Pétrarque: L’écriture Comme Philosophie

Petrarch is often considered as the founder of humanism and from then on classified in our division of knowledge on the side of literature, even though several times he claims to be in his writings on the side of philosophy. In retracing the thread of historiographic tradition to understand how Petrarch found himself to be placed outside of philosophy, we would like to examine thoroughly the interrogation on the relationship between literature and philosophy in the west of the xiv ^th century, and try to show how Petrarch tried to bring into existence a conception of philosophy as an art of living and writing, leaning on the social space of courses thus proposing an alternative to the learned constructions of the university world.     

Unterscheidung und Synthese: Rezeptionsformen akustischer Forschung in der Musikliteratur des 19. Jahrhunderts

Differentiation and synthesis. Forms of reception of acoustical research in the musical literature of the nineteenth century. In the nineteenth century, both musical scholars and natural scientists discussed the relevance of acoustical research for the theory and practice of music. Whereas some musical theorists and acousticians plead together for an acoustical foundation of musical theory, other scholars questioned the significance of physical and physiological knowledge for a deeper understanding of music. Based on an analysis of musical journals, popular scientific writings, theoretical treatises and musical dictionaries this article demonstrates how musical scholars and natural scientists argued about the question which discipline should have the final say about musical concepts and terminologies. To merge both heterogeneous spheres – music and acoustics – or to carefully distinguish between them – these two positions shaped the dispute over the relationship between music and natural sciences in the nineteenth century.     

Tradition as a governing theme in the writings of John Cassian

John Cassian has been criticized in recent scholarship for historical inaccuracy – but it is not self‐evident that his works were intended as histories in the sense that is supposed by that criticism. Instead, Cassian presents himself as the promoter of key traditions. This paper describes of Cassian's own thinking about ‘tradition’ as a key theme in his works. To that end, it aims to redress scholarly misgivings about the worth of Cassian's writings by taking them as the transmission of identifiable traditions into early to mid‐fifth‐century Gaul (rather than as documentary evidence for late fourth‐century Egyptian monasticism).     

A tribune named Niccolò: Petrarchan revolutionaries and humanist failures in Machiavelli’s Florentine Histories

Given Machiavelli’s fascination with ancient Rome’s plebeian tribunate, it is not surprising that he would take an interest in Cola di Rienzo, the Roman who declared himself Tribune of the Plebs in 1347. However, Cola appears just once in Machiavelli’s corpus, in a single short and enigmatic chapter in the Florentine Histories. This paper argues that Machiavelli nevertheless quietly elaborates on Cola’s legacy later in his Histories, when he introduces Stefano Porcari, another ‘Roman citizen’ whose reform efforts fail catastrophically. Though Machiavelli never explicitly criticizes Cola, he does blame Porcari for exercising poor judgement. This blame, importantly, is entwined with Machiavelli’s allusions to the humanist writings of Francesco Petrarch. By placing these accounts of Cola and Porcari side by side, this paper aims to reveal the Florentine Histories’ complicated relationship with Petrarch, Italy’s most famous humanist. The web of cross-references among Cola, Porcari and Machiavelli himself indicates the latter’s vexation with the sort of rhetorical idealism that Petrarch’s famous endorsement of Cola’s revolution came to represent.     

Socialism and democratic strategy in Italy’s Biennio Rosso: Gramsci contra Treves

This article examines the divisions in Italian socialism between revolutionaries and reformists against the backdrop of the Biennio Rosso (1919–20), taking the writings of Antonio Gramsci and Claudio Treves respectively as characteristic of the two traditions. The central focus is on their opposing accounts of how the socialist movement should organize the masses to achieve its objectives – referred to here as its ‘democratic strategy.’ I demonstrate how the key strategic elements of Gramsci’s and Treves’s positions developed in a dialogue centered on the place that violence, (il)legality, soviets, parliaments and compromise should play in effectively mobilizing the masses for socialism. The article concludes by arguing that in retrospect Treves’s reformism has been a more successful approach, and Gramsci himself conceded something to it in his prison writings. However, I also maintain that the popular character of Gramsci’s radical democratic strategy – first fashioned in the Biennio Rosso – can still contribute to debates on socialism and social democracy today.     

Cultural Identity and the Canonization Of Music in Early China

This article shows that over the course of the Warring States period (479–221 BCE) authors began to organize and categorize music in a manner that helped define and reinforce their conceptions of themselves as a distinct cultural or ethnic group: variously referred to as the Huaxia, Zhuxia, and Zhou. By examining how Ruist (Confucian) authors articulated distinctions among various types of music, and by showing how such identifications denigrated nefarious forms not associated with the Zhou court and its culture, I show how authors endeavored in a process of musical canonization while also consolidating a sense of an ethno-cultural self. The fact that these writings distinguished among and evaluated musical types not primarily through a discussion of musical form or theory but via a morally-laden language rooted in the civilizing rhetoric of the day suggests that music was a primary site for formulating, expressing, and promoting cultural identity.     

