Tuning in and Dropping Out: The Disturbance of the Dutch Premiere of Stockhausen’s Stimmung
The disruption of the Dutch premiere of Stockhausen’s Stimmung in June 1969 has become an often-told aspect of the piece’s early history, but existing accounts—including Stockhausen’s own—significantly misrepresent the event. The performance was interrupted, not (as Stockhausen later claimed) by young, politically engaged composers such as Peter Schat and Louis Andriessen, but by a group of composition students who wished to ‘participate’ in the piece. In an impromptu debate following the aborted performance, Schat and Andriessen defended Stockhausen’s right to have his music heard in silence. I interpret this clash of young Dutch musicians in terms of the sharp schism that emerged in 1969 between Amsterdam’s thriving hippie counterculture, whose communal ‘happenings’ encouraged the dismantling of the performer–audience distinction, and the city’s student movement, whose emphasis on political action found reflection in Schat’s and Andriessen’s growing interest in communism. It is clear, however, that Schat’s and Andriessen’s stance was also motivated by commitments to musical professionalism and to the ideology of musical progress, commitments that sat as uneasily with the musical preferences of the student movement as they did with the hippie counterculture.
Musical Listening in the German Enlightenment: Attention, Wonder and Astonishment
Contents: Introduction Attentive Listening: The problem of attention The theory and significance of attention: Descartes to Meier Pleasure, emotion and the 'flow' experience Adaptation of mimesis Adaptation of rhetoric Wonder and astonishment. Interlude: Rousseau's Transports of Attention: Simultaneous and successive unities Applications. Sulzer and the Aesthetic Force of Music: Civilizing the savage The aesthetic force of music. Forkel on Expert and Amateur Listening Practices: Kenner and Liebhaber: two modes of hearing Musical decline and Forkel's remedy Concert programming: pleasure, amusement and instrumental music A metaphysical history of musical hearing A new approach to attention. Elements of a Rhetoric of Attention: Arousing the attention: the rules of periodicity Sustaining the attention: a musical dispositio Forkel on music-rhetorical figures The rhetoric in practice: Georg Benda and C.P.E. Bach. Bibliography Index.
French film theory and criticism : a history/anthology, 1907-1939
These two volumes examine a significant but previously neglected moment in French cultural history: the emergence of French film theory and criticism before the essays of Andr Bazin. Richard Abel has devised an organizational scheme of six nearly symmetrical periods that serve to "bite into" the discursive flow of early French writing on the cinema. Each of the periods is discussed in a separate and extensive historical introduction, with convincing explications of the various concepts current at the time. In each instance, Abel goes on to provide a complementary anthology of selected texts in translation. Amounting to a portable archive, these anthologies make available a rich selection of nearly one hundred and fifty important texts, most of them never before published in English.