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Books > Arts & Architecture
Only a few years after the 2013 Sundance Film Festival premiere of
Blackfish - an independent documentary film that critiqued the
treatment of orcas in captivity - visits to SeaWorld declined,
major corporate sponsors pulled their support, and performing acts
canceled appearances. The steady drumbeat of public criticism,
negative media coverage, and unrelenting activism became known as
the "Blackfish Effect." In 2016, SeaWorld announced a stunning
corporate policy change - the end of its profitable orca shows. In
an evolving networked era, social-issue documentaries like
Blackfish are art for civic imagination and social critique.
Today's documentaries interrogate topics like sexual assault in the
U.S. military (The Invisible War), racial injustice (13th),
government surveillance (Citizenfour), and more. Artistic
nonfiction films are changing public conversations, influencing
media agendas, mobilizing communities, and capturing the attention
of policymakers - accessed by expanding audiences in a transforming
media marketplace. In Story Movements: How Documentaries Empower
People and Inspire Social Change, producer and scholar Caty Borum
Chattoo explores how documentaries disrupt dominant cultural
narratives through complex, creative, often investigative
storytelling. Featuring original interviews with award-winning
documentary filmmakers and field leaders, the book reveals the
influence and motivations behind the vibrant, eye-opening stories
of the contemporary documentary age.
Defining Deutschtum: Political Ideology, German Identity, and
Music-Critical Discourse in Liberal Vienna offers a nuanced look at
the intersection of music, cultural identity, and political
ideology in late-nineteenth-century Vienna. Drawing on an extensive
selection of writings in the city's political press,
correspondence, archival documents, and a large body of recent
scholarship in late Habsburg cultural and political history, author
David Brodbeck argues that Vienna's music critics were important
agents in the public sphere whose writings gave voice to distinct,
sometimes competing ideological positions. These conflicting
positions are exemplified especially well in their critical
writings about the music of three notable composers of the day who
were Austrian citizens but not ethnic Germans: Carl Goldmark, a Jew
from German West Hungary, and the Czechs Bed?ich Smetana and
Antonin Dvo?ak.
Often at stake in the critical discourse was the question of who
and what could be deemed "German" in the multinational Austrian
state. For critics such as Eduard Hanslick and Ludwig Speidel,
traditional German liberals who came of age in the years around
1848, "Germanness" was an attribute that could be earned by any
ambitious bourgeois-including Jews and those of non-German
nationality-by embracing German cultural values. The more
nationally inflected liberalism evident in the writings of Theodor
Helm, with its particularist rhetoric of German national property
in a time of Czech gains at German expense, was typical of those in
the next generation, educated during the 1860s. The radical student
politics of the 1880s, with its embrace of racialist antisemitism
and irredentist German nationalism, just as surely shaped the
discourse of certain young Wagnerian critics who emerged at the end
of the century. This body of music-critical writing reveals a
continuum of exclusivity, from a conception of Germanness rooted in
social class and cultural elitism to one based in blood.
Brodbeck neatly counters decades of musicological scholarship and
offers a unique insight into the diverse ways in which educated
German Austrians conceived of Germanness in music and understood
their relationship to their non-German fellow citizens. Defining
Deutschtum is sure to be an essential text for scholars of music
history, cultural studies, and late 19th century Central European
culture and society."
Lee Miller's work for Vogue from 1941-1945 sets her apart as a
photographer and writer of extraordinary ability. The quality of
her photography from the period has long been recognized as
outstanding, and its full range is shown here, accompanied by her
brilliant despatches. Starting with her first report from a field
hospital soon after D-Day, the despatches and nearly 160
photographs show war-ravaged cities, buildings and landscapes, but
above all they portray the war-resilient people - soldiers,
leaders, medics, evacuees, prisoners of war, the wounded, the
villains and the heroes. There is the raw edge of combat portrayed
at the siege of St Malo and in the bitterly fought Alsace campaign,
and the disbelief and outrage Miller describes on witnessing the
victims of Dachau. The war's horror is relieved by the spirit of
post-liberation Paris, where she inudulged in frivoluous fashions
and recorded memorable conversations with Picasso, Cocteau, Eluard,
Aragon and Colette. The book ends with Miller's first-on-the-scene
report giving a sardonic description of HItler's abandoned house in
Munich, and the looting and burning of his alpine fortress at
Berchtesgaden, which marked a symbolic end to the war. David E.
