Pub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.1080/08905495.2023.2162806
Dane Stalcup
Why does music stir our desires and enliven our emotions? Beyond hearing, how does it relate to our other senses? What does the existence of music suggest about human nature? And what does music even mean? Wayne Koestenbaum hints at answers to some of these questions in relation to the experience of hearing – and seeing – opera: “A singer’s voice sets up vibrations and resonances in the human body” (2001, 42). Indeed, the idea of music as a physical system of waves and vibrational sensations has inspired thinkers for millennia, from Pythagoras to the composer Jean-Philippe Rameau and beyond. So, too, of course, has the notion that music links directly to human passions and perhaps even our morality. Koestenbaum continues:
{"title":"Introduction: music and the senses","authors":"Dane Stalcup","doi":"10.1080/08905495.2023.2162806","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/08905495.2023.2162806","url":null,"abstract":"Why does music stir our desires and enliven our emotions? Beyond hearing, how does it relate to our other senses? What does the existence of music suggest about human nature? And what does music even mean? Wayne Koestenbaum hints at answers to some of these questions in relation to the experience of hearing – and seeing – opera: “A singer’s voice sets up vibrations and resonances in the human body” (2001, 42). Indeed, the idea of music as a physical system of waves and vibrational sensations has inspired thinkers for millennia, from Pythagoras to the composer Jean-Philippe Rameau and beyond. So, too, of course, has the notion that music links directly to human passions and perhaps even our morality. Koestenbaum continues:","PeriodicalId":43278,"journal":{"name":"Nineteenth-Century Contexts-An Interdisciplinary Journal","volume":"45 1","pages":"1 - 6"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42195734","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.1080/08905495.2023.2195529
Matthew Jones
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Pub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.1080/08905495.2023.2161804
Marte Stinis
“Had Sargent taken to music instead of painting he would have been as great a musician as he was a painter,” the violinist Joseph Joachim is claimed to have said of his friend, John Singer Sargent (1856-1925; as quoted in Charteris 1927, 137). If he had done so, many museums would be emptier for it. Sargent’s portraits of actors, writers, musicians, friends, and patrons fill many Western museums, such as the infamous Portrait of Madame X (1883-1884) in the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the vibrant Carmencita (1890) in the Musée d’Orsay. Yet the near-continual focus on portraiture in public exhibitions and most scholarship obscures Sargent’s multifaceted talents; he was equally proficient in watercolor, landscape, murals, drawings, and even prints like lithographs and monotypes. Of all his inspirations, his interest in music remains thoroughly under-researched, especially considering not only his active communication and friendship with prominent musicians and composers, but also his patronage of the composer Gabriel Fauré, his own musical abilities on the piano, and his frequent visits to café-concerts, music halls, and orchestral performances (Langley 2018). Music was part of Sargent’s identity as a painter throughout his life and career. In this essay I will focus on a number of Sargent’s depictions of orchestras and stage performances to determine what place these musical works held in his oeuvre. For Sargent’s emotional and sensuous connection with music instigated musical engagement at the visual level that resulted in imagery so evocative, imposing, and enigmatic that it warrants further investigation. It is with this in mind that I want to return to Sargent’s earlier years as a student in Paris, when he was only just developing his own style. Between 1874 and 1879, he was a pupil in the atelier of Charles Auguste Émile Durand, popularly known as Carolus-Duran, who provided a different approach to more conservative and neoclassical styles such as those popularized by Jean-Léon Gérôme. It was during this formative time that Sargent painted the orchestral rehearsals of the famous conductor Jules Pasdeloup (1819-1887) as they were held at the Cirque d’Hiver, or Winter Circus, in Paris (Bernard 1971). His impressions of Pasdeloup’s Concerts Populaires resulted in two nearly identical oil paintings, both entitled Rehearsal of the Pasdeloup Orchestra at the Cirque d’Hiver (both dated c. 1879). Sargent made both a monochromatic and a color version, held in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Art Institute of Chicago, respectively. In the
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Pub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.1080/08905495.2023.2163772
T. Meyer
mated status prized and precarious. In other words, immunocapital was much like other forms of capital in the nineteenth century, inherently suspect and unstable. Similarly, Necropolis and the nineteenth-century residents of New Orleans side-stepped the oft-discussed contagionist debates of the era by simply ignoring any attempt to stop the ailment. Not only did New Orleans refuse quarantine (the contagionist approach) and sanitation (the anticontagionists’ favorite) but ridiculed those who tried to avoid the presumably inevitable disease. Those with proven immunity could leave during the epidemics but those like newly-arrived Sylvester Larned in 1819 faced harsh criticism for attempting to avoid the disease by leaving and refusing to face acclimation (Olivarius 2022, 71–73). No white newcomer could truly become part of the city without accepting the rules of immunocapitalism: acclamation, resistance to structural improvement, and support of race-based slavery. Throughout the book Olivarius implicitly and explicitly tells her audience that yellow fever mattered deeply in New Orleans, shaped notions of belonging, and created racial categories. The threat of sickness or death, survival, and racialized experiences around the virus shaped the city and its society. Understanding the power of immunocapital in New Orleans matters not only to historians of medicine or public health, but to anyone who considers the role of the city, cotton, or slavery in American history. Moreover, her inclusion of individual stories, clear narration, and general lack of jargon makes it an excellent example of a book that can successfully be read across subfields.