The rediscovery of the Spanish Republic of Letters

This article provides a reappraisal of the history of proyectismo. Scholars have employed the concept to categorise early eighteenth-century Spanish authors and reforms, and have thereby severed them from their historical context. This article explores the imperial origins of this political culture by shedding light on the generation of knowledge in early eighteenth-century diplomatic and imperial spaces. The article focuses on the overlooked thinker Álvaro José Navia-Osorio y Vigil, Marquis of Santa Cruz de Marcenado (1684–1732) – long considered to be a proyectista – and his appeal to the Spanish Republic of Letters to assist him in his project for a universal dictionary; an enterprise that predated Chamber’s Cyclopedia and Diderot and D’Alembert’s Encyclopédie. Marcenado’s contributions to the establishment of Spanish intellectual connections with foreign thinkers were, moreover, symptomatic of the political approach of early eighteenth-century ilustrados – transterritorial, transnational, and transversal thinkers who drew on the peninsula’s ties with the Flanders and Italy to revitalise the intellectual life of Spain. These thinkers recovered the study of Muslim Spain, and envisioned the establishment of councils and academies in Mexico and Peru. The Spanish Enlightenment, then, originated in the early eighteenth-century from their rediscovery of the Spanish Republic of Letters.     

Constantin Frantz and the intellectual history of Bonapartism and Caesarism: a reassessment

The conservative German publicist and political theorist, Constantin Frantz (1817–1891), occupies an ambiguous place in German intellectual history. Some, such as Friedrich Meinecke, located him within the rich intellectual tradition of German federalism, highlighting his hostility to the idea of the “nation-state” and the traditions of nationalism, Realpolitik and militarism. Others, by contrast, have situated him within a long genealogy of German fascism, identifying his remarkable 1852 work, Louis Napoleon, as a kind of precursor or antecedent of twentieth-century fascist ideology. This interpretation raises broader questions about the historiography on Bonapartism and Caesarism, which has often been motivated by an interest in the intellectual origins of modern fascism. The present article supplies a reinterpretation of Frantz’s thinking about Bonapartism (Napoleonismus) and Caesarism by focusing on a much broader range of his intellectual output and by tracking the development of his view of Bonapartism’s significance between 1851 and the early 1870s. The main outcome is not just to question Frantz’s place in the “prehistory” of fascism, but also to show how deeply nineteenth-century debates about Bonapartism were connected to concerns about liberalism, democracy, nationalism and imperialism.     

Theorising the anti-nation: George Woodcock,anarchism, and Canadian nationalism

George Woodcock was anarchism's most influential historian and an important public intellectual in Canada. This article focuses on his engagement with Canadian nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s. It argues that a ‘philosophical anarchism’ was at the heart of his intellectual project, and this informed his reading of Canadian cultural development and subsequent political challenge to Pierre Elliott Trudeau's civic nationalism. Woodcock decoupled the concepts of ‘nation’ and ‘state’ in order to develop a radically different model for Canada—the ‘anti-nation’—defined by regionalism, federalism and direct democracy. His reading of Canada's cultural history supporting this position was therefore part of a strategy to repurpose nationalist rhetoric towards anti-state ends.     

“Kontakte” – Reflexionen naturwissenschaftlich‐technischer Innovationsprozesse in der frühen Elektronischen Musik Karlheinz Stockhausens (1952–1960)

“Kontakte” – Reflections of Innovative Processes in Science and Technology in Karlheinz Stockhausen's Early Electronic Music (1952–1960). The following article will give an overview of the interdependence of aesthetic and scientific/technical developments in German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen's early works of electronic music. It is an outline of the major steps in his artistic evolution between the works “Etude (Musique concrète)” and “Kontakte”, their relation to innovations in psychoacoustic and sound‐studio technology as well as the impact, that the works from that period had on the fundamental changes in musical aesthetics during the course of the 20th century.     

Minerva Scientifica: the owl that flies at dawn - women scientists,women composers

ABSTRACT

Under the leadership of soprano Frances M Lynch, Minerva Scientifica deploys sung theatrical performances to encourage, celebrate and demonstrate the achievements of women in science and music. Based on collaborative discussions between practising female scientists and contemporary classical composers, the events staged by Minerva Scientifica are receiving high acclaim not only as educational and musical experiences for general audiences, but also for enhancing scientists’ appreciation of their own work. Adopting a historical approach, this article first explores the relationships between three pairs – women and science, music and science, women and music – before giving a more detailed account of the project’s evolution since 2011.     

Natural Law in Dryden’s Translations of Chaucer and Boccaccio

This article examines the influence of natural law philosophy upon four of Dryden’s translations of Chaucer and Boccaccio published in his final collection Fables, Ancient and Modern (1700): “Sigismonda and Guiscardo”, “The Wife of Bath, her Tale”, “Palamon and Arcite” and “Cymon and Iphigenia”. Situating Dryden’s tales alongside the writings of his philosophical, political and literary contemporaries as well as their classical sources, it argues that Dryden’s distinctive choice of vocabulary and innovative amplifications of his originals constitute a subtly provocative interrogation of the use of natural law rhetoric within the seventeenth century.     

