Towards hermeticist grammars of music : a proposal for systems of composition based on the principles of the hermetic tradition, with musical demonstrations

PhD Thesis, Multimedia items accompanying this thesis to be consulted at Robinson LibraryThis thesis is a composer's manual on how to select and appropriately use musical materials in accordance with some of the parameters of the Hermetic Tradition. It puts to the reader's consideration a few proposals for Hermeticist grammars of musical composition. 'Grammar' here is used in the sense of a set of rules which govern the construction of musical discourse. Musical grammars thus comprise rules pertaining to the construction and selection of both 'lineal' musical materials such as pitch rows, rhythms, motifs and timbres, as well as of simultaneous events such as harmonic or contrapuntal textures. The adjective 'Hermeticist', derived from the noun Hermeticism, refers to a form of traditional Western urban, learned and humanist occultism. This occultism is distinct from folk, popular, or religious/devotional forms of magic, which also occur in the West as well as in other cultures and societies. It is also distinct from other Western occult movements that are either revivalist in their inspiration (such as Wicca or neopagan religions) or related to the 'pop culture' of the last quarter of the twentieth century, such as the movements of New Age and Chaos Magick. The first part of the thesis, the textual component, briefly examines the historical encounters between Hermeticism and music theory, very few of which have produced sounding pieces of music, while most of them have happened exclusively at the theoretical, philosophical or mystical-speculative levels. In the second part, the portfolio of musical compositions, I demonstrate the application of the proposed methods through pieces of music I have composed using the historical, theoretical and technical background presented at length in part 1. I further comment on these musical results through annotations and description of precompositional work, context research and composition processes used in each individual piece

Bodies in the Margins: Refiguring the Rebetika as Literature

This thesis engages a literary analysis of a corpus of songs and recordings known as the rebetika (sing. rebetiko), which prospered in the port districts of major cities throughout the Aegean in the early 20th century. Engaging the rebetika as literary texts, I argue, helps us understand how they have functioned as a kind of pressure point on the borders between nation and Other. Without making unproveable biographical claims about the motives of the music progenitors, I examine why so many have reached for the rebetika as texts with which to articulate various political and cultural desires. Using a multidisciplinary theoretical framework that includes Elaine Scarry, Stuart Hall, Edward Said, Mark C. Jerng, and Judith Butler, I track the ways the rebetika are implicated in the social marking and rendering of different kinds of bodies. I argue that through the devices of metaphor and metonymy, the songs, recordings, and lyrics of the rebetika preserve the memory of state violence and the experience of bodies in exile and, in doing so, clashed with contemporaneous processes of negotiating Greek national identity and policing the geosocial borders of Europe. I also examine the kinds of meanings and body formations that secondary materials about the rebetika discursively produce. I ultimately argue that the rebetika provide a useful narrative vocabulary for talking about different kinds of marginality

Putting Chinese natural knowledge to work in an eighteenth-century Swiss canton: the case of Dr Laurent Garcin

Symposium: S048 - Putting Chinese natural knowledge to work in the long eighteenth centuryThis paper takes as a case study the experience of the eighteenth-century Swiss physician, Laurent Garcin (1683-1752), with Chinese medical and pharmacological knowledge. A Neuchâtel bourgeois of Huguenot origin, who studied in Leiden with Hermann Boerhaave, Garcin spent nine years (1720-1729) in South and Southeast Asia as a surgeon in the service of the Dutch East India Company. Upon his return to Neuchâtel in 1739 he became primus inter pares in the small local community of physician-botanists, introducing them to the artificial sexual system of classification. He practiced medicine, incorporating treatments acquired during his travels. taught botany, collected rare plants for major botanical gardens, and contributed to the Journal Helvetique on a range of topics; he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of London, where two of his papers were read in translation and published in the Philosophical Transactions; one of these concerned the mangosteen (Garcinia mangostana), leading Linnaeus to name the genus Garcinia after Garcin. He was likewise consulted as an expert on the East Indies, exotic flora, and medicines, and contributed to important publications on these topics. During his time with the Dutch East India Company Garcin encountered Chinese medical practitioners whose work he evaluated favourably as being on a par with that of the Brahmin physicians, whom he particularly esteemed. Yet Garcin never went to China, basing his entire experience of Chinese medical practice on what he witnessed in the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia (the ‘East Indies’). This case demonstrates that there were myriad routes to Europeans developing an understanding of Chinese natural knowledge; the Chinese diaspora also afforded a valuable opportunity for comparisons of its knowledge and practice with other non-European bodies of medical and natural (e.g. pharmacological) knowledge.postprin

Taming savage nature : the body metaphor and material culture in the sixteenth-century conquest of New Spain.

