theatre and practices, but also, increasingly, among voices and perspectives of those analyzing and theorizing. Bruce Barton's introduction to Volume 12, Collective Creation, Collaboration and Devising, proposes compelling framework for analysis, clarifying much-conflated terminologies without reducing practices to fixed 'categories.' An overarching Dramaturgy of Agency--aiming for not merely affect but effect (vii)--will thus be constructed differently different circumstances, perpetual negotiation between and navigation of [...] distinct yet related terms (ix). Barton emphasizes intersubjectivity and multiple perspectives over common assumptions of consensus collective and collaborative work. He segues into essays an appropriately openended assertion that the proximate positioning of concepts can be as illuminating as that of living bodies performance (xxii). A significant number of authors Volume 12 provide meticulous details of creative processes, demonstrating various techniques that allow meaning(s) and aesthetic choices to emerge through making of work. Yet what distinguishes this volume from much existent writing field is that majority of contributors go beyond mechanics of process and aesthetics of public presentation, to engage questions, preoccupations, and intentions that spur creative acts. As result, voices and concerns of primary creators are more readily placed in conversation with voices of academics (though of course there are several instances of authors who inhabit both those worlds.) The importance of 1970s collective creation to development of theatre Canada has been well documented and theorized; it is nonetheless fascinating to consider earlier analyses of these canonical works relationship to more recent practices and critical frames of reference. In both earlier and later essays, important considerations of context, of relationship to audience, and of reception are often central. Conversely, and as noted by Wasserman (244; 250), cultural nationalism of 1970s and 1980s gave way to multivalence politics and ideology among more current practices examined. In Ethnic, Multicultural, and Intercultural Theatre, various contributors throughout expose normative and exclusionary aspects of Canadian and Quebecois nationalisms. Later essays point to movement among a younger generation of culturally diverse and alternative theatre artists [. …

Suzanne Jackson’s Gallery 32 and Los Angeles’s Burgeoning African American Arts Community

This essay reconsiders Los Angeles’s Gallery 32 and its vital contribution to Los Angeles art history from 1968 to 1970. Founded and run by Suzanne Jackson, Gallery 32 exhibited challenging, controversial work and became a gathering place where not only art but politics and society were discussed and explored. As such, the gallery partook of the broad political struggles of the times and contributed to the city’s remarkable artistic diversity.

The Presence of Hindemith in Nono's Sketches: A New Context for Nono's Music

Approximately two hundred leaves of Luigi Nono's sketches from 1946 to 1951 demonstrate that he was well schooled in the teachings of Paul Hindemith, a theorist and composer whose outlook and musical inclinations would seem to be altogether different from those of the younger musician. To be sure, Nono never pointed to Hindemith as a direct influence; and the aesthetic climate at Darmstadt would surely have encouraged Nono to remain quiet on this subject. Furthermore, commentators on Nono's earliest music have tended to focus on comparisons with Webern's twelve-tone technique. While such comparisons reveal much about the reception of Webern, they obscure Nono's antipointillist concern for expression and musical tension. The sketches suggest a means to reassess Nono's music by showing how Hindemith's building stones furnished a foundation for Nono's artistic diversity. In Nono's sketches, Hindemith emerges as a progressive theorist to whose teachings the younger composer would return for many years.

Cezanne and beyond

The famous proclamation that Cezanne 'is the father of us all' has been attributed to both Matisse and Picasso, and his influence has extended to a great diversity of artists thereafter. In this monumental book, a team of distinguished scholars offers the most comprehensive view to date on Cezanne's vital role in shaping European and American art throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first.More than forty paintings and ten works on paper by Cezanne - many of his best-known and most admired - are juxtaposed throughout the catalogue with approximately 120 works by a range of modern and contemporary artists who found in Cezanne a central inspiration. They include Max Beckmann, Georges Braque, Charles Demuth, Alberto Giacometti, Arshile Gorky, Marsden Hartley, Fernand Leger, Brice Marden, Piet Mondrian, Giorgio Morandi, Liubov Popova, and Jeff Wall, as well as Picasso, Matisse, Johns, and Kelly. The essays offer insights into the 'conversation' between Cezanne and each of these other artists, who stand on a par with his greatness. Among its many features, this book contains a conceptual overview by Richard Shiff and an illustrated chronology.

Fresh perspectives on familiar Beethoven

The 20th century has witnessed a plethora of live and recorded performances of Beethoven's piano sonatas, by a diversity of artists. This reflects the centrally canonical place the sonatas have occupied since the mid-19th century, when figures like Liszt, Clara Schumann, Ignaz Moscheles and Anton Rubinstein began to include them in their public recitals. More recent players have introduced new perspectives on this repertory by performing it on restored or newly built fortepianos. This was pioneered by Melvyn Tan, who rose to prominence in the late 1980s when the historical performance movement began to encompass repertory from the Classical era. Like Tan, the Dutch pianist Ronald Brautigam is proficient on both piano and fortepiano, but developed his interest in the fortepiano once he had already established his reputation using modern instruments. 2004 saw the beginning of Brautigam's release of a 17-CD Beethoven cycle whose first five discs, Beethoven, Piano Sonatas, vols.1–5 (BIS CD-1362, 1363, 1472, 1473, 1573, rec 2003–5, 70′, 81′, 82′, 74′, 68′) are the subject of the present review. They include Beethoven's earlier sonatas, from op.2 to op.31, a total of 18 works composed from 1793 to 1802 when Beethoven was between 23 and 32 years old. The sonatas assisted Beethoven's establishment of a reputation as a pianist-composer in Vienna, until his hearing began to deteriorate in about 1798.