Pub Date : 2020-07-02DOI: 10.1080/01411896.2020.1775087
Laurence Dreyfus
ABSTRACT The idea of a musical performance as an “interpretation” cannot be dated before the 1840s, yet we use the term unthinkingly as a synonym for a privileged performance of any music from the past. Tracing a history and pre-history of the metaphor and its usage sheds light on the eclipse of more richly textured models of music-making from previous eras as well as on an esthetic predicament within contemporary “historicist” performance. The limitations of the metaphor suggest moving “beyond interpretation” in favor of more experiential and intuitive notions of making music.
{"title":"Beyond the Interpretation of Music","authors":"Laurence Dreyfus","doi":"10.1080/01411896.2020.1775087","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/01411896.2020.1775087","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The idea of a musical performance as an “interpretation” cannot be dated before the 1840s, yet we use the term unthinkingly as a synonym for a privileged performance of any music from the past. Tracing a history and pre-history of the metaphor and its usage sheds light on the eclipse of more richly textured models of music-making from previous eras as well as on an esthetic predicament within contemporary “historicist” performance. The limitations of the metaphor suggest moving “beyond interpretation” in favor of more experiential and intuitive notions of making music.","PeriodicalId":42616,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF MUSICOLOGICAL RESEARCH","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-07-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75874610","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-07-02DOI: 10.1080/01411896.2020.1773265
Martin Küster
ABSTRACT For understanding eighteenth-century notions of “singing” on an instrument, modern standards of “classical” performance can be a source of confusion rather than clarification. Rather than simply calling for legato or vibrato, such notions tapped into a pool of ideas concerned with essential commonalities between music and language. Song, as understood in the eighteenth century, is the anthropological origin of music and language, a primitive vocal expression of emotion carried into verbal speech through its musical properties (prosody) and understood as working similarly in musical melody. At the same time, a trove of terms used in music theory—such as “rhythm,” “meter,” “accent,” or “phrase”—is concerned not with language (as is often claimed), but with the same intersection of music and speech, a gray area between these realms. It is in this field that the eighteenth-century theory of text setting operates. It can be said that, from an eighteenth-century perspective, every piece of instrumental music is a “Song without Words,” having all the music-prosodic features—accents, lines, phrases, even rhymes—with which the vocal composer would respond to a specific text. Such a perspective can illuminate and perhaps answer some questions that performers (especially historically informed performers) often struggle with and are forced to answer with theories indebted to more recent traditions, such as those associated with Schenker and Riemann.
{"title":"Should the End of a Phrase be Emphasized? An Essay in Musical Prosody","authors":"Martin Küster","doi":"10.1080/01411896.2020.1773265","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/01411896.2020.1773265","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT For understanding eighteenth-century notions of “singing” on an instrument, modern standards of “classical” performance can be a source of confusion rather than clarification. Rather than simply calling for legato or vibrato, such notions tapped into a pool of ideas concerned with essential commonalities between music and language. Song, as understood in the eighteenth century, is the anthropological origin of music and language, a primitive vocal expression of emotion carried into verbal speech through its musical properties (prosody) and understood as working similarly in musical melody. At the same time, a trove of terms used in music theory—such as “rhythm,” “meter,” “accent,” or “phrase”—is concerned not with language (as is often claimed), but with the same intersection of music and speech, a gray area between these realms. It is in this field that the eighteenth-century theory of text setting operates. It can be said that, from an eighteenth-century perspective, every piece of instrumental music is a “Song without Words,” having all the music-prosodic features—accents, lines, phrases, even rhymes—with which the vocal composer would respond to a specific text. Such a perspective can illuminate and perhaps answer some questions that performers (especially historically informed performers) often struggle with and are forced to answer with theories indebted to more recent traditions, such as those associated with Schenker and Riemann.","PeriodicalId":42616,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF MUSICOLOGICAL RESEARCH","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-07-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89314254","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-07-02DOI: 10.1080/01411896.2020.1802263
Andrew Friedman
ABSTRACT Until rather recently, music theory has had little to no truck with performance, whether disregarding it entirely, derogating its corporeal-temporal non-ideality, or issuing it unsolicited prescriptions from atop the ivory tower. Consequently, the dialogue between these two domains, especially in the twentieth century, has been closer to a paternalistic monologue with (understandably) no audience. Happily, a rapprochement is afoot and the prospect of a sustained, salutary, and symbiotic relationship seems increasingly possible, its early fruits provocative and promising. I begin by tracing the relationship of theoria and praxis from Hellenic times to our own, highlighting the philosophical and cultural ideas and ideals that have shaped our terrain. I then survey recent work in performance analysis, in particular that of the last three decades, in which theorists have-- perhaps for the first time--truly listened to performance and performers with open ears and minds. I conclude by offering my approach to the issues at hand, exemplifying it with analyses of Haydn and Chopin that open up what I hope will be intriguing possibilities for performance interpretations.