Scherman, the renowned war photojournalist who shared many of
Miller's assignments, contributes a foreword.
During the nineteenth century, nearly one hundred symphonies were
written by over fifty composers living in the United States. With
few exceptions, this repertoire is virtually forgotten today. In
Orchestrating the Nation: The Nineteenth-Century American Symphonic
Enterprise, author Douglas W. Shadle explores the stunning
stylistic diversity of this substantial repertoire and uncovers why
it failed to enter the musical mainstream. Throughout the century,
Americans longed for a distinct national musical identity. As the
most prestigious of all instrumental genres, the symphony proved to
be a potent vehicle in this project as composers found inspiration
for their works in a dazzling array of subjects, including Niagara
Falls, Hiawatha, and Western pioneers. With a wealth of musical
sources at his disposal, including never-before-examined
manuscripts, Shadle reveals how each component of the symphonic
enterprise-from its composition, to its performance, to its
immediate and continued reception by listeners and
critics-contributed to competing visions of American identity.
Employing an innovative transnational historical framework,
Shadle's narrative covers three continents and shows how the music
of major European figures such as Beethoven, Schumann, Wagner,
Liszt, Brahms, and Dvorak exerted significant influence over
dialogues about the future of American musical culture. Shadle
demonstrates that the perceived authority of these figures allowed
snobby conductors, capricious critics, and even orchestral
musicians themselves to thwart the efforts of American symphonists
despite widespread public support of their music. Consequently,
these works never entered the performing canons of American
orchestras. An engagingly written account of a largely unknown
repertoire, Orchestrating the Nation shows how artistic and
ideological debates from the nineteenth century continue to shape
the culture of American orchestral music today.
Now in its fourth edition, The Art of Music Production has
established itself as the definitive guide to the art and business
of music production and a primary teaching tool for college
programs. It is the first book to comprehensively analyze and
describe the non-technical role of the music producer. Author
Richard James Burgess lays out the complex field of music
production by defining the several distinct roles that fall under
the rubric of music producer. In this completely updated and
revised fourth edition of a book already lauded as "the most
comprehensive guide to record production ever published," Burgess
has expanded and refined the types of producers, bringing them
fully up to date. The first part of the book outlines the
underlying theory of the art of music production. The second part
focuses on the practical aspects of the job including training,
getting into the business, day-to-day responsibilities, potential
earnings, managers, lawyers, and - most importantly - the musical,
financial, and interpersonal relationships producers have with
artists and their labels. The book is packed with insights from the
most successful music producers ranging from today's chart-toppers
to the beginnings of recorded sound, including mainstream and many
niche genres. The book also features many revealing anecdotes about
the business, including the stars and the challenges (from daily to
career-related) a producer faces. Burgess addresses the changes in
the nature of music production that have been brought about by
technology and, in particular, the paradigmatic millennial shift
that has occurred with digital recording and distribution.
Burgess's lifelong experience in the recording industry as a studio
musician, artist, producer, manager, and marketer combined with his
extensive academic research in the field brings a unique breadth
and depth of understanding to the topic.
