Singing From Stones: Physiovocality and Gardzienice's Theatre of Musicality

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from OUP via the DOI in this record.Wlodzimierz Staniewski, director of the Polish Centre for Theatre Practices Gardzienice, considers directing as a praxis pertaining to the field of musical composition. His pieces have been theorised as either “ethno-oratoria” or “village operas,” while the pedagogy developed by the group is a territory for the exploration of the tensions between the physical and the vocal. Building on my recent fieldwork with the company, this chapter problematizes the separation of vocality and choreographic/movement practices in performer training and uses Gardzienice’s example as a case study in physiovocality. Meanwhile, the core principles of Staniewski’s work, namely mutuality, musicality and chorality, are analyzed as points of departure from music theaters towards a theater of musicality

The Diverse Agencies of Renaissance Engineers in the Shadow of War

Early Modern military engineers are obvious ‘shadow agents’ of war: not necessarily present on the battlefield, their impact on the art of war was nevertheless considerable. The complexity of the professional profile of Renaissance military engineers during the ‘military revolution’ still makes their identity a historical riddle. In this chapter, I will try to address two issues concerning Renaissance military engineers from the standpoint of the history of science and technology: the cultural models behind their apparent polymathesis – here intended as a wide-ranging learning freely pursued independently from cultural models – and their agency in lesser-known military affairs such as technological propaganda, intelligence and astrology

“Ahorita estamos en lo nuestro” (“Now We Are Ourselves”): Afro-Venezuelan Music Rituals for Health and Community Wellbeing

In Venezuela, people of West African descent developed rituals for wellbeingwithin Catholic contexts. This study analyses performances directed at fulfilling health-related desires. The first is ritual street performance staged as part of Corpus Christi, under the name of the Devils of Corpus Christi. It includes instrumental music, dance, special clothing, theatricality and high symbolism. The second performance is the Feast of Saint John, celebrated with drums, songs, dances and rituals. These ritual music festivities also present communal benefits like solidarity, pleasure and unity, since people can express their unique identities through them and use them as acts of resistance

Music between nature and culture

In considering the titular opposition - music between nature and culture - we shall refer to such categories as time, with its levels and zones, and cultural communication. Conceptions of time. In an archaic situation dating from the Palaeolithic era, people lived, and cultures functioned, in sacred time, with no notion o f secular time. Another conception of time comes from the Bible, where we first encounter a ‘straightening’ of time, delineating its direction from the Creation to the Final Judgment (inopposition to ancient views on time, associating it with the wheel, with circular motion, dying and birth). Aristotle drew on Plato’s concept of time. He reduced it to the dimension of the human world, thereby initiating reflection on the ‘present’, which would endure in European thought through Saint Augustine to Edmund Husserl and our contemporary times. From this perspective, music is a process: playing, listening or participating in a musical event. Levels of time. These are as follows: atemporality (contains only simultaneity), prototemporality (contains temporal order, but also simultaneity), eotemporality (besides the features belonging to the aforementioned levels, also contains temporal intervals), biotemporality (as above, and also the present), and finally nootemporality (the human mind, awareness of time). The zones of time, meanwhile, comprise the zone of the psychological present (the motion of one’s own body, the perception of the sensory organs, natural language, musical language), the zone of performances of works (the shaping of form, including musical form), the zone of the temporal environment (three cycles: the diurnal, lunar and annual), and the zone of individual and communal life (the time from birth to death, and also memory, which reveals the sense of music from many perspectives). Cultural communication. In considering this phenomenon, we develop Roman Jakobson’s popular model of communication, expanded to encompass Karl Popper’s model of ‘three worlds’, through which we can propose a layered model of reality and, derived from that model, a concept of music as an efflorescence of nature in the culture of man. This is presented in detail in a series of figures (19-23 and especially 27)

Gods and men on stage: cosmology in the staging of XVII century

La concepción cosmológica que se fue configurando en la época moderna impuso la semiótica del gobierno de los monarcas absolutistas, que tenía su traducción en una tipología iconográfica, recurrente, en la decoración escenográfica de los distintos espectáculos de la celebración áulica, en base a los denominados cuatro elementos de Tales de Mileto. Se propone una aproximación a la simbología del “Buen Gobierno” o más bien de la mentalidad implícita a la sumisión y el vasallaje por el que se regían los gobiernos autocráticos, a través del análisis escenográfico de algunas obras emblemáticas de la Historia del Arte y de las Artes Escénicas.The cosmological conception took shape in the modern era imposed semiotics government of absolutist monarchs, who had his translation iconographic, recurrent typology in the scenic decoration of the different performances of courtly celebration, based on the so-called four elements of Thales. An approach to the symbolism of "Good Goverment" or rather the implicit mentality of submission or allegiance by the autocratic governments were ruled through the scenographic analysis of some emblematic works of art history and proposed the Performing Arts.Biblioteca Histórica Marqués de ValdecillaUCM. BibliotecaTRUEpu

Michael Praetorius Creuzbergensis-The Man, the Musician, the Theologian: An Introduction

One particular focus of this paper will be Praetorius\u27 theology of music, woven of the thread of coneio et cantio, sermon and song, that runs through the prefaces and dedicatory letters to many of his works. The overall purpose of this paper is to make available in English an introduction to the music and thought of Praetorius, since most of the primary sources and much of the secondary literature are not translated. Material quoted in the text from German and Latin sources has been translated into English, and a translation of one important primary source, his Funeral Sermon, is appended at the end