“Did that play of mine …?”: James Connolly,Cathleen Ni Houlihan and staging revolution

Abstract

Despite the crucial position he occupies in Irish history as one of the leaders of the Easter Rising, and the political – and emotional – impact of his subsequent execution, while wounded, by the British Army on 12 May 1916, the writings of Edinburgh-born James Connolly have often been overlooked in both Irish and Scottish studies, and not just in accounts of the Rising but also in the wider context of cultural connections, including cultures of commemoration. In particular, Connolly’s surviving literary work, including Under Which Flag?, the drama staged on the eve of Easter 1916, as well as poems and songs, has had limited attention. This article reconsiders Under Which Flag? in comparison with Yeats and Gregory’s Cathleen ni Houlihan in order to demonstrate the central place the drama holds as a continuation – and complication – of Connolly’s political and journalistic writings. If Connolly is a neglected figure as a writer – as opposed to a political leader and martyr – then the play he left behind (once thought to have been lost, like another of his dramas, The Agitator’s Wife) affords us an opportunity to reassess his contribution to the struggle for independence as part of its literary wing.     

George Woodcock and the Doukhobors: peasant radicalism,anarchism, and the Canadian state

For the British-Canadian writer and intellectual George Woodcock, the Doukhobors – a persecuted radical Christian sect, many members of which emigrated from Russia to Canada at the turn of the twentieth century – were a continual source of fascination. A cause célèbre for a host of nineteenth-century thinkers, including Leo Tolstoy and Peter Kropotkin, the Doukhobors were frequently portrayed as the exemplars of the viewer’s particular ideological beliefs. The present article examines Woodcock’s shifting interpretation of the Doukhobors, mapped onto the development of an intellectual career that saw him emerge as a leading anarchist thinker, and his broader transition from a British writer to a Canadian public intellectual. Where once he saw the Doukhobors representing anarchism in action, as his politics matured his view of the sect became more complex. Rather than living anarchists, he came to see the Doukhobors’ experience as a powerful reminder of the forces of assimilation at work in modern democracies that threatened the liberties of dissenters. Reflecting Woodcock’s revised anarchist politics, the Doukhobors’ story now became a key component of an intellectual vision that cast a probing light on Canadian history and Canadian cultural politics.     

Cultural policies for national music in South and North Korea (1960s–70s): a comparative study

ABSTRACT

This article is a comparative study of the cultural policies of North Korea (DPRK) and South Korea (ROK) in the 1960s and 1970s, specifically concerning the disciple of music. In this period, both South and North Korean regimes demonstrated similar conceptualisations of ‘national music’, harmonising Korean traditional music with western musical styles, but the end result differed in the two regimes. The DPRK developed national music through a homogenised musical style by assimilating Korean folk music with a western musical style while excluding traditional court music, with drastic modifications to traditional instruments and musical forms. In contrast, the ROK’s policy on establishing national music resulted in a combination of traditional court music for the ruling class and western classical music, indicating elitism. Particularly, this article argues that these distinct features of their national music were the result of differences in the strength and interest of government officials between the regimes.     

Contemporary ‘Folk’ Dynamics: Shifting Visions and Meanings in the Goalpariya Folk Music of Assam

Abstract

Goalpariya music is a genre of folk music sung primarily by women. Common among the rural labouring classes, the songs deal with women’s desires, emotions, sensuality, and longings. Since the 1950s, major transformations have emerged within the performative space of the folk tradition, especially with the coming of Pratima Barua Pandey into this field. From an original mundane setting, Goalpariya music has now moved to an international musical performance context. This article explores this transition of the music from the ‘common folk’ to a ‘respectable’ platform. The article analyses how folk traditions may undergo a range of shifts to adapt to various social, economic, and cultural forces. Paradoxically, these transformations also lead to the emergence of a politics of authenticity, leading to a questioning of the concepts of tradition, authenticity, and cultural purity. The findings of this study are the outcome of fieldwork conducted in Gauripur and Guwahati in Assam, India.     

Transcendent myths,mundane objects: setting the material scene in rock,soul, and country museums

The many varied myths of origins, aesthetic transcendence, and greatness that surround popular music continue to proliferate in a variety of forms. One comparatively recent type of institution producing such forms of mythology is the popular music museum. This article uses the familiar idea of the ‘experience economy’’ to examine how three popular music museums produce experiences through objects that, while they are deliberately cast as mundane and everyday, work to support widely-shared narratives of the musical traditions of which they are a part. I argue that they do so in the service of larger myths of popular music. In each case I examine, I show that the myths on display are specific to the music that forms that content of the exhibitions. I argue that the specific kinds of spectator experiences these museums seek to produce are designed to enhance the value of these museums and their collections through claims made on specific types of musical patrimony made material through carefully contextualized objects of display. As such, traditionalist myths of musical greatness and aesthetic transcendence are well-served by the forms of exhibition and display produced by these institutions.