Ruth H. Webber (ed.), Spanish balladry today. Garland, New York-London, 1989; xi + 327 pp.

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Subsídios para o arquivo do Romanceiro no Brasil

O Romanceiro Ibérico tem sido alvo de uma bateria infindável de estudos acadêmicos. Contudo, continua a carecer de um esforço de organização e de classificação dos temas que fazem parte da memória cultural brasileira. A partir disto, a proposta deste trabalho é aliar um levantamento bibliográfico o mais completo possível do Romanceiro Ibérico recolhido e publicado no Brasil com uma análise histórico-social, visando traçar possíveis relações que elucidem os elementos que permeiam essa expressão neste país. Posteriormente, propomos agregar os estudos do Romanceiro brasileiro numa só plataforma, e, ao mesmo tempo, alçá-los no domínio das Humanidades Digitais, aplicando-lhe ferramentas que facilitem o acesso, a análise, a sistematização e o inventário deste arquivo e a sua integração no universo do Romanceiro em Língua Portuguesa. O objetivo final do presente projeto é, pois, partindo do trabalho prévio enunciado, lançar os primeiros subsídios de uma base de dados digital em livre acesso, integrada no modelo já existente do Arquivo do Romanceiro em Língua Portuguesa, na plataforma Romanceiro.pt.The Hispanic Ballad has been the subject of many academic studies and pappers, however, it continues to lack an effort to organize and classify the themes that are part of Brazilian cultural memory. Based on this, the purpose of this work is to combine a more complete bibliographic survey of the Hispanic Ballad collected and published in Brazil with a historical and social analysis, aiming to trace possible relations that elucidate the elements that permeate this expression in that country. And, after that, we seek to aggregate the studies of the Brazilian Folk Ballads in a single platform, and, at the same time, to raise them in the domain of the Digital Humanities, applying tools that facilitate the access, the analysis, the systematization and the inventory of this file and its integration in the universe of the Portuguese spoken balladry. Thus, the final goal of this project is, based on the previous work we metioned, to propose a digital database in open access system, integrated in the existing model of the Arquivo do Romanceiro em Língua Portuguesa, available at the platform Romanceiro.pt

The Flowering Thorn

The flowering thorn expresses the dual nature of the ballad: at once a distinctive expression of European tradition, but also somewhat tricky to approach from a scholarly perspective, requiring a range of disciplines to illuminate its rich composition. Most of this latter quality has to do with the very features that characterize ballads... or narrative songs. These include an appearance of fragmentation; a wide range of cultural and social referents; complex, evocative symbolic language; and variation. The notable multiformity of meaning, text and tune is mirrored in scholarship, too. The Flowering Thorn is therefore wide ranging, with articles written by world authorities from the fields of folklore, history, literature, and ethnology, employing a variety of methodologies—structuralism to functionalism, repertoire studies to geographical explorations of cultural movement and change. The twenty-five selected contributions represent the latest trends in ballad scholarship, embracing the multi-disciplinary nature of the field today. The essays have their origins in the 1999 International Ballad Conference of the Kommission fur Volksdichtung (KfV), which focused particularly on ballads and social context; performance and repertoire; genre, motif, and classification. The revised, tailored, and expanded essays are divided into five sections—the interpretation of narrative song; structure and motif; context, version, and transmission; regions, reprints, and repertoires; and the mediating collector\u27s offering a range of examples from fifteen different cultures, ten of them drawing on languages other than English, resulting in a series of personal journeys to the heart of one of Europe\u27s richest, most enduring cultural creations. —Thomas McKean, from the Introduction CONTRIBUTORS: Mary Anne Alburger, David Atkinson, Julia C. Bishop, Valentina Bold, Katherine Campbell, Nicolae Constantinescu, Luisa Del Giudice, Sheila Douglas, David G. Engle, Frances J. Fischer, Simon Furey, Vic Gammon, Marjetka Golez-Kaucic, Pauline Greenhill, Cozette Griffin-Kremer, J. J. Dias Marques, William Bernard McCarthy, Isabelle Peere, Gerald Porter, James Porter, Roger de V. Renwick, Sigrid Rieuwerts, Michèle Simonsen, Larry Syndergaard, Stefaan Top, Larysa Vakhnina, Lynn Wollstadthttps://digitalcommons.usu.edu/usupress_pubs/1062/thumbnail.jp

The Flowering Thorn

The flowering thorn expresses the dual nature of the ballad: at once a distinctive expression of European tradition, but also somewhat tricky to approach from a scholarly perspective, requiring a range of disciplines to illuminate its rich composition. Most of this latter quality has to do with the very features that characterize ballads... or narrative songs. These include an appearance of fragmentation; a wide range of cultural and social referents; complex, evocative symbolic language; and variation. The notable multiformity of meaning, text and tune is mirrored in scholarship, too. The Flowering Thorn is therefore wide ranging, with articles written by world authorities from the fields of folklore, history, literature, and ethnology, employing a variety of methodologie