{"title":"What Can Performance and Theory Teach Each Other?","authors":"Andrew Friedman","doi":"10.1080/01411896.2020.1802263","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/01411896.2020.1802263","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Until rather recently, music theory has had little to no truck with performance, whether disregarding it entirely, derogating its corporeal-temporal non-ideality, or issuing it unsolicited prescriptions from atop the ivory tower. Consequently, the dialogue between these two domains, especially in the twentieth century, has been closer to a paternalistic monologue with (understandably) no audience. Happily, a rapprochement is afoot and the prospect of a sustained, salutary, and symbiotic relationship seems increasingly possible, its early fruits provocative and promising. I begin by tracing the relationship of theoria and praxis from Hellenic times to our own, highlighting the philosophical and cultural ideas and ideals that have shaped our terrain. I then survey recent work in performance analysis, in particular that of the last three decades, in which theorists have-- perhaps for the first time--truly listened to performance and performers with open ears and minds. I conclude by offering my approach to the issues at hand, exemplifying it with analyses of Haydn and Chopin that open up what I hope will be intriguing possibilities for performance interpretations.","PeriodicalId":42616,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF MUSICOLOGICAL RESEARCH","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-07-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87722022","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-07-02DOI: 10.1080/01411896.2020.1773264
David Hyun-su Kim
ABSTRACT The most superficially apparent feature of the Historically–Informed Performance movement is the use of “historically-appropriate” instruments. Interest in such instruments has grown alongside the dedication and expertise of instrumental builders and restorers who have performed extensive research on antique instruments. Thanks to their efforts, modern musicians have access to high-quality copies and restored antiques that offer inspiring musical insight. Despite these opportunities, the relationship between players and instrument-builders has not fundamentally changed: the vast majority of musicians lack basic organological knowledge and—in a perhaps telling irony—the close relationship that musicians of the common practice period had with instrument-makers remains anomalous, even amongst HIP-sters. Interviews with six of the world’s foremost fortepiano builders demonstrate the musical and interpretive relevance of organological knowledge by transmitting piano-technical information for the performer, while arguing that builders are an integral part of music-making, as they wrestle with musical and historical topics just as musicians do. With the impressive wealth of knowledge that builders have acquired in the past decades, the time may be ripe for the serious consideration of instruments to become a meaningful and indispensable part of the contemporary interpretive process.
{"title":"Listening to Builders","authors":"David Hyun-su Kim","doi":"10.1080/01411896.2020.1773264","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/01411896.2020.1773264","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The most superficially apparent feature of the Historically–Informed Performance movement is the use of “historically-appropriate” instruments. Interest in such instruments has grown alongside the dedication and expertise of instrumental builders and restorers who have performed extensive research on antique instruments. Thanks to their efforts, modern musicians have access to high-quality copies and restored antiques that offer inspiring musical insight. Despite these opportunities, the relationship between players and instrument-builders has not fundamentally changed: the vast majority of musicians lack basic organological knowledge and—in a perhaps telling irony—the close relationship that musicians of the common practice period had with instrument-makers remains anomalous, even amongst HIP-sters. Interviews with six of the world’s foremost fortepiano builders demonstrate the musical and interpretive relevance of organological knowledge by transmitting piano-technical information for the performer, while arguing that builders are an integral part of music-making, as they wrestle with musical and historical topics just as musicians do. With the impressive wealth of knowledge that builders have acquired in the past decades, the time may be ripe for the serious consideration of instruments to become a meaningful and indispensable part of the contemporary interpretive process.","PeriodicalId":42616,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF MUSICOLOGICAL RESEARCH","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-07-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90498822","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-06-30DOI: 10.1080/01411896.2020.1780923
Nicholas Mathew
ABSTRACT Two of the most famous pianists of the 1950s, Glenn Gould and Liberace occupied opposing esthetic and cultural positions. Liberace’s style of performance and self-presentation was by and large consistent with his late nineteenth-century pianistic models; however, emerging television esthetics, among other factors, made this style increasingly incomprehensible, except as an extreme brand of musical kitsch or camp (the mode for which he became notorious). Meanwhile, Gould’s studied neutrality, which energetically deployed the period’s new media forms to cultivate a radical denial of the performing mechanism and the performing body, interpellated a generation of listeners who were not addressed by a musical rhetorician as much as they were invited to eavesdrop on, and to make their own, a self-possessed sound object. The story of Gould and Liberace thus not only sheds light on the new austerity of 1950s performance practice, but has something important to teach us about the ideological fate of nineteenth-century performance cultures since the late twentieth century.
