Harmony Model Research Articles

Charles I and the Erosion of Trust, 1625–1628

In contrast to their predecessors, who emphasized constitutional conflict and opposition in the parliaments of early Stuart England, revisionists emphasized harmony and cooperation. There was a problem with this new, anti-Whig orthodoxy from the outset, however, and that was the problem of trust. Defying the revisionist model of harmonious relations between Crown and Parliament, the M.P.s of early Stuart England perversely refused to trust James I and Charles I. Revisionists adopted two strategies to deal with this problem of trust. Conrad Russell exemplified the one strategy: he acknowledged the existence of distrust but treated it as a deep mystery requiring ingenious explanations. Surveying the reign of James I, Russell discovered “profound distrust, but it is hard to show how this distrust was implanted.” Perplexed by this enigma, Russell observed, “One of the most crucial, and one of the most difficult, questions of the early Stuart period is why this distrust developed.” For Russell, then, it was not natural for M.P.s to distrust the king. It was, instead, an unnatural attitude that had to be “implanted” or “developed.” In time, of course, Russell solved the mystery of distrust by providing a series of explanations: distrust resulted from the pressures of war, friction between the localities and the center, the functional breakdown of an inadequately financed government, court factionalism, and the growth of Arminianism. In Russell's view, the underlying problems that gave rise to distrust had more to do with circumstances and structures than with people, least of all James I and Charles I. A second strategy for dealing with the problem of trust is best exemplified by Kevin Sharpe: he solves the problem neatly by denying its existence. Steadfastly adhering to the revisionist model of harmony and cooperation, Sharpe claims that M.P.s did in fact behave the way that model predicts they should have. “In the early Stuart period,” writes Sharpe, “compromises between king and parliaments…were common because fundamental beliefs were shared and there was an atmosphere of trust.” Sharpe admits that there was an “erosion of trust” in the latter part of Charles's reign. “But,” he insists, “there is little evidence that it unfolds in the parliaments of early Stuart England.”

Music Cognition and Perceptual Facilitation: A Connectionist Framework

The mind internalizes persistent structural regularities in music and recruits these internalized representations to facilitate subsequent perception. Facilitation underlies the generation of musical expectations and implications and the influence of a musical context on consonance and memory. Facilitation is demonstrated in experiments showing priming of chords: chords that are harmonically closely related to a preceding context are processed more quickly than chords that are harmonically distant from the context. A tonal context enhances intonational sensitivity for related chords and heightens their consonance. Facilitation occurs even when related chords don't share component tones with the context, and even when overlapping harmonics are eliminated. These results point to the indirect activation of representational units at a cognitive level. In a parallel study conducted in India, tones considered to play an important role in a rag but absent from the experimental rendition of that rag were facilitated in the same way. In a connectionist framework, facilitation is a consequence of activation spreading through a network of representational units whose pattern of connectivity encodes musical relationships. In a proposed connectionist model of harmony, each event in a musical sequence activates tone units, and activation spreads via connecting links to parent chord units and then to parent key units. Activation reverberates bidirectionally until the network settles into a state of equilibrium. The initial stages of the activation process constitute the bottom-up influence of the sounded tones, while the later, reverberatory stages constitute the top-down influence of learned, schematic structures internalized at the cognitive level. Computer simulations of the model show the same pattern of data as human subjects in experiments on relatedness judgments of chords and memory for chord sequences.

Goethe's Faust: The Making of Part I (review)

228 GOETHE SOCIETY OF NORTH AMERICA "classical temperament?" Is the implication warranted indeed that Goethe's writing of the Bekenntnisse was specifically triggered by Humboldt's conservative Horen essay "Ãœber den Geschlechtsunterschied?" To what extent does self-consciousness obscure the object under study rather than elucidate the Standortbedingtheit, and isn't such selfabsorption once again removing Goethe into a misty distance, this time not of veneration but of the incommensurable? Are any of the ways presented here—structuralist or Lacanian readings are missing and hardly the answer—doing justice to Goethe's admonition, given in reference to antiquity but equally applicable nowadays to himself, namely that he is past, and fully so? This collection of diverse essays, as little as any other, conclusively explicates "the significance of the heritage of Goethe" (Foreword) for our days, and one is actually grateful that the essays do not directly address this problem with its dangerous undertow of specious "relevance." They steer a good course between blind attack and equally misguided eulogy, and between the image of a Germanisten-Goetht and that of the unflappable sage. It is a worthwhile contribution in the effort to see the supposed Olympian on level ground rather than on a pedestal. Emory University Erdmann Waniek Gearey, John, Goethe's Faust: The Making of Part I. New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 1981. It seems puzzling at first that a study of Faust written for a contemporary American audience in the 1980s should use a translation from the 1880s, a version which offers the following examples of the translator's art: Since here avails nor argument nor prayer Thee hence by force I needs must bear. Though fathom thee no angel may. Reason he names it and doth so Use it than brutes more brutish still to grow. Ever too prone is man activity to shirk In unconditioned rest he fain would live. But after reading Gearey's study one is convinced that the choice of translation was perhaps not entirely inappropriate. Gearey's book offers some useful observations on Faust, but its main arguments and even its stylistic quirks seem more attuned to an audience at home with "fain" and "doth" than to the actual concerns oÃ- present-day readers. This is not to say that every new study on Goethe has to be thoroughly trendy; but our discipline does have a history and there are risks, as Gearey's work suggests, in disregarding whole chunks of it. Neil Flax 229 Given the nature of the translation, it is understandable that the poetry of Goethe's play is not an overriding concern for Gearey. The author's argument is rather that the manner in which Faust was composed—through several incomplete versions and over a long period of time—is the clue to the essential meaning of the work, which is "the recognition of life as process" (p. 187). The idea that literature of the Romantic era is concerned with ongoing "process" as opposed to static "being" is of course one of the more familiar themes of modern cultural history. Gearey doesn't exactly claim that his application of the idea to Goethe is original, but at the same time he takes little notice of the fact that he is covering well-worked critical ground. It is a measure of the curious insularity of the study that the first hint that "process" is a standard notion in the history of the period comes in a footnote a few pages before the end. We learn there that Werden and Sein are "concepts upon which the distinction between the romantic and the classical view of life and of art is often built" (p. 204). But apart ftom its over-familiarity, the argument as applied hete is questionable in its basic premise. No criticism in any of the arts has succeeded in establishing a necessary connection between the way a work is composed and its essential meaning. The sense of a poem written in a single burst of inspiration is often perfectly contradictory and openended , while a work labored over for years and through numerous interruptions can end up as a model of classical closure and harmony. This does not mean...

