Groove, as a musical quality, is an important part of jazz and pop music appreciative practices. Groove talk is widespread among musicians and audiences, and considerable importance is placed on generating and appreciating grooves in music. However, musicians, musicologists, and audiences use groove attributions in a variety of ways that do not track one consistent underlying concept. I argue that that there are at least two distinct concepts of groove. On one account, groove is ‘the feel of the music’ (...) and, on the other, groove is the psychological feeling (induced by music) of wanting to move one’s body. Further, I argue that recent work in music psychology shows that these two concepts do not converge on a unified set of musical features. Finally, I also argue that these two concepts play different functional roles in the appreciative practices of jazz and popular music. This should cause us to further consider the mediating role genre plays for aesthetic concepts and provides us with reason for adopting a more communitarian approach to aesthetics which is attentive to the ways in which aesthetic discourse serves the practices of different audiences. (shrink)

Music is an important philosophical theme in Confucian writings, one that is intimately related to ritual. But the relationship between music and ritual requires clarification. This paper seeks to argue for a general sense of music that reflects a particular aspect of ritual that has to do with performance. There is much material available in classical texts, such as the 'Record of Music' ('Yueji'), that allows for nuanced explications of the musical qualities of such performances. Thus explicated, those (...) class='Hi'>musical terms provide for a way of speaking about the overall effects of ritual that is not bound to specific choreographic details or particular ritual rules. Finally, it is suggested that the Confucian notion of ren 仁 could be usefully compared to the generalised notion of music. (shrink)

When a jazz, rock, or hip-hop drummer strikes certain notes in each measure slightly late, instead of hearing the degree to which those notes are late, we typically hear the effects of those variations; namely, a groove, the "feel" of a rhythm. Slight variations of pitch function similarly. In this essay, I argue that certain analytic theorists go astray due to their preoccupation with the variations themselves. By invoking Maurice Merleau- Ponty's insights into subtle visual perceptions, and his notion of (...) perceptual indeterminacy, I avoid an account of musical subtlety suggested by Daniel Dennett that is too coarse-grained, as well as the bleak conclusion that certain musical subtleties are ineffable, Diana Raffman's view. I conclude that elements of music that are perceived ambiguously can perform a positive function in such aesthetic experiences: they can mediate or foster emergent qualities; moreover, they must be perceived in this way to do so. (shrink)

Music impacting on speech processing is vividly evidenced in most reports involving professional musicians, while the question of whether the facilitative effects of music are limited to experts or may extend to amateurs remains to be resolved. Previous research has suggested that analogous to language experience, musicianship also modulates lexical tone perception but the influence of amateur musical experience in adulthood is poorly understood. Furthermore, little is known about how acoustic information and phonological information of lexical tones are processed (...) by amateur musicians. This study aimed to provide neural evidence of cortical plasticity by examining categorical perception of lexical tones in Chinese adults with amateur musical experience relative to the non-musician counterparts. Fifteen adult Chinese amateur musicians and an equal number of non-musicians participated in an event-related potential (ERP) experiment. Their mismatch negativities (MMNs) to lexical tones from Mandarin Tone 2–Tone 4 continuum and non-speech tone analogs were measured. It was hypothesized that amateur musicians would exhibit different MMNs to their non-musician counterparts in processing two aspects of information in lexical tones. Results showed that the MMN mean amplitude evoked by within-category deviants was significantly larger for amateur musicians than non-musicians regardless of speech or non-speech condition. This implies the strengthened processing of acoustic information by adult amateur musicians without the need of focused attention, as the detection of subtle acoustic nuances of pitch was measurably improved. In addition, the MMN peak latency elicited by across-category deviants was significantly shorter than that by within-category deviants for both groups, indicative of the earlier processing of phonological information than acoustic information of lexical tones at the pre-attentive stage. The results mentioned above suggest that cortical plasticity can still be induced in adulthood, hence non-musicians should be defined more strictly than before. Besides, the current study enlarges the population demonstrating the beneficial effects of musical experience on perceptual and cognitive functions, namely, the effects of enhanced speech processing from music are not confined to a small group of experts but extend to a large population of amateurs. (shrink)

Our study explored the application of emotion philosophy in vocal music teaching. We utilized surveys, semi-structured interviews, and focus group discussions to gather data from a group of 18 students. The survey results revealed an average familiarity with emotion philosophy concepts but a strong agreement on the importance of understanding a song's emotions for effective singing. Students perceived their current vocal training to be somewhat helpful in understanding emotional background but felt it focused more on technical skills than fostering emotional (...) connection. Thematic analysis of interview data highlighted several key themes. Students emphasized the importance of imagination and storytelling techniques to connect with a song's emotions. Additionally, they valued understanding the historical context of a work and viewed developing emotional intelligence as beneficial. Integrating philosophical frameworks on emotional expression was seen as a way to gain a deeper understanding of vocal performance. In terms of vocal techniques, timbre variations were seen as a powerful tool for emotional expression. Nuances in dynamics and phrasing were viewed as ways to create specific emotions, and clear articulation was considered important for ensuring listeners grasped the lyrical message and connected with the song's emotional core. Overall, this study suggests that incorporating emotion philosophy concepts and techniques into vocal training has the potential to enhance students' understanding and expression of emotions in their singing. (shrink)

The central point of Raffman’s discussion is to distinguish the perception, knowledge, and effability of the standard chromatic “categorical” pitch events from what she calls “nuance” pitch events—events whose individuation is more fine-grained than C-events, and which seem to resist reliable, psychologically available categorization. Thus, two pitches a quarter-tone apart may be classified as the same C-event, even though they are different N-events. Experimental evidence suggests that whereas people are quite good at recall and discrimination of C-events, they are (...) considerably poorer with respect to N-events, and this, according to Raffman, is due to the availability of “schemas,” or conceptual “cubby-holes,” in the former but not the latter case. But this is not to say that people aren’t aware of N-events: a good deal of musical pleasure turns on appreciation of such N-events as vibrato, slides, and pitch coloration. The point is merely that “it is overwhelmingly unlikely that we have, or could have, interval schemas as fine-grained as the N-pitches and N-intervals we can hear”. (shrink)

Philosophy and Theory in Music Therapy: Navigating the Labyrinth invites students, clinicians, and educators to explore the foundational philosophies and theories that shape music therapy. For students, it emphasizes the importance of philosophy and theory as the cornerstones of practice, research, and professional growth. For clinicians, it offers fresh perspectives to enhance their practice, delving into ideas that may not have been part of their formal training. For educators, it provides nuanced explanations of music therapy theories, transcending the adaptation of (...) frameworks from other disciplines. Designed as more than just a textbook, this book is a versatile resource. Some chapters align with specific coursework, while others span multiple academic or clinical contexts. Clinicians may find certain sections helpful in explaining treatment approaches to colleagues or administrators, while other chapters are simply enjoyable for intellectual exploration. Educators can draw inspiration for developing new theories, and researchers may discover frameworks to test and refine. Rich with case studies and clinical examples, each chapter offers practical insights and tangible applications, bringing music therapy philosophies and theories to life. Whether for study, practice, or teaching, this book provides an inclusive and accessible guide to the dynamic and ever-evolving field of music therapy. (shrink)

Roholt explains why grooves, which are forged in music’s rhythmic nuances, remain hidden to some listeners. He argues that grooves are not graspable through the intellect nor through mere listening; rather, grooves are disclosed through our bodily engagement with music. We grasp a groove bodily by moving with music’s pulsations. By invoking the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s notion of “motor intentionality,” Roholt shows that the “feel” of a groove, and the understanding of it, are two sides of a coin: to (...) “get” a groove just is to comprehend it bodily and to feel that embodied comprehension. (shrink)

Some facets of making music are explored by combining arguments of Raffman's cognitivist explanation of ineffability with Merleau-Ponty's view of embodied perception. Behnke's approach to a phenomenology of playing a musical instrument serves as a further source. Focusing on the skilled performer-listener, several types of ineffable knowledge of performing music are identified: gesture feeling ineffability —the performer's sensorimotor knowledge of the gestures necessary to produce instrumental sounds is not exhaustively communicable via language; gesture nuance ineffability —the performer is (...) aware of nuances of instrumental gestures, e.g., micro-variations of intensity or duration of musical gestures, but cannot perceptually, and consequently conceptually, categorize those fine-grained variations; and ineffabilities of inter-subjectivity —the non-verbal interaction between performers that makes a performance a vibrant dialogue is similarly incommunicable. An attempt to identify some of the ineffable dimensions of this dialogue is proposed. Further ineffabilities relating the acoustical embedding of performing are identified. (shrink)

Theodor W. Adorno, one of the principal figures associated with the Frankfurt School, wrote extensively on culture, modernity, aesthetics, literature, and—more than any other subject—music. To this day, Adorno remains the single most influential contributor to the development of qualitative musical sociology which, together with his nuanced intertextual readings of musical works, gives him broad claim as a continuing force in the study of music. This long-awaited collection of twenty-seven essays represents the full range of Adorno's music writing. (...) Nearly half of the essays appear in English for the first time; all of the essays are fully annotated; and the previously translated essays have been corrected and missing text restored, making this volume the definitive resource on Adorno's musical thought. (shrink)

Expert skill in music performance involves an apparent paradox. On stage, expert musicians are required accurately to retrieve information that has been encoded over hours of practice. Yet they must also remain open to the demands of the ever-changing situational contingencies with which they are faced during performance. To further explore this apparent paradox and the way in which it is negotiated by expert musicians, this article profiles theories presented by Roger Chaffin, Hubert Dreyfus and Tony and Helga Noice. For (...) Chaffin, expert skill in music performance relies solely upon overarching mental representations, while, for Dreyfus, such representations are needed only by novices, while experts rely on a more embodied form of coping. Between Chaffin and Dreyfus sit the Noices, who argue that both overarching cognitive structures and embodied processes underlie expert skill. We then present the Applying Intelligence to the Reflexes (AIR) approach?a differently nuanced model of expert skill aligned with the integrative spirit of the Noices? research. The AIR approach suggests that musicians negotiate the apparent paradox of expert skill via a mindedness that allows flexibility of attention during music performance. We offer data from recent doctoral research conducted by the first author of this article to demonstrate at a practical level the usefulness of the AIR approach when attempting to understand the complexities of expert skill in music performance. (shrink)

Flourishing has become a popular ideal in the educational debate. Could flourishing guide meaningful choices in education? My skepticism rests on unclear definitions of _flourishing_, a hidden insistence of theories of flourishing on selfish and individualistic themes, and an elitist vision of flourishing as the consequence of favorable conditions. To avoid the controversial aspects of flourishing theories, I will suggest that education could instead promote medium-term goals that, without directly aiming at students’ realization, nurture the base on which students can (...) imagine their flourishing. Drawing on ancient Greek culture, I will discuss _metron_ as an inspiring medium-term goal for music education. In its archaic meaning, _metron_, the right measure, is both a dynamic balance and an ongoing movement that regulates individual actions and guides individuals toward their realization. I believe that _metron_ in music education could help students explore their possibilities and limits as individual and social agents toward a more nuanced understanding of their selves. Thus, I will consider how promoting _metron_ in music classrooms could enhance students’ self-knowledge and foster their sense of self in and though musical interactions and critical reflections. (shrink)