{"title":"Gould and Liberace, or the Fate of Nineteenth-Century Performance Culture","authors":"Nicholas Mathew","doi":"10.1080/01411896.2020.1780923","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/01411896.2020.1780923","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Two of the most famous pianists of the 1950s, Glenn Gould and Liberace occupied opposing esthetic and cultural positions. Liberace’s style of performance and self-presentation was by and large consistent with his late nineteenth-century pianistic models; however, emerging television esthetics, among other factors, made this style increasingly incomprehensible, except as an extreme brand of musical kitsch or camp (the mode for which he became notorious). Meanwhile, Gould’s studied neutrality, which energetically deployed the period’s new media forms to cultivate a radical denial of the performing mechanism and the performing body, interpellated a generation of listeners who were not addressed by a musical rhetorician as much as they were invited to eavesdrop on, and to make their own, a self-possessed sound object. The story of Gould and Liberace thus not only sheds light on the new austerity of 1950s performance practice, but has something important to teach us about the ideological fate of nineteenth-century performance cultures since the late twentieth century.","PeriodicalId":42616,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF MUSICOLOGICAL RESEARCH","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-06-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/01411896.2020.1780923","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"72493051","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-06-29DOI: 10.1080/01411896.2020.1771185
Malcom Bilson
ABSTRACT In several late works of Beethoven, we find a curious tie over the barline, in string and especially in piano works, where we find the numbers 4,3 over the tie, seemingly indicating fingering. Since the late nineteenth century scholars and performers have been discussing whether or not the second note should be struck or bowed again. Interpreting this curious tie goes not only to the problem of execution, but to the deeper musical question of Affekt.
{"title":"The Case of Beethoven: A Tie by Any Other Name...","authors":"Malcom Bilson","doi":"10.1080/01411896.2020.1771185","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/01411896.2020.1771185","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In several late works of Beethoven, we find a curious tie over the barline, in string and especially in piano works, where we find the numbers 4,3 over the tie, seemingly indicating fingering. Since the late nineteenth century scholars and performers have been discussing whether or not the second note should be struck or bowed again. Interpreting this curious tie goes not only to the problem of execution, but to the deeper musical question of Affekt.","PeriodicalId":42616,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF MUSICOLOGICAL RESEARCH","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-06-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74995765","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-06-26DOI: 10.1080/01411896.2020.1774755
K. Hamilton
ABSTRACT Few pianists have been as acclaimed or as abominated as Vladimir Horowitz. Long ago the subject of a notorious hatchet-job by Michael Steinberg in the New Grove Dictionary of Music, and of an equally trenchant, if undeniably wittier, defense by Richard Taruskin in the New York Times, Horowitz’s playing polarized critical opinion in a manner clearly unattainable by polished mediocrity. But now, nearly thirty years after his death, the time is finally ripe for a reassessment of his artistry and public persona, not least because of the recent release of dozens of live recordings from the later decades of his career. These recordings not only allow a hitherto unattainable overview of Horowitz’s pianism, but prompt a reevaluation of his earlier discography. Moreover, they provide evidence for an analysis of the myths surrounding the art of interpretation in general. Horowitz was routinely castigated by critics for alleged crimes against acceptable practice, while idolized by audiences for many of the same reasons. A reappraisal of Horowitz’s legacy serves to evaluate its place in the history of pianism and seeks to illuminate competing esthetic perspectives on the art of interpretation itself, arguing that for nearly two centuries many pianists and critics have been missing the point: some supposedly purely musical issues in performance practice have as much to do with concepts of ethics and ownership, authority and morality, as with art.