{"title":"Transported to Botany Bay: class, national identity, and the literary figure of the Australian convict","authors":"T. Meyer","doi":"10.1080/08905495.2023.2163772","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/08905495.2023.2163772","url":null,"abstract":"mated status prized and precarious. In other words, immunocapital was much like other forms of capital in the nineteenth century, inherently suspect and unstable. Similarly, Necropolis and the nineteenth-century residents of New Orleans side-stepped the oft-discussed contagionist debates of the era by simply ignoring any attempt to stop the ailment. Not only did New Orleans refuse quarantine (the contagionist approach) and sanitation (the anticontagionists’ favorite) but ridiculed those who tried to avoid the presumably inevitable disease. Those with proven immunity could leave during the epidemics but those like newly-arrived Sylvester Larned in 1819 faced harsh criticism for attempting to avoid the disease by leaving and refusing to face acclimation (Olivarius 2022, 71–73). No white newcomer could truly become part of the city without accepting the rules of immunocapitalism: acclamation, resistance to structural improvement, and support of race-based slavery. Throughout the book Olivarius implicitly and explicitly tells her audience that yellow fever mattered deeply in New Orleans, shaped notions of belonging, and created racial categories. The threat of sickness or death, survival, and racialized experiences around the virus shaped the city and its society. Understanding the power of immunocapital in New Orleans matters not only to historians of medicine or public health, but to anyone who considers the role of the city, cotton, or slavery in American history. Moreover, her inclusion of individual stories, clear narration, and general lack of jargon makes it an excellent example of a book that can successfully be read across subfields.","PeriodicalId":43278,"journal":{"name":"Nineteenth-Century Contexts-An Interdisciplinary Journal","volume":"45 1","pages":"86 - 88"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48336391","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-12-28DOI: 10.1080/08905495.2023.2161793
J. M. Andrick
One of the newly emerging areas of study in nineteenth-century Spiritualism centers on music and the sensory experiences generated by spirit-played instruments and attendee singing during séances (Ostrowski 2019; Raz 2021; Spinner 2021). Undoubtedly, the most remarkable of all musical Spiritualists was the enigmatic and sensational pianist/ vocalist christened Benjamin Henry Jesse Francis Shepard (1848–1927), known most famously as either Jesse Shepard or Francis Grierson, the latter bearing his mother’s maiden name which he assumed when undertaking a literary career in 1897. Shepard performed widely throughout Europe, America, and Australia in a period running from the late 1860s to his final return to the United States in 1913. The most thorough account of Shepard’s worldly excursions, the mansion built for him by Spiritualists in San Diego, and the favors he received from European royalty can be found in various works of the late Harold P. Simonson (1926–2011), the foremost Shepardian scholar (Simonson 1958, 1960, 1966). Though relatively forgotten today, Shepard was well known in his time as an astonishing pianist who allegedly played and sang through the psychical inspiration of deceased composers and operatic singers. Whether in Europe or America, Shepard stunned the small audiences that he preferred to perform before with musicales (i.e. musical performances generally held at private residences) never before witnessed, producing through a vocal range of high soprano to deep bass an eerie room-filling choral assemblage generating intensely vivid sensory impressions while his handsome features, curly locks, and long slender hands caused much comment and cross-gender admiration. David Howes and Constance Classen, among a number of scholars engaged in sensory studies, have explored the nature of sensation and the ways it relates to individual lives, social groups, and the wider culture through a probing analysis centered on the sensorium (Howes and Classen 2014). The sensorium can be understood as an assemblage of humans, non-humans, things, and atmospheres – a series of interconnected interior/ exterior, subjective/objective, intersensory stimuli affecting embodied humans either in solitary or collective settings. Viewed in this sense as a holistic system of synaesthetic perception, David Howes considers the sensorium to be a conceivably larger formulation than the mere sum of the five senses while others further indicate that spiritual and intuitive senses must be considered when exploring cultures of Spiritualist artistic sensoriums (Howes 2017, 165; 2019, 20; Fisher and 2006; McDaniel 2011; Fritz 2012). With the