An adequate account of musical understanding must be sufficiently detailed and nuanced so as to be able to make sense of the experience of listeners with diverse musical and cultural backgrounds. It should also help us begin to understand the wide variety of responses to music, including the responses of those who hear music as having semantic content. I approach these issues in the more general philosophical context of aesthetic understanding. As an approach to my own position, I (...) examine the accounts of aesthetic understanding offered by Nelson Goodman, Roger Scruton, and Peter Kivy. Because each can be seen as broadly within the Kantian tradition, I also undertake an examination of Kant's aesthetics. ;My account of what it is to understand music and of how this understanding is achieved draws upon a phenomenological analysis of listening. I argue that a continuum of two levels of understanding music can be distinguished. At the lowest level, "recognitional understanding," the listener can hear a series of tones as a rhythmic and melodic gestalt, and understand a minimum of expressive and gestural characteristics. The second level, "enhanced understanding," requires greater sensitivity to the music's expressive character, being able to place the music in an appropriate historical context, and some awareness of musical form. Beyond these two levels but presupposing them is a third, which I call "interpretive understanding." Listening to music, we sometimes get the sense that the music is "profound" or has something to say, if only we could grasp it. ;For musical understanding of any sort, involvement with the music is crucial. I develop an account of involvement with music which stresses the similarities between following a musical performance and following or constructing a narrative. I conclude by suggesting the ways in which my account of musical understanding captures some of the strengths of the accounts already discussed , and consider some objections which might be made against it. (shrink)

Designing and developing a digital musical instrument (DMI) to a level of refinement that provides musically rich applications and nuanced interaction capabilities requires a long-term commitment to both technical and creative aspects. This process often leads to the acquisition of sensory, communicative, and intuitive knowledge—dimensions of instrument design that are typically overlooked in mainstream discussions. This paper explores this development journey through the lens of three instruments: the Resonant Object Interface (ROI), the Floors, and the Table Floor. These instruments (...) have undergone extensive development, with the latest instrument building upon the lessons learned from the previous two. We discuss the challenges encountered during the ongoing refinement of these devices and our evolving interaction with their physical complexities. A key focus is the tacit knowledge gained through hands-on engagement, which, though often taken for granted once established, requires significant time and effort to develop. Further, we reflect on our experiences sharing these instruments with other musicians, highlighting how tacit engagement plays a critical role in the creation of new processes, materials, sensing technologies, and sensory experiences in the realm of digital musical instrument design. (shrink)

Abstract:For decades, education has been inundated with neoliberal policies described as enabling its structures to adjust to a global knowledge economy. Located at the intersection of such "reform" language and classical liberal economic theory is a troubling paradox–the idea that knowledge should be centrally concentrated in order to "liberalize" education along free market lines. This essay considers implications of centralized knowledge for music education in light of this contradiction and the rhetoric that obscures it. To raise awareness of this paradox, (...) I briefly summarize some of the literature on neoliberalism and state intervention before examining the ideas of an individual skeptical of central knowledge planning despite his pivotal role in the birth of modern educational "reform": Peter Drucker. The ideological collapsing of Drucker's nuanced views by neoliberal interests stands in stark contrast with what could be a less instrumental argument for the development of problem-solving skills for lifelong benefit. Finally, I ask whether we reinforce this contradiction if we champion music's curricular legitimacy and relevance, yet fail to teach students to think musically for themselves as evidenced by prescriptive instructional methods or participation in standardizing musical knowledge through failure to resist the totalizing ideology of the audit culture. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In this article I venture the hypothesis that music confronts education with the possibility to think violence in ways that are both inherently educational and radically affirmative. Beginning with a reflection on a poem by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, which emphatically evokes the violence within the genesis of music, I then move in a different direction in the second section, which surveys how extant (music-) educational has thematized violence so far. Concluding that this thematization, notwithstanding many nuances, invariably implies a (...) negative validation of violence, I devote the third section to a search for more affirmative concepts of educational violence. Eventually, this culminates in a return to the issue of a possibly intrinsic, positive relation between violence and music education. I first discuss this possibility more generally, connecting the discussed affirmative concepts of violence to the antipodal music-educational ideas of Plato and Nietzsche. Finally, in the last section, returning to Browning’s poem, I specify it by reclaiming the particular violence of music’s instrumental aspects for music education. (shrink)

The Eurocentric canon remains the predominant focus of music education often excluding the role of music and experiences of Black individuals and people of color. This singular perspective creates an incomplete and inaccurate understanding of the comprehensive nature of music and the humans who create, perform, and engage with it. In this article, the author shares her experience as a Black music educator and her aspirations for a music profession that incorporates the full range of human music engagement and expression. (...) The paper begins with a reflection on W.E.B. DuBois’s double consciousness followed by an exploration of the nuances, complexities, contradictions, and beauty of being a Black educator in a primarily white field. Subsequently, the essay presents four conceptual principles for a reimagined, inclusive music education approach, drawing inspiration from Sylvia Wynter’s “new science of the Word.” These principles advocate retelling the music education narrative to incorporate historically marginalized voices, reorienting music education to be human-centered, embracing interdisciplinary approaches to view music teaching and learning, and acknowledging the power of music in uplifting the human condition. Finally, this paper proposes a pathway for reconciling diverse identities prevalent in American culture with music education and academia. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Rethinking Social Action through Music: The Search for Coexistence and Citizenship in Medellín’s Music Schools by Geoffrey BakerKim BoeskovGeoffrey Baker: Rethinking Social Action through Music: The Search for Coexistence and Citizenship in Medellín’s Music Schools (Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2021)If indeed there exists, as Geir Johansen has proposed,1 a self-critical movement within the field of music education, Geoffrey Baker is undoubtedly one of its leading figures. According (...) to Johansen, the self-critical turn is characterized by an increasing number of music educators directing criticism toward music education itself by denouncing overly romantic visions of “the power of music” and scrutinizing how music educational practices are implicated in the propulsion of problematic social forces of inequality, oppression, and injustice. Baker’s widely read book from 2014, El Sistema: Orchestrating Venezuela’s Youth,2 thoroughly denounced the globally acclaimed Venezuelan ‘musical miracle’ as a myth. Based on extensive field work in Venezuela, Baker painstakingly dissected El Sistema as an archaic, morally, and pedagogically flawed model of music education veiled in the empty rhetoric of music as a tool of social redemption and documented how such models are ripe with opportunities for abuse, in every sad sense of the word.The continuation of Baker’s critical project is published in the form of a four-hundred-page book, entitled Rethinking Social Action Through Music. Baker presents the text as “a ‘post-El Sistema’ project”3 as it constitutes a departure [End Page 92] from his preoccupation with ‘The System’ toward potential alternatives to the Venezuelan model. He finds such an alternative in the Red (Red de Escuelas de Música de Medellín), a network of music schools in the Colombian city of Medellín, which figures as the center of attention in Baker’s institutional ethnography. However, even as the Colombian institution is invoked as a counterexample to its Venezuelan sibling, the Red is not held up for its ability to enact social change or display of innovative pedagogical principles. What Baker finds exemplary and worthy of investigation is the willingness he locates within the administrative layer of the Red to continuously engage in reflective work with regards to the tensions, conflicts, and pitfalls, as well as potentials of musical-social work. Particularly, Baker’s attention is directed to the decision-making processes and discussions among the leaders of the institution; how senior staff members adopt self-critical stances, how needs for institutional change are recognized, the recurring frictions between musical staff and members of the institution’s social team, and tensions between public statements expressing confidence in the program’s efficacy and internal conversations full of ambivalence and doubt.It is with reference to the reflexive processes of the Red that Baker conducts insightful and well-informed discussions of a range of themes relevant to music educators and scholars. Baker situates his analysis within the wider landscape of SATM (Social Action Through Music), which can roughly be understood as the field of musical practice emanating from the large socio-musical orchestral programs conceived in Latin America in the last decades of the 20th century and subsequently spread as ‘Sistema-inspired’ offspring throughout the globe in the beginning of the 21st century. Yet, the discussions found in this book are easily connected to pertinent themes of the philosophy and sociology of music education, such as the notion of artistic citizenship, decolonization, the political nature of music education, ‘the social’ in music education, to name a few. One of the striking qualities of this book is its ability to identify important issues in the local context of Medellín, extract the underlying mechanisms and through empirical examples unfold a much broader discussion of what social justice and social change might mean in the field of music education. Baker, originally educated as an ethnomusicologist, reflects on these topics with depth and nuance, underscoring the relevance of approaching these complex issues through ethnographic work, rather than basing such discussions solely on conceptual exploration.Appearing as a red line throughout the book is Baker’s insistence on foregrounding the ambiguity and ambivalence of musical-social work. In fact, his critical encounter with the field... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Singing Democracy:Music and Politics in Jean-Jacques Rousseau's ThoughtJulia SimonComment? Tous les intervalles de mon Clavecin sont altérés?... Fi, le vilain instrument; ne m'en parlez plus.... Je veux chanter.—Anton Bemetzrieder, Leçons de ClavecinDemocratic theory of the eighteenth century, and particularly Rousseau's, is suffused with the idealism and lack of pragmatism that make it both immensely compelling and extraordinarily frustrating. Conceived under the decaying edifice of the absolute monarchy, it strives (...) toward perfection, offering theoretical formulations that often defy practical application. Yet this theory continues to inspire democratic practice and political debates even more than 200 years after its writing. In one passage of Du contrat social Rousseau asserts, "If there were a people of Gods, it would govern itself democratically. Such a perfect government is not suited to men."1 And yet the thrust of the work and the critical force of Rousseau's corpus encourage and challenge us to strive toward democracy, as impossible a goal as it may be for mere mortals.Alongside Rousseau's works in social and political theory lies another vast body of theoretical work in music. Rarely, if ever, are they read in tandem. Music in the eighteenth century suffers from many of the same difficulties that political theory does, especially the tendency toward a level of abstraction that defies practical application. Like the problem of democracy in the eighteenth century, music also presents the temptation of retreat into a world of abstract perfection based on mathematical certainty with little relation to practical reality. [End Page 433] Perhaps nowhere is the tension so acute between the ideal and the real in music as in the domain of tuning specifically, in keyboard tuning, and the question of tempering. So as in the political domain, there is a potentially wide gulf between music theory and music practice.If there is any hope of realizing democracy in the way that Rousseau understood it, an exploration of his music theory may provide the crucial bridge between theory and practice. Rousseau's theoretical work in music, and singing in particular, covers a number of distinct subject areas. First, his proposal for a new system of musical notation links directly to democratic impulses in his political and social theory. Second, the kinds of emotions that music stirs are related in Rousseau's thought to forms of expression that remain closer to their natural origins. Finally, Rousseau's preference for melody, as opposed to harmony, relates directly to his conception of the political sphere and specifically to the relationship between the general will and the workings of the body politic in a democracy. Unexpectedly, reading Rousseau's musical theory alongside his democratic theory produces a nuanced and moderate view of the social contract that deepens our understanding of the relationship between relative and absolute values in politics as well as in music and offers a model for practice.Musical Notation and DemocracyA distinctly democratic impulse motivates the Projet concernant de nouveaux signes pour la musique for Rousseau's revision of the musical notation system is designed to increase accessibility to music. With characteristic rhetoric Rousseau introduces his project for "simplifying" musical notation with a short, to-the-point paragraph: "This project tends to make music easier to write down, easier to learn and much less diffuse."2 Following this statement of purpose, Rousseau relates, in a contrasting rhetorical style—replete with specialized vocabulary—the current state of affairs in musical notation:This quantity of lines, keys, transpositions, of sharps, flats, naturals, of simple and complex measures, of whole-notes, half-notes, quarter-notes, eighth-notes, sixteenth-notes, thirty-second notes, of rests, half-rests, quarter-rests, eighth-rests, sixteenth-rests, etc. gives a quantity of signs and combinations from which result two principle inconveniences: the first, to occupy too great a volume, and the second to overload the memory of schoolchildren in such a way that the ear being formed and the organs having acquired all the necessary facility long before one is [End Page 434] capable of singing from a book, it follows that the difficulty is more in the observation of rules than in the execution of... (shrink)

_This study probes into a comparative multimodal discourse analysis (MDA) of two influential Pakistani rap music videos ‘The Sibbi Song’ by Abid Brohi and ‘Karachi Chal’ performed by Young Stunners, a rap duo consisting of Talha Anjum and Talhah Yunus to explore their portrayal of societal hierarchies and individual identity. Drawing upon the theoretical framework of MDA the analysis has discovered the linguistic, visual, aural, spatial, and gestural elements of each video. The first video portrays the protagonist’s journey from innocence (...) to success, while the other highlights urban working-class struggles through nuanced examination. Major findings reveal themes of resilience, social change, and identity negotiation of urban life and cultural expression in Pakistan’s diverse societal fabric which individuals from distinct cultural backgrounds often use to express their norms and values through various forms of visual arts and entertainment. Furthermore, the global phenomenon of rap music has gained significant traction, offering a platform for contemporary rap music artists in Pakistan to articulate their unique identities, confrontations, and triumphs as a cultural shift towards self-expression._. (shrink)

This inquiry explores the terms yogakshema, sampradaya, and manodharma sangita, as well as theories and practices of improvisation and innovation in music and other fields of Hindu culture. It considers the ways Hindu traditions play out the human contradiction—that life must always combine both old and new; the ways improvising is part of the Hindu frameworks in Vedic chanting, and the performance of ragas and other cultural activities in India. Both set patterns and nuanced interpretations in literary and musical (...) works present processes which suggest models of progress and renewal in various fields of human endeavor. I am unpacking the scholar V. Raghavan’s ideas about how traditions in Indian culture can adapt creatively in time. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Complicating, Considering, and Connecting Music Education by Lauren Kapalka RichermeNasim NiknafsLauren Kapalka Richerme, Complicating, Considering, and Connecting Music Education (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2020)Laurern Kapalka Richerme courageously engages with some of the significant concepts of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in a timely bounded volume, Complicating, Considering, and Connecting Music Education. Through this colossal endeavor, though not the first time a music education scholar deeply explores Deleuzian (...) concepts and theoretical analyses, Richerme provides a fresh perspective on his oeuvre within the field and paves the way for more engaged scholarly exploration on the roles and responsibilities of music education.1Considering the vanity in saying what one sees, as “what we see never resides in what we say,”2 any review of works related to Deleuzian concepts is more of an arborescent endeavor than a rhizomatic one. Consequently, the current review of Richerme’s book may also refute and go against Deleuze and Guattari’s most salient arguments. However, I would like to specifically elaborate on Richerme’s treatment of time; a much welcomed and overlooked aspect of education that Richerme has appositely and strongly delivered. “Music education is not a stagnant ‘what’ but a temporal ‘when’... While the question, ‘What is music education?’ solidifies music education into an immobile identity, asking ‘When is music education?’ emphasizes the differing, individually constructed nature of [End Page 202] educational experiences.”3 Not necessarily an original proposition to treat music education as a process rather than a product, a journey rather than a destination, a meandering rather than walking on a straight line, a desired path rather than a pre-constructed road, Richerme’s angle of this conversation takes on an entirely new path. Rather than solving the problem, as the problem is one’s music education, she elegantly modifies the question: “When is music education?”4 Richerme redirects the reader’s attention from the “spatial turn” in which the field has been engrossed to a temporal one, and from a totalizing music education to a totality of music education:5 “My voice cannot be ‘lost’ or ‘found,’ only silenced or embraced—restrained or encouraged to grow. It will always exist in an uncertain middle, differing day after day.”6Written in eight chapters with two bookending chapters with the same title, “Rhizomatic Journeying,” while the middle chapter re-considers considering and the penultimate chapter discusses the when in music education, Richerme demands the reader to attend to not only the book’s content but the poetic delivery of its prose. One could even recite the sentences and feel the elevation. Richerme’s unique voice is laudable for its humility of approach and candid pronouncements of mistakes made along the way of becoming-toward7 music educator. When reading, I felt I was a fellow traveler crossing paths with her while she shared some of her moments with me. She and I were the Nighthawks of Edward Hopper’s painting. Richerme was there to tell her story and I was there to silently listen; “the story is told and untold. Then retold.”8 And it is in this retelling that I would like to situate this review.This volume is first and foremost an ode to music education. Richerme has a command of the music education literature which manifests itself in the myriad examples she explores. She does not claim to portray novel ideas but crossing paths with other scholars in music education concerning not only Deleuzian concepts but ethical matters of education: “deeming something ‘good for’ is not the same as finding it ‘good’ in the ethical sense.”9 She does not disagree with scholars, perhaps following Deleuzian footsteps, but complements them; an exercise in nuance and scholarly practice not always historically prevalent in the field.However, this practical side of the book that attempts to situate Deleuzian concepts within music education are brought forth at the expense of a deeper level of theoretical analysis of and engagement with their comprehensively theorized concepts such as becoming, striated space, immanence, refrain, and deterritorialization. At times, it feels as though these concepts have been magiccarpeted rather than integrated within music education situations. This volume comes across, marvellously... (shrink)

Extending a nascent line of Asian philosophical research in music education, we mine Indian philosophies of music and education. Three key questions guide our project: What are Vedic philosophies of music? What are Vedic philosophies of education? Taken together, what insights can we draw for contemporary music education writ large? To address our questions, we analyze key passages from the Upanishads and synthesize ideas from these texts. A quartet of inter-related ideas emerge from our analysis: the guru, the shishya, vidya, (...) and moksha. In brief, the guru (teacher) is revered as one would god, for it is the teacher who leads the shishya (student) toward vidya (knowledge) and through that toward moksha (liberation of the soul), which can also be attained via making music, such as the singing of Om (the absolute sound). In addition to proffering insights for contemporary music education, particularly in terms of how the ancient Vedic guru-shishya parampara adds nuance to contemporary discussions on the master-apprentice model of music education, we imagine how music education philosophy might look like if it were to be sung. (shrink)

The paper’s authors are composers operating within the field of experimental music. Their music is created from the use of limited materials placed into repetitive structures involving cyclic pitch patterns and sustained tone textures. This reductive approach to composition provides a fertile area for discussions of temporality, as the music functions outside of standard teleological narrative structures thereby prompting more varied subjective temporal experiences for listeners. The paper will take as its starting point the experience of the listener, rather than (...) the musical score, enhancing discussions from Thomas Clifton’s Music as Heard.1 This angle is particularly relevant when discussing minimal works, as the score does not (and is not intended to) give an indication to what the auditory experience will be, it simply acts as what pianist Philip Thomas describes as a ‘prescription for action’ for the performers.2 Drawing particularly upon work on the temporal experience by Merleau-Ponty (after Husserl), the paper discusses how phenomenological approaches can provide effective insight into the experience of sustained tone and repetitive music. By discussing notions of retention and protention, the two composers will explore how this permeates their compositional approach, particularly in relation to the use of repetition, examining the different types of musical materials used by the composers and how this affects the temporalities experienced upon performance. Points of similarity and variance between the two outlooks are explored in detail, providing an in-depth discussion as to how attitudes towards temporality can result in nuanced differences in output. Fundamental essences are clarified and discussed in relation to other composers’ work, and in particular American composer James Tenney’s work in applying a phenomenological model upon the listening experience is considered alongside the central discussion. The results of this investigation provide both clear artistic statements on the role of phenomenological thought in the creative process, and also tentative starting points for further discussion on experiential temporalities in minimal and experimental musics. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Response to Lauren Kapalka Richerme, "The Diversity Bargain and the Discourse Dance of Equitable and Best," Philosophy of Music Education Review 27, no. 2 (Fall, 2019)Nasim NiknafsI was asked to write a response to Lauren Richerme's convincing research on why and how one should distinguish between "equitable educational practices"1 and what she calls following Ellen Berry the "diversity bargain" where equity as the second-best option has always taken a (...) hit from the more dashing diversity. If I may metaphorically put this conversation into a romantic comedy, equity is always the wingperson of color to diversity as the main protagonist; by the end of the show it is the main protagonist who survives the hardship and reaches salvation, be it a long-lost love, an oasis of sorts, or making it to the finish line. The rest of the cast have the function of complementing and highlighting the main actor but never substituting for it; or they are as Homi Bhabha would say, "almost the same but not quite."2 For the sake of filling in the blank of let's-add-more-color-into-it, the genuine conversation over the nuances of equitable practices gets undermined and diffused of its poignancy. And this is what Richerme is arguing against: let us not forget that a more significant challenge than a mere technicolor presence is at play. In that, my response to Richerme's essay would [End Page 215] not be so much of a response but a grand nod, a body gesture, an embedded signal of approval between two human beings born and raised in two different parts of planet earth who after years of diverse and perhaps un-equitable educational access ended up in the same room at the same time. Thus, my nod to Richerme also originated from personal experiences and intimate familiarities with unequitable educational access. Yes, people of color can be assets to their institutions and their corresponding fields who add to the diversity of knowledge creation practices, but it is not people of color's project or responsibility to act as the trophy to alleviate the unhappy conscience of educational malpractice or give a helping hand to the main protagonists for whom the scenario has already been written. Undoubtedly, they can take on that role if they want to, but it is only contingent upon where their desires lie not where they should lie.I strongly agree with Richerme's claim that music classrooms and I would add any classroom and learning environment should be a place and space for "sharing stories and insights"3 to not only learn about the content material whatever it may be but to learn to empathize with one another, understand positive and negative human behaviors toward humans and their environment, and act against discriminatory practices, racial, ethnic, religious, and gender prejudices, and to the point of Richerme's essay, unequitable practices that are insistent in today's political climate on a global scale.At this very juncture I diverge not from Richerme's fine thesis and argumentation, but from the larger issue of the premise of her arguments grounded on Thomas Green's educational framework.4 Green argues that the "rank order of political arguments that can be mustered in support of the [educational] system … [is] roughly as follows": (1) the fundamental or compelling interests of the state; (2) the aggregate of individual or parental interests; (3) societal interests; and (4) educational goods for their own sake."5 Following Green's framework Richerme analyzes contemporary music education initiatives in relation to the differing political strengths of each group of stakeholders: the state, parents, society, and educational goods for their own sake.There is a sense of mistrust in the local and national government implied by Green's framework, reminding one of the cumulative mistrust of the elite by U.S. citizens. Years of neglect, condescension, and lack of attention to the real and tangible needs of people amalgamated into what today one sees as white nationalism, plutocracy, and protectionism across borders. Green wrote his book, Predicting the Behavior of the Educational System, in 1980; historically the world order was increasingly metamorphosing and establishing itself... (shrink)

Musicians of all sorts talk of getting “into a groove,” whether using those words or others; musical listeners also talk about the groove of a passage of music, a performance, or a recording. In his four-chapter essay, Groove, Tiger Roholt offers answers to questions that seem obvious candidates for philosophical inquiry yet that few philosophers have even touched on: what is a groove, exactly, and what is it to perceive or understand—to get— a groove? His answers are intriguing, not (...) just because they are thoughtfully argued positions on an important yet neglected topic, but because, if correct, they challenge some central orthodoxies of philosophy of music, at least in the analytic tradition.Roholt’s main... (shrink)

Let us look first at poetry. It is well known that by the fifteenth century, lyric poetry had undergone a radical transformation; the early lyric fluidity and formal variability had hardened into the nonlyric and even, some maintain, antilyric forms fixes which characterize the poetic formalism of late medieval France. Dispensing with the details of how and why this occurred, the essential point is that by the end of the Middle Ages, the poet in France and Burgundy saw himself as (...) an artisan of words, not as a singer.6 He refers to himself as a craftsman , and it is plain, sometimes painfully so, to anyone who reads the works that the rhétoriqueur is, indeed, an artisan of forms—or, if you will, an architecte de la parole, a specialist in verbal matter. He works words, sounds, metric and strophic forms into intricate patterns and arranges his elaborate designs in blocks of exact and harmonious symmetry. He is, in fact, from Machaut on, a virtuoso of the verbal equivalent of the architectural art of carrelage which adorned the princely château in which he worked and lived. No one familiar with the period will avoid noticing the strikingly similar types of patters in the poet’s works and in his surroundings.I have gathered elsewhere the visual documentation which bears out Zumthor’s suggestions quoted above with respect to the meticulously constructivist mentality of the Franco-Burgundian artisan. But the analogies I found are much more than perceptual. It is true that the elaborate designs on the walls, floors, ceilings, windows, woodwork, and so forth of the early Renaissance château are, indeed, composed of intricate blocks of material; but their function is not merely decorative , it is also narrative, with emblematic motifs and allegorical figures arrayed in linear patterns of “visual” discourse—the invariable “discours de la gloire” which silently proclaims the magnificence of the patron prince and proprietor of the château .7 6. A summary of internal and external factors in the transformation of lyric to Rhetoric is provided in my review of Die musikalische Erscheinungsform der Trouvèrepoesie by Hans-Herbert S. Räkel , in Romance Philology 34 : 250-58.7. This following collage of fragments from ML was constructed ôto serve as commentary on photographs of tile designs compared with verbal texts, in an earlier version of this paper , from which the examples in figs. 1-4 are taken.Culte de l’objet subtilement travaillé, au-delà de toute fonctionnalité primaire *** primat du labeur ardu, patient, du difficile, de l’inattendu *** les mots mêmes semblent travaillés d’un besoin de scientificité fictive, d’anoblissement par le savoir *** les … mots ne sont plus que les particules d’une parole dont la seule signification est globale *** matériau émancipé des contraintes de la phrase, transposé sur un plan où le signe devient le nom vide de ce signe *** goût du bricolage plutôt que de l’industrie; … du bariolage plus que du fondu et de la nuance; de l’équilibre numéral des parties plus que de la synthèse; du multiple plus que de l’un. Outil forgé martelé d’ “aornures” sans fonction utilitaire; enchâssements cubiques, coniques, pyramidaux, cruciformes du bâtiment … meubles marquetés, forrés de tiroirs minuscules et secrets [and so forth].For the iconography of these examples , see Emile Amé, Less Carrelages émaillés du Moyen Age et de la Renaissance , pp. 61-108. Jonathan Beck is associate professor of French at the University of Arizona. He is the author of Théâtre et propaganda aux débuts de la Réforme , a sequel to his edition and study, Le Concil de Basle: Le Origines du theater réformiste et partisan en France. (shrink)

In this paper I argue for a fully intended and carefully tailored allusion in Plato’s Phaedrus to Pindar’s Pythian 1 with the pivotal image of Typho. The analysis of verbal and conceptual links leads to a better appreciation of the nuances in the Platonic passage, including a hitherto utterly unexplored layer of the text, its musical metaphoricity. On this level several main themes of Plato’s thought, such as the problem of singleness vs. manyness, musical ethos and criticism, converge (...) in an extraordinarily dense expression. (shrink)

L'humour en musique n'a pas bonne presse. Labile, déroutant, anecdotique, il a été vilipendé par certains philosophes et compositeurs de la modernité – Schopenhauer, Adorno, Varèse et Boulez en tête – tandis que d'autres – Bergson, Jankélévitch – y voyaient l'expression d'une légèreté sérieuse, l'essence même de l'art. Après une période de déni, consécutive à la Seconde Guerre mondiale, l'humour musical se manifeste depuis les années 1960 chez de multiples compositeurs comme Mauricio Kagel, Gyêrgy Ligeti, Luc Ferrari, Luciano Berio, (...) Bruno Maderna, Arvo Part, Krzysztof Penderecki, Régis Campo, etc. Les quatorze articles réunis dans ce volume tentent tout d'abord d'en éclaircir les principales nuances et de caractériser les cousinages avec le comique, la satire, la parodie, l'ironie. Un deuxième temps est consacré à l'étude du rire musical, ses techniques et sa sémantique. Sans être toujours attaché à l'humour, il engendre des significations secondaires : la peur, la folie, le désespoir. La dernière partie aborde l'esthétique de la satire, qui révèle de riches intertextualités, en particulier à travers le détournement de citations. Y sont également abordés les liens qu'entretiennent l'humour et ses dérivés avec les mutations postmodernes et hypermodernes des sociétés occidentales. (shrink)

Birdsong is widely analysed and discussed by people coming from both musical and scientific backgrounds. Both approaches provide valuable insight, but I argue that it is only through combining musical and scientific points of view, as well as perspectives from more tangentially related fields, that we can obtain the best possible understanding of birdsong. In this paper, I discuss how my own training as a musician, and in particular as a composer, affects how I listen to and parse (...) birdsong. I identify nine areas of overlap between human music and birdsong, which may serve as starting points both for musical and scientific analysis, as well as for interdisciplinary analysis as practiced in the developing field of “zoomusicology.” Using the hermit thrush (Catharus guttatus) as an example, I discuss how the song of a single species has been described by writers from a variety of disciplines, including music, literature, and the sciences, as well as how we can contextualise these varied perspectives in terms of broader cultural thought trends. I end with discussion of how combining approaches from multiple fields can help us to figure out new questions to ask, can help us identify how our own cultural biases may affect how we hear birdsong, and ultimately can help us develop richer and more nuanced understandings of the songs themselves. (shrink)

The sonic and aesthetic nuances of Black religious traditions have often gone underexamined as critical resources for Christian ethical reflections and scholarship. Many Christian ethics scholars have focused on text-based analyses of lyrics, doctrinal statements, sermons, and archives. More teaching and scholarship on how the sounds and aesthetics performed in specific Black religious contexts could enrich Christian ethics discourses. But how should teachers responsibly engage the Black religious sonic in teaching and learning Christian ethics? This essay posits Black religious sounds (...) and aesthetics as a site for contesting, deconstructing, and constructing ontologies, notions of communal flourishing, and racial, gender, and sexual identities. The result is the assemblage of new knowledge critically resourced by sound, music, and aesthetics that emphasizes how sound facilitates communal moral formation. Specifically, I look to the 2018 Aretha Franklin Homegoing as a site for Black religious sonic sources and ethical dilemmas. (shrink)

Fado, the urban folk of Lisbon and Coimbra, is an art of nuances. These nuances music takes from poetry; as ‘sung poetry’ (‘poema cantado’ in Portuguese) fados are not to be equated with ‘songs’ that turn the word into a vehicle – a dominant procedure in, e.g., rock music. Again, ‘voice’ in fado does not so much manifest individual expression; rather it is, as it were, ‘on loan’ from tradition. Keeping some distance from dance, too, fado at the beginning of (...) the 21st century could and can resist being swallowed up into the mainstream of global popular music. (shrink)

The production of artworks can be based on a fixed modus operandi, i.e., on a general manner and, alongside, specific patterns to be applied all over again. Alternatively, each artwork can be seen as (cor-)responding to an individual problem for which there is no recipe; in this case it needs to be looked at afresh. That approach characterizes the aesthetics of music composer Isabel Mundry (*1963); her art, ever unpredictable, is one of nuances.

Schafer contends that we suffer from an overabundance of acoustic information, and explores ways to restore our ability to hear the nuances of sounds around us.

The article focuses on meaning generation in music and language cognition based on complexes of image schemas. We hypothesize that schemas are involved in dynamic interactions fostering online complex conceptual construction found both in language and elsewhere in various cognitive code expressions. Expanding on recent work, we propose that an account of image-schema interaction should include the notion of scalarity, a higher-order parameter which captures the intensity with which schemas occur and/or interact with one another. In that sense, schemas are (...) proposed to have a binary valence (positive or negative) and a three-tier range of intensity levels. We focus on some examples of the interaction of force, path, link, balance, and containment image schemas in language and music to illustrate how a formal routine emerging from our proposal may help in addressing not only aspects of propositional semantics, but also affective and connotative nuances in musical and linguistic expression. (shrink)

What do exotic area rugs, handcrafted steel-string guitars, and fiddling have in common today? Many contemporary tradition bearers embrace complexity in form and content. They construct objects and performances that draw on the past and evoke nostalgia effectively but also reward close attention. In Rugs, Guitars, and Fiddling: Intensification and the Rich Modern Lives of Traditional Arts, author Chris Goertzen argues that this entails three types of change that can be grouped under an umbrella term: intensification. First, traditional creativity can (...) be intensified through virtuosity, through doing hard things extra fluently. Second, performances can be intensified through addition, by packing increased amounts of traditional materials into the conventionally sized packages. Third, in intensification through selection, artistic impact can grow even if amount of information recedes by emphasizing compelling ideas-e.g., crafting a red and black viper poised to strike rather than a pretty duck decoy featuring more colors and contours. Rugs handwoven in southern Mexico, luthier-made guitars, and southern US fiddle styles experience parallel changes, all absorbing just enough of the complex flavors, dynamics, and rhythms of modern life to translate inherited folklore into traditions that can be widely celebrated today. New mosaics of details and skeins of nuances don't transform craft into esoteric fine art, but rather enlist the twists and turns and endless variety of the contemporary world therapeutically, helping transform our daily chaos into parades of negotiable jigsaw puzzles. Intensification helps make crafts and traditional performances more accessible and understandable and thus more effective, bringing past and present closer together, helping folk arts continue to perform their magic today. (shrink)

Patricia Joy Huntington reflects that loneliness does not only consist of the heartfelt absences of a friend, partner, spouse, or child, but rather stems from a radical breach in one's life journey. In this conceptually rigorous and warmly poetic book, Huntington develops a unique philosophy of receptivity and an original portrait of redemptive suffering. By fully exploring notions of pain, she also examines how the relation between the heart's musical attunement and meaning-filled life passages can lead one to a (...) more spiritual philosophy and a more independent life. Huntington reveals the maternal face of God and encourages the feminine divine in her poignant narrative of overcoming. This deeply philosophical meditation offers a nuanced view of religious experience, providence, and transcendence. (shrink)

As the Byzantinist Ihor Ševčenko once observed, "Philology is constituting and interpreting the texts that have come down to us. It is a narrow thing, but without it nothing else is possible." This definition accords with Saussure's succinct description of the mission of philology: "especially to correct, interpret, and comment upon the texts." Philology is not just a grand etymological or lexicographical enterprise. It also involves restoring to works as much of their original life and nuances as we can manage. (...) To read the written records of bygone civilizations correctly requires knowledge of cultural history in a broad sense: of folklore, legends, laws, and customs. Philology also encompasses the forms in which texts express their messages, and thus it includes stylistics, metrics, and similar studies. _On Philology _brings together the papers delivered at a 1988 conference at Harvard University's Center for Literary and Cultural Studies. The topic "What is Philology?" drew an interdisciplinary audience whose main fields of research ran the gamut from ancient Indo-European languages to African-American literature, signaling a certain sense of urgency about a seemingly narrow subject. These papers reveal that the role of philology is more important than ever. At a time when literature in printed form has taken a back seat to television, film, and music, it is crucial that scholars be able to articulate why students and colleagues should care about the books with which they work. Just as knowledge will be lost if philological standards decline, so too will fields of study die if their representatives cannot find meaning for today's readers. _On Philology _will be of interest not only to students of philology but also to anyone working in the fields of hermeneutics, literature, and communication. (shrink)

Translated and with an Introduction by Daniel W. Smith Afterword by Tom Conley Gilles Deleuze had several paintings by Francis Bacon hanging in his Paris apartment, and the painter’s method and style as well as his motifs of seriality, difference, and repetition influenced Deleuze’s work. This first English translation shows us one of the most original and important French philosophers of the twentieth century in intimate confrontation with one of that century’s most original and important painters. In considering Bacon, Deleuze (...) offers implicit and explicit insights into the origins and development of his own philosophical and aesthetic ideas, ideas that represent a turning point in his intellectual trajectory. First published in French in 1981, _Francis Bacon_ has come to be recognized as one of Deleuze’s most significant texts in aesthetics. Anticipating his work on cinema, the baroque, and literary criticism, the book can be read not only as a study of Bacon’s paintings but also as a crucial text within Deleuze’s broader philosophy of art. In it, Deleuze creates a series of philosophical concepts, each of which relates to a particular aspect of Bacon’s paintings but at the same time finds a place in the “general logic of sensation.” Illuminating Bacon’s paintings, the nonrational logic of sensation, and the act of painting itself, this work—presented in lucid and nuanced translation—also points beyond painting toward connections with other arts such as music, cinema, and literature. _Francis Bacon_ is an indispensable entry point into the conceptual proliferation of Deleuze’s philosophy as a whole. Gilles Deleuze was professor of philosophy at the University of Paris, Vincennes–St. Denis. He coauthored _Anti-Oedipus_ and _A Thousand Plateaus_ with Félix Guattari. These works, as well as _Cinema 1, Cinema 2, The Fold, Proust and Signs_, and others, are published in English by Minnesota. Daniel W. Smith teaches in the Department of Philosophy at Purdue University. (shrink)

L'intitulé du présent ouvrage a été choisi pour faire écho à la critique formulée naguère par Jean-François Lyotard à l'encontre d'Adorno : Lyotard réclamait, pour aborder les musiques qu'il estimait susceptibles de participer authentiquement à la " réécriture de la modernité ", que l'on abandonnât l'" alternative " définie par cet auteur ; n'étant " ni apparence, musica ficta, ni connaissance laborieuse, musica fingens ", l'œuvre (ou la non-œuvre) " littérale ", povera, serait " jeu métamorphique d'intensités sonores, travail parodique (...) de rien, musica figura ". On s'est donc efforcé, d'enquêter sur l'élaboration de la " catégorie postmodernité " prise in statu nascendi, c'est-à-dire à sa source musicale. Cela permettait de faire droit à la relative complexité sémantique du mot fiction. Celui-ci n'est pas seulement synonyme de " fabrication ", car au latin fabricare, le fingere ajoute la nuance d'une " feinte ". Et " feinte " nous expédie vers l'eirôneia des Grecs " ironie " et postmodernité ne peuvent que s'entendre. Mais le premier des ironistes postmodernes n'est autre que le premier musicien vraiment répétitif : Nietzsche. Son Fragment an sich, un morceau de piano de 22 mesures daté de 1871, comporte en effet un Da Capo non chiffré : illimité! La fiction musicale de la postmodernité, ne serait-ce pas dès lors la ritournelle, figure (figura) de l'éternel retour? (shrink)

Après avoir rappelé le sens musical du mot variation, l’article se penche sur les nuances synonymiques du lexique de la variation dans les dictionnaires des synonymes et dans les articles de Diderot de l’Encyclopédie. Emerge alors un embarras du philosophe sur la question morale et politique de la variation. Inéluctable et parfois souhaitable, la variation des pensées, des individus et des sociétés doit cependant être compensée par des ferments d’unité et de constance. L’écriture fictionnelle permet de mettre en scène (...) librement les variations morales des individus, notamment dans Jacques le fataliste, comme le constate avec jubilation Milan Kundera dans une nouvelle variation qu’il propose deux siècles plus tard sur le roman de Diderot. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Mystery on the Move:Aquinas’s Theological Method as Transforming WisdomGilles Mongeau, S.J.CONTEMPORARY APPROACHES to the thought of Thomas Aquinas have begun to recover its character as a “wisdom practice” aimed at the transformation of persons and sociocultural situations.1 The wise person helps others move along a path through the mysteries of faith toward a wisely ordered life for themselves in a justly ordered society. The starting point of this essay (...) is the supposition that Aquinas’s theological method in the Summa theologiae, rooted in the practice of the three arts of language (grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric) is itself a wisdom practice that proposes an ordered series of exercises that must be performed by the student, leading him or her to a greater participation in divine wisdom. I will show that Aquinas’s use of the tools of rhetoric, particularly the enthymemes known as arguments of fittingness, are a set of practical instructions that facilitate an affective response to divine mystery in order to enable a judgment by connaturality. [End Page 285] Thus, we can learn from Aquinas how fruitfully to order affect and reason in the exercise of the theological craft.The essay proceeds in three parts. First, a thought experiment will help us understand (a) how a medieval text works as a guide to performance, and (b) how intellect and affect interact in both artistic performance and aesthetic appreciation. Second, I will trace the role of affect and reason in knowledge for Aquinas, specifically in knowledge of the beautiful, of the good, and of divine mysteries. Third, I will show how Aquinas’s use of rhetorical enthymemes, specifically the argument of fittingness, promotes an affectively founded judgment whose fruit is true knowledge of the divine mysteries.I. A Thought ExperimentThe image below reproduces the sheet music for “O nuit d’amour,” a duet for tenor and soprano between Faust and Marguerite in Gounod’s opera Faust. A person with absolutely no training in music, looking at this page, will be able to glean only a small amount of information from it: the content of the text itself; the fact—indicated by the names “Faust” and “Marg.” listed above the score—that there are two singers; possibly, if he or she is enterprising and looks up a translation of “andante,” the fact that this piece of music is sung at a walking pace, moderately slow and mellow. But he or she is unlikely to be able to sing the duet without memorizing it from a performance he or she hears.Now, someone with singing experience in a choir, though without training in solfège, will be able to get a bit more information from the page: he or she will likely be able to recognize the time signature and the sequence and value of the notes and rests, as well as the ascending and descending patterns of the melody, so that given solid accompaniment and competent direction, and enough practice time, he or she could sing the duet. But this performance will not rely so much on the sheet music as it will rely on the external supports, and the nuances of the performance will be minimal. [End Page 286] Click for larger view View full resolutionFinally, two singers with training in solfège will be able to notice a number of things about the duet: first, that it is in D flat major, but that Faust’s part shades at bars five and six into B flat minor, adding a mysteriously ambiguous quality to his declaration of love; second, that Marguerite’s part remains always in a major key, though it shifts between D flat major and G flat major, adding a kind of temporary “lift” at key points in [End Page 287] her melody; that some of the chords in the accompaniment, at key points in the duet, are not played in their root positions, but in their second or third inversions, thus transforming the quality of the sound; they will also note instructions for holding notes. All of this information will allow a well-trained singer to sight-sing the duet and supply the necessary nuances from the... (shrink)

