The Concept of Systematic Corruption in American Political and Economic History

The critical role of governance in the promotion of economic development has created intense interest in the manner in which the United States eliminated corruption. This paper examines the concept of corruption in American history; tracing the term corruption to its roots in British political philosophy of the 17th and 18th century, and from there back to Machiavelli, Polybius and Artistole. Corruption was defined prior to 1850 in a way that was significantly different from how it was defined in the Progressive Era. "Systematic corruption" embodied the idea that political actors manipulated the economic system to create economic rents that politicians could use to secure control of the government. In other words, politics corrupts economics. The classic cure for systematic corruption was balanced government. Americans fought for independence because they believed that the British government was corrupt. The structure of American constitutions was shaped by the need to implement balanced government. Conflict and debate over the implementation of balanced government dominated the political agenda until the 1840s, when states began moving regulatory policy firmly towards open entry and free competition. By the 1890s, systematic corruption had essentially appeared from political discourse. By then corruption had come to take on its modern meaning: the idea that economic interests corrupt the political process. What modern developing countries with corrupt governments need to learn is how the United States eliminated systematic corruption.

Piano lessons in the English country house, 1785-1845

Two largely unexplored collections form the basis for research on the significance of piano lessons in the country homes of the British elite in the years around 1800. The owners of the music libraries were the Egerton family at Tatton Park, Cheshire and the Aclands of Killerton House, Devon. The women who married into these families, along with their children, form casestudies that stretch the boundaries of domestic amateur music-making, within an overlooked area of English keyboard repertoire. The piano was emerging as the ideal instrument for girls and women in the home, and this study examines the instruments at their disposal, providing substantial new information on the important Broadwood grand that belonged to Lydia Hoare Acland. Teachers, pupils and pedagogical tools cast light on the transition from a girl’s polite pastime to an emerging school of excellence, and this thesis examines, in detail, the practice of preluding in the education of Elizabeth Sykes Egerton, placing it against the broader background of women’s instruction in the ‘science of music’. The repertoire in the two family collections is a huge, multi-layered resource that adds colour to the outlines of early piano pedagogy, and exemplifies a breadth of skill across three or four generations. In this thesis, I place these important printed music collections in the context of additional contemporary sources, including diaries, memoirs, manuscript music and a commonplace book. Considering these collections in this wider arena, not only reveals a rich picture of early piano pedagogy, but also yields insights into the lives of the individuals who bought and used music for performance, study and sociability

Performing History: Bach Pianism in Britain, 1920–35

The canonical repertoire of Western art music – and, by association, the pantheon of its progenitors – exists both as history and in the living, sounding present. It undergoes reinvention and renegotiation through performance and related activities, prompting reflection on how to account for its multi-faceted ontology. This study applies an array of methodologies to the task of describing and contextualising performance acts with the aim of gaining a more nuanced understanding of one repertoire in one historical time and place. The early decades of the twentieth century were a time of sustained interest in Bach’s music in British musical culture. That interest was manifested with exceptional intensity in the performing, editing, and recording of his keyboard works by pianists. Such a range of phenomena, along with attendant discourses, reveals a historically and culturally situated portrait of the composer as he was understood in Britain between 1920 and 1935. The research questions underlying this enquiry fall into two categories: those related to Bach, and those related to the interaction of performance and history. (1) How did the events of the decades preceding the 1920s shape the way in which Bach and his keyboard works were perceived in Britain? (2) How, by whom, when and where were Bach’s keyboard works performed live, recorded, edited, discussed, taught etc. in Britain during the 1920s and 1930s? Then, (3) How does this range of activity form a more broadly conceived historical narrative? (4) How does the historical context enrich our understanding of the performances themselves? Although it attends to performances and, more generally, to the concerns of the performer, this study is not limited to describing historically situated practices. It seeks more nuanced perspectives on issues such as wider patterns of Bach reception in the twentieth century; how canonical repertoires come to be understood, appreciated, and performed across borders and through time; and finally, how history may be written on the basis of performance events.Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (Canada

Maynooth Musicology: Postgraduate Journal

The second issue of Maynooth Musicology Postgraduate Journal will be a memorable one for the student editors, and for me too as founder and general editor. Many of the young musicologists who have written these essays will embark on new journeys, leaving our department with MLitts. or PhDs, some bringing their experience at Maynooth to bear on studies further afield. It is to the students of this volume and to musicology students in general that this preface is directed, for what matters on such occasions is not so much the educational givens of your background but the state of readiness of your own spirit. In fact, the ability to start out upon your own impulse is fundamental to the gift of keeping going on your own terms, not to mention the further and more fulfilling gift of getting going all over again -never resting upon the oars of success or in the doldrums of disappointment, but getting renewed and revived by some further transformation