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Pub Date : 2022-12-28DOI: 10.1080/08905495.2023.2161845
Shannon Draucker
ABSTRACT This article traces the emergence of a curious musical phenomenon in fin-de-siècle Britain: the ladies’ orchestra. As British music conservatories began to open to women in the 1870s and 1880s, and the violin gradually became a more “acceptable” instrument for women to play, ladies’ orchestras offered female musicians – still excluded from the country’s major symphony orchestras – opportunities to perform in public and sometimes even earn a living. Analyzing responses to ladies’ orchestras in the British periodical press, this article shows that ladies’ orchestras invited Victorian audiences to think about classical music in new ways. Ladies’ orchestras, though niche, fundamentally shifted the sensual experience of the orchestra concert, transforming it from a staid, solemn event centered on “the music itself” to a multisensorial spectacle, complete with colorful costumes, dazzling stage settings, and dynamic displays of musical vigor and passion. Ladies’ orchestras embraced what musicologists now call a “performance-based” approach, one that tunes into the spatial, temporal, sensory, kinesthetic, and affective dimensions of classical music.
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Pub Date : 2022-10-20DOI: 10.1080/08905495.2022.2140997
J. Devereux
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Pub Date : 2022-10-20DOI: 10.1080/08905495.2022.2140994
P. Brimblecombe
for example, a psychology article or literary analysis. The claim that, for ToM, mental states are propositional is most obviously mistaken in those cases where our understanding of other people’s minds is spontaneous and simulative rather than effortful and inferential. This in turn brings us to perhaps the central problem with Walser’s treatment of ToM. She fails to distinguish its components and varieties. The most fundamental of these divisions is between ToM inference and ToM simulation. A number of Walser’s criticisms apply solely to the former, if they apply at all. Walser also repeatedly refers to heuristics that we employ in ToM. Though she is not entirely clear about her understanding of heuristics, it is undoubtedly the case that we do use heuristics. But they are important primarily in spontaneous ToM responses. Effortful inference can be a straightforward matter of logical entailment. Other distinctions concern whether the ToM addresses information processing or emotion; personality/disposition, affective state (e.g., mood), or situation (and so on) – all of which bear in some way on Walser’s claims. Of course, readers ofWalser’s book are likely to be particularly interested in her treatment of the literaryworks. Here, too, there are recurring problems, related to her concernwith debunking ToM. For one thing, she often fails to consider alternatives that are prima facie more plausible. For example, she discusses a recurring motif in Charles Brockden Brown, where characters expect to find crucial information inside of some container, but open the container and find nothing of value. I suppose this could be a criticism of the container metaphor of mind, but – based on Walser’s evidence – it could equally be a comment on materialism (one doesn’t find motives as such when one looks in a brain), or free will, or something else. But of course there is more to Walser’s book than I have suggested. I began by saying that most literary readers will react very differently than I have. Literary critics are particularly likely to find her literary analyses rewarding. Indeed, even partisans of ToM will – rightly – find many of her literary observations genuinely illuminating, particularly in her discussion of Harriet Beecher Stowe.
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