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The folk tunes collection in this chapter differs from most of those hitherto printed in the Folk-Song Journal in that, while former collections have been gathered from one county, the present tunes represent no less than seven: Essex, Norfolk, Sussex, Wiltshire, Yorkshire, Kent, and even London. It is not suggested that the tunes grouped under the counties are their exclusive property; indeed, the more wonderful fact elicited from the search for folk songs is that the same tune may be heard, with hardly any variation, in Norfolk, Sussex, or Yorkshire. This proves more than anything the fundamental character of the genuine folk song. It will be noticed that a large proportion of the tunes in this collection are modal in character—Dorian, Aeolian, or Mixolydian. The chapter suggests that the Mixolydian and Dorian tunes are more characteristic of agricultural districts, while Aeolian tunes belong more to towns, and to trades such as fishing and cobbling.

This chapter re-examines the circumstances and events leading up to Paul Whiteman's celebrated historic Aeolian Hall “Experiment in Modern Music”, at which was premiered Gershwin's seminal jazz inspired work, the “Rhapsody in Blue”. The public and most critics were ecstatic; the chapter offers insights as to why some euro-centric music critics remained deeply divided for generations. It then details Whiteman's respect and passion for jazz, and for Ellington; and the role of skilled arrangers. The challenges faced by the author in recreating the Aeolian Hall event “same day, same hour, same block, sixty years later”, are described. Sleuthing out the scores and parts; assembling a replica band that included several unusual instruments such as hecklephone, sopranino saxophone, a serious slide whistle and 1920's drum kit; and relearning how to play ragtime style are explained. The recreated concert sets off a media storm, triumph and is repeated in cities elsewhere starting in Rome, Italy. The chapter finishes with a rethinking of the whole event as but a part of a very rich and textured American music story.

This chapter mainly deals with three topics: the attack by Scottish Enlightenment historiography on the earlier historiography of Scotland, and specifically the idea of a usable national past; the way in which some Enlightenment thought allowed this past to survive on condition that it became ‘romance’, a literature of sentiment; and how the images, ideas, and creative process of Scottish writers, such as Macpherson, attempted to struggle with the vision of the past as ‘romance’ while still defending its importance and value, derived in part from the world of Gaelic poetry. Using both postcolonial theory and close reading, the role played by Macpherson in the key debates of the era, and his development of the Aeolian harp metaphor subsequently to become so important to Romanticism, are alike explored in detail. The chapter also discusses the effect that pressures to standardize written, and to an extent, spoken English had on Scottish writers and the symbolic importance of the ‘bard’.

Although Wordsworth is the most influential poet of the Romantic era, his role in the development of modern concepts of virtuality has yet to be explored. Where Blake hopes to transform the actual by drawing on a virtuality (an open-ended, unstructured potential) that lies beyond it, Wordsworth discovers an analogous potential within the actual itself. This powerful revisioning of the actual is the topic of this chapter, which discusses Wordsworth's ‘Composed on Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802’ and the ‘Cave of Yordas’ episode in Book VIII of The Prelude. It concludes by turning to romantic accounts of the Brocken Spectre and Aeolian Harp, which it argues are attempts to compose a ‘living theatre’ that, in contrast to popular entertainments such as the phantasmagoria, draws attention to the audience's active role in fabricating the illusions that appear before their eyes.

Three categories of the Aeolian are explored: naturally occurring Aeolian, instruments built for the purpose, and the Aeolian heard in telegraph lines and poles. That all three can produce the same sound suggests that there is no strict distinction between nature and technology or among classes of technology. Eduard Hanslick’s rejection of the idea that the sounds of nature could be considered music is contrasted to Henry David Thoreau’s embrace of the sounds of nature generally and the telegraphic Aeolian specifically. The relationship of the telegraphic Aeolian to the Deep Cut, the destructive excavation through which flowed the railroad and telegraph lines, is examined, as is Thoreau’s concept of sphere music.

This chapter explores Euripides' Wise Melanippe and Captive Melanippe. In Wise Melanippe, the young Melanippe has borne twin sons by Poseidon and tried to hide them from her father Aeolus in a stable; when discovered they are taken for cow-born monsters which must be destroyed, and she tries to protect them without incriminating herself, by arguing that they must be some unknown girl's natural children. The twins Aeolus and Boeotus survive to become the ancestors of Aeolian and Boeotian Greeks; the outcome for Melanippe is not known. Meanwhile, Captive Melanippe was not simply a sequel to Wise Melanippe. Its key features were the rearing of the twins by a royal couple, a foiled plot by their stepmother to have them killed as they approached adulthood, and the liberation of Melanippe by her sons from the bondage which gives the play its subtitle.