More than thirty-five years after its first release in 1971, Don McLean’s “American Pie” still resonates deeply with music listeners and consumers of popular culture. In a 2001 public poll sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Recording Industry Association of America, McLean’s eight-and-a-half-minute masterpiece was ranked number 5 among the 365 “most memorable” songs of the twentieth century. In 2002, the song was voted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. In 1997, Garth brooks performed “American Pie” (...) at a concert in Central Park, and in 2000, pop icon Madonna performed her own version of “American Pie” on the soundtrack of her movie The Next Best Thing. In 1999, American Pie became the title of a popular – and irreverently comical – coming-of-age movie starring Jason Biggs (the movie American Pie was followed by American Pie 2 in 2001, American Wedding in 2003, and American Pie Present – Band Camp in 2005). Like the movie to which it lent its name, the song “American Pie” presents a coming-of-age narrative; and, also like the movie, the song appealed strongly and immediately to its contemporary audience. Three months after its release in November of 1971, the song reached the number one slot on the charts in January of 1972, and it remained in the Top 40 for a total of seventeen weeks (longer than any other single during the year of 1972). Unlike the movie, however, the song “American Pie” is highly nuanced and sophisticated, containing multiple allusions and layers of meaning which challenge and heighten our understanding of rock ’n’ roll music and the possibility of self-reflection and self-critique in popular culture. (shrink)