很少有钢琴家像弗拉基米尔•霍洛维茨那样受到赞誉，也很少有人像他那样令人厌恶。很久以前，迈克尔·斯坦伯格(Michael Steinberg)在《新格罗夫音乐词典》(New Grove Dictionary of Music)中发表了一篇臭名昭著的诽谤文章，理查德·塔鲁斯金(Richard Taruskin)在《纽约时报》上发表了一篇同样尖锐(如果不可否认更诙谐)的辩护文章。霍洛维茨以一种圆滑的平庸者显然无法达到的方式，演奏了两极分化的批评意见。但现在，在他去世近30年后，重新评估他的艺术和公众形象的时机终于成熟了，尤其是因为最近发布了数十张他职业生涯后期的现场录音。这些录音不仅让人们对霍洛维茨的钢琴演奏有了一个前所未有的了解，而且促使人们对他早期的专辑进行重新评价。此外，它们为分析围绕阐释艺术的神话提供了证据。霍洛维茨经常因为所谓的违反可接受的行为而受到评论家的严厉批评，同时也因为许多同样的原因而受到观众的崇拜。重新评价霍洛维茨的遗产有助于评估其在钢琴史上的地位，并试图阐明对诠释艺术本身的竞争美学观点，认为近两个世纪以来，许多钢琴家和评论家都错过了一点:在表演实践中，一些被认为纯粹的音乐问题与伦理、所有权、权威和道德的概念一样多，就像艺术一样。
{"title":"Do They Still Hate Horowitz? The “Last Romantic” Revisited","authors":"K. Hamilton","doi":"10.1080/01411896.2020.1774755","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/01411896.2020.1774755","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Few pianists have been as acclaimed or as abominated as Vladimir Horowitz. Long ago the subject of a notorious hatchet-job by Michael Steinberg in the New Grove Dictionary of Music, and of an equally trenchant, if undeniably wittier, defense by Richard Taruskin in the New York Times, Horowitz’s playing polarized critical opinion in a manner clearly unattainable by polished mediocrity. But now, nearly thirty years after his death, the time is finally ripe for a reassessment of his artistry and public persona, not least because of the recent release of dozens of live recordings from the later decades of his career. These recordings not only allow a hitherto unattainable overview of Horowitz’s pianism, but prompt a reevaluation of his earlier discography. Moreover, they provide evidence for an analysis of the myths surrounding the art of interpretation in general. Horowitz was routinely castigated by critics for alleged crimes against acceptable practice, while idolized by audiences for many of the same reasons. A reappraisal of Horowitz’s legacy serves to evaluate its place in the history of pianism and seeks to illuminate competing esthetic perspectives on the art of interpretation itself, arguing that for nearly two centuries many pianists and critics have been missing the point: some supposedly purely musical issues in performance practice have as much to do with concepts of ethics and ownership, authority and morality, as with art.","PeriodicalId":42616,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF MUSICOLOGICAL RESEARCH","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-06-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81349014","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-06-24DOI: 10.1080/01411896.2020.1770091
Rebecca Cypess
ABSTRACT Despite the increased use of period instruments in modern-day conservatories and concert life, many classical musicians continue to make their careers by playing early music on “modern” instruments. In such performances, aspects of the esthetic impulse of the music can always be conveyed. In adapting early music for modern instruments, it is helpful to think about the adaptation as an “arrangement,” and to seek out ways of capturing the esthetic impulse of the music despite the use of instruments from later time periods. It is possible to contextualize an understanding of the term “arrangement” within performance practices of the eighteenth century by highlighting sources that attest to the flexibility of instrumentation as an important feature of eighteenth-century music. A series of examples of performance practices from the collection of the Berlin salonnière Sara Levy reveal a spectrum of choices available to interpreters of music from the Bach family tradition and help provide a set of historically grounded principles for arrangements that may be applied in the present day by instrumentalists of all sorts.
