Speechsong

"Speechsong is a work of imaginative musicology that addresses the engimas of Schoenberg and Gould, of singing and speaking, of Moses und Aron, of technology and being. Its point of departure is Gould’s last public performance, given at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre in Los Angeles, where a number of Schoenberg’s works were performed during his California exile. It is here, after that last performance, that Gould encounters a spectral Schoenberg in a staged conversation that explores Schoenberg’s travails in rethinking the fundamentals of Western music. This first part of Speechsong recalls Schoenberg’s operatic masterpiece, Moses und Aron, in which the divinely inspired Moses seeks the help of his brother to relate his vision: Moses speaks and Aron sings. Written as a twelve-tone composition, the opera produces an involution of harmonics that was Schoenberg’s response to Richard Wagner’s diatribes about synagogue noise. For Gould, Schoenberg’s is a formalist revolution; Schoenberg’s life, however, suggests that it was a search for personal and political freedom. The second half of Speechsong is a critical essay in twelve “moments” that re-articulates the staged conversation as an inquiry into the intersections of music and mediation. Gould’s turn to the recording studio emerges as a post-humanist inquiry into recorded music as a repudiation of the virtuoso tradition and a liberation from unitary notions of selfhood. Schoenberg’s exodus from musical tradition likewise takes his twelve-tone invention beyond musical performance, where it emerges, along with Gould’s soundscapes, as a prototype of acoustic installations by artists such as Stephen Prina and Cory Arcangel. In these works, music abandons the concert hall and the exigencies of harmony for an acoustic space that embraces at once the recordings of Gould and the performances of Schoenberg that have found their home on the internet.

Speechsong

"Speechsong is a work of imaginative musicology that addresses the engimas of Schoenberg and Gould, of singing and speaking, of Moses und Aron, of technology and being. Its point of departure is Gould’s last public performance, given at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre in Los Angeles, where a number of Schoenberg’s works were performed during his California exile. It is here, after that last performance, that Gould encounters a spectral Schoenberg in a staged conversation that explores Schoenberg’s travails in rethinking the fundamentals of Western music. This first part of Speechsong recalls Schoenberg’s operatic masterpiece, Moses und Aron, in which the divinely inspired Moses seeks the help of his brother to relate his vision: Moses speaks and Aron sings. Written as a twelve-tone composition, the opera produces an involution of harmonics that was Schoenberg’s response to Richard Wagner’s diatribes about synagogue noise. For Gould, Schoenberg’s is a formalist revolution; Schoenberg’s life, however, suggests that it was a search for personal and political freedom. The second half of Speechsong is a critical essay in twelve “moments” that re-articulates the staged conversation as an inquiry into the intersections of music and mediation. Gould’s turn to the recording studio emerges as a post-humanist inquiry into recorded music as a repudiation of the virtuoso tradition and a liberation from unitary notions of selfhood. Schoenberg’s exodus from musical tradition likewise takes his twelve-tone invention beyond musical performance, where it emerges, along with Gould’s soundscapes, as a prototype of acoustic installations by artists such as Stephen Prina and Cory Arcangel. In these works, music abandons the concert hall and the exigencies of harmony for an acoustic space that embraces at once the recordings of Gould and the performances of Schoenberg that have found their home on the internet.

Ritual Economies

Humanities Research Group Working Papers 13https://scholar.uwindsor.ca/hrg-working-papers/1012/thumbnail.jp

The Shalem Counselling Assistance Plan for Students (CAPS): Delivering Social Work Services to Faith-Based School Systems

In Ontario, Canada, non-Catholic faith-based schools do not receive provincial government funding but are funded primarily by families of students and through fundraising. As a result, historically school-based provision of counselling or school social work resources to students has been the exception rather than the rule, as this has typically been considered an adjunct resource. A new initiative was launched in the province of Ontario in 2011 to address this gap, the Counselling Assistance Plan for Students (CAPS). CAPS was premised on another novel idea, a Congregational Assistance Plan, which itself grew out of concepts derived from Employee Assistance Programming that has roots dating back to the 19th century in Canada. While CAPS has parallels to Student Assistance Programming (SAP), which exists throughout the United States, development of SAP has not taken hold in Canada. This article examines the origins of CAPS, its development, and the nature of assistance it has provided to the schools that have been early adopters

McLuhan and the Humanities

A discussion of McLuhan's influence on the humanities

McLuhan’s “Borderline Case” Revisited

L’essai « Canada: The Borderline Case » [Le Canada: le cas frontière], de McLuhan (1967), propose d’envisager le Canada non pas comme un pays ayant un « contenu » culturel et politique stable, ou une relation singulière avec les États-Unis, mais comme une nation en devenir, du fait de ses multiples relations de frontières, apparues avec la médiation électronique. Les idées de McLuhan ont trouvé un intérêt renouvelé à l’ère de la mondialisation, où la dynamique entre le local et le mondial revêