In order to maintain the traditional characteristics of Yong Opera music and promote its innovative development, based on the historical background of Yong Opera music, its artistic characteristics and its position in music culture, the main tunes of Yong Opera music, such as melody, rhythm, and tonality, are analyzed in order to reveal its unique artistic charm. Combine the application of digital media in the inheritance and innovation of Yong opera music, according to the categories of new media, the way (...) of intersection and the influence on the dissemination of Yong opera music. Field research on the level of inheritance and innovation of Yong opera music reveals that 55% lack of young audience and 45% lack of innovative elements are the main dilemmas facing the inheritance of Yong opera music. In addition, the single way of inheritance is also a problem that cannot be ignored. When exploring innovative ways, digital recording and dissemination has a high support rate of 70%, and fusion with modern music elements, cross-border cooperation and innovative network promotion strategies are also highly recognized. Therefore, this paper proposes to strengthen digital recording and protection, digital publishing and dissemination, innovative network promotion strategies and marketing methods, implement the development strategy of Yongju opera music, and integrate the artistic characteristics of Yongju opera music into the network promotion strategy, so as to attract more young audiences and promote its sustainable development, and to ensure that the unique charms of Yongju opera music can be inherited for a long time. (shrink)

Adorno believed that a circular relationship was established between immediacy and mediation. Should we now say that this model with its clear Hegelian influence is outdated? Or does it need some theoretical integration? This volume addresses these questions by covering the performance of music, its technological reproduction and its modes of communication - in particular, pedagogy and dissemination through the media. The book's four parts each deal with different aspects of the mediation process. The contributing authors outline the problematic (...) moments in Adorno's reasoning but also highlight its potential. In many chapters the pole of immediacy is explicitly brought into play, its different manifestations often proving to be fundamental for the understanding of mediation processes. The prime reference sources are Adorno's Current of Music, Towards a Theory of Musical Reproduction and Composing for the Films. Critical readings of these texts are supplemented by reflections on performance studies, media theories, sociology of listening, post-structuralism and other contiguous research fields. (shrink)

This book explores the democratization of music in our current era made possible by digital technologies. It investigates how the utopian ideals and experimental practices of 20th-century musicians helped to spawn the recent seismic disruptions to the art form. In the current environment of networked connectivity, music has become ubiquitous and increasingly intertwined with everyday life, rendering previous models of creation, performance, dissemination, and consumption largely obsolete.

The strict lockdown experienced in Spain during March–June 2020 as a consequence of the COVID-19 crisis has led to strong negative emotions. Music can contribute to enhancing wellbeing, but the extent of this effect may be modulated by both personal and context-related variables. This study aimed to analyze the impact of the two types of variables on the perceived efficacy of musical behaviors to fulfill adults’ emotional wellbeing-related goals during the lockdown established in Spain. Personal variables included age, gender, musical (...) training, personality, resilience, and perception of music’s importance. Contextual variables referred to living in a region with a high COVID-19 impact, perception of belonging to a risk group, being alone, having caring responsibilities during confinement, and amount of time of music listening as compared to prior to the crisis. The study was conducted retrospectively during August–December 2020, when the strict lockdown was over in Spain. An online survey was disseminated among the general population and groups of musicians, and the answers of 507 adults were analyzed. Only personal, but not COVID-19 context-related variables, showed an impact on music’s efficacy. The youngest age group of adults and those with musical training reported the highest efficacy of music for wellbeing enhancement, and music’s importance was found to be the main significant predictor of music’s perceived efficacy. Our findings suggest that the people who have been reported to be emotionally more vulnerable during the lockdown, due to either a strong impact on their daily lives or their lower resilience, perceive a higher benefit from musical behaviors. Being musically trained, even for a small number of years, also leads to a perception of higher efficacy of music for the achievement of emotional wellbeing goals. However, this effect is explained by the musically trained individuals’ higher perception of music’s importance. Although musical behaviors can be generally considered as important for wellbeing enhancement, our study highlights who are the potential individuals who could benefit the most from music-related activities for obtaining better levels of wellbeing, at least within the current context of the COVID-19 crisis. (shrink)

In the contemporary world, the safeguarding and transmission of cultural heritage have garnered increasing attention, emphasizing the need for comprehensive strategies to preserve such legacies. American vocal music, with its rich spiritual and cultural connotations, represents a critical element of this heritage. This paper explores the unique characteristics and historical significance of American singing styles, particularly focusing on how these forms embody broader philosophical and spiritual narratives. Employing digital technologies, this study not only seeks to preserve the authentic essence of (...) these musical expressions but also to enhance their accessibility and educational value. The implementation of digital tools has facilitated an extensive reach, with coverage of American vocal music’s historical context achieving a 95% rate. Updates are frequent, occurring approximately 85 times, ensuring the material remains relevant and engaging. The application of digital strategies has significantly impacted educational outcomes, with student feedback scoring between 9.2 and 9.5 on a scale of 10, and a 95% acceptance rate of digital content on American vocal music. These findings underscore the effectiveness of digital media in promoting and preserving musical heritage, thereby increasing awareness and appreciation among newer generations. More importantly, this approach allows for a deeper engagement with the philosophical and spiritual dimensions of American singing, ensuring that the transmission of this cultural form remains not only intact but vibrant and meaningful. Through the digital preservation and educational dissemination of American vocal music, this study contributes to the ongoing development of music education and the broader understanding of its cultural and spiritual impact. (shrink)

The knowledge and skills of employees could play a valuable role in organizational success. Organizations seek practices to create a knowledge-sharing culture to take full advantage of individual competencies. However, the knowledge-hiding behavior of individuals is a hurdle in the internal dissemination of knowledge and expertise. It becomes more critical in the case of teaching institutions, where the students are taught and trained. Scholars are now putting their efforts into seeking the antecedents and consequences of knowledge-hiding behavior. This study (...) also attempts to determine the role of interpersonal distrust as an antecedent of knowledge hiding behavior of music education students. Based on the social exchange theory, the present study attempts to check the association of interpersonal distrust with emotional exhaustion and knowledge hiding. For empirical investigation, this study assumes that interpersonal distrust positively enhances knowledge hiding and emotional exhaustion, respectively. Moreover, the present study also attempts to check the association of emotional exhaustion with knowledge hiding. This study also assessed the mediating role of emotional exhaustion in the relationship between interpersonal distrust and knowledge hiding. This current study also aims to check the moderating role of mental health self-efficacy in the relationship between emotional exhaustion and knowledge hiding. For empirical investigation, the present study collected the data from 310 music learning students of various Chinese universities through a structured questionnaire method using a convenient sampling technique. This study applied partial least square structural equation modeling for empirical analyses using Smart PLS software. The findings of this study revealed that interpersonal distrust does not directly influence knowledge hiding; however, interpersonal distrust has a positive association with emotional exhaustion. The findings also acknowledged that emotional exhaustion positively correlates with knowledge hiding. The results also confirmed that emotional exhaustion positively mediates the relationship between interpersonal distrust and knowledge hiding. Further, the outcomes depicted that mental health self-efficacy negatively moderates the relationship between emotional exhaustion and knowledge hiding. In addition, this study’s findings also serve the literature of knowledge hiding by providing important theoretical and practical implications. (shrink)