Rhetoric and Poetics in the English Department: Our Nineteenth-Century Inheritance

During most of this century, Departments of English in America have paid little attention to the relationship between rhetoric and poetics. With the notable exception of Kenneth Burke, I. A. Richards, and some members of the Chicago School, those who have addressed the issue at all have usually looked upon rhetoric as a subordinate discipline, relegating it to the domain of language in the scientific or rational realms. Poetics is declared the primary business of English studies, constituting the central concern (or even the sole concern) of the department.1 Literary texts thus enjoy a privileged status while rhetorical texts are regarded as meriting little or no attention. This diminution of rhetoric as a discipline worthy of serious study is, however, a historical anomaly of the late nineteenth century. Prior to that period rhetoric was almost invariably considered at least as important as poetics in the education of the young, at all levels of formal training. In this essay I shall explore the process that led to the mutual isolation of rhetoric and poetics, an isolation resulting in the sanctification of poetics and a corresponding denigration of rhetoric. Recognizing the singularity of the contemporary conception of the rhetoricpoetics distinction requires a glance at the relation of the two disciplines in the past. In this case it is best to begin at the beginning, considering the two as they were conceived in the Greece of Aristotle and the Rome of Cicero and Quintilian. I realize that the description to be offered is a simplification, a model of complete balance and harmony more desired than attained at any historical moment, even during the time of Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian. Still this conceptual scheme will provide useful distinctions in considering rhetoric and poetics in nineteenth-century America. In ancient Greece and Rome rhetoric and poetics were commonly defined in relation to each other. As Charles Sears Baldwin indicates in Ancient Rhetoric

Mobilizing Interventions for Rural Development: A Comparative Study

Active association and willing cooperation of the people are essential ingredients for the success of rural development programmes. In the earlier part of this two part study,* the author had discussed in depth two intervention techniques (the harmony model and the conflict model) for mobilizing rural masses. In this concluding part, the author analyses techniques employed in rural development programmes of China, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Tanzania, and India. He discerns five common dimensions between the harmony and conflict models and finds that the latter model is most suitable for bringing about structural interventions.

Mobilizing Rural Poor: A Conceptual Framework

Rural development programmes have been undertaken by the governments of developing countries not only to uplift the rural poor but also to introduce modern techniques or innovations for bringing about changes in desirable directions. One of the ingredients for the success of the programmes is the active association and willing cooperation of the rural people. How can this be achieved ? Two intervention techniques are discussed in depth: the harmony model and the conflict model. The latter model, the author concludes, has the potency in mobilizing people at grass roots for effective and active participation.

The Peace Corps in Our Past

America is a land of habits, attitudes, or re sponses, whether one wishes to call them traditions or not. Many of these have been agents preparing the way for the ap pearance of the Peace Corps. The concept of an American world mission, first associated with Protestantism but broad ened to include world peace and the dissemination of our tools of economic success, certainly falls into this category. An interest in the fate of common men everywhere, expressed through numerous privately financed American relief and de velopment projects overseas, is another instance of an attitude which has been extended by the Peace Corps. John F. Ken nedy's 1960 campaign proposal came after a decade of dis cussion and lobbying on behalf of an official "people-to-people" program involving volunteer technicians. The Peace Corps is a product of American anti-Communist foreign policy. But more than that, it is an expression of ongoing American opti misms in the fate of man. Whether Americans, who have not yet succeeded in making their own land a model of brotherly harmony and general prosperity, can succeed in their global enterprise, remains to be seen.

Some Social Functions of Violence

American social science has traditionally been somewhat remiss in examining social conflict and social violence because of its excessive commitment to models of social har mony ; this has resulted in a tame view of social structures. This paper proposes to redress the balance somewhat by dis cussing three social functions of violence: violence as a form of achievement, violence as a danger signal, and violence as a catalyst. A plea is made that the study of social violence be given greater emphasis in further research.