In this major new interpretation of the music of J. S. Bach, we gain a striking picture of the composer as a unique critic of his age. By reading Bach’s music “against the grain” of contemporaries such as Vivaldi and Telemann, Laurence Dreyfus explains how Bach’s approach to musical invention in a variety of genres posed a fundamental challenge to Baroque aesthetics. “Invention”—the word Bach and his contemporaries used for the musical idea that is behind or that generates a composition—emerges as an invaluable key in Dreyfus’s analysis. Looking at important pieces in a range of genres, including concertos, sonatas, fugues, and vocal works, he focuses on the fascinating construction of the invention, the core musical subject, and then shows how Bach disposes, elaborates, and decorates it in structuring his composition. Bach and the Patterns of Invention brings us fresh understanding of Bach’s working methods, and how they differed from those of the other leading composers of his day. We also learn here about Bach’s unusual appropriations of French and Italian styles—and about the elevation of various genres far above their conventional status. Challenging the restrictive lenses commonly encountered in both historical musicology and theoretical analysis, Dreyfus provocatively suggests an approach to Bach that understands him as an eighteenth-century thinker and at the same time as a composer whose music continues to speak to us today.
This study analyzes the family life and public careers of six generations of a notable Parisian family, the Cochins. Bourgeois merchants in the 17th and 18th centuries, the Cochins earned nobility through the office of alderman (^D'echevin) of Paris. Their family ethos fostered a much-needed element in French public life: a cautious, critical, liberal reform that reflected an independence from the Left, the Legitimist--and later nationalist--Right, as well as the Catholic Church. Still, even these reforming conservatives, however liberal, ultimately found themselves opposing the Third Republic. Winnie highlights the contributions made by the Cochins and the opposition of the Third Republic. He approaches this task not by looking at a mere series of political crises, but rather by examining the cultural background and the family ethos that sustained them from the Old Regime to World War I. Like much of the latest work in modern French social history, this book finds a significant cultural divide between revolutionary republicanism and even liberal notables from the Old Regime. It demonstrates how these tensions continued through the 19th and into the 20th century. This reflects the fundamental incompatibility between France's political legacies--sustained by powerful and abiding social and cultural factors--that has shaped French life to this day.
The music of Broadway is one of America's most unique and popular calling cards. In Broadway to Main Street: How Show Tunes Enchanted America, author Laurence Maslon tells the story of how the most beloved songs of the American Musical Theater made their way from the Theater District to living rooms across the country. The crossroads where the music of Broadway meets popular culture is an expansive and pervasive juncture throughout most of the twentieth century--from sheet music to radio broadcasts to popular and original cast recordings--and continues to influence culture today through television, streaming, and the Internet. The original Broadway cast album--from the 78 rpm recording of Oklahoma! to the digital download of Hamilton--is one of the most successful, yet undervalued, genres in the history of popular recording. The challenge of capturing musical narrative with limited technology inspired the imagination of both the recording industry and millions of listeners: between 1949 and 1969, fifteen different original cast albums hit number one on the popular music charts, ultimately tallying more weeks at number one than all of the albums by Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, and The Beatles combined. The history of Broadway music is also the history of American popular music; the technological, commercial, and marketing forces of communications and media over the last century were inextricably bound up in the enterprise of bringing the musical gems of New York's Theater District to living rooms along Main Streets across the nation. Featuring new interviews with Stephen Schwartz, Chita Rivera, Steve Lawrence, and prominent record producers and music critics, the story of this commercial and emotional phenomenon is told here in full--from the imprimatur of sheet music from Broadway in the early 20th century to the renaissance of Broadway music in the digital age, folding in the immense impact of show music on American culture and in the context of the recording industry, popular tastes, and our shared national identity. A book which connects cherished cultural artifacts to the emotional narratives at the core of American popular music, Broadway to Main Street: How Show Tunes Enchanted America is an ideal companion for all fans of American musical theater and popular music.
First published in 1990 The Philosopher's Habitat introduces the subject by investigating a variety of the problems which are currently engaging philosophers, and which can be made intelligible to an absolute beginner. Rather than introducing philosophy by examining, in the traditional way, the writings of great philosophers, the author has inverted this procedure. The idea is that the reader will become absorbed in these dramas, will thereby come to appreciate the ways in which the stage was set by the great writers of the past, and will feel the urge to participate. Questions at the end of each chapter encourage the reader to push beyond the text. This book is a must read for students of philosophy.
This book is concerned with developing an in-depth understanding of contemporary political and spatial analyses of cities. In the three-part development of the book’s overall argument or premise, the reader is taken in Part I through a range of contemporary critical and political understandings of urban securitizing. This is followed by an historical urban landscape of emerging liberalism and neo-liberalism, in nineteenth-century Britain and twentieth-century United States, respectively. These case-study historical chapters enable the introduction of key political issues that are more critically assayed in Parts II and III. With Part II, the reader is introduced in depth to a series of spatial analyses undertaken by Michel Foucault that have been crucial for especially late-twentieth and twenty-first century urban theory and political geography. With Part III the full ramifications of a paradigmatic shift are explored at the level of rethinking territory, population and design. This book is timely and useful for readers who want to develop a stronger understanding of what the book’s researchers term a new political paradigm in urban planning, one ultimately governed by global economic forces that define the end of probability.