The COVID-19 crisis, and its ensuing periods of confinement, has generated high levels of social stress on a global scale. In Spain, citizens were isolated in their homes and were not able to interact physically with family members, friends or co-workers. Different resources were employed to face this new stressful and unexpected situation (fitness, reading, painting, meditation, mindfulness, dancing, listening to music, playing instruments, cooking, etc.). Humor was one of the most frequent and widely used strategies in an attempt to (...) keep perspective, deal with the seriousness of the situation and make the day-to-day more bearable. Humor is cultural: it varies from one country to the next and is part of the idiosyncrasies of a culture. It is deemed a particularly important feature of the Spanish personality. During the COVID-19 crisis, the main means or channels of communication were social networks. Throughout the confinement period, there was an excessive flow of humorous memes concerning Coronavirus and related shared experiences during the National State of Emergency decreed by the Spanish Government. The memes draw on irony, ingenuity and creativity to make a difficult and stressful experience more bearable. In this paper, a qualitative methodology based on ethnography research is used and ethnographic fieldwork is carried out on the memes disseminated through WhatsApp during the lockdown period experienced in Spain (14 March to 21 June 2020). The memes are considered to be an example of Netlore, digital contemporary folklore, and a theoretical framework on memes and humor is presented that discusses its different functions in order to channel grief, fear and suffering or to play down specific situations. A corpus of 644 memes that have flooded social networks are categorized and analyzed to witness how the Spanish have managed to bring out their humorous and creative side in difficult times even as they have criticized political decisions, let out their frustrations, described their new “normal” lives, interacted with others and anticipated the future. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Globalizing Music Education. A Framework by Alexandra Kertz-WelzelGeir JohansenAlexandra Kertz-Welzel, Globalizing Music Education. A Framework (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018)A recurring challenge for the scholarship of music education is that, in a time of information overflow, we still miss significant knowledge about each other’s work, disseminated across national and cultural borders. However, as such challenges are situated within larger, more general frames of cultural as well as political (...) forces and powers, we need systematic approaches to handling them, based on international and global perspectives.Alexandra Kertz-Welzel’s book Globalizing Music Education constitutes an excellent ground for such work. Her purpose is to provide a conceptual framework, entailing “a theoretical structure of categories and conceptual elements that can facilitate becoming a united and diverse global music education community”1 which is “culturally sensitive.”2 She constructs the framework by introducing its conceptual elements along with unfolding the argument within each chapter. For some readers, it might have been easier to achieve the framework structure if described explicitly, for example in a model. For others, it may be exciting to explore it gradually together with the author as she develops her narrative.Kertz-Welzel intends the book to be a guide “for people’s own scholarly journeys, as well as for the profession.”3 As her point of departure, she takes a [End Page 97] comprehensive perspective, drawing the readers’ attention to how “[g]lobalization and internationalization have shaped our lives in ways that we do not notice anymore.”4 Pointing to a variety of non-musical as well as musical examples and relating her overview to social anthropologist Thomas Hylland Eriksen’s5 eight dimensions of globalization, she demonstrates her comprehensive knowledge of relevant information within other fields along with the ability to utilize it in order to enrich her analyses. This attention to other fields represents a recurring trait within the book, significantly increasing its quality.Modestly and realistically, she states that the book “can only be a first attempt to start a professional discourse about the impact globalization and internationalization have on music education worldwide....”6 Here, one might be confused about whether ‘discourse’ points to ‘discussion’ or discourse theory,7 but the latter perspective is brought in more clearly as she moves along. Secondly, the attention towards ‘impact,’ occurring several times throughout the book, raises a question about the balance between a focus on coping with the consequences of globalization and emphasizing our agency in these matters. Bringing in the latter by statements such as “[w]e are actors, not victims”8 and increasing this balance when discussing policy in Chapter Three, Kertz-Welzel’s argument still reveals a potential for further discussion. Moreover, addressing the challenges of globalization, we need to “help [students] develop different kinds of musicianship connected to their personal music identities,”9 she holds. Again, a potential for further discussion emerges, this time about the weight on the personal and individual over the collective. This issue might be an interesting one to discuss further within a globalized music education community.What is globalizing music education about, then? A condensed version of Kertz-Welzel’s argument might include addressing the challenges we face today by uniting our efforts and using the multi-faceted strengths we have, across the globe, in order to arrive at a united yet diverse and culturally sensitive global music education community.The main body of the book contains three chapters. In Chapter One, Kertz-Welzel distinguishes between internationalization and globalization by connecting ‘international’ with relations between nations and national organizations, while globalization rests within a notion of a worldwide community, representing a new unity based on global visions and interests, constantly transformed and in search of its identity. “This notion of globalizing can concern areas such as music education,”10 she suggests. The chapter addresses the impact globalization and internationalization have on education, music, and language, making those concepts constitute cornerstones of the suggested framework.Addressing education, Kertz-Welzel holds that globalization and internationalization have changed education from being a clearly national endeavor [End Page 98] rooted in distinctive, national values and traditions to becoming a cultural project of the world society... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Response to Anthony J. Palmer, “Music Education for the Twenty-First Century: A Philosophical View of the General Education Core”Ana Lcuía FregaI would like to discuss three themes related to Tony Palmer's paper: (1) my agreement with the content of his paper in general, (2) some remarks on elements of what he deals with, including notions about the concept or a vision of what music education should be in the (...) USA and in the rest of the world and an approach to training music teachers at university level in the USA and in the rest of the world, and (3) my personal conclusions.Music is a particular medium of expression, irreplaceable, not interchangeable with any other. It is also a natural medium of human communication. We do not think or propose that schools should create musicians, but that they should aid in the improvement of all humankind.1This quotation of mine allows me to introduce my general agreement with the main content of the first part of Palmer's paper. Neither of us argues against the importance of teaching music within the general system of education. We both promote this and work to make this a fact in our different parts of the world.We both view the tasks known as "music education" as a part of the teaching of the humanities as a way to maintain a certain level of civilization and of a culture; that is, to keep alive the rich tradition in each culture, to develop skills, to listen to, perform, and create music, and to become acquainted with the wealth of masterpieces.Also, as I have said,"I can only give what I have," and "a teacher does not teach what he/she knows but what he/she is."2 I agree with Palmer on the relevance and importance of the task of music educators. There should be a correlation between the school's mission and the quality of the training for prospective teachers for them. This is consistent with Palmer's thinking about the university task when training future music teachers.George Steiner articulated some of the difficulties, limitations, and new possibilities brought into university classrooms by the technology of the global village when he wrote:[Those artifacts] determine a new way to organize human knowledge and to connect contemporary research with previous books. All taxonomies are essentially [End Page 194] philosophical, any library... represents a formalized vision of how the world is structured, and what are the optimum views about both the human mind and the phenomenological whole.3He also adds, "We will not be able to avoid the illusion-and so it is when talking about Humanities-that knowledge is cumulative, that there is an improvement and an unavoidable teleology needed when expressing sentiments and ideas."4By introducing Steiner's ideas, I am opening a line of critical thinking about a kind of "universalization" of both Palmer's concept of whatmusiceducationmeans as well as whether and then how there should be a world-wide dissemination of the training model that he describes for music teachers. I have doubts about the underlying assumptions of these notions and their feasibility.The examples Palmer gives of listening would require an inordinate amount of time and effort. Although this may be a valuable expenditure of resources in some parts of the world, in other parts the focus would be better directed elsewhere. In some places many people do not complete their basic education, do not have access to good nutrition, and have not acquired basic language and communication skills. The big question is, "What should we really teach them?"My point here is that if Michael Murphy's model is indeed an inspiring framework, it may be useful for people belonging to a part of the so-called First World only. Palmer's work should be understood with that consideration in mind. Africa, Latin America, and the Arab world are certainly not looking for these kinds of skills from the music taught at the general level if there happens to be any music taught at all in schools.Multiculturalism is another significant issue in Palmer's paper. I understand the... (shrink)

This volume challenges readers to think about what music means in contemporary society, and how music education can remain culturally relevant in the new millennium. A collection of thought-provoking philosophical perspectives on music education. Explores the changing ways in which music is being produced, disseminated and received. Considers how current phenomena such as the commoditization of music, the use of new technologies, and access to hybrid music forms, relate to music education. Covers themes such as pragmatism, performativity, cultural identity, emotion, (...) autonomy and globalization. Asks how music teaching and learning can remain culturally relevant. (shrink)

This Article aimed to study this paper aims to analyze the impact of professional skills involved in singing on performers by studying the environment, conditions, and historical development when performing Italian chamber vocal music works, clarifying the skills and knowledge that performers need to master. This study will delve into the diversity of Italian chamber vocal music works and extract their unique values and characteristics. Through a mixed research method combining qualitative and quantitative research, this study helps researchers better understand (...) the characteristics and musical value of Italian chamber vocal music and provides methodological guidance for other researchers. The sample was two parts: one part consists of 110 teachers and students specializing in chamber vocal music at Italian music and other part is 200 amateurs with a strong interest in Italian chamber vocal music in society academies. They was selected by learn the art of Italian chamber vocal music performance through educational activities. The instrument for collecting data was by questionnaire Format. Analysis data by Descriptive statistics and Content Analysis. The research results were found as follows: 1.The Italian chamber vocal music has grown over time, with evolving techniques, styles, and cultural traits enriching its legacy. 2.In the 21st century, globalization and technological advances easy to promote Italian chamber vocal music. New media technologies offer opportunities for its dissemination. 3.The talent pool for Italian chamber vocal music is aging and shrinking. As a specialized art form with a limited audience, it's challenging to attract new talent. Therefore, nurturing new vocal talents is crucial. (shrink)

Music is the universal language of mankind. The process of learning music can be understood as the process of constantly copying and spreading cultural memes. The term "mime" here comes from meme theory, which is a theory that studies cultural imitation and aims to explore the evolutionary model of cultural information dissemination. According to the principle of meme theory, music education itself is a process of cultural dissemination, which is transmitted to different meme carriers through imitation and replication. (...) At present, music education, especially instrumental music education, focuses on teaching performance skills, so there are many performers and educators who "only focus on skills". The author believes that this process should be based on the transmission of metaphysical music culture to be more in line with the philosophical meaning of education? Is education based on meme theory more effective? In order to verify this view, the author selected 20 students from a primary school and conducted a piano teaching experiment lasting 7 months. In the end, it was proved that the piano teaching model of " listening, reading, and playing" based on meme theory has a more benign improvement on students, and also revealed the philosophical significance of music education under the perspective of meme theory and the practical path of the future development of music education. (shrink)

The overarching guiding principle of Alan Turing’s work was directed towards modelling the human mind as a machine. It is extraordinary that Turing introduced, in his early papers, ideas that are only now beginning to be investigated. Throughout his life, he considered conjectures to be of great importance because they suggest useful lines of research. In my own conjecture, I am asking the question: what is the brain’s geometry? Can it ever be unravelled, or does its complexity defy any form (...) of visual representation? Recent research reveals that the detailed workings of the brain take place in a ‘global workspace’, where conscious contents appear to be disseminated globally to a great multitude of networks throughout the brain that are unconscious. During conscious tasks, neurons contributing to the global workspace enter into a coherent activation pattern by being tightly connected through long axons. Is it possible, therefore, that my proposed geometric pattern (an Islamic latticework) can be envisaged as a useful means of interconnecting multiple long axons in a unified global workspace dedicated to conscious thought? I share and communicate my idea through a process that combines visual imagery with musical performance (i.e. visual music). It is a method that can assist in clarifying concepts that might otherwise remain elusive or esoteric. (shrink)

Ṣāliḥ Nābī (d. 1914) is a person who lived in the last periods of the Ottomans and is a medical graduate and interested in Turkish music. In 1910, he received a work called al-Falsafa al-Mūsiḳī (Philosophy of Musica). In this study, the effects of music on the human soul, music history, and musical understanding in the Ottoman period were found. Throughout history, many musical compositions have been received and reflected some philosophical thoughts. But an independent study of philosophy and music (...) is not found before the 20th century. For this reason, Ṣāliḥ Nābī's al-Falsafa al-Mūsiḳī work is remarkable in terms of its title. There are brief explanations about various issues in the work but the most important issue that attracts our opinion is the musical perception of the period. Because Ṣāliḥ Nābī, as a witness at that time, thinks that music has been neglected for a long time in the Ottoman Empire. This is the reason why he has already taken him to a work. In this article, it has been tried to be given to today's musical literalism. Summary: Ṣāliḥ Nābī was born on May 5, 1886, in Istanbul Yedikule. After his primary and secondary education, he started the Military Medicine Faculty in Cengelkoy on March 13, 1901. He graduated in 1911 after having studied for a total of ten years here. Prior to his graduation he worked as assistant at Bel-Air Hospital in Switzerland for a while. He died at the age of twenty-eight in 1914 after having practiced medicine in several different regions.Ṣāliḥ Nābī, who died at a young age, has two works that arrive present days. One of them is the graduation thesis named Mental Illnesses and Bel-Air Hospital in the Twentieth Century. In this work that he published in 1911, he made suggestions about the architectural works to be done in this area by making use of some of the examinations in Switzerland Bel-Air Bâmârhânesi where he served as an assistant for a while. The other work, which is also the subject of our work, is named al-Falsafa al-Mūsiḳī(Philosophy of Musica).Al-Falsafa al-Mūsiḳīis composed of thirty-two pages. The first fascicle, which is the subject of our work, is the only known number of this work that planned to be published as monthly magazines. This work is written to explain the subjects of music and philosophy. But this work could not continue because of Ṣāliḥ Nābī’s participation in the Balkan Wars after his graduation and later his death at a young age. Al-Falsafa al-Mūsiḳīconsists of three parts, one of which is the introduction part. Under the heading entitled "Medhal", the cultural and musical environment of the Ottomans in those days is mentioned and the purpose of writing the work is explained. The second part is about the musical influences on soul. This section examines the following topics: Musical influence on soul, the importance and service of the ancient Greeks to music, some notes about music in history. The name of the last part is “Mūsiḳīnin İctimā’iyāt ve Tārihle Munāsebeti (Relation of Music with Sociology and History)”. Under the last title these subjects are respectively discussed: the place of music in social life, the origins of music, the invention of some instruments used by the ancient Greeks, especially the "lyric", the services of the ancient Greeks as music, the development of music in the Arab world and its pioneers, the effect of the invention and dissemination of musical notation.As you can see, although the author uses “music” and “philosophia” words in the name of work, he has made statements on many issues. We will examine these issues under five headings in terms of better understanding of the work and on the subject matter integrity. These are: The origin of the word of “al-Mūsiḳī/music”, the musical thought in the work, the history of music, the musical understanding and works in the Ottoman in the twentieth century and the music-literature relation. Since the topics under these headings will be given in detail in the article, we can summarize them briefly as follows. There is some information in the sources of musicology that the origin of the word of “al-Mūsiḳī/music” is derived from the ancient Greeks. According to this idea, word of “al-Mūsiḳī/music” comes from “musa” which is the goddess of poetry and music. But Ṣāliḥ Nābī did not accept this claim. The author states that this word is used to be by the ancient Greeks, but also existed long before them. Moreover, Sālih Nâbî states that such thoughts arise as a result of a mistake such as searching for the origin of everything in the ancient Greeks. Ṣāliḥ Nābī states that music is art that can express the deepest feelings of the soul. This is the humane direction of music. On the social side, music is the most important means of revealing the structure of a society and the world of thought. For this reason, the development of music shows the development of the country. Therefore, music is important in child bringing-up and in the first education period of a child. Because the generation who knows the music, senses the deepest feeling of the soul (which is the conscience, they also have moral norms that are socially necessary. There are some explanations of music history in the work of Ṣāliḥ Nābī. The author bases musical history before the creation of Adam. Because the voice was there before man was created. The works of the ancient Greeks in the history of music cannot be denied. They have reached important information on issues such as instrument inventions, influence of music on soul, the fact that music becomes a science, and they have conveyed them to future generations with their works. The author, who stated that similar works were done in the world of Islam, gives two examples with the mention of Fārābī and Ibrāhīm al-Mavsilī. One of the issues that the author is talking about is the influence of music on soul. Ṣāliḥ Nābī is a doctor interested in music. He had also done research on this subject, prepared a thesis as mentioned before, and published his work. The author, explaining this effect of music, has given examples in the history that some wars have been gained thanks to music.One of the most remarkable parts of the work of Ṣāliḥ Nābī is that he analysed the situation of the Ottoman Empire at that time. The author criticizes the current rulings for their indifference to Turkish music. Moreover, he expresses that they are trying to dig root of Turkish music for a while. During this period, a disconnection between the Ottoman palace and the people has begun. Because in the Ottoman palace music is considered to be an elite art and the pleasures of the people are ignored. The author, describing this negative situation, states that despite all of this, there is a correction in the current state of Turkish music in its period. Now the Ottoman palace was not indifferent to Turkish music. In addition, some theoretical studies about Turkish music have begun to emerge in the Ottoman Empire.The author, who also deals with the relationship between music and literature, expresses that these two fields are very close to each other. Therefore, a good poet should know music and a good musician should know literature. (shrink)

Euro Women's Independent Label Distribution (WILD) was a pan-European network of feminist music distributors active in the early 1980s. They were affiliated to WILD, the US-based Women's Music distribution network founded in 1979 to disseminate the growing corpus of Women's Music emerging from the US Women's Liberation Movement (WLM). This article presents an interpretation of archive materials that document Euro WILD's activities from the Women's Revolutions Per Minute archive, housed at the Women's Art Library, London. Constrained and enabled by the (...) archive materials on offer, I revisit some of the practical and political problems the network faced as European distributors of US Women's Music. Key issues explored include the perception of US cultural imperialism by women based in Europe and the affective politics that circulated transnationally between distributors. Finally, this article explores how the concept and practice of the Women's Music industry changed when women beyond the borders of the US engaged with it. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reflections on Futures for Music Education PhilosophyEstelle R. JorgensenIn 1990, when I convened the first International Symposium for the Philosophy of Music Education at Bloomington, Indiana, there was one dominant philosophy of music education in the United States and another was about to make its appearance. The five succeeding symposia (Toronto, Canada, in 1994, led by David Elliott; Los Angeles, United States, in 1997, led by Anthony Palmer and (...) Frank Heuser; Birmingham, United Kingdom, in 2000, led by Mary Reichling and Forest Hansen; Lake Forest, Illinois, United States, in 2003, led by Iris Yob, Frank Heuser, and Forest Hansen; and Hamburg, Germany, in 2005, led by Charlene Morton, Paul Woodford, Frede Nielsen, and Jürgen Vogt) have promoted other philosophies. And this burgeoning of different voices and perspectives has greatly enriched the philosophical underpinnings of music education and moved us from relying on a narrow range of philosophical views towards a plethora of them.In our infant society, the International Society for Philosophy of Music Education (ISPME), we are creating and institutionalizing a forum that can nurture and critique ideas and practices and sustain the work of philosophical reflection in music education over the longer term. We have also benefited from long-term commitments by the Indiana University School of Music and Indiana University [End Page 15] Press to publishing the Philosophy of Music Education Review, now in its fourteenth volume (building on three years of publication of the Philosophy of Music Education Newsletter), and the Counterpoints: Music and Education series that provides an important venue for publishing cutting-edge scholarship in our field. And over the past two years, we have begun to build an international team of philosophers committed to establishing a strong philosophical society in music education.Beyond institutionalizing philosophical scholarship in music education, our society is committed to creating a genuinely international community that offers a global perspective. In the past, music education grew up within national borders and its work was often nationalistic in emphasis. Now, we face new challenges of thinking beyond these national commitments to a world of music education. This world might be seen as what Maxine Greene aptly terms "multiplicities and pluralities,"1 the many differing groups forged within language groups, religious perspectives, political ideologies, economic strictures, and familial obligations. And as philosophers, we work especially within our various linguistic and cultural traditions as we also seek to transcend these traditions in a common discourse.How shall we address philosophically the multiplicities and pluralities, commonalities and differences in music education internationally? Radical relativism and pluralism offer contrasting perspectives.2 Radical relativism sees the host of different music education beliefs and practices around the world as incommensurable and focuses on differences between them. For example, viewing Japanese and British music education within this stance would suggest that since Japanese and British music education reflect Japanese and British society and culture respectively, each cannot be understood in terms of the other, they are different and incommensurate with the other, and it is important to understand each in its own terms. Pluralism, however, sees differences as commensurable and focuses on shared attributes. Since human beings are the creators of culture and society, common threads amidst the differences emerge from this common humanity. For example, as a reflection of their different societies and cultures, although we expect to encounter differences between British and Japanese music education, we may also observe commonalities since they both bear the imprint of a shared humanity.Notwithstanding that musics and educational systems seem, upon first glance and when considered specifically, to be incommensurable, a deeper and more general examination turns up evidence supporting a pluralist perspective.3 Historically, cultures regularly borrow from different others as if there were common human threads. Maurice Ravel, Carl Orff, and Paul Simon are among twentieth-century composers to draw on cultures from the Far East and Africa. In music [End Page 16] education, Masafumi Ogawa's study of the introduction of Luther Whiting Mason's ideas into Japan in the nineteenth century,4 the dissemination of Shinichi Suzuki's ideas into the United States, the spread of Zoltán Kodály's, Émile Jaques-Dalcroze's, and Carl Orff's and Gunild... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Role of the Heavens in the Thought of Philip MelanchthonCharlotte MethuenPhilip Melanchthon has long been recognized as one of the central figures in the German Lutheran Reformation. His theological contribution to the Reformation may be found in his codifying of Lutheran theology in the Confessio Augustana and in the Loci Communes, the first major Lutheran theological textbook, which long remained a central text for the teaching of theology (...) in Lutheran schools and universities. A teacher at the University of Wittenberg from 1518 until his death, Melanchthon was also involved in the reform of universities and the establishment of school systems throughout Lutheran Germany. These reforms facilitated the spread of the Reformation by encouraging the development of Lutheran educational principles and the establishing of Humanist education as the basis for the schools and universities of Lutheran Germany, and Melanchthon’s role in this process has led to his being accorded the title Praeceptor Germaniae. 1 More recently, Melanchthon has also been hailed as the initiator of a new “Lutheran” approach to natural philosophy. 2 It is my contention in this article that Melanchthon’s interest in natural philosophy is integrally connected to his educational interest and that these hang upon a particular theological and cosmological [End Page 385] understanding of the universe, particularly the heavens, as becomes clear from his defense of astronomy.I. Despite his theological interests and his commitment to the dissemination of Lutheran theology, Melanchthon was reluctant to teach theology and remained primarily concerned with the teaching of the subjects which made up the curriculum of the arts faculty in a sixteenth-century university. It was as Professor of Greek that he was originally appointed to the University of Wittenberg, and he had a deep interest in the teaching of ancient languages, especially Greek, and in the study of ancient texts in their original form rather than through later commentators. His promotion of the trivium (grammar, logic, and rhetoric) led him to write a textbook in each of these areas; and these works continued to be used as prescribed works in many German universities into the seventeenth century. 3 As an educator Melanchthon was thus firmly in the humanist mold. However, Melanchthon’s interests did not only take in the teaching of languages; he also promoted the teaching of both moral and natural philosophy. 4 Moreover, he was a strong advocate of the teaching of the mathematical sciences, particularly arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy. These, together with music, made up the quadrivium, which complemented the linguistic arts.In Melanchthon’s day the mathematical sciences had long been accepted as part of the arts curriculum, 5 even if in practice minimal attention had been paid them at many universities. 6 Their ambiguous status is reflected by the attitude taken by many humanist reformers, who did not regard arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music as an essential part of the curriculum. Thus Erasmus believed that music, arithmetic, and geography should be taught only to pupils who had a particular interest in these subjects 7 and that knowledge of nature, astrology, architecture, and other related subjects would come from reading the ancient authors. 8 In a similar vein Juan Luis [End Page 386] Vives argued that mathematics tended to divorce the mind from the practical concerns of life and that its study was not, therefore, to be recommended. 9 In contrast Melanchthon seems to have recognized the value of the study of the mathematical sciences from the beginning of his scholarly career. Perhaps he was inspired by his professor of mathematics at Tübingen, Johannes Stöffler, a gifted mathematician who wrote his own Arithmetic and was also fluent in the praise of his subject. 10 In an early oration, De artibus liberalis, delivered in Tübingen in 1517, Melanchthon praises arithmetic as a principal part of philosophy; geometry for its role in producing the wonderful machines of war and the beautiful ornaments of cities; music for its elegance and harmony; and astronomy (very briefly) for its applications in medicine. 11This oration should almost certainly be read as part of the tradition of orations and odes which extolled each of the liberal arts for its practical (and often also... (shrink)

Graphic justice and the law of aesthetics have in very recent years successfully brought law, aesthetics and comics scholarship into the same space. The culture of copyright infringement within comics (including in the Marvel, DC, and Disney universes) has been extensively in the literature by scholars including Saval. How copyright law is portrayed within the graphic novels and comics themselves is the focus (and contribution of) this article. This article will explore several comics and graphic novels, as well as included (...) this author’s reflections of portraying copyright visually within zines for public dissemination. Throughout this article, the discourses of ghosts and spectres that are interwoven with copyright law and haunt the texts will be seen, as will the discourses of oppression and warfare that are involved for anyone seeking to make use of copyright works. As Gómez Romero and Dahlman note, comics offer “an alternative legal discourse” and we can see these alternative legal discourses through their aesthetic graphic form. This article will consider: the aesthetic portrayal of copyright law in A Gift for a Ghost and Josie and the Pussycats No. 6; as well as Bound by Law, Theft! A History of Music, and Pictures within Pictures. These comics and graphic novels have been chosen as they aesthetically portray copyright law and copyright infringement (referred to in some of the comics as “plagiarism”), and others aesthetically portray the public domain and fair use. In viewing these aesthetic manifestation of copyright law, the reader understands the limiting nature of copyright on creative freedoms, and that copyright law’s power is absolute. This article will explore the following: (i) copyright’s aesthetic portrayals and the impact of this; (ii) comics haunted by copyright law, considering A Gift for A Ghost and Josie and the Pussycats; (iii) comics about the necessity of the public domain and fair use, considering Bound by Law, Theft! A History of Music, and Pictures within Pictures; and (iv) self-reflections on portraying copyright aesthetically in publicly disseminated research zines. This article has not set out to determine that certain visual aesthetic portrayals are “correct” or “better”, but rather to explore how legal discourses and narratives about copyright law are circulated through the comics medium. These visual depictions hold considerable weight, and it is striking to see similar narratives used across a range of comics works, with different intended audiences. What is clear is that the visual depiction of copyright law enables a greater ability to convey the multiple copyright law discourses that can be felt at once, and also to highlight that some of these discourses are contradictory to one another. (shrink)

Before the intervention of the missionaries in Bapedi society, the traditional beliefs, customs and practices, such as traditional healing, circumcision, polygamy, indigenous music and rituals, had a vibrant existence. These practices had been prevalent for centuries before the arrival of Christianity. After the missionaries of all church denominations were welcomed in Bapedi society to establish churches and schools as the main vehicles for the dissemination of European culture, confusion started to build. In this article, I will highlight the reaction (...) of Bapedi people of Sekhukhune district, Limpopo province, South Africa, to the missionary activities of Berlin Mission Society, Germany, from 19 July 1860 to 08 July 2018. The purpose of this study was to explain the conflict or integration of different cultural norms and the missionary influence on the Bapedi indigenous way of life. The questions that I attempt to answer in this article are: how do people understand one another when they do not share a common cultural experience? and who are to blame, the missionaries or the Bapedi people themselves? I address this question by analysing the missionary influence on Bapedi traditional beliefs, customs and practices. Primary data were collected through video recordings of cultural and religious rituals, interviews and observations. Secondary data include publications. It was concluded that in spite of fundamental and multi-consequential changes that Christianity brought about in Bapedi society, a large percentage of Bapedi people, independent churches inclusive, have used and are still following their traditional beliefs, taboos, customs and practices. (shrink)

The term "third wave" within contemporary feminism presents some initial difficulties in scholarly investigation. Located in popular-press anthologies, zines, punk music, and cyberspace, many third wave discourses constitute themselves as a break with both second wave and academic feminisms; a break problematic for both generations of feminists. The emergence of third wave feminism offers academic feminists an opportunity to rethink the context of knowledge production and the mediums through which we disseminate our work.

This paper explores global K-pop's negotiation and reconstruction of Korean aesthetics via the dismantling, adoption, appropriation, and transfiguring of central elements of Korean traditional culture. Recently, K-pop groups have been incorporating traditional music and dance (gugak), traditional attire (hanbok), traditional houses (hanok), and old palaces (gogung) into music videos disseminated globally over digital platforms like YouTube. In their efforts to incorporate more 'Koreanness' into their musical productions and neutralize criticisms of their use of the 'K' prefix as inauthentic and unconnected (...) to Korean aesthetics, groups like BTS and BLACKPINK are redefining 'K-heritage' for music consumers worldwide. Along with other globally consumed Hallyu productions like K-movies, K-dramas, and K-games, K-Pop is in the process of reconstructing Koreans' and the world's view of the meaning of Korean-ness. (shrink)

In Absolute Music: The History of an Idea, author Mark Evan Bonds examines how writers have struggled to isolate the essence of music in ways that account for its profound effects on the human spirit. By carefully tracing the evolution of absolute music from Ancient Greece through the Middle Ages to twentieth-century America, Bonds provides the first comprehensive history of this pivotal concept, and provokes new thoughts on the essence of music and how this essence explains music's effect. A long (...) awaited book from one of the most respected senior scholars in the field. (shrink)