Soundscapes of punishment in Early Modern England

The violent and destructive potential of sound has long been known, extending back to at least antiquity with the alluring and fatal songs of sirens in Greek mythology. However, there is a surprising paucity of scholarship relating to the sounds associated with violence and punishment in the early modern world. With this in mind, this thesis sets out to enhance our understanding of the relationship between sound and punishment in early modern England by exploring the ways in which historical subjects experienced, interpreted, and responded to punitive soundscapes. Firstly, I explore sound's ability to cause both physical and psychological harm during rituals of unofficial, popular punishment. I demonstrate that the punitive and judicial dimensions of rough music and libelling can only be fully realised when we open our ears to their sounding qualities, ultimately amplifying the prevalence of sonic violence in early modern England. This thesis also explores the soundscapes of rituals of official (state-sanctioned) punishment, demonstrating that spaces such as the prison and the gallows were shaped and transformed through sonic production. Whilst sound could function as a means of violence and punishment, it also offered a medium for resistance, endurance, and self-expression within these contexts. Finally, I explore how communities engaged with the discourse of public execution through the singing and hearing of popular ballads, and how these songs helped shape attitudes towards capital punishment more generally. At the more conceptual level, this thesis interrogates the ways in which sound interacted with networks of power through a Foucauldian lens, opening our ears to the multifaceted power struggles that surfaced during punitive rituals, and the ways in which individuals navigated their surroundings in times of oppression. Drawing insights from musicological, historical, literary, and critical methodologies, this approach offers an original, nuanced, and interdisciplinary method for understanding a period of political and religious instability, ultimately helping us sharpen our ears to the violent and punitive, but also the consolatory power, of the sonic realm

Scottish scenes and Scottish story : the later career of David Allan, historical painter

David Allan's artistic career may be divided into two major periods. Having first attended the Foulis Academy, he spent at least a decade in Italy, finally returning to Scotland in 1779, his home for the next seventeen years. The pictures which he executed during this second period form the basis of the present study. Since the emphasis of this study is thematic rather than biographical, some distortion of chronology is inevitable, though it is not uncomfortably obvious. At the same time, some element of biography is indispensable. This is particuarly true of the first chapter, a necessary setting of the scene which highlights Allan's training in the arts, his collection of prints, copies, original drawings and plaster casts, and the most important works from his years abroad. That part of this biographical account which deals with his Scottish career is devoted largely to Allan's work as Master of the Trustees' Academy, since the pictures with which he was occupied at this time - portraits, Conversation pieces, literary illustrations, Historical paintings and Genre scenes - are taken in groups and discussed in greater depth in the chapters which follow. Before the first chapter concerned with Allan's work in any of these genres, however, there stands a chapter dealing with the wider context of narrative painting in Britain at the time and introducing a number of themes traced throughout later chapters, where they are more fully and particularly discussed

Accounting for taste: The early American music business and secularization in music aesthetics, 1720--1825

This study redefines popular music in early America as sacred music sung and performed in most churches and, starting in the 1790s, theater music imported from England. Rather than more static secular ballads and traditional dance pieces customarily understood as popular music, sacred and theater music intersected with more people more often and did so with more participation. Conflicting tastes of practitioners of religious music and secularizing influences from the theater created a series of reforms and counter measures that featured regional, as well as personal, fractures in American society. These personal and public debates, carried out in diaries, letters, hymnal prefaces, newspapers, and magazines, reflected larger divisions in an evolving American culture. This research focuses particular attention on the process whereby a cohort of homespun American composers of psalmody in the northeast self-consciously sought to replace the new country\u27s dependence on English sacred music with an indigenous style during the Revolutionary and Federal periods. This three-decade supremacy was countered by a redoubled return to European imported music, as well as standards of composition, brought about by a wave of immigrant professional European musicians who arrived during the 1790s to work in the orchestras of the nation\u27s proliferating theaters. The return to a commodified importation of European-based music ramified in American culture through a greatly expanded repertory of sacred music types, instrumental art-music, and a new genre of simple sentimental popular songs. The diverse elements of this transformation explores the nature of continuities between colonial and independent status, further informing and complicating our understanding of early national cultural formation and state-building

Transforming music criticism? An examination of the changes in music journalism in the English broadsheet press from 1981 to 1991

To date, very little academic attention has been awarded specifically to English broadsheet music writing and of the few texts which do touch upon this area many have relied upon the anecdotal accounts of only a handful of authors. As such, this research was undertaken to provide new insights into this relatively untouched area, concentrating particularly upon the period 1981 to 1991 during which, it was anticipated, a number of fundamental changes might be observed. The research triangulates fmdings from three sources; firstly, quantitative analysis is drawn from a large database constructed for the purposes of this study, which details the music-related content of 744 sample broadsheet publications, to reveal a series of shifts in the nature of broadsheet music coverage during the period under review. A detailed qualitative analysis of38 sample broadsheet music reviews then highlights differences in the critical styles adopted by broadsheet music writers across and within the spectrum of music genres and time period examined. Secondly, insights into the nature of change within broadsheet music coverage between 1981 and 1991 are presented from the perspectives of thirteen broadsheet music writers themselves, resulting from interviews conducted specifically for this research. Finally, the research findings are placed within a suggested literary and conceptual framework through reference to a range of secondary sources. In considering the motives for change, particular attention is devoted to the Thatcher government, whose free market policies fuelled an increase in music marketing and whose reduction of trade union powers resulted in the Wapping Dispute of 1986 and the subsequent upheaval of broadsheet production practices. Consideration is also given to both the impact of emergent and discontinued contemporary publications, with particular attention awarded to The Independent newspaper, and to shifting editorial attitudes - the latter of which, it is suggested here, led to a destabilisation of the traditional genre hierarchy. The thesis also examines the employment conditions of broadsheet music journalists during the period under review in order to understand how their recruitment, training, reward and working relationships may have affected their critical output. Finally, a brief examination of a sample of broadsheets from 2009 suggests that the editorial mindset inherited from the latter 1980s has possibly deepened, if not become entrenched, in twenty first century broadsheet production practices. The thesis, by virtue of the original evidence gathered here, argues that a significant dynamic of change within broadsheet music coverage was indeed in place during the period 1981 to 1991 and that, given its possible implications for music audiences, further scholarly examination of this subject is imperative