Audiences have long enjoyed Sergei Prokofievs musical score for
Sergei Eisensteins 1938 film Alexander Nevsky. The historical epic
cast a thirteenth-century Russian victory over invading Teutonic
Knights as an allegory of contemporary Soviet strength in the face
of Nazi warmongering. Prokofievs and Eisensteins work proved an
enormous success, both as a collaboration of two of the twentieth
centurys most prominent artists and as a means to bolster
patriotism and national pride among Soviet audiences. Arranged as a
cantata for concert performance, Prokofievs music for Alexander
Nevsky music proved malleable, its meaning reconfigured to suit
different circumstances and times. Author Kevin Bartig draws on
previously unexamined archival materials to follow Prokofievs
Alexander Nevsky from its inception through the present day. He
considers the musics genesis as well as the surprisingly different
ways it has engaged listeners over the past eighty years, from its
beginnings as state propaganda in the 1930s to showpiece for
high-fidelity recording in the 1950s to open-air concert favorite
in the post-Soviet 1990s.
Discoveries from the Fortepiano meets the demand for a manual on
authentic Classical piano performance practice that is at once
accessible to the performer and accurate to the scholarship.
Uncovering a wide range of eighteenth-century primary sources,
noted keyboard pedagogue Donna Gunn examines contemporary
philosophical beliefs and principles surrounding Classical Era
performance practices. Gunn introduces the reader to the Viennese
fortepiano and compares its sonic and technical capabilities to the
modern piano. In doing so, she demonstrates how understanding
Classical fortepiano performance aesthetics can influence
contemporary pianists, paying particular focus to technique,
dynamics, articulation, rhythm, ornamentation, and pedaling. The
book is complete with over 100 music examples that illustrate
concepts, as well as sample model lessons that demonstrate the
application of Gunn's historically informed style on the modern
piano. Each example is available on the book's companion website
and is given three recordings: the first, a modern interpretation
of the passage on a modern piano; the second, a fortepiano
interpretation; and the third, a historically informed performance
on a modern piano. With its in-depth yet succinct explanations and
examples of the Viennese five-octave fortepiano and the nuances of
Classical interpretation and ornamentation, Discoveries from the
Fortepiano is an indispensable educational aid to any pianist who
seeks an academically and artistically sound approach to the
performance of Classical works.
Aims and Scope Growing social and economic needs exert major
pressures on landscapes, challenging preserved landscape values and
the regional significance of places. As a result, the scope
oflandscape management has broadened and diversifiedin response to
international calls for greater landscape protection, and to
existing and new challenges, such as thoserelating to climate
change adaptation and ecosystem services. Within this context,
landscape impact assessment and more in general landscape planning
have been regarded as effective mechanisms for promoting and, at
the same time, as the basis of sustainable landscape development.
Set within the European context, thisbookaims to provide
acontemporary review of landscape impact assessment theory and
practice, looking at both the project and planning level. It
coversthe overall process, content and scope of landscape impact
assessment, including the main principles for good practice.
Thisbook also provides guidance on a rangeof methods and techniques
for different aspects of landscape impact assessment and public
participation needs; and explains the advantages of close
co-ordination between landscape impact assessment and landscape
planning, especially in land use planning. Finally, a selection of
case studies reviewing different aspects and practices of landscape
impact assessment are reviewed. This book will be of interest to
professionals involved in the day-to-day application of landscape
impact assessment, as well as scholars and teachers working in the
broad area of landscape planning andmanagement. The authors of
thisbook have vast experiencein the research and practice of
environmental assessment and landscape management.
Music in the USA: A Documentary Companion charts a path through
American music and musical life using as guides the words of
composers, performers, writers and the rest of us ordinary folks
who sing, dance, and listen. The anthology of primary sources
contains about 160 selections from 1540 to 2000. Sometimes the
sources are classics in the literature around American music, for
example, the Preface to the Bay Psalm Book, excerpts from Slave
Songs of the United States, and Charles Ives extolling Emerson. But
many other selections offer uncommon sources, including a satirical
story about a Yankee music teacher; various columns from
19th-century German American newspapers; the memoirs of a
19th-century diva; Lottie Joplin remembering her husband Scott; a
little-known reflection of Copland about Stravinsky; an interview
with Muddy Waters from the Chicago Defender; a letter from Woody
Guthrie on the "spunkfire" attitude of a folk song; a press release
from the Country Music Association; and the Congressional testimony
around "Napster." "Sidebar" entries occasionally bring a topic or
an idea into the present, acknowledging the extent to which
revivals of many kinds of music play a role in American
contemporary culture. This book focuses on the connections between
theory and practice to enrich our understanding of the diversity of
American musical experiences. Designed especially to accompany
college courses which survey American music as a whole, the book is
also relevant to courses in American history and American Studies.