continent. 1.3 (2011): 201-207. “Poetry is experience, linked to a vital approach, to a movement which is accomplished in the serious, purposeful course of life. In order to write a single line, one must have exhausted life.” —Maurice Blanchot (1982, 89) Nikos Karouzos had a communist teacher for a father and an orthodox priest for a grandfather. From his four years up to his high school graduation he was incessantly educated, reading the entire private library of his granddad, comprising mainly (...) the Orthodox Church Fathers and the ancient classics. Later on in his life he sold the library for money, only to buy a little more time before he went broke again: “I carry sorrow like a cage/ I got no birds/ as I come back from her hair/ I see the profit emptied/ cool from terror.” (1993, Ι, 101) Nowadays—and ridiculously recently—we are more than apt to speak of a certain insouciance pertaining to the Greek form of expenditure: expenditure without any type of investment, sometimes not (even) symbolic. In the vaults of the European unconscious, this imprudent stance still conjures a “capital punishment” in the form of de-capitation, reflecting back the fear of excess and the terror of its consequences.1 Thus the Greek way of living is very close to what a stranger could have termed as “the Greek way of dying.” Yet, what is not often understood is that the Greek esprit , the same one that invented the maxim μηδ?ν ?γαν (“nothing in excess”), does not experience death solely as an imminent fear of bankruptcy. For it miraculously combines its unconditional acceptance with the promise of a resurrection that is always there in the scents of Spring, from Dionysus to the orthodox Christ: “Everyone resurrects himself through dying [….] Resurrection is the switching of mortalities.” (2002, 94) Hence, if an entire library was imprudently traded for a plate with seven olives, a sliced tomato and some fresh goat cheese, let us not be fooled: this is not the meal of the pauper, but that of “an aristocrat from God” (1993, II, 491) feeding his eloquent loudmouth, ridiculously cut open in an otherwise rock-solid caput . *** To speak of the Greek experience is to speak about a half-dead language that still utters in life what is seemingly excluded from it and thus forbidden to be talked about: death. Death as anything that is out of this world, as something that will never return . Still, along with an experience of death that recently waned as a worn-out academic fashion, the Greek experience is dead too. Nearly 2300 years of written words separating Homer from the fall of Byzantium equal 500 books on a library traded for money: “I am with the killed. Hence my deepest solitude. I do not feel this tremendous macho society, beyond from the fact that it is a ruthlessly consuming one. It is me who pays all the time .” (2002, 57) Let us do the math and see how much this dealing with the Greek experience is costing the poet and how much dealing with the Greek experience might cost us today. *** “I do not guarantee a single word.” (Karouzos, 1993, II, 454) Through its various dialects and forms, the Greek language speaks through an incessant historical dissemination. Anyone who is aware of this terrifying polymorphy and still calls himself a poet, must stand against a white sheet of paper, pen-in-hand, with a very particular duty: to be as fully inconsistent as possible. In the formally ironic uniqueness of the poem, the poet functions as “a band-aid for lesser and greater antinomies.” (1993, I, 251) Of course these antinomies are not exhausted in language—they are historical, political and, alas, existential. Yet, beyond appearances , it is language that ruthlessly encodes them through history, submitting the poet to the temptation of placing them one next to the other on a single white sheet. The closer their neighboring, the greater the scattering of the writer in the ironic uniqueness of the paper. In a work where poetic license is described as a “freedom-impasse” (2002, 51), this task is undertaken in full conscience of its personal consequences: “what I am interested in is to escape my individuality (envisioning the non-ego) […] Nevertheless, my dissociations never achieve duration.” (2002, 74-75) Hence, though poetry is the “deserted direction of will,” (1998, 62) the stance of the poet is not that of a Nietzschean “great man.”2 Whereas drunkenness provides a thread between the poem and the excess it both presupposes and infuses (“Poetry always enlarges. ‘Drunkenness’ is nothing more than that,” (2002, 85)), whereas language flashes in loudmouth spurts of déraison (“When I am alone I do something else. I utter words. For example, while having my ouzo and listening to music I am most likely capable of randomly shouting ‘Electricity!’” (2002, 138)), the poet never gives in to the double affirmation that would eventually risk the “element of pleasure in discourse.” (2002, 80)” It is exactly because the gap of the antinomies is so vast that poetry is not meant to be written with a hammer. Neither does writing consist in a reevaluation of those elements. In short, poetry is not an affirmation of difference, but the surprising beauty of chiming antinomies. We might never transcend them, but it is up to us to put them together. Yet again, this voisinage is not to be identified with the necessity of chance as an eternal return.4 On the contrary it is a return from that very return : Let us treat Yes as a No to No and No as a Yes […] And let us not forget that this pissed affirmation crumbled down Nietzsche’s intellect in the dark paths of this world. (2002, 88) This return from the “vicious circle” should in no way be taken as a form of artistic prudence. Rather it can be seen as a dribble of demonic inconsistency as Dionysus transforms himself into a Christ that is in turn de-theologized: “Who can forbid that? Every man is capable of his own theology, nothing can stop him.” (2002, 73-74) This is a turn towards an existential vision of the world, historically coinciding with a particular political defeat of the Left, to which the poet devoted all his life: after the defeat of the popular front I raised the question “why do we exist?” while others were asking “why we failed.” (2002, 57)5 But most of all it is a return to poetry that exceeds the existential question itself, going beyond the issue of faith. Poetry comes in as a question of return after a defeat that is confessed in full profanity. Though it accepts the necessity of the defeat, it does not affirm it. Though it negates it, the negation is not in the name of a promise to be delivered in the kingdom of heavens. Following a historical and existential defeat, poetry is born post mortem . It signals a return to Christ as “groundless religiousness in the surprise of the real as such” (2002, 72) which is at once a return to the refuge of childhood. It is not a question of endurance towards an eternal return. Rather it is a question on the possibility of an existential return. Returning in a world as someone who cannot enjoy any returns exactly because he is averse to guarantees. A return without returns. *** PHOTOCOPY OF HAPPINESS When I was young I used to pin down cicadas and step on ant nests. I used to stand there silent for hours. With threads I decapitated bees. Now I am a dead man breathing. (Karouzos, 1993, II, 336.) The return to the “paradise of childhood” (2002, 68) constitutes the devouring refuge of its own memory when defeat becomes the synonym of adulthood. The political struggles of a young communist in a country torn up by a civil war right after World War II fraught with incarcerations and exiles. Historically they resulted in the defeat of the communist movement in Greece and opened up a long turbulent road that would peak in the dictatorship of 1967. Existentially they led to a series of disillusionments: mental breakdown, divorce, abandonment of studies in law school. To the question “why do we exist” the answer was poetry. Still this exposé should not be read as a sweeping chronography of a man. For it actually happens to coincide with the historical fate of a nation that after its modern constitution never stopped dreaming of the glories of its past youth, in a present that was (and is) sweepingly disappointing. But isn’t this return to youth finally a way of compensating for a loss of youth that necessarily results in a losing adulthood? Will Greeks, the eternal children of Plato and Nietzsche, ever learn? How to return without dying, how to remember without wasting time? WE ARE IN THE OPEN MEANING Living the coldest mauve night right across Parthenon I went to take a piss on some foliage and I was enjoying the foliage as it was steaming. (Karouzos, 1993, II, 340) Beyond the historical tragedies of modern Greece and away from any personal disappointments, the relation that this land holds with language and history is mediated through the Greek light—whose omnipresence is the very condition of its transcendence. All historical contradictions from Dionysus to Christ took place under this light; all those disseminated dialects were spoken beneath its warmth. To paraphrase Lévinas,6 light is both the condition of the world and of our withdrawal from it—a withdrawal towards the invisibility of God, of the dead, of meta-physics, resulting from the temptation that all is still here, behind this light the visibility of which they once evaded: “birds, the allurement of God.” (1993, I, 17) Under that luminous sky, if Greeks can do anything at all, it is to envision a return that will never come. All they can do is write poetry—which is doing nothing; other than lending an ear to a disseminated language whispering a unity that cannot be promised, as an adulthood in defeat is ready to recognize. Trying “to trap the invisible in visibility” (1993, II, 483) they forget that they have grown up and one day they die—with the promise of return. Hence an additional meaning must be given to this return to childhood. It does not signal salvation but rather its promise. To the ears of an aged continent it means that the return to/of poetry is a losing game, a return without returns. “Europe, Europe… you are nothing more than the continuation of Barabbas.” (1993, I, 295) *** “Life is not there to verify theories.”7 The records show that Karouzos was finally given a second-class pension from the Greek government, at the time when he was being recognized by the literary press as one of Greece’s major contemporary poets. Being neither a bourgeois nor a nobelist, he proclaimed himself to be an anarcho-communist, unconditionally faithful to the utopia of a classless society. He also drank, heavily. “Capitalism made an animal out of man/ Marxism made an animal out of truth/ Shut up.” (1993, II, 369) Perhaps one of the most scandalous divides of our times has been the one between the living and the dead, the latent prohibition that the living should not be concerned with the dead based on the mere impossibility of the dead to be concerned with the living in the first place. What adds to this scandal is that this divide abuses anything that cannot return to us by subsuming it under the same futility. Hence death is no longer “loss” in the usual sense. It no more refers to the things we lost but to our “loss” (of time, money and well-being) as we insist to dwell on them. Death is a waste —of time. It is this waste that we find in the insouciance of Greek expenditure; the waste in dealing with a language that most of its historical part is no longer spoken (a dead language); the waste in translating a poet who is ex definitio untranslatable; the waste of his vision, his money, his life. The waste of dealing with anything that cannot return and that cannot bring in any returns . But it is also the waste of life that poetry itself presupposes, the waste of dealing with invisibility, with anything that is out of this world and thus invokes the fear of death that is in turn—and surprisingly— nowhere to be found. Instead of death, what is there, beyond the light, is the being without us (to recall the Lévinasian il y a ), the mumble of our own nothingness which constitutes the price to be paid for writing poetry under an evergreek light. To understand this to-and-fro, is to realize that poetry is something out of this world that nevertheless takes place in this world, by virtue of this world. But to ridiculously equate this to-and-fro with death as non-existence, is to exile poetry along with its own possibility from this same old world: I do not believe that poetry will ever disappear from this world. […] But I am also sure that it does not have many chances of playing, as you say, a redemptive role in our vertiginous technological future. Without being endangered as a creative need, it will be placed on the side of history. (2002, 32) It is mainly there that we would like to locate the meaning of Nikos Karouzos’s poetry today. If we are willing to include the Greek original it is because we consider that it will be both a waste of time for us to do so (since most of you cannot read Greek) and because it might induce you to the even larger waste of learning it. We would additionally be glad if this small introduction served as an equally wasteful, academically useless piece of reading, gesturing towards a taboo of investing in anything Greek—that is in anything dead among the living, in anything that will never come back and maybe was never here in the first place. This is the only way to reserve for ourselves the possibility of poetry and preserve the light of its promise. “To return: that is the miracle.” (1993, I, 17) Athens, Greece July 10, 2011 NOTES 1 “ Capitale (a Late Latin word based on caput “head”) emerged in the twelfth to thirteenth centuries in the sense of funds, stock of merchandise, sum of money or money carrying interest.