Maynooth Musicology: Postgraduate Journal

The aim of the Maynooth Musicology: Postgraduate Journal is twofold: it compiles a selection of articles written by postgraduate students in our department each year. It also affords up to three of our postgraduate students the valuable experience of editing their first journal, drawing on our joint professional work. This volume contains thirteen essays by postgraduate students reflecting current areas of specialism in the music department. Irish musical studies are addressed in articles by Adèle Commins, Jennifer O’Connor and Lisa Parker; Schubert studies are represented by Adam Cullen; nineteenth- and twentieth-century song studies are represented by Paul Higgins, Aisling Kenny and Meng Ren and Late European Romanticism by Jennifer Lee and Emer Nestor. Gender is addressed by Jennifer Halton and essays within the area of electro-acoustic music and music technology are contributed by Brian Bridges, Brian Carty and Barbara Dignam

Edwin Fischer and Bach Performance Practice of the Weimar Republic

Edwin Fischer (1886-1960) provided a synthesis of approaches to Bach pianism that resolved dialectical tensions of long standing between schools that opposed one another throughout the nineteenth century. I argue that Fischer’s synthesis––which permits exegetical interpretation while maintaining a preservationist stance toward the integrity of the text––resembles both Felix Mendelssohn’s bifurcated approach to Bach’s music and Moses Mendelssohn’s description of a similar duality within modern Judaism. Such resemblance may not be coincidental or superficial, given that Fischer married into the Mendelssohn family at the height of its cultural influence in Weimar-Era Berlin. Although pieces of the Mendelssohnian construct were in circulation well before Fischer’s HMV recording of The Well-Tempered Clavier (recorded between 1933 and 1937), that recording served to codify and promulgate his synthesis, which was based on a crucial new approach. The foundations of this approach, which I call musical interpretation through structural amplification, we laid by Ernst Kurth, Karl Straube, Albert Schweitzer, and Ferruccio Busoni, all of whom were in Fischer’s personal circle. Fischer’s exegetical manner of approaching Bach’s keyboard music, through a combination of analysis and amplifying commentary (via pianistic interpretation), appears to have been instrumental in altering Bach pianism in the long term. Despite Fischer’s significance, however, nothing yet has been written that analyzes his Bach-performance practice. I attempt to address that lacuna with this work, the execution of which stems from my belief that conducting a performance practice analysis alone would be insufficient, that such an analysis is best viewed within the complex matrix of Bach-reception in the Weimar Republic; in other words, as an exercise of network science. Fischer’s network was rife with nationalist sentiment that gathered around a revolving diorama of Bach, Dürer, and German Gothic art and architecture during, and just prior to, Fischer’s formative years; with statements of belief regarding the apotropaic power of Bach’s music, which emerged naturally from the German social construction known as Kunstreligion; and with the aesthetics of das neue Bauen that were manifested by the Bauhaus, with which Fischer was very closely associated. In pursuing my investigation and report of findings in this way, I also employ techniques and theories that I have borrowed from cognitive science, especially as it relates to religion, and from the social anthropology of art. On the whole, I suggest that performance practice change takes place within complex systems––which behave in ways that differ fundamentally from those of simple systems––and that such changes in performance styles are poorly described and understood if one indulges in conjuring notions of hovering entities (e.g., “modernist Bach-performance”) in place of describing networks and processes

Victorian Noon

Originally published in 1979. Carl Dawson looks at the year 1850, which was an extraordinary year in English literary history, to study both the great and forgotten writers, to survey journals and novels, poems and magazines, and to ask questions about dominant influences and ideas. His primary aim is descriptive: How was Wordsworth's Prelude received by his contemporaries on its publication in 1850? How did reviewers respond to new tendencies in poetry and fiction/ Who were the prominent literary models? But Dawson's descriptions also lead to broader, theoretical questions about such issues as the status of the imagination in an age obsessed by mechanical invention, about the public role of the writer, the appeal to nature, and the use of myth and memory. To express the Victorians' estimation of poetry, for example, Dawson presents the contrasting views help by two eminent Victorians, Macaulay and Carlyle. In Macaulay's opinion, the advance of civilization led to the decline of poetry; Carlyle, on the other hand, saw the poet as a spiritual liberator in a world of materialists. The fusion of the poet's personal and public roles is witnessed in a discussion of the two mid-Victorian Poet Laureates, Wordsworth and his successor, Tennyson. In analyzing the relationship between the two writers' works, Dawson also highlights the extent of the Victorians' admiration for Dante. To give a wider perspective of the status of literature during this time, Dawson examines reviews, prefaces, and other remarks. Critics, he shows, made a clear distinction between poetry and fiction. Thus, in 1850, a comparison between, say, Wordsworth and Dickens would not have been made. Dawson, however, does compare the two, by focusing on their uses of autobiography. Dickens surfaces again, in a discussion of Victorian periodical publishing. Here, Dawson compares the Pre-Raphaelites' short-lived journal The Germ with Dickens' enormously popular Household Words and a radical paper, The Red Republican, which printed the first English version of "The Communist Manifesto" in 1850. In bringing together materials that have often been seen as disparate and unrelated and by suggesting new literary and ideological relationships, Carl Dawson has written a book to inform almost any reader, whether scholar of Victorian literature or lover of Dicken's novels