Starring New York considers twenty-one films in detail, and more
generally discusses many others, that were shot on location and
released between 1968 and 1981. Corkin looks at their complex
relationship to the fortunes of New York City during that era,
probing the multiple connections among film, history, and
geography. This period was a volatile moment in the history of the
city as it went from the hopefulness of the Lindsay years (1966 to
1973) to financial default in 1975, under the leadership of Abe
Beame to its reemergence as a center of international finance in
the 1980s, under the leadership of Edward I. Koch (1978 to 1989).
These changing regimes and fortunes form the backdrop for films
that picture New York's racial and ethnic populations, its decaying
districts, its violent street-life, and its emerging gentrification
by the later years of the decade. The films, directed by an
emerging generation of filmmakers influenced both by the Italian
neo-realists and the French auteurs, sought a higher realism than
that offered in conventional Hollywood productions. Martin
Scorsese, Francis Coppola, Sidney Lumet, Paul Mazursky, Woody
Allen, and John Schlesinger, all of whom became noted by a general
audience during this period, capture the excitement and volatility
of the period. More broadly, Starring New York proposes that this
concentration of popular films that picture the city in transition
provide viewers with a means to begin reorienting their view of New
York's space, their significance, and their relation to other
places of the globe.
The Russian school of violin playing produced many of the twentieth
century's leading violinists - from the famed disciples of Leopold
Auer such as Jascha Heifetz, Nathan Milstein, and Mischa Elman to
masters of the Soviet years such as David Oistrakh and Leonid
Kogan. Though descendants of this school of playing are found today
in every major orchestra and university, little is known about the
pedagogical traditions of the Russian, and later Soviet, violin
school. Following the revolution of 1917, the center of Russian
violin playing and teaching shifted from St. Petersburg to Moscow,
where violinists such as Lev Tseitlin, Konstantin Mostras, and
Abraham Yampolsky established an influential pedagogical tradition.
Founded on principles of scientific inquiry and physiology, this
tradition became known as the Soviet Violin School, a component of
the larger Russian Violin School. Yuri Yankelevich (1909 - 1973), a
student and assistant of Abraham Yampolsky, was greatly influenced
by the teachers of the Soviet School and in turn he became one of
the most important pedagogues of his generation. Yankelevich taught
at the Moscow Conservatory from 1936 to 1973 and produced a
remarkable array of superb violinists, including forty prizewinners
in international competitions. Extremely interested in the
methodology of violin playing and teaching, Yankelevich contributed
significant texts to the pedagogical literature. Despite its
importance, Yankelevich's scholarly work has been little known
outside of Russia. This book includes two original texts by
Yankelevich: his essay on positioning the hands and arms and his
extensive research into every detail of shifting positions.
Additional essays and commentaries by those close to him examine
further details of his pedagogy, including tone production,
intonation, vibrato, fingerings and bowings, and his general
approach to methodology and selecting repertoire. An invaluable
resource for any professional violinist, Yankelevich's work reveals
an extremely sophisticated approach to understanding the
interconnectivity of all components in playing the violin and is
complete with detailed practical suggestions and broad historical
context.