[…] The word and the reality it stood for appear in the sermons of St. Bernardino of Siena (1380-1444) ‘… quamdam seminalem rationem lucrosi quam communiter capitale vocamus ’, ‘that prolific cause of wealth that we commonly call capital’” (Braudel, 1992, 232-233). 2 “A great man – a man whom nature has constructed and invented in the grand style – what is he? First : there is a long logic in all of his activity, hard to survey because of its length, and consequently misleading; he has the ability to extend his will across great stretches of his life and to despise and reject everything petty about him, including even the fairest, ‘divinest’ things in the world.” (Nietzsche, 1968, 505, §962) 3 Cf. Deleuze, 1986, 186-9. 4 “Return is the being of becoming, the unity of multiplicity, the necessity of chance: the being of difference as such or the eternal return.” (Deleuze, 189)5 In this 1982 interview Karouzos refers to the defeat of the communist movement in Greece after the civil war of 1946-1949 between the Governmental Army and the Democratic Army of Greece, the military division of the Greek communist party. Karouzos’s father was a member of the communist National Liberation front (EAM) members of which formed the mainl resistance movement (ELAS) in Greece during WWII. The poet was a member of the United Panhellenic Organization of Youth (EPON), which was a youth division of EAM. After the end of the war, ELAS was called to disarmament in view of the formation of a National Army. The members of EAM resigned from the government of national unity and a series of protests led to a 3 year civil war between ELAS and the Government Army. After the defeat of ELAS the Communist party was outlawed and many communists were exiled in deserted Greek islands. Karouzos, who took action in the Greek resistance and was active during the Greek civil war, was exiled in Icaria on 1947 and in Makronisos on 1953 where he was called two years earlier to do his military service. 6 “Existence in the world qua light, which makes desire possible, is then, in the midst of being, the possibility of detaching oneself from being. To enter into being is to link up with objects; it is in effect a bond that is already tainted with nullity. It is already to escape anonymity. In this world where everything seems to affirm our solidarity with the totality of existence, where we are caught up in the gears of a universal mechanism, our first feeling, our ineradicable illusion, is a feeling or illusion of freedom. To be in the world is this hesitation, this interval in existing, which we have seen in the analyses of fatigue and the present.” (Lévinas, 1988,43-4) 7from a TV interview. THE POETRY OF NIKOS KAROUZOS From Redwriter [ Ερυθρογρ?φος ], in Collected Works, Vol . II, Athens: Ikaros. 1993, 463-4. [Athens: Apopeira, 1990, 9-10.] JESUS ANTI-OEDIPUS* Why were we once saving till the fifth day the Paschal lamb? The scriptures say: with this victim’s meat we ought to cleanse all of our senses. To give life to the whitest wave miraculous odors in the extension of the chest. Ideals to death. For us to witness the illustrious dawns of Absinthe and for the soul to be a deeply carved ornament on the fore we named will. Then many deer running amidst the evergreen growth with watery hymns, then, the unintended angels descending with heights spiraling in their momentum offer themselves to the luminous Adventure. Whence the need for speech and our sufferings covered with flags like the glorified dead. An incorporeal finger pointing at the flamboyant and fragrant holocausts within the tired horizons and the exhausted breadths with joys of the mistletoe on fire and shivering all of the green-leaved love. Something would have chirped again had we not driven it away— maybe the ewe’s grass. Something would have called us to the eternal resurrection— maybe the grace of spring. But now our heart is fiercely blinded, withdrawn to the appearances of Hades. Silence and ice incessantly cover the Infant Spirit in thatched times. While the cherry trees are dreaming faintly glowing in absolute darkness there’s nothing the Babylonians can contemplate in labs with automatic colored lights. How to rejoice now in the fifth day of the lamb? We have forked the stars. We’ve gradually become supposedly sublime with plucked chimeras in our hands. Avenged relentlessly by science. *Though the poem appears in a 1990 collection, it was actually written in 1968. Hence the reader must be aware in not associating Karouzos’ Anti-Oedipus with the famous 1972 work of Deleuze and Guattari, given that the former precedes the latter. ΙΗΣΟΥΣ ΑΝΤΙ-ΟΙΔΙΠΟΥΣ Γιατ? κρατο?σαμε κ?ποτε ?ς την π?μπτη μ?ρα το πασχαλιν? πρ?βατο; Τα κε?μενα λ?νε: μ’ αυτο? του θ?ματος το κρ?ας ?πρεπε να καθαρ?σουμε ?λες τις αισθ?σεις. Για να δ?σουμε κ?μα στη ζω? λευκ?τατο θαυμ?σιες ευωδι?ς στην ?κταση του στ?θους. Ιδανικ? στο χ?ρο. Για να βλ?πουμε τα λαμπρ? χαρ?ματα του ?ψινθου και να ’ναι η ψυχ? στ?λισμα βαθυχ?ρακτο της πλ?ρης που την ε?παμε θ?ληση. Τ?τε πολλ?ς δορκ?δες τρ?χοντας αν?μεσα στην καταπρ?σινη φ?ση με τους υδ?τινους ?μνους, τ?τε, κατεβα?νοντας οι αθ?λητοι ?γγελοι με κυλινδο?μενο το ?ψος στην ορμ? τους χαρ?ζονται της αστραφτερ?ς Περιπ?τειας. ?θεν η μιλι? γι’ αυτ? χρει?ζεται και τα δειν? σκεπ?ζονται ωσ?ν τους τιμημ?νους νεκρο?ς με σημα?ες. Ασ?ματο δ?χτυλο δε?χνει τα φλογ?δη και μοσχοβ?λα ολοκαυτ?ματα στους κουρασμ?νους ορ?ζοντες στα εξουθενωμ?να πλ?τη καθ?ς αν?βουν οι χαρ?ς του νερα?δ?ξυλου και τρ?μει ολ?κληρη η πρασιν?φυλλη αγ?πη. Κ?τι θα κελαηδο?σε π?λι αν δεν το δι?χναμε— μπορε? της προβατ?νας το χορτ?ρι. Κ?τι θα μας καλο?σε στην απ?ραντη αν?σταση— μπορε? του ?αρος η χ?ρη. Μα η καρδι? μας ?γρια τυφλ?θηκε π?ρασε στα φαιν?μενα του ?δη. Σιγ? και π?γος αδι?κοπα σκεπ?ζει στους αχυρ?νιους καιρο?ς το Ν?πιο Πνε?μα. Την ?ρα που ονειρε?ονται οι βυσσινι?ς και λ?μπουν αμυδρ? μεσ’ στο απλ?τατο σκοτ?δι τ?ποτα δε στοχ?ζονται οι βαβυλ?νιοι στα εργαστ?ρια με τ’ αυτ?ματα χρωματιστ? φ?τα. Π?ς να χαρο?με πια την π?μπτη μ?ρα του προβ?του; Φουρκ?σαμε τ’ αστ?ρια. Γ?ναμε σιγ?-σιγ? δ?θεν υπ?ροχοι με μαδημ?νες χ?μαιρες στα χ?ρια. Μας ν?μεται σκληρ? η επιστ?μη. From: Redwriter [Ερυθρογρ?φος], in Collected Works, Vol. II, Athens: Ikaros. 1993, 472. [Athens: Apopeira, 1990, 18.] DIALECTΙCS OF SPRING Christ the straight angle; Christ the Pythagorean theorem. Christ the infinitesimal calculus from above the blessed Sets Christ. Christ the tessellation of massive particles Christ the zero mass. Hence we spray numbers and fields of lust. We are carabineers of diseased logic plus something— Observed means observer and Hekate The darkness luminous and light in the dark Astarte banqueters demons from today. ΔΙΑΛΕΚΤΙΚΗ ΤΟΥ ΕΑΡΟΣ Χριστ?ς η ορθ? γων?α· Χριστ?ς το πυθαγ?ριο θε?ρημα. Χριστ?ς ο απειροστικ?ς λογισμ?ς ?νωθεν ?λβια Χριστ?ς τα Σ?νολα. Χριστ?ς η ψηφιδογραφ?α στα μαζικ? σωμ?τια Χριστ?ς η μ?ζα μηδ?ν. ?ρα ψεκ?ζουμε αριθμο?ς και πεδ?α λαγνε?ας. Ε?μαστε τυφεκιοφ?ροι νοσο?σης λογικ?ς και κ?τι-- παρατηρο?μενο σημα?νει παρατηρητ?ς και Εκ?τη σκ?τος το π?μφωτο και φως εν τ? σκοτ?? η Αστ?ρτη συνδαιτημ?νες δα?μονες απ’ ?ρτι. From: Redwriter [Ερυθρογρ?φος], Athens: Apopeira, 1990, 18. [1993, II, 472]. CREDO (as we are used to say in Latin) Α I believe in one Poet expelled from heavens / fugitive from the god and vagabond, Empedocles / and here on earth / exile on the earth etc. of Baudelaire /. Β I believe in one Computer inside thunder and through matter. Γ Suffering undefiled / substantive / the Poet uplifts himself slow-burning suicidal implying lengthy sleeps. Δ Cutting down on prospective mistakes. Ε Of all things visible and invisible officiating the onion-peelings. Ζ The Poet has nothing / see the departed /. Η I believe in one Poet that says: madness I enjoy; he ridicules existence; let me light up from my mana. Θ Syntax he doesn’t care about when musicality commands him. Along with still more licenses, and Ts are played according to the concept sound anywhere. E.g. the winters here, he winters there; it will not come—I will not rest, etc. etc. Ι The Poet exercises thought until it’s stripped down. Κ And if he’s Greek he must always study the fineness of Attica, in light, mountains, fields and sea. For this fineness teaches language. Λ And if he’s deeply destined the Poet expresses the unexplainable of the explained; he happens to be a rightful heir to the scientist and his predecessor. Μ On the froth he does not last; the Poet blusters at the bottom of the pot. Ν Flamebred and never redeemed. Ξ The Poet must sometimes say: what a consumption of presence — be a bit lonely for a change! Ο The Poet is twilit. Π He is susceptible of deaths and resurrections. Ρ He looks from the corner of his eye and exists in a glance. Σ He follows behind the mother. Τ Eveningless when it comes to age. Υ I believe in one Poet who says: let the purities coincide. Until the Corinth of the Universe or even further. Φ In a higher despair. Χ In a brighter quintessence. Ψ In one sensation that lifts off. Ω Forgiving everyone. CREDO (ως ε?θισται να λ?με λατινιστ?) Α Πιστε?ω εις ?να Ποιητ?ν εκτ?ς ουρανο? / φυγ?ς θε?θεν και αλ?της, Εμπεδοκλ?ς / και επ? της γης / εξ?ριστος π?νω στη γη κ.λπ. του Βωδελα?ρου /. Β Πιστε?ω εις ?να Υπολογιστ?ν εντ?ς κεραυνο? και δια της ?λης. Γ Υποφ?ροντας ?χραντα / ουσιαστικ?ν / ο Ποιητ?ς ανατε?νεται βραδυφλεγ?ς αυτ?χειρας εξυπακο?οντας πολ?ωρους ?πνους. Δ Τα υποψ?φια λ?θη λιγοστε?οντας. Ε Ορατ?ν τε π?ντων και αορ?των ιερουργ?ντας την αποκρομμ?ωση. Ζ Ο Ποιτ?ς ?χει τ?ποτα / βλ?πε τους αναχωρ?σαντες /. Η Πιστε?ω εις ?να Ποιητ?ν που λ?ει: η τρ?λα μ’ αρ?σει· γελοιοποιε? την ?παρξη· ας αν?ψω απ’ τη μ?να μου. Θ Συνταχτικ? δεν το γνοι?ζεται στην προσταγ? της μουσικ?τητας. Μαζ? και μ’ ?λλες ακ?μη λευτερι?ς, και τα νυ πα?ζονται κατ? την ?ννοια ?χος οπουδ?ποτε. Π.χ. τον χειμ?να εδ?, το χειμ?να εκε?· δε θ? ’ρθει – δεν θα καταλαγι?σουμε, κ. λπ. κ.λπ. Ι Ο Ποιητ?ς γυμν?ζει τη σκ?ψη σε απογ?μνωση. Κ Κι αν ε?ναι ?λληνας οφε?λει να σπουδ?ζει π?ντοτε της Αττικ?ς τη λεπτ?τητα, σε φως, βουν?, χωρ?φια και θ?λασσα. Διδ?σκει γλ?σσα η λεπτ?τητα το?τη. Λ Κι αν ε?ναι βαθι? πεπρωμ?νος ο Ποιητ?ς εκφρ?ζει το ανεξ?γητο του εξηγητο?· τυγχ?νει ν?μιμος δι?δοχος του επιστ?μονα και προκ?τοχ?ς του. Μ Στον αφρ? δεν ?χει δι?ρκεια· στο πατοκ?ζανο μα?νεται ο Ποιητ?ς. Ν Φλογοδ?αιτος και ποτ? ξελυτρωμ?νος. Ξ Ο Ποιητ?ς κ?ποτε πρ?πει να λ?ει: μεγ?λη καταν?λωση παρουσ?ας – γενε?τε και λ?γο μοναξι?ρηδες! Ο Ο Ποιητ?ς ε?ναι αμφ?φλοξ. Π Επιδ?χεται θαν?τους και αναστ?σεις. Ρ Ακροθωρ?ζει και υπ?ρχει σε ξαφνοκο?ταγμα. Σ Ε?ναι ουραγ?ς της μητ?ρας. Τ Αν?σπερος απ? ηλικ?α. Υ Πιστε?ω εις ?να Ποιητ?ν που λ?ει: να συμπ?σουν οι αγν?τητες. Μ?χρι την Κ?ρινθο του Σ?μπαντος ? μακρ?τερα. Φ Σε αν?τερη απελπισ?α. Χ Σε φαειν?τερη πεμπτουσ?α. Ψ Σε μια α?σθηση που πτηνο?ται. Ω Συγχωρ?ντας τους π?ντες. From Large Sized Logic [ Λογικ? μεγ?λου σχ?ματος ], Athens: Erato, 1989, n.p. [1993, II, 521-3]. (shrink)