continent. 2.1 (2012): 22–28. Jeroen Mettes burst onto the Dutch poetry scene twice. First, in 2005, when he became a strong presence on the nascent Dutch poetry blogosphere overnight as he embarked on his critical project Dichtersalfabet (Poet’s Alphabet). And again in 2011, when to great critical acclaim (and some bafflement) his complete writings were published – almost five years after his far too early death. 2005 was the year in which Dutch poetry blogging exploded. That year saw the foundation (...) of the influential, polemical, and populistically inclined weblog De Contrabas (The Double Bass), which became a strong force for internet poetry in Dutch in the years to follow. In the summer of that year, a lively debate raged in the aftermath of Bas Belleman’s article “ Doet poëzie er nu eindelijk toe ?” (“Does poetry finally matter now?”), on a blog specifically devoted to this question. Up to that point, the poetical debate in the Netherlands had largely been confined to literary reviews (which were often subsidized), having become mostly marginalized in more mainstream media, where poetry could be covered by only a small number of so-called authorities. As a result, literary debate had acquired a rather placid quality. Though a variety of camps with different aesthetics could be discerned, most poetical positions shared a general acceptance of poetry as a form of art somewhat apart from fundamental political concerns. Late modernists would pursue subtlety and density of reference. Others would insist poetry was best understood as a form of entertainment that should ideally be accessible and work well on the stage. Still others would insist that poetry is mostly a play with forms. Linguistically disruptive strategies were valued highly by some, but mostly for their aesthetic effect. Values of disinterested playfulness reigned supreme everywhere. Any idea that poetry could be a field in which one confronts politics and the world was decidedly marginal. This led to a climate in which most attempts at polemics were DOA, often based on far too superficial positioning and analysis. The greatest polemical debates were revolving around the question of whether poetry should be difficult or easy, with both camps defining their ideas of difficulty and accessibility in ways that were so utterly shallow as to make the entire point moot. Debates were performed, rather than engaged with. It was a postmodern hell of underarticulated poetics. Half-consciously, people were yearning for new forms of criticism that could put the oomph back into poetry. Weblogs provided for ways to explore debate directly outside of the clotted older channels of the reviews and the newspapers. Belleman’s essay and the resulting online activity had shown that there was a widespread eagerness to take poetry more seriously as a social art form. It was in this environment that Mettes started his remarkable project Dichtersalfabet . At that moment, Mettes was active mostly in academic circles, having become noted at Leiden University as a particularly gifted student of literary theory. Within the Netherlands, the field of literary theory has a very odd relationship to literature as it is practiced in the country. Academic theory tends to have a mostly international view and engage with international debates of cultural criticism, literary theory, and philosophy, with academics often publishing in English and attending conferences around the world. Literature itself however is much more concerned with domestic traditions. Consequently, in the Netherlands, there exists a language gap between academic theoretical practice (as it is studied in the literary theory departments) and literary practice (which, academically, gets studied in specialized departments of Dutch literature). The Dichtersalfabet can be seen as Mettes’s attempt to close this gap. It is also an attempt to bridge the divide between theory and practice, in which he could apply his theoretical knowledge in a very unorthodox and unacademic critical mode that moreover could reach far beyond the domain of conventional criticism. Mettes’s goal was to trace a diagonal through Dutch poetic culture, to “strangle” what he perceived to be its dominant oppressive traditions of agreeable irrelevance, in order to see whatever might be able to survive his critical assaults. But he could only do so by means of a very serious engagement with poetry itself. To this end, he would go systematically through the poetry bookshelf of the Verwijs bookshop (part of a mainstream chain of booksellers) in The Hague, buying one publication per blog item, starting from A and working his way through the alphabet, reading whatever he might encounter that way in the restaurant of the HEMA store (another big commercial chain in the country). He would subsequently write down his reading experiences, refraining however from trying to write a nuanced book review. Rather, he would write about anything that caught his attention and sparked his critical interest. This way of working would yield vast, at times somewhat rambling, dense, lively, and generally brilliant essays, in which he held no punches. He never hesitated to pull out his entire arsenal of concepts from the international theory traditions, while never degenerating into mere academic exercise and pointless intertextualities. The attempt was rather to live the poetry that he read, and to engage it with the full range of political, academic, cultural, and personal references that he had at his disposal—all that composed the individual named Jeroen Mettes as a reader. Often what he wrote would not be according to the standards of what we usually think of as a critical review of a book of poetry. Sometimes he would even be a little sloppy in his judgments of poets or representations of the books he read, for example by basing an entire essay on the blurb of a book rather than its poetry content. But what he did was always brilliant writing nonetheless—virtuoso riffs on poetic fragments randomly found within capitalist society, exposing an incisive and insistent poetical sensibility. Mettes read poetry for political reasons, to see whether poetry could offer him a way to deal with a political world he detested. The right-wing horrors of the Bush years, the Iraq war, and the turn of Dutch public opinion towards ever more conservative, narrow-minded, and xenophobic views alongside a complete failure of the political left to present any credible alternative, were weighing heavily on the times in which Mettes reported on his reading. Poetry was to measure this world, diagram it, to lay bare its inconsistencies and faults, to indicate where lines of flight might be found. Amid the ruins of a world wrecked by imperialist policies, corporate capitalism, and doctrinal neoliberalism it would have to show the possibility of a new community. And it was, through its rhythmical workings, to release the reading subject from his confinement to ideologically conditioned individuality and lead him into the immanent paradise of reading. The stakes were high. Much higher than anything Dutch poetry had seen for many years. Mettes’s blog was widely read from the start. His posts sparked lively debates. Some of these subsequently led to the publication of extensive essays on a few key poets in some literary journals, particularly Parmentier and the Flemish journal yang , for which Mettes would become a member of the editorial board, a few months after starting the Dichtersalfabet . This could have been the start of a brilliant career, but this was not to be. The initial manic energy that fueled the blog gradually subsided. The Alfabet was updated less and less regularly. Mettes sometimes just disappeared for many weeks, then suddenly returning with a brilliant essay. Until, on September 21, 2006, he posted his final blogpost, consisting of no text whatsoever. That night I learned from his mentor at Leiden University that he had committed suicide. Mettes and I had had some fruitful exchanges on poetry, rhythm, music, and form, mostly on the blogs, but also by email. Three weeks before his death was the last time I heard from him: a very sudden, uncharacteristically curt note saying “My old new sentence epic.” Attached to that message I found a DOC-file of a work so major that I felt intimidated. This was N30 , a text he had been working on for over five years. After his death, it took me a long time before I dared to read it in its entirety. In the meantime, the work of preparing the manuscript for publication was entrusted by his relatives to his colleagues at yang magazine. It took them a few years to brush up the text and to edit the Dichtersalfabet -blog (which, apart from the Alphabet project itself, incorporated many other fragments of political, polemical, and theoretical writing) into book form along with the essays. The result of this labor was finally published in 2011 as a two-book set, and Mettes burst onto the Dutch poetry scene for the second time. The work was widely reviewed, on blogs, in journals, magazines, and newspapers. Many critics who had not followed the blogs in 2005 showed themselves surprised, baffled even, by the intensity of Mettes’s critical writing. But for those who had read the blog, the main surprise was in the poetry. During Mettes’s lifetime, some of his poems had already been published in Parmentier . Although these were strong texts by themselves, in no way did they prepare readers for N30 . Nothing like it had been written in Dutch before. Instead, N30 explicitly follows the American tradition of Language Writing, directly referencing Ron Silliman and his concept of The New Sentence. However, it would seem that much of the poetical thinking around his use of this technique puts him closer to a writer such as Bruce Andrews. For Mettes, using non sequiturs as a unit of poetic construction was not only a way of reinventing formal textual construction, but it was another way of finding the fault lines in the social fabric. From the perspective of the Language tradition, one may put N30 somewhere between Silliman and Andrews. N30 shares an autobiographical element with Silliman’s New Sentence projects, and as in Andrews, there is a concern for mapping out social totality within text—what Mettes refers to as a “textual world civil war.” Again this shows a formal textual strategy for allowing the person “Jeroen Mettes” to be absorbed by the world, which here appears as a whirlwind of demotic and demonic chatter, full of violence, humor, intensity, beauty, disgust, sex, commerce, and strife. Influenced as it may by American precursors, Mettes’s tone and form end up quite different from his American counterparts, consistently referencing a world that is Dutch, all too Dutch, taking on the oppressive orderliness of Dutch society with its endemic penchant for consensus by introducing chaos into its daily life and laying bare its implicit aggressions. The work’s 31 chapters each have a different feel and rhythmical outline, but none of them follow a predetermined pattern. Rather, Mettes would consistently edit and reedit the text, randomly rewriting parts of it, as he explains in his poetical creed Politieke Poëzie (Political Poetry). N30 – referring to the 1999 antiglobalist protest in Seattle – was to be the first text of a trilogy. The work itself was written “in the mode of the present.” A second text was to be written in the mode of the future, and a third one, in the mode of the past, was going to be an epic poem about the Paris Commune, and to form an alternative poetic constitution for the European project. I still deeply regret that Jeroen Mettes never got to complete those projects, just as I would be very keen on knowing what he might have had to say about more recent political developments. Instead, in 2006, he remained stuck in the horrors of the present, that ended up consuming him completely. He left Dutch literature with some of its most piercing criticism and its most profoundly moving, exciting and powerful poetry. Excerpts from N30 Translated by Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei from Jeroen Mettes. "N30." In N30+ . Amsterdam: De wereldbibliotheek, 2011. Published with permission of Uitgeverij Wereldbibliotheek, Amsterdam. Chapter 1 1999. A day is a space too. And another man, who had chained himself, had his ribs crushed, and a motor has driven over somebody’s legs. Dutch health care system spends ±145 million guilders per year on worriers. A spiderweb vibrates as I pass by. Randstad renovating. She slaps her bag against her ass: “Hurry up!” OPINION IS TRUE FRIENDSHIP Your skin. It doesn’t express anything. “But the use of the sword, that’s what I learned, and you’ll need nothing more for the moment.” Just try to interrogate a guy like that. Gullit in Sierra Leone. Codes silently lying all around. But that’s simply what belongs to “that it’s just allowed”: that sigh of “world” (a word expressing that the trees are now standing along the water like black men with white bags in their hair); that’s nothing else right? And you see how everything has to move, and first of all what cannot do so. Without Elysium and without savings, barbarians lashing out, horny for an enemy, staring across the water, staring into the air—staring to get out of it. “You’ve never showed me more than the mall,” she said. All those “dreams” in the end—and now? It was lying on the stairway, so I picked it up and took it upstairs. Chapter 3 “You know what?” Telecommunication. For love… I don’t really like that cheap cultural pessimism, but… The holy city is on pilgrimage in the earthly bodies of the faithful until the time of the heavenly kingdom has come. The end of an exhausting autumn day behind the computer, my eyes filled with tears of fatigue. KITCHEN / INSTALLATION / SPECIALIST. Network integration. In the sun, stretched out on a sheet. (…) I don’t believe what I’m reading, because I want to believe something else. An illusion? Suits me. There’s a variety of shapes and tastes… “So what?” you may think. 102 dalmatians can’t be wrong. But I want more, dear… A feel good movie. I’m smashing the burned body. So what? We continue to save the European civilization. What’s there to win? Plato with poets = Stalin without gulag? Ball against the crossbar. No wonder. She comes straight to her point. She’s standing in the kitchen eating an apple. (…) The godless Napoleon had used her as a stable and wanted to have her taken down. “Our” Rutger Hauer. Ready or not here I come. Psst… are you also wearing a string? Nobody understands our desire. Cliffs breaking the waves and shattering the sunset. I used to be a real romantic (as a poet). A typical fantasy used to be the one in which I brutally raped mother and daughter Seaver from the sitcom Growing Pains . Nevertheless you only contain bad words. Eyelashes. Automatic or manual? That your skin always in the afternoon. Integration. The air is empty. Too bad! Hand in hand on their lonely way. Alaska! Chapter 12 May 5, 2001 [10:00-10:30] A dust cloud on a hill. Globe. Indian (British) (tie) / pope. Damascus. Rape. We’re carrying the ayatollah’s portrait through the streets. At the moment the girl is mostly suede jacket with white ribbons on her sleeves. A small explosion flares up/impact. Camouflage. Close up. We’re analyzing the situation. He’s dead right? Dead dead. Dead. Everything without, these, and only with the body. Indices signal death. Dollar bills are printed in factories. Holes. Light patch. Globe in a box. Microphone. What’s the situation? Grey impact on a green hill (field?). The water is blue. He has no lips. Interns on the background with skirts that are too long. This is an example of a sonnet. An Islamic woman pushes against the door of an electronics shop. Arrows (percentages (prices)). Is this what awaits the American? Touch screen interface. The word, an island, can only be a sign in that situation. We pull up a chair, join in on the fun. On the shelves only books about computers. One glance in the distance is enough to lighten up a luna park in the distance. She’s really desperate, especially when she laughs. Click. Ah. Next. And now it’s raining, but that’s ok. Yellow stains sliding over the south. Shallow caves light: clothes, boots, electrical equipment. 45. 22:10. Nothing gives you the right to eat more than people starving to death. The Hague. Slam dunk. Traffic light. Two H’s, one L (standing for the L (little prick)). We’re happy to say something. Clouds, small suns, temperatures, cities. The truth is never an excuse. Yellow. Yellow. Green. Yellow. Yellow. Yellow. Yellow. Green. Green. Yellow. Will you email me? Skeleton: “No.” Ex-nerds in brand-new and brightly red sport cars. $$$. I love. Shihab. Hooves in the sand. Skinny senior with over-sized sunglasses; old jockey (cap, trophy) smiling in slow motion. And there I am again, flashback, crying with my head in between my hands. Sometimes I’ve got the feeling that cannibals. Eyes: blue. Cancer. Why would I wait until tomorrow? Golden beams protruding from the lifted/lit earth. May 5, 2001 [11:30-12:45] You’ll remember this for the rest of your life. Graphs, diagrams. Bu$ine$$. Blue shirt, white collar, no neck (porn star). A name lights up. I’m hysteric. Will you join us? Letters falling in their words. Fingers set up a tent and start to dance. Young entrepreneurs from poor neighborhoods (read: black) guided by Microsoft. Kinda makes me happy, that sort of kitsch. A sense of exhaustion/impotence to see anything but the present. (…) Wouldn’t you like to? Orange explosion in an industrial zone. YOU’RE DOING THIS FOR AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL. Would you. A familiar face. Clouds and blossom. Sunflowers. Supermodels. Mountainous area in a rectangle: shades of brown, from dark to beige, more green toward the south. Tents and next to them (it’s all a blur) people. Plane. Stadium. Geometrical block of people. No, I ain’t crying. I don’t speak no more. I just want. Quote + photo. (Positive:) screaming crowd. Three-piece suit, seen from the back, before entering the arena. On the back: “Daddy abused me.” Oh, bummer. State of emergency has been declared and everyone has to cooperate. She’s cut her wrists. What we do know (…) is that there’s never been a unique word, an imperative name, nor will there ever be. [Click here for work that suits you.] Barefooted children are watching it (coherent pieces revelation of what’s lying below). Who knows how she’s changed during those two years. “Everything used to be better” + sigh. And here we are. An empty field of parquet. A city lying behind it. Explosion. Blue. A rain drop falling in my coffee. May 5, 2001 [14:30-15:30] A young Arafat on video speaking with raised finger. “I’m calling from my convertible.” Names on walls, victims, numbers… Tourists. Yellow. Yellow. “Your own child! Really, what kind of human are you?” I don’t want to hear it no more. A woman jumping out of the water in a yellow bikini against a background of fireworks and the Cheops pyramid. Thy sorrow shall become good fortune, thy complaints laudation. All planets will float and wander. Wo die Welt zum Bild wird, kommt das System (…) zur Herrschaft. It is something, but is it? May 5, 2001 [18:30-19:00] Iris. Leaves. NASDAQ. Open / and white and. For the one who’s doing nothing, just waiting. (…) NO DEFEAT is made entirely up of defeat -- since / the world it opens is always a place / formerly / unsuspected. October 2002. “Jeroen, I’m leaving for the cemetery, byeeee.” The rise of the middle class. My entire oeuvre is an ode to the. My entire head is a fight against the. God always demands what you cannot sacrifice. You may take that the easy way, but… “The state hasn’t made us, but we make the state” (Hitler). A stork exits the elevator. Skeletons of. Moscow. Helsinki. Palermo. Paris. Chapter 30 Like your paradises: nothing. United Desire, as only remaining superpower. And even though the sea is now calmer and the wind is blowing pleasantly in my face… Heart! Who determines whether a tradition is “alive”? The yellow leaf or the white branch? Mars. This sentence is a typical example. Most Dutch people are happy. No consolation. When I see a girl sitting at a table with a book, a notepad, a pen, a bottle of mineral water, her hand writing in the light—then I consider that one thing. “Presents,” “poetry,” “classics.” We are what we cannot make from ourselves. “Left”: mendicant orders, missionaries. Saint-Just: “A republic is founded on the destruction of its enemies.” She crosses the street with a banana peel between her fingers. (…) We chose our own wardens, torturers, it was us who called all this insanity upon ourselves, we created this nightmare… But “no”? Girl (just like a beach ball) talking rapid Spanish (Portuguese?) in a mobile phone. Do I have a chance now that her boyfriend is getting bold? CLIO, horny bitch. What else do you want? An old woman, between the doors of the C1000, is suddenly unable to go on; her husband stretches out his hand, speaking a few encouraging words. Selection from. Der Führer schenkt den Jüden ein Stadt. How can it reach us if we haven’t been already reached somehow? It doesn’t “speak.” No problem. Each word she uses is a small miracle, as if she doesn’t belong to it, to language, but wanders around with a pocket light looking for the exit; she’s never desperate (maybe a little nervous), lighting up heavy words from the inside. But indeed, we’re free. But the predicate is not an attribute, but an event, and the subject is not a subject, but a shell. That’s why also samurai, knights, and warriors raised the blossom as emblem: they knew how to die. Locked up in a baby carriage with a McDonald’s balloon. Blue helicopter, the blue sky. Whether you want to refer? The point is. How / Motherfucker can I sing a sad song / When I remember Zion? You’ll feel so miserable and worthless that you think: “If only I were dead!,” or: “Just put an end to it!” “So you’re an economist?” Her card—two little birds building a nest, her handwriting shaking—is still on the mantelpiece. Guevara: “No, a communist.” A straw fire, such was our life: rapidly it flared up, rapidly it passed. I’m fleeing, coming from nowhere. (…) Eazy-E drinking coffee with the American president. If I’d scream, would that be an event? Drown it: the cleaner it will rise up from the depths. No! The night, so fast… As if there’s something opened up in that face. Come on, we may not curse life. He shows me his methadone: “If you drink that all at once, you’ll die instantly.” The last one dictates how we should behave to deserve happiness. One shine / above the earth. “I want to go to Bosnia,” I said bluntly. I don’t even know the name of the current mayor. Let’s despise our success! “There is no future; this is the future. Hope is a weakness that we've overcome. We have found happiness!” Sun. Sushi. Volvo. I feel like a bomb about to explode at any moment. Makes a difference for the reconstruction right? The decor moves forward. Daughter of Nereus, you nymphs of the sea, and you Thetis, you should have kept his tired head above the waves! Alas! This sentence has been written wearing a green cap. I receive my orders from the future. A frog jumps into it. Her husband has turned the Intifada, which he follows daily on CCN, into his hobby, “to forget that he doesn’t have his driver’s license yet." Suddenly the sun slides over the crosswalk. Her (his?) foot is playing with the slipper under the table. Is this how I’m writing this book now? I’m not a fellow man. I hate you and I want to hurt you. These are my people. Their screaming doesn’t rise above the constantly wailing sirens which we've learned to ignore. My whole body became warm and suddenly started to tremble. Unfortunate is he who is standing on the threshold of the most beautiful time, but awaits a better one. Arafat’s “removal” is contrary to American interests. Jeep drives into boy. What you can do alone, you should do alone. A food gift from the people of the United States of America. Two seagulls. [...]. (shrink)

This comprehensive Research Handbook explores the wide variety of work conducted in legal semiotics, providing a thorough understanding of how the law works through signs and symbols. Demonstrating that the law is a strategical system of fluctuating signs, contributors critically analyse the ever-evolving conceptualisations of law and legal discourse. Bringing together leading international experts, this Research Handbook focuses on the material, everyday forms of law comprised by non-verbal legal semiotics. Contributors conduct culturally nuanced semiotic analyses of the modern world, covering (...) topics from COVID-19, religion, and human rights, to comic books and music. Chapters consider the foundations of semiotics, as well as the philosophy of law, identifying the cross-cultural similarities in how legal semiotics and visual legal semiotics intersect. Ultimately, the Research Handbook demonstrates that the law is in a state of perpetual flux, with many unique dimensions only made visible by semiotic analysis. The Research Handbook on Legal Semiotics will be an invaluable resource for students and scholars of law, jurisprudence, legal culture, linguistics, and semiotics. It will also be an important guide for legal practitioners seeking to better understand the nuances of the legal system. (shrink)

This article provides insight into one form of audience involvement with celebrities: parasocial relationships. To address several shortcomings in PSR research – focus on TV, confusion between PSI and PSR, use of student samples, neglect of socio-demographic variables – a representative online survey was conducted with 1000 Flemish adults who indicated 382 celebrities as favorites. A new scale reveals that PSR contain two important elements: emotional connections and an analogy with social relationships. Confirming previous research, most favorite celebrities are male, (...) and cultural proximity is especially important for older respondents. In one combined model, respondents’ and celebrities’ characteristics are included as potential PSR predictors. This model nuances previous research and reveals that people who are male, older, more lowly-educated, and interested in celebrity news have stronger PSR. Further, stronger PSR are found for local and religious, political, sports, and music celebrities than for film celebrities. (shrink)

continent. 1.2 (2011): 125-128. What is the nature of sound? What is the nature of volume? William James, in attempting to address these simple questions wrote, “ The voluminousness of the feeling seems to bear very little relation to the size of the ocean that yields it . The ear and eye are comparatively minute organs, yet they give us feelings of great volume” (203-­4, itals. original). This subtle extensivity of sensation finds its peer in the subtle yet significant influence (...) of habituated action upon our lives. This expansive quality of habit­making is what Craig Dongoski's bodies of work enable us to appreciate. Nearly ten years ago Dongoski had a habit of turning on his audio recorder every day at three o'clock for three minutes. No matter what the setting, what the activity, Dongoski recorded the ambient sounds in his environment at that moment. As it happened, one day he was teaching a drawing class and he recorded the sounds of their pencils scratching across their respective surfaces. This was a critical moment for him. Later he would place a contact mic onto a drawing surface and record the sound of his signature. Signatures change over time, they respond to the conditions in which they are performed. Signatures speak volumes about the author, but a practice of attunement is required for the volume to be audible. To hear all that a signature can tell about its author, the listener must tune into the frequency at which this information is being broadcast. Dongoski's drawings and video works draw­out the peculiar artifact that habit makes of living: habits establish a tempo of living and it seems that one's habitus is the signature of habitual living. I sat down with Craig in an attempt to sound­out some of the depths of thought in his practice. What follows is selected from our conversation. Paul Boshears (PB): Clearly your work is dealing with time: from the painstaking action of rendering the drawing to the free­form approach of launching a microphone into a body of water and waiting to see what's recorded. Craig Dongoski (CD): Are we talking about the films or the drawings? PB: Well, it's a bit of both in my mind. I know the drawings on first glance seem to be these flows of lines without concern but I realize that there is this painstaking action involved. CD: I'm interested in time because I'm interested in forms outside of control, outside of politics, and outside of economics. I think that art, when it's alive, does go beyond those. I'm interested in duality and paradox—a stream of contradiction, I suppose. For instance, scale and size. There is a tendency to think that these are the same thing. But really you can have something small that has a lot of scale—look at Goya's drawings, Los Caprichos , they're very small but they have a lot of scale. Likewise things that are spontaneous don't necessarily mean that they take only two or three seconds to do. This latter distinction is what I'm most interested in. Having that appearance of spontaneity. The image has rhythm, you can latch onto it; but the reality is that it took many hours—and many months in some cases—to arrive at. And this is in keeping with geological time. I like to insert this series of thoughts into my work sometimes as an attempt to make some of this stuff comprehensible. There are all these distractions inundating us throughout our days now. Time gets tweaked by all these technologies that we interact with daily. There's more than just digital time or the mechanical time of your watch. There's biological time, that time in which you're growing. PB: I'm reminded of McLuhan here: he made his career by making that strong claim that the humans of today are not the same humans of three generations ago because technology has fundamentally changed us. Are we not the same human beings as a hundred years ago? CD: I mean, I don't think we're the same human beings that we were when he was around! It's my understanding that before painting a flower, monks would meditate for hours on that flower and then they would complete the painting of that flower in less than a minute. That's what I want to point out about our world today, we have all this information, but how much of it are we metabolizing? PB: Is there a message you're looking for? Or that you're trying to share? CD: These drawings set­up the circumstances for me to continue them forever. I'm only about six years into it, but with more time, things can unfold. You know? If you take this cup of coffee and vow to restrict your work to only this material and medium for seven years—you'll make interesting work. The problem is that most people can't hold on to things or they give up or they get distracted. They don't trust that anything is possible; anything is potential material. Staying with this cup of coffee example, we can get enveloped in the history of the recycling logo, or the process for harvesting coffee and so on. The same is true for my work as it has lead me into places like graphical music scores. I had, of course, known about John Cage's notations and I'd always been interested in sound itself, but this drawing practice made it feasible to explore the intersections in a meaningful way. I think that if you trust your instincts and your curiosities and your abilities, then the bus drives itself. Look at Roman Opalka, he's kind of the patron saint of time painting. The claim is that no one can count to a billion in a lifetime so he's set­out to paint to seven sevens (7,777,777). He began with white numbers on a black field but over the years he has gradually reduced the black field to ever­lightening grays. His plan is to paint these seven sevens on what ostensibly will be white on white. PB: It occurs to me that I've never thought of the actual, literal, meaning of “microphone” in relation to “microscope.” The mic has made everything loud, the world's not allowed to be quiet anymore. Maybe we should call them “macrophones” since telephone's already taken... CD: Well, a microscope is a lens. What got me interested in sound was that a microphone acts like a lens. There are wide angle lenses, or a lens that gets your eye up close to something far away, or at a tiny level. The same is true of the microphone. You can use a parabolic mic to hear what the coach is saying on a sports field or a mic that picks­up the sound from the entire cathedral. There's this whole gamut... I'm kind of playing with the words here. I'm into the minuteness of the sound, but I'm interested in the minuteness of the mark itself. PB: I guess it's a Deluezean, generative, statement, then? It's not a metaphor, it's an actual thing with which we can work. CD : That's right. PB: While doing some background work on you I found myself at interesting places on the internet. For example, Konstantin Raudive and a brief jog into Electronic Voice Phenomena (EVP); perhaps this was just synchronicity. But, it's a happy coincidence nonetheless because the them of this issue of continent. is “the moraine” and one of the nuances of this term is “what remains.” Is there a metaphysical or epistemological problem that you're sorting­out here? CD: Think about fossils: fossils are the first recording device, you know? It's the first, natural, recording device. It's in this way that I think my works are fossilized time. Artifacts of that process. Van Gogh is a strong source for me in this regard: it's not what he's painting it's how. You're seeing his nervous system at work. The what is so incidental, the chairs, the flowers, etc. It's funny: when I first started doing this, before I started drawing voices, I was doing these things in cemeteries. I was doing automatic drawings. And when I took this experiment to its maximum I was taking hydrophones and burying them in abandoned graves. I was thinking about the mic rig as the south coordinate and I'd use a shortwave radio as the north coordinate. Usually it was just white noise, but on the east and west I'd station a writer and a drawer. So I'd have these things going on simultaneously and I'd be mixing them at the same time. PB: How'd it come out? CD: Well, just like you'd expect. It was a lot of white noise. But I think that Raudive was on to something. Burroughs used to say something similar when he'd talk about being in a foreign country where he didn't know the language and then he'd start to hear things. At the base, what I'm doing is pattern recognition. I do have a writing component to the drawings. I haven't exploited it in a while but... I use a vocoder, which was developed to encrypt spy signals during one of the World Wars. The mechanism takes two channels, one being the spy's signal combined with noise and then the other channel is a sine wave so that the intended recipient can pick out the words. So I did something like this with Beowulf. I tried combining the spoken word with other television and radio sources, but that didn't work because a book on tape is usually read in a very steady clip and the result was too garbled. So the second try, instead of drawing I was writing, trying to articulate the sounds that I could hear in this garbled transmission of Beowulf. You start to think you hear something, so you start to write what you think you're hearing. But what you're hearing is just being triggered by this articulating action. When the sound of the drawing lines up with the sound of the word you get something. But it's not ever what you're really hearing. You start writing and you're trying to keep up with what you think you're hearing and it is truly, in the most true sense of the phrase, automatic writing. You can contrive and go into a “spirit trance” or whatever, but... PB: It's uninteresting to you? CD: Well, it's unbelievable. It's just listening to sounds and following along. The magic is out there, there are no tricks or anything. You do this exercise with twenty people and you will get twenty totally different writings. But, you're creating the sound and you're creating the writing as an interpretation. That's the thing with EVP, it's homophonic translation. PB: Do you trust a straight line? I know you start with these meticulous lines at the beginning of the drawings but they do change over time. CD: I'm trying to show that there are these imperfections in structures and that over the reiterations of these structures these imperfections become amplified. But you can see them in tree formation as well. The rings alter their shape as the trees grow. PB: Is that your transmission then? You're not just receiving these sounds but you're broadcasting this message as well? CD: Things exist because of their opposites. These drawings are really about nothing. It's the first body of work I've had where people project so much of stuff onto the works. So there you go, things existing because of their opposites. It's kind of like with Mike Kelley: the work was about a critique of commodity culture and commodifying emotions. Using toys this was a critique of production. But then suddenly people were saying it was about abuse and the abuse that Mike Kelley had suffered. And it wasn't but he heard that and said, “I'll go with it,” and so he did. I think that's the nature of communication: I send this but you receive that instead and this makes me think about what I sent in a different way. (shrink)

Jean-Luc Nancy stands as one of the great French theorists of "deconstruction." His writings on philosophy, politics, aesthetics, and religion have significantly contributed to the development of contemporary French thought and helped shape and transform the field of continental philosophy. Through Nancy's immense oeuvre, which covers a wide range of topics such as community, freedom, existence, sense/ touch, democracy, Christianity, the visual arts and music, and writing itself, we have learned to take stock of the world in a more nuanced (...) fashion. In this collection, contemporaries of Nancy and eminent scholars of continental philosophy, including Giorgio Agamben, Étienne Balibar, Ginette Michaud, Georges Van Den Abbeele, Gregg Lambert and Ian James, have been invited to reflect on the force of Nancy's "deconstruction" and how it has affected, or will affect, the ways we approach many of the most pertinent topics in contemporary philosophy. The collection also includes Jean-Luc Nancy's previously unpublished 'Dialogue Beneath the Ribs', where he reflects, twenty years after, on his heart transplant. Nancy Now will be of critical interest not only to scholars working on or with Nancy's philosophy, but also to those interested in the development and future of French thought. (shrink)