Chances and Choices: Exploring the Impact of Music Education
considers the aims and impact of formative musical experiences,
evaluating the extent to which music education of various kinds
provides a foundation for lifelong involvement and interest in
music. The discussion draws upon rich qualitative data, in which
over 100 adults with an active interest in music reflect upon the
influences and opportunities that shaped their musical life
histories. Pitts addresses the relationship between the claims made
for music education, the practice and policy through which those
aims are filtered, and the recollections of the lived experiences
of learning music in a variety of contexts. This consideration of
school music is set in the broader context of learning in the home
and community, and illustrates the circumscribed yet immensely
powerful role that music teachers and other potential role models
can play in nurturing open-minded, active musicians. The four
central chapters focus on generational change in home and school
experiences of music; the locations in which musical learning takes
place, including cross-cultural comparisons; the characteristics of
teachers, parents and others as musical mentors and role models;
and the lifelong outcomes of musical engagement for performers,
teachers, listeners and adult learners. This analysis is then used
to illuminate the claims made for music education in historical and
contemporary debate, and to propose ways in which school music
might better prepare young people for lifelong engagement in music.
Poised to shed new light on the long-term effects of music
education, this book is an important resource to understand how we
can encourage lifelong involvement with music and general
engagement in cultural activities in every individual.
This study reconstructs F.W.J. Schelling's philosophy of language
based on a detailed reading of 73 of Schelling's lectures on the
Philosophy of Art. Daniel Whistler argues that the concept of the
symbol present in this lecture course, and elsewhere in Schelling's
writings of the period, provides the key for a non-referential
conception of language, where what matters is the intensity at
which identity is produced. Such a reconstruction leads Whistler to
a detailed analysis of Schelling's system of identity, his grand
project of the years 1801 to 1805, which has been continually
neglected by contemporary scholarship. In particular, Whistler
recovers the concepts of quantitative differentiation and
construction as central to Schelling's project of the period. This
reconstruction also leads to an original reading of the origins of
the concept of the symbol in German thought: there is not one
'romantic symbol', but a whole plethora of experiments in
theorising symbolism taking place at the turn of the nineteenth
century. At stake, then, is Schelling as a philosopher of language,
Schelling as a systematiser of identity, and Schelling as a
theorist of the symbol.
Winding it Back: Teaching to Individual Differences in Music
Classroom and Ensemble Settings is a collaborative effort by
practicing music educators, teacher educators, pedagogy experts,
researchers, and inclusion enthusiasts with a combined one hundred
plus years in the field of music education. The framework of this
text is centered on the following principles: 1) Honoring the
individual learning needs of all students; 2) providing multiple
access points and learning levels; and 3) providing adequate
learning conditions for all students within the music classroom.
This framework is based on research and best practice within music
education. Topics include early childhood music, creative movement,
older beginners, rhythm, melodic, and tonal development as well as
secondary choral and instrumental music. All chapters focus on
meeting the needs of all students and all learning levels within
the music classroom. Many of the authors are pairs of music
educators that bring different experiences to each topic. In
addition, all authors contributed to the editing and musical
examples that are provided as part of the collaborative writing
process preserving the synergy between practicing K-12 music
educators, researchers, and music teacher educators. Therefore,
this text can be used as a resource for practicing music educators,
teacher educators, and arts integration specialists and
enthusiasts. Specific musical examples are provided both within the
text and on the extended companion website. These include musical
examples, lesson ideas, videos, assessment tools and sequencing
ideas that work. The aim of this book is to provide one resource
that can be used by music educators for all students in the music
classroom both for classroom music education and music teacher
preparation.