In this paper, we advance the thesis that music-making can be advantageously understood as an exploratory phenomenon. While music-making is certainly about aesthetic expression, from a phenomenological, cognitive, and even evolutionary perspective, it more importantly concerns structured explorations of the world around us, our minds, and our bodies. Our thesis is based on an enactive and phenomenological analysis of three cases: the first concerns the study of infants involved in early musical activities, and the two latter are phenomenologically inspired interviews (...) with an expert jazz improviser, and members of a prominent string quartet. Across these examples, we find that music-making involves a dual intentionality - one oriented towards the exploration of the sonic, material, and social environment, and one oriented toward the self, including the exploration of bodily awareness and reflective mental states. In enactivist terms, exploration is a fundamental way of making sense of oneself as coupled with the world. Understanding music-making as a pre-eminent case of exploration helps us explicate and appreciate the developmental, sensorimotor, and more advanced cognitive resources that exist in music-making activities. (shrink)

Ranging chronologically from the twelfth to the fifteenth century and thematically from Latin to vernacular literary modes, this book challenges standard assumptions about the musical cultures and philosophies of the European Middle Ages. Engaging a wide range of premodern texts and contexts, from the musicality of sodomy in twelfth-century polyphony to Chaucer's representation of pedagogical violence in the Prioress's Tale, from early Christian writings on the music of the body to the plainchant and poetry of Hildegard of Bingen, the author (...) argues that medieval music was quintessentially a practice of the flesh. The book reveals a medieval world in which erotic desire, sexual practice, torture, flagellation, and even death itself resonated with musical significance and meaning. In its insistence on music as an integral part of the material cultures of the Middle Ages, the book presents a revisionist account of an important aspect of premodern European civilization. (shrink)

Pop music is a form of indexical art -- Pop music belongs to the second of three culture industries -- At the heart of pop music is no object, but an impulse to connect -- An assembly of effects and small noises -- Minus music : popularity and criticism -- Production aesthetics.

The present research deals with the topic of music in creative society, analyses various intersections between music and game. The research is focused on the relevant topic of mutual relations between music and leadership. Both, possibilities and advantages of music, as well as its dangers, when used for the purposes of manipulation, attract interest of scholars, philosophers and sociologists. The authors deal with the influence of music in the process of self-creation, or opposite – self-destruction. The research begins with a (...) brief philosophical review of possible advantages and disadvantages of music and its influence on the process of education of youths and formation of the qualities of leaders. As said, this research is focused on a stream (trend) which is evaluated between leadership and music. A picture from a probable scenario and future is presented which has not sensed till now. This mentioned picture can be considered as a weak signal from a bigger universal image. The hermeneutic approach and trend analysis were the main methods of this research, and finally the authors come to the conclusion that in the world of music one may expect fundamental changes and their influence would even grow. When properly used, music will become an effective tool in the process of development of leadership skills. (shrink)

Governments and societies often have condemned music as being ?indecent? and encouraging people to act unethically. Despite these accusations, research did not previously address the link between music and unethical acts. Here we argue that music may signal what is appropriate or inappropriate, hence moral behavior. We focus on the distinction between tonal and atonal music to examine the relation of music with unethical behavior. Results from an experimental study showed that harmonic or tonal music encouraged unethical behavior in adolescents (...) and this was mediated by negative affect. Our findings suggest that music plays an integral role in driving (im)moral behavior. (shrink)

[Tnis is a new translation of Adorno's Philosophie der neuen Musik. The older translation has the title 'Philosophy of Modern Music'. -NJ].

This article focuses on Alexei Losev’s literary texts that embrace his mythology of music: “I was 19 years old,” “A meteor,” “A woman-thinker,” “The Tchaikovsky trio,” and “An encounter.” It is shown that Losev’s musical mythology developed from his early musical-critical works—through the artistic-mythological episodes of his philosophical works per se —to his fiction of the 1930s. Losev’s intentionally abstract philosophy of music required to be complemented by the artistic, emotional, socially and historically specific expression. The main idea of Losev’s (...) musical myth in its historical-cultural aspect is to reflect the relevant self-consciousness of an individual. The epoch of religious super-individualism and “prayerful delight” is replaced by the epoch of “musical delight” and professed idealization of an individual. This change was a reason of the extreme ambivalence of music, which, on the one hand, expresses the highest order and harmony and, on the other, is a continuous evolvement and chaos, a substantive uncertainty. The novelty of the article consists, firstly, in the analysis of correspondence between musical ambivalence and drama in the lives of the heroes, especially heroines symbolizing music itself; and secondly, in identifying the constant features of Losev’s musical myth, as well as its specific features that emerge at different stages. (shrink)