{"title":"Arrangement Practices in the Bach Tradition, Then and Now: Historical Precedent for Modern Practice","authors":"Rebecca Cypess","doi":"10.1080/01411896.2020.1770091","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/01411896.2020.1770091","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Despite the increased use of period instruments in modern-day conservatories and concert life, many classical musicians continue to make their careers by playing early music on “modern” instruments. In such performances, aspects of the esthetic impulse of the music can always be conveyed. In adapting early music for modern instruments, it is helpful to think about the adaptation as an “arrangement,” and to seek out ways of capturing the esthetic impulse of the music despite the use of instruments from later time periods. It is possible to contextualize an understanding of the term “arrangement” within performance practices of the eighteenth century by highlighting sources that attest to the flexibility of instrumentation as an important feature of eighteenth-century music. A series of examples of performance practices from the collection of the Berlin salonnière Sara Levy reveal a spectrum of choices available to interpreters of music from the Bach family tradition and help provide a set of historically grounded principles for arrangements that may be applied in the present day by instrumentalists of all sorts.","PeriodicalId":42616,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF MUSICOLOGICAL RESEARCH","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-06-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74243900","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-06-22DOI: 10.1080/01411896.2020.1778428
Sezi Seskir, David Hyun-su Kim
{"title":"Introduction: Topics in Musical Interpretation","authors":"Sezi Seskir, David Hyun-su Kim","doi":"10.1080/01411896.2020.1778428","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/01411896.2020.1778428","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42616,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF MUSICOLOGICAL RESEARCH","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-06-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85701919","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-06-18DOI: 10.1080/01411896.2020.1754128
Robynn J. Stilwell
ABSTRACT In Akira Kurasawa’s classic 1950 film Rashômon, three participants testify to a tribunal about a rape/murder. The rape itself has been elided into the crime of murder in most of the literature—a symptom of patriarchal frames, both Eastern and Western, and both within the film and in the scholarship. Two characters represent female archetypes: the woman Masako is—even in the same tellings—a lady and a seductress; the Medium who channels the testimony of the samurai—a crone figure, androgynous, powerful, and terrifying. Music is at its most manipulative in relationship to these two characters, functioning like narrative magic: a glamor that conceals beneath an appealing surface, or an incantation that summons a ghost. Fumio Hayasaka’s score borrows heavily from an exoticist Franco-Russian depiction of Spanishness from the dance repertoire of the 1910–20s, emphasizing the startling physicality of the two women that may challenge the tale’s misogyny. The unmarked male gaze is perhaps irreparably shattered to modern viewers, particularly in an era sensitized by scandals of powerful men abusing their power over women.
{"title":"The “Rashômon Effect” Effect: Post-Orientalism in the Era of #MeToo","authors":"Robynn J. Stilwell","doi":"10.1080/01411896.2020.1754128","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/01411896.2020.1754128","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In Akira Kurasawa’s classic 1950 film Rashômon, three participants testify to a tribunal about a rape/murder. The rape itself has been elided into the crime of murder in most of the literature—a symptom of patriarchal frames, both Eastern and Western, and both within the film and in the scholarship. Two characters represent female archetypes: the woman Masako is—even in the same tellings—a lady and a seductress; the Medium who channels the testimony of the samurai—a crone figure, androgynous, powerful, and terrifying. Music is at its most manipulative in relationship to these two characters, functioning like narrative magic: a glamor that conceals beneath an appealing surface, or an incantation that summons a ghost. Fumio Hayasaka’s score borrows heavily from an exoticist Franco-Russian depiction of Spanishness from the dance repertoire of the 1910–20s, emphasizing the startling physicality of the two women that may challenge the tale’s misogyny. The unmarked male gaze is perhaps irreparably shattered to modern viewers, particularly in an era sensitized by scandals of powerful men abusing their power over women.","PeriodicalId":42616,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF MUSICOLOGICAL RESEARCH","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-06-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82690935","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
京公网安备 11010802042870号
京ICP备2023020795号-1
扫码关注我们
求助内容：
应助结果提醒方式：