Why does the Mona Lisa have an uneven smile? Was Picasso's
Demoiselles d'Avignon an exploration of Satanism? Why did
Michelangelo depict so many left-handed archers? Why did the
British Queen look so different when Annie Liebowitz lit her from
her left side in a recent official portrait? The answer to all
these questions lies in a hidden symbolic language in the visual
arts: that of the perceived differences between the left and right
sides of the body. It is a symbolism that has been interpreted by
artists through the centuries, and that can be uncovered in many of
our greatest masterpieces, but that has been long forgotten about
or misunderstood by those concerned with the history of art and the
human body. The Sinister Side reveals the key, and sheds new light
on some of the greatest art from before the Renaissance to the
present day. Traditionally, in almost every culture and religion,
the left side has been regarded as inferior - evil, weak, worldly,
feminine - while the right is good, strong, spiritual and male. But
starting in the Renaissance, this hierarchy was questioned and
visualised as never before. The left side, in part because of the
presence of the heart, became the side that represented authentic
human feelings, especially love. By the late nineteenth century,
with the rise of interest in the occult and in spiritualism, the
left side had become associated with the taboo and with the
unconscious. Exploring how works of art reflect our changing
cultural ideas about the natural world, human nature, and the mind,
James Halls'Sinister Side is the first book to detail the richness
and subtlety of left-right symbolism in art, and to show how it was
a catalyst for some of the greatest works of visual art from
Botticelli and Van Eyck to Vermeer and Dali.
Arguably the world's most popular partnered social dance form,
salsa's significance extends well beyond the Latino communities
which gave birth to it. The growing international and
cross-cultural appeal of this Latin dance form, which celebrates
its mixed origins in the Caribbean and in Spanish Harlem, offers a
rich site for examining issues of cultural hybridity and
commodification in the context of global migration. Salsa consists
of countless dance dialects enjoyed by varied communities in
different locales. In short, there is not one dance called salsa,
but many. Spinning Mambo into Salsa, a history of salsa dance,
focuses on its evolution in three major hubs for international
commercial export-New York, Los Angeles, and Miami. The book
examines how commercialized salsa dance in the 1990s departed from
earlier practices of Latin dance, especially 1950s mambo. Topics
covered include generational differences between Palladium Era
mambo and modern salsa; mid-century antecedents to modern salsa in
Cuba and Puerto Rico; tension between salsa as commercial vs.
cultural practice; regional differences in New York, Los Angeles,
and Miami; the role of the Web in salsa commerce; and adaptations
of social Latin dance for stage performance. Throughout the book,
salsa dance history is linked to histories of salsa music, exposing
how increased separation of the dance from its musical inspiration
has precipitated major shifts in Latin dance practice. As a whole,
the book dispels the belief that one version is more authentic than
another by showing how competing styles came into existence and
contention. Based on over 100 oral history interviews, archival
research, ethnographic participant observation, and analysis of Web
content and commerce, the book is rich with quotes from
practitioners and detailed movement description.
During the mid-1950s, when Hollywood found itself struggling to
compete within an expanding entertainment media landscape, certain
producers and studios saw an opportunity in making films that
showcased performances by rock 'n' roll stars. Rock stars
eventually found cinema to be a useful space to extend their
creative practices, and the motion picture and recording industries
increasingly saw cinematic rock stardom as a profitable means to
connect multiple media properties. Indeed, casting rock stars for
film provided a tool for bridging new relationships across media
industries and practices. From Elvis Presley to Madonna, this book
examines the casting rock stars in films. In so doing, Rock
Star/Movie Star offers a new perspective on the role of stardom
within the convergence of media industries. While hardly the first
popular music culture to see its stars making the transition to
screen, the timing of rock's emergence and its staying power within
popular culture proved fortuitous for a motion picture business
searching for its place in the face of continuous technological and
cultural change. At the same time, a post-star-system film industry
provided a welcoming context for rock stars who have valued
authenticity, creative autonomy, and personal expression. This book
uses illuminating archival resources to demonstrate how rock stars
have often proven themselves to be prominent film workers exploring
this terrain of platforms old and new - ideal media laborers whose
power lies in the fact that they are rarely recognized as such.
Combining star studies with media industry studies, this book
proposes an integrated methodology for writing media history that
combines the actions of individuals and the practices of
industries. It demonstrates how stars have operated as both the
gravitational center of media production as well as social actors
who have taken on a decisive role in the purposes to which their
images are used.