Beginning with the era of synchronized sound in the 1920s, music has been an integral part of motion pictures. Whether used to heighten the tension of a scene or evoke a subtle emotional response, scores have played a significant—if often unrealized—role in the viewer’s enjoyment. In The Invisible Art of Film Music, Laurence MacDonald provides a comprehensive introduction for the general student, film historian, and aspiring cinematographer. Arranged chronologically from the silent era to the present day, this volume provides insight into the evolution of music in cinema and analyzes the vital contributions of scores to hundreds of films. MacDonald reviews key developments in film music and discusses many of the most important and influential scores of the last nine decades, including those from Modern Times, Gone with the Wind, Citizen Kane, Laura, A Streetcar Named Desire, Ben-Hur, Lawrence of Arabia, The Godfather, Jaws, Ragtime, The Mission, Titanic, Gladiator, The Lord of the Rings, Brokeback Mountain,and Slumdog Millionaire. MacDonald also provides biographical sketches of such great composers as Max Steiner, Alfred Newman, Franz Waxman, Bernard Herrmann, Elmer Bernstein, Henry Mancini, Maurice Jarre, John Barry, John Williams, Jerry Goldsmith, Dave Grusin, Ennio Morricone, Randy Newman, Hans Zimmer, and Danny Elfman. Updated and expanded to include scores produced well into the twenty-first century, this new edition of The Invisible Art of Film Music will appeal not only to scholars of cinema and musicologists but also any fan of film scores.
The long and illustrious career of Edouard Vuillard spans the fin-de-siecle and the first four decades of the twentieth century, during which time the French painter, printmaker, and photographer created an extraordinary body of work. This is the first volume to explore Vuillard's rich and varied career in its totality, presenting nearly 350 works that demonstrate the full range of his subject matter and reveal both the public and private sides of this quintessentially Parisian artist." "In a series of illustrated essays and catalogue entries, the authors explore Vuillard's complex and diverse artistic development, beginning with his academic training in Paris in the late 1880s and the innovative Nabi paintings of the 1890s for which he is best known, including his provocative, disquieting middle-class interiors and his work associated with the avant-garde theatre. The authors also examine Vuillard's splendid but lesser known large-scale decorations, his luminous landscapes, and the elegant portraits from the last decades of his career. In addition to paintings, the volume includes a substantial selection of drawings and graphics, together with a large group of striking photographs by the artist, many of which are published here for the first time." "This illustrated catalogue accompanies the most comprehensive exhibition ever devoted to the work of Edouard Vuillard (1868-1940). The exhibition opens at the National Gallery of Art in Washington and travels to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Galeries nationales du Grand Palais in Paris, and the Royal Academy of Arts, London."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Nearly five million Muslims call France home, the vast majority from former French colonies in North Africa. While France has successfully integrated waves of immigrants in the past, this new influx poses a new variety of challenges—much as it does in neighboring European countries. Alarmists view the growing role of Muslims in French society as a form of "reverse colonization"; they believe Muslim political and religious networks seek to undermine European rule of law or that fundamentalists are creating a society entirely separate from the mainstream. Integrating Islam portrays the more complex reality of integration's successes and failures in French politics and society. From intermarriage rates to economic indicators, the authors paint a comprehensive portrait of Muslims in France. Using original research, they devote special attention to the policies developed by successive French governments to encourage integration and discourage extremism. Because of the size of its Muslim population and its universalistic definition of citizenship, France is an especially good test case for the encounter of Islam and the West. Despite serious and sometimes spectacular problems, the authors see a "French Islam" slowly replacing "Islam in France"–in other words, the emergence of a religion and a culture that feels at home in, and is largely at peace with, its host society. Integrating Islam provides readers with a comprehensive view of the state of Muslim integration into French society that cannot be found anywhere else. It is essential reading for students of French politics and those studying the interaction of Islam and the West, as well as the general public.
Elizabeth Bowen: A Literary Life reinvents Bowen as a public intellectual, propagandist, spy, cultural ambassador, journalist, and essayist as well as a writer of fiction. Patricia Laurence counters the popular image of Bowen as a mannered, reserved Anglo-Irish writer and presents her as a bold, independent woman who took risks and made her own rules in life and writing. This biography distinguishes itself from others in the depth of research into the life experiences that fueled Bowen’s writing: her espionage for the British Ministry of Information in neutral Ireland, 1940-1941, and the devoted circle of friends, lovers, intellectuals and writers whom she valued: Isaiah Berlin, William Plomer, Maurice Bowra, Stuart Hampshire, Charles Ritchie, Sean O’Faolain, Virginia Woolf, Rosamond Lehmann, and Eudora Welty, among others. The biography also demonstrates how her feelings of irresolution about national identity and gender roles were dispelled through her writing. Her vivid fiction, often about girls and women, is laced with irony about smooth social surfaces rent by disruptive emotion, the sadness of beleaguered adolescents, the occurrence of cultural dislocation, historical atmosphere, as well as undercurrents of violence in small events, and betrayal and disappointment in romance. Her strong visual imagination—so much a part of the texture of her writing—traces places, scenes, landscapes, and objects that subliminally reveal hidden aspects of her characters. Though her reputation faltered in the 1960s-1970s given her political and social conservatism, now, readers are discovering her passionate and poetic temperament and writing as well as the historical consciousness behind her worldly exterior and writing.