The El Alamein Project began in 2008 as a research project promoted by the University of Padova (Italy) and the Italian Society of Military Geography and Geology in order to study and preserve the El Alamein battlefields. The conditions of ordinary soldiers, manning the dusty outposts in the desert, crouching for days in foxholes and trenches, is clearly revealed and documented in this absorbing account of the University of Padova's geomorphic project of mapping and analyzing the desert battle terrain. Surveying and documenting these areas before the site is transformed to an extent that results in the disappearance of such remarkable and unique historical war remains, is now clearly essential. The El Alamein Project has two goals. The first is to establish a complete, detailed database of military archeological remains, and to publish the associated findings. Second, to create from those findings a framework of guidelines for the development of a well designed historical, cultural, tourist site on the old battlefield.

This chapter focuses on the Hutchinson Family Singers' attempts to build an identity for themselves through their music career in 1841. Society was not the kind of performance that the Hutchinsons had in mind. With their music career stalling, they focused on their worsening financial situation. In 1841 audiences found the Hutchinsons' Aeolian associations weak—their performance was hardly effortless or instinctive, natural, or wondrous; their singing failed to inspire a search for the supernatural within the natural world. Living in Lynn once again, the Hutchinson brothers resumed their nonmusical employ. The Boston papers generally liked the Hutchinsons, who, as time progressed, used their family name more often than the rubric Aeolian Vocalists.

The historical scope, topical focuses, theoretical positions, and structure of the book are introduced. Natural radio and its early reception on telephone lines serve as means to discuss the relationship between nature and communications. The motivation of the book is described as an attempt to understand specific instances of experimental music and art that incorporate natural radio, require reconceiving several basic historical presumptions, and, in turn, redress larger questions about energy and earth magnitude in the arts and media. The sound and signal in the book’s title are related to the physical classes of mechanical (acoustics/sound) and electromagnetic energy, with emphasis given to the concept of lived electromagnetism played out over locations on the electromagnetic spectrum from telegraphy to nuclear weaponry. Finally, positions are delineated with respect to the term nature, the Aelectrosonic as the electromagnetic equivalent of the Aeolian, ecological analyses of green media, inscriptive versus transmissional media technologies, the concept of variable technology, and the historical media theory of Friedrich Kittler.

Given that mechanics (acoustics) and electromagnetism are basic forms of energy and that naturally occurring energies of both types can be heard in telegraph and telephone lines, an electromagnetic equivalent of the Aeolian is introduced—the Aelectrosonic—to account for aesthetic and musical engagements of nature sounds in telecommunications technologies. The distinction of transduction-in-degree versus transduction-in-kind is introduced as a means to understanding the movement from one energy state to the next in physical and physiological settings. The vagary between nature and technology in the Aelectrosonic is applied to notions of acoustical and electronic musical instruments. Naturally occurring Aelectrosonics are discussed in terms of the sounds of atmospheric electricity, polar auroras, and magnetic storms.

This chapter explores Horace's influences in writing the Odes. It argues that his references to Aeolian or Lesbian poetry embrace both Sappho and Alcaeus. Horace was also decisively influenced by the striking, pervasive, and seemingly unprecedented dualism of gender which is found in Catullus' poetry and that, as an admirer and imitator of archaic Greek lyric, he was particularly interested in the role which Sappho was given in that dualism. Horace's reading of Catullus made him realize that, by claiming to imitate Sappho as well as Alcaeus, he might himself reproduce — though in a radically different form — the dualism of gender which is presented by Catullus and to which his own dualism is itself a response.

During the eighties and through his death in 1891—that is, the height of high realism and the Realism War—Melville actively wrote, revised, and published his last two volumes, composed Billy Budd, and wrote and revised an extensive body of unpublished poems. Yet scholarship has rarely situated Melville the poet in the debates about realism and idealism common in the print culture of the age. This chapter demonstrates that he carved out a realist poetics. This poetics simultaneously countered both Howellsian models of realism and the genteel poetics of romantic idealism. Melville predicates his realist poetic practice on a vision of “the Real”—his term in “The Aeolian Harp” (1888)—as epistemologically opaque.