The Drowned Muse is a study of the extraordinary destiny, in the
history of European culture, of an object which could seem, at
first glance, quite ordinary in the history of European culture. It
tells the story of a mask, the cast of a young girl's face entitled
"L'Inconnue de la Seine," the Unknown Woman of the Seine, and its
subsequent metamorphoses as a cultural figure. Legend has it that
the "Inconnue" drowned herself in Paris at the end of the
nineteenth century. The forensic scientist tending to her
unidentified corpse at the Paris Morgue was supposedly so struck by
her allure that he captured in plaster the contours of her face.
This unknown girl, also referred to as "The Mona Lisa of Suicide",
has since become the object of an obsessive interest that started
in the late 1890s, reached its peak in the 1930s, and continues to
reverberate today. Aby Warburg defines art history as "a ghost
story for grown-ups." This study is similarly "a ghost story for
grown-ups", narrating the aura of a cultural object that crosses
temporal, geographical, and linguistic frontiers. It views the
"Inconnue" as a symptomatic expression of a modern world haunted by
the earlier modernity of the nineteenth century. It investigates
how the mask's metamorphoses reflect major shifts in the cultural
history of the last two centuries, approaching the "Inconnue" as an
entry point to understand a phenomenon characteristic of 20th- and
21st-century modernity: the translatability of media. Doing so,
this study mobilizes discourses surrounding the "Inconnue", casting
them as points of negotiation through which we may consider the
modern age.
Since 1997, the war in the east of the Democratic Republic of the
Congo has taken more than 6 million lives and shapes the daily
existence of the nation's residents. While the DRC is often
portrayed in international media as an unproductive failed state,
the Congolese have turned increasingly to art-making to express
their experience to external eyes. Author Cherie Rivers Ndaliko
argues that cultural activism and the enthusiasm to produce art
exists in Congo as a remedy for the social ills of war and as a way
to communicate a positive vision of the country. Ndaliko introduces
a memorable cast of artists, activists, and ordinary people from
the North-Kivu province, whose artistic and cultural interventions
are routinely excluded from global debates that prioritize
economics, politics, and development as the basis of policy
decision about Congo. Rivers also shows how art has been mobilized
by external humanitarian and charitable organizations, becoming the
vehicle through which to inflict new kinds of imperial domination.
Written by a scholar and activist in the center of the current
public policy debate, Necessary Noise examines the uneasy balance
of accomplishing change through art against the unsteady background
of civil war. At the heart of this book is the Yole!Africa cultural
center, which is the oldest independent cultural center in the east
of Congo. Established in the aftermath of volcano Nyiragongo's 2002
eruption and sustained through a series of armed conflicts, the
cultural activities organized by Yole!Africa have shaped a
generation of Congolese youth into socially and politically engaged
citizens. By juxtaposing intimate ethnographic, aesthetic, and
theoretical analyses of this thriving local initiative with case
studies that expose the often destructive underbelly of charitable
action, Necessary Noise introduces into heated international
debates on aid and sustainable development a compelling case for
the necessity of arts and culture in negotiating sustained peace.
Through vivid descriptions of a community of young people
transforming their lives through art, Ndaliko humanizes a dire
humanitarian disaster. In so doing, she invites readers to reflect
on the urgent choices we must navigate as globally responsible
citizens. The only study of music or film culture in the east of
Congo, Necessary Noise raises an impassioned and vibrantly
interdisciplinary voice that speaks to the theory and practice of
socially engaged scholarship.
Granddaughter of the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn and sister of
the composer Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, Fanny Hensel (1805-1847)
was an extraordinary musician who left well over four hundred
compositions, most of which fell into oblivion until their
rediscovery late in the twentieth century. In Fanny Hensel: The
Other Mendelssohn, R. Larry Todd offers a compelling, authoritative
account of Hensel's life and music, and her struggle to emerge as a
publicly recognized composer.
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