This is a study of how sixteenth-century Spaniards used fundamental aspects of material culture, and the ideas and attitudes surrounding them, to subjugate the Aztec empire of Mexico. Edicts, relaciones, court decisions, letters and chronicles have been employed to discern the attitudes of the time. Those attitudes reveal that food, clothing and shelter were used both to distinguish Spaniards from Amerindians and to bind conquerors and conquered to the same social system. Principles of hierarchy and reciprocity were employed by Spaniards and Amerindians to define the appropriate customs and means of exchange in a new, syncretic culture of conquest. Together, Spaniards and Amerindians created a sixteenth-century body politic and organic society in what Europeans deemed a New World

Poisoned Ground, The Roots of Eurocentrism: Teleology, Hierarchy, and Anthropocentrism

The dissertation starts with the premise that Eurocentrism, in philosophy and many other areas, continues to be a problem. It comes from the belief in teleological history, which itself rests on hierarchical, anthropocentric metaphysics. To combat the negative effects of Eurocentrism, we must establish alternatives to the metaphysics it rests on and the historical attitudes that it constructs and maintains. The dissertation is divided into three main parts, each with a number of subdivisions. Part one sketches the history of academic Eurocentrism and demonstrates that it is built on a combination of historical ignorance and certain presuppositions associated with Western religious thinking. Specifically, Eurocentrism, since the modern era, has substituted the monotheistic Deity with a peculiar notion of Reason, and has constructed a myth that Reason, and all the positive things it signifies, are uniquely European. Part two is the longest section and it examines Hegel's influence in building the Eurocentric world. He expounds a history that is unequivocally teleological, in which non-European people and ways of thinking are stepping-stones to the more highly evolved European, Christian culture. The events of history have been the unfolding of a code, and that code, or Logos, was discovered in his Science of Logic. This underlying Logic explains both the life of the mind--described in his Phenomenology of Spirit--as well as the life of the world, described in other works, such as his Lectures on the History of Philosophy and Philosophy of History. However, is the Logos truly the source-code for historical events showing them to be completely determined by a preexisting fate? Or does it merely explain the conditions of the possibility for events to arise, the way that they constantly do arise and have arisen? These are completely different alternatives and their implications are massive. I then compare diverging interpretations of Hegel that choose to focus on either his anthropocentric historical teleology, or else his more abstract and spacious metaphysics, which may undermine much of his historical theory. The thrust of these chapters is to show that anthropocentric metaphysics support beliefs in teleological history, which leads to political and social practices of inequality and injustice (e.g., Eurocentrism). To counter this tendency of Hegel's, I consider Darwin's insights against teleology, as well as contemporary object-oriented-ontology, which help us move beyond philosophical anthropocentrism. Rather than being absolute antipodes to these developments, Hegel's theories are adaptable enough to be a useful resource for non-teleological, non-anthropocentric, and non-Eurocentric theories. Part three focuses on the role of language and metaphor in the Eurocentric canons of philosophy. For example, Hegel famously employs the metaphor of the master and slave to describe the dialectical process at work in both the mind and history. The metaphor has significant heuristic power, but it is still a metaphor. When taken literally, it can lead to dangerous misunderstandings about history and justifications for violence. Moreover, when Hegel writes about the Oriental and the African, those terms are hidden metaphors: they do not denote any real persons. However, what he says about them has historically been taken literally, thus leading to warped attitudes about real Asians and Africans in the world. I also analyze the role of literary style in establishing Eurocentric canons, suggesting that an important critical development against Eurocentrism would be the proliferation of alternative writing styles to the entrenched norms of the argumentative monograph and journal article

Spatial Boundaries, Abounding Spaces

Colonial expansion and spatial grammar in French-language works from different historical and national contexts Colonialism advanced its project of territorial expansion by changing the very meaning of borders and space. The colonial project scripted a unipolar spatial discourse that saw the colonies as an extension of European borders. In his monograph, Mohit Chandna engages with narrations of spatial conflicts in French and Francophone literature and film from the nineteenth to the early twenty-first century. In literary works by Jules Verne, Ananda Devi, and Patrick Chamoiseau, and film by Michael Haneke, Chandna analyzes the depiction of ever-changing borders and spatial grammar within the colonial project. In so doing, he also examines the ongoing resistance to the spatial legacies of colonial practices that act as omnipresent enforcers of colonial borders. Literature and film become sites that register colonial spatial paradigms and advance competing narratives that fracture the dominance of these borders. Through its analyses Spatial Boundaries, Abounding Spaces shows that colonialism is not a finished project relegated to our past. Colonialism is present in the here and now, and exercises its power through the borders that define us

Annual Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution, showing the operations, expenditures, and condition of the Institution to July, 1897.

Annual Report of the Smithsonian Institution. 14 Apr. HD 575 (pts. 1-3), 55-2, v78-79 (pts. 1 and 2), 2308p. [3706-3708] Research related to the American Indian