The Emancipation of Europe's Muslims traces how governments across Western Europe have responded to the growing presence of Muslim immigrants in their countries over the past fifty years. Drawing on hundreds of in-depth interviews with government officials and religious leaders in France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Morocco, and Turkey, Jonathan Laurence challenges the widespread notion that Europe’s Muslim minorities represent a threat to liberal democracy. He documents how European governments in the 1970s and 1980s excluded Islam from domestic institutions, instead inviting foreign powers like Saudi Arabia, Algeria, and Turkey to oversee the practice of Islam among immigrants in European host societies. But since the 1990s, amid rising integration problems and fears about terrorism, governments have aggressively stepped up efforts to reach out to their Muslim communities and incorporate them into the institutional, political, and cultural fabrics of European democracy. The Emancipation of Europe’s Muslims places these efforts--particularly the government-led creation of Islamic councils--within a broader theoretical context and gleans insights from government interactions with groups such as trade unions and Jewish communities at previous critical junctures in European state-building. By examining how state-mosque relations in Europe are linked to the ongoing struggle for religious and political authority in the Muslim-majority world, Laurence sheds light on the geopolitical implications of a religious minority’s transition from outsiders to citizens. This book offers a much-needed reassessment that foresees the continuing integration of Muslims into European civil society and politics in the coming decades.
Gustave Flaubert is probably the most famous novelist of nineteenth-century France, and his best known work, Madame Bovary, is read in numerous comparative literature and French courses. His fiction set the standard to which other authors turned to learn their craft, and his cult of art and his unrelenting search for stylistic perfection inspired many later writers, such as Maupassant, Proust, Conrad, Faulkner, and Joyce. His denunciation of materialistic, corrupt society; his fascination with altered states of consciousness; his oscillation between metaphysical longings and a radical nihilism; and his deep-seated mistrust of the adequacy of words themselves anticipate the works of contemporary authors. This reference is a convenient guide to his life and writings. Included in this volume are several hundred alphabetically arranged entries on Flaubert's individual works and major characters; historical persons and events that shaped his life; the themes that run throughout his writings; the critical approaches employed by scholars studying his works; and related topics of interest. Each entry is written by an expert contributor and most close with a brief bibliography. All of his major works are treated at length, and the volume mentions nearly every unpublished project of his that has a title. The book concludes with a selected, general bibliography of major studies.
The answers to these questions - and much, much more - are to be found in The Changing Room , which traces the origins and variations of theatrical cross-dressing through the ages and across cultures. It examines: * tribal rituals and shamanic practices in the Balkans and Chinese-Tibet * the gender-bending elements of Greek and early Christian religion * the homosexual appeal of the boy actor on the traditional stage of China, Japan and England * the origins of the dame comedian, the principal boy, the glamour drag artiste and the male impersonator * artists such as David Bowie, Boy George, Charles Ludlam, Dame Edna Everage, Lily Savage, Candy Darling, Julian Clary and the New York Dolls. Lavishly illustrated with unusual and rare pictures, this is the first ever cross-cultural study of theatrical transvestism. It is a must for anyone interested in cross-dressing, theatre, and gender.
In analyzing the causes of World War I without concern for the question of guilt, the author places emphasis on two central facts: first, that when statesmen and peoples took actions they knew might lead to war, they were not envisaging the catastrophe that the war became but rather a quick and limited war; and, second, that among the many conflicts that might have led to war, the one that did was the threat to the integrity of Austria-Hungary posed by Serbia and Serb nationalism.
Art of the Defeat offers an unflinching look at the pivotal role art played in France during the German occupation. It begins with Adolf Hitler's staging of the armistice at Rethondes and moves across the dark years - analyzing the official junket by French artists to Germany, the exhibition of Arno Breker's colossi in Paris, the looting of the state museums and Jewish collections, the glorification of Philippe P?tain and a pure national identity, the demonization of modernists and foreigners, and the range of responses by artists and artisans. The sum is a pioneering expos? of the deployment of art and ideology to hold the heart of darkness at bay"--Page 4 of cover.
Thank you for visiting our website. Would you like to provide feedback on how we could improve your experience?
This site does not use any third party cookies with one exception — it uses cookies from Google to deliver its services and to analyze traffic.Learn More.