Don’t Sing it on a Feast Day: the reception and performance of Western sacred music in Soviet Russia, 1917-1953
Abstract Despite official hostility to religion and ambivalence towards Western bourgeois culture, the Soviet Union9s major orchestras and choirs retained a high number of Western sacred works in their concert repertoire. In this article, I examine the apparent incongruity of this aspect of Soviet concert practice, with specific focus on the two most important Soviet choirs in Moscow and Leningrad: the Leningrad Capella, and the Moscow-based Russian Choir of the USSR. I argue that the process of cultural appropriation in the Soviet Union embraced a sufficiently broad conception of Western musical culture for this repertoire to be considered not only safe, but of central canonic importance. With an appropriate ideological varnish, and even textual alteration, a careful selection of Western sacred music could be rendered “Soviet” enough to remain core repertoire, albeit subject to fast-changing currents in cultural politics throughout the period 1917–53.
The sacralization of politics in fascist Italy
Introduction: in search of a civil religion the holy militia the fatherland dons the black shirt the archangel of this world the liturgy of collective harmony the temples of the faith Italy's new god.
Discourse Forms and Processes in Indigenous Lowland South America: An Areal-Typological Perspective
▪ Abstract In indigenous lowland South America there are several discourse forms and processes that are shared by groups of people of distinct genetic linguistic affiliations; this leads us to posit this large region, which we label greater Amazonia, as a discourse area, a concept that parallels the notion of linguistic area. The discourse forms and processes we examine are ceremonial dialogue, dialogical performance, templatic ratifying, echo speech, ceremonial greeting, ritual wailing, evidentiality, speech reporting practices, parallelism, special languages, and shamanistic language use. We hypothesize that in lowland South America, discourse is the matrix for linguistic diffusion, i.e., that linguistic areas emerge within discourse areas. What we propose then is a discourse-centered approach to language change and history, parallel to a discourse-centered approach to language structure and use. Our survey includes a plea for a careful archiving of recorded and written materials dealing with lowland So...