Search Results

Articulation and Phrasing

Clive Brown

in Classical and Romantic Performing Practice 1750-1900

This chapter looks at the ways in which articulation and phrasing were either indicated by the composer, or expected to be provided by the performer on the basis of experience and musicality. ... More

This chapter looks at the ways in which articulation and phrasing were either indicated by the composer, or expected to be provided by the performer on the basis of experience and musicality. Connections between accentuation and articulation are considered. The structural and expressive aspects of musical articulation are related to rhetoric and language in general; this was a view that persisted throughout the period, although the manner in which it was realised may have changed significantly. Approaches to the structural aspect of articulation are explored through comparison of a succession of theoretical treatments of the subject in Sulzer's Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste (by J. A. P. Schulz), Türk's Klavierschule, Corri's A Select Collection, Baillot's L'art du violon, García's A New Treatise, Bériot's Méthode de violon, and Joachim and Moser's Violinschule.Less

British Economic Warfare and Switzerland

NEVILLE WYLIE

in Britain, Switzerland, and the Second World War

This chapter charts British efforts to limit Swiss–German economic collaboration. It explores how the Ministry of Economic Warfare tried to compel Berne into reducing its exports to Germany through a ... More

This chapter charts British efforts to limit Swiss–German economic collaboration. It explores how the Ministry of Economic Warfare tried to compel Berne into reducing its exports to Germany through a mixture of blockade quotas, pre-emptive purchasing, and the use of statutory and black list mechanisms, but how these efforts were always limited by an appreciation of the importance of ‘danegeld’ — Swiss manufactured goods — to the British war effort and the priority given to Britain's political relations with the Swiss government. The substantial concessions, granted by Berne following the listing of the Hans Sulzer engineering firm in late 1943, effectively met London's principal desiderata and for the remainder of the war London assumed the role of honest-broker between the Swiss and the Allied governments, and sought to use to position to temper U.S. efforts to impose the Allied ‘Safehaven’ programme on the Swiss authorities in the final months of the war.Less

From the critique of Wolffian apperception to the idea of the ‘pre-existence’ of self-consciousness

Udo Thiel

in The Early Modern Subject: Self-Consciousness and Personal Identity from Descartes to Hume

There was a long and lively debate about of Wolff’s account of consciousness and self-consciousness in the eighteenth century; and in this context, non-Wolffian views about personal identity were ... More

There was a long and lively debate about of Wolff’s account of consciousness and self-consciousness in the eighteenth century; and in this context, non-Wolffian views about personal identity were advanced, even if not always explicitly, as part of the critiques of Leibniz and Wolff. The main focus of this chapter is the issue of consciousness and self-consciousness. The chapter begins with an examination of a debate about the relationship between followers and critics of Wolff concerning consciousness and the act of distinguishing. Critics such as Rüdiger and Crusius argue against Wolff that the act of distinguishing presupposes consciousness, and so the latter cannot depend on the former. Defenders of Wolff, such as Klosse, argue that even having any sensation or feeling involves distinguishing it from previous perceptions. Hollmann holds that we have no direct consciousness of either the self or objects, rather we are immediately conscious only of representations, while von Creuz hints at the notion of a self-consciousness that is independent of the consciousness of objects and the act of distinguishing. The most important critics of Wolff are Johann Georg Sulzer and Jean Bernard Mérian, discussed in detail in this chapter. Sulzer introduces, contra Wolff, a fundamental distinction between two basic mental powers: representing (object-directed) and feeling (subject-directed). He undermines his own distinction, however, by adopting an essentially Wolffian notion of consciousness. On the positive side and more strongly than other thinkers of the time, Sulzer links self-consciousness to our physical existence. Mérian develops his critique of Wolff differently, arguing that self-consciousness is absolutely fundamental: it is an immediate or “original” apperception that is necessary to all thought as such. This idea of an original self-consciousness as a necessary condition of all thought sounds rather Kantian. Nevertheless, there are several crucial differences between Kant’s and Mérian’s accounts.Less

Music between Reaction and Response

Holly Watkins

in Musical Vitalities: Ventures in a Biotic Aesthetics of Music

Chapter 5, “Music Between Reaction and Response,” evaluates music’s capacity to thwart conceptions of the human based on the sovereign power of rationality. Music’s ability to blur the boundaries ... More

Chapter 5, “Music Between Reaction and Response,” evaluates music’s capacity to thwart conceptions of the human based on the sovereign power of rationality. Music’s ability to blur the boundaries between human and nonhuman bodies has long been recognized, as two Greek myths attest: Orpheus made music that inspired human-like attention in animals, trees, and stones, while the Sirens reduced passing sailors to the level of animals incapable of resisting their song. Recast in terms employed by Jacques Lacan and criticized by Jacques Derrida, these myths portray music as calling forth a response in creatures thought merely able to react and, contrariwise, stripping away the capacity for response in humans, leaving nothing but reaction in its place. The chapter revisits eighteenth- and nineteenth-century commentaries by the philosophers and critics Johann Georg Sulzer, Johann Gottfried Herder, and Eduard Hanslick in order to illuminate persistent anxieties over the admixture of reaction and response in musical listening. Addressing more recent studies in music perception and ethology, the chapter weaves research on the physiological reactions involved in musical responsiveness into a philosophical perspective on the expressiveness of sound that accommodates the communicative arts of both humans and animals.Less

Life in Lexington

RON PEN

in I Wonder as I Wander: The Life of John Jacob Niles

The Niles' trip to Kentucky took them first to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and then to Pittsburgh, where they spent Easter with their close friends, the Eliots. When they arrived at Lexington they ... More

The Niles' trip to Kentucky took them first to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and then to Pittsburgh, where they spent Easter with their close friends, the Eliots. When they arrived at Lexington they checked into the Phoenix Hotel and had dinner with President McVey and his wife. Through President McVey, Niles got to know Elmer Sulzer, the director of the university's radio station. Niles was familiar with radio through his work in Chicago and New York City. He was a highly respected performer who could talk eloquently about music. Lexington offered a new beginning; they were liberated from the memories of New York City and Brasstown that haunted Niles's past and free of the family entanglements of Albany and Louisville.Less

Some Temporal Factors in Vision

Boynton Robert M.

in Sensory Communication

This chapter presents three psychophysical experiments involving temporal relations in vision. The first shows that, even with improved experimental technique, high-intensity short flashes can indeed ... More

This chapter presents three psychophysical experiments involving temporal relations in vision. The first shows that, even with improved experimental technique, high-intensity short flashes can indeed look brighter than longer flashes of the same intensity, thus indicating that the classical Broca-Sulzer effect is not an artifact. The second experiment was a study of the transitional fraction of a second between dark adaptation and the beginning of light adaptation, using the conditioning-stimulus-test-flash technique. The third experiment concerns the successful measurement of test-flash thresholds in the presence of a 30-cps flickering stimulus. Each of these experiments raises a number of questions regarding the neurophysiological organization, function, and interactions of the visual systems serving the two eyes. A common unifying principle is the idea of temporal quantization of the visual input by the higher visual nervous system.Less

Maximizing or Minimizing Opt-Outs

in Mass Torts in a World of Settlement

This chapter covers other efforts to draw upon class settlements as vehicles for peace, whether by expanding or constraining in practical terms the opportunity of persons within the class to opt out ... More

This chapter covers other efforts to draw upon class settlements as vehicles for peace, whether by expanding or constraining in practical terms the opportunity of persons within the class to opt out of the peace plan and thereby to preserve their opportunity to bring a conventional, individual tort action. It employs the examples of fen-phen and the Sulzer hip implant examples to highlight the fundamental tension in mass tort class settlements between legitimacy and peace. The continued existence of the tort system provides a safety valve that circumscribes the law reform power of the class settlement. The fen-phen class settlement did not stop the progress of litigation toward those dysfunctions.Less

Interpreting Hume on the Causal Principle: Treatise 1.3.3, “A letter from a gentleman,” and Kant’s German Contemporaries

Abraham Anderson

in Kant, Hume, and the Interruption of Dogmatic Slumber

Chapter 4 supports by means of collateral evidence the claim that Hume woke Kant by attacking the principle of sufficient reason. First, it considers Treatise 1.3.3, though without supposing that ... More

Chapter 4 supports by means of collateral evidence the claim that Hume woke Kant by attacking the principle of sufficient reason. First, it considers Treatise 1.3.3, though without supposing that Kant knew this text, in order to show that there, where Kemp Smith and others thought Hume was attacking the principle that every event has a cause, he was actually attacking the principle of sufficient reason. Second, it explains Hume’s lack of explicitness in the Enquiry about the fact that he was attacking the principle of sufficient reason; he avoided explicitness on this score, I argue, in order to veil his antitheological intentions. Third, it examines Sulzer’s commentary on Enquiry Section 4, which Kant surely knew well, to show that Sulzer read Section 4 as attacking the principle of sufficient reason. The fact that Kant’s contemporaries such as Sulzer and Tetens read Hume in this way makes it plausible to suppose that Kant did too.Less

Measuring Music

Roger Mathew Grant

in Beating Time and Measuring Music in the Early Modern Era

Through the long eighteenth century, the relationship between motion and time was rewritten. Time, in this new view, was no longer a conceptual descendant of motion but was, in its new form, ... More

Through the long eighteenth century, the relationship between motion and time was rewritten. Time, in this new view, was no longer a conceptual descendant of motion but was, in its new form, absolute: a demarcated backdrop against which events were situated. Discourses on meter reflected this shift in time's epistemological grounding. Meter, explained anew, was no longer a motion, the beat and the measure finally parted ways in this transition. Theorists in the eighteenth century shifted the focus of their explanation from the physical act of the beat to the properties of the measure, and the edifice that had once joined meter, character, and tempo began to shatter. Kirnberger's Die Kunst des reinen Satzes in der Musik drew on the particular images and pieces of language associated with absolute time in natural philosophy and mathematics. In this document, Kirnberger reimagined meter as an ongoing, dynamic division of absolute time.Less

Hypermeter

Danuta Mirka

in Hypermetric Manipulations in Haydn and Mozart: Chamber Music for Strings, 1787 - 1791

This chapter unearths a number of cues that point to eighteenth-century recognition of what today is called hypermeter and retraces the line of tradition that led from eighteenth-century music theory ... More

This chapter unearths a number of cues that point to eighteenth-century recognition of what today is called hypermeter and retraces the line of tradition that led from eighteenth-century music theory to the emergence of the modern concept of hypermeter in the twentieth century. It departs from the eighteenth-century concept of compound meter, related to hypermeter by some modern authors, and from the analogy between measures and phrases posited by Johann Philipp Kirnberger and Johann Abraham Peter Schulz in Johann Georg Sulzer’s Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste (1771–74). While compound meter proves irrelevant for the development of hypermeter, the analogy between measures and phrases, adopted by Gottfried Weber in his Versuch einer geordneten Theorie der Tonsetzkunst (1817) and further refined by German music theorists, provides the point of departure for the development of the concept of hypermeter in American music theory. The further course of the chapter traces more recent history of this concept. It evaluates the contribution of Schenkerian theory and the cognitive study of music, and it introduces a dynamic model of hypermeter as an extension of the dynamic model of meter presented by the author in Metric Manipulations in Haydn and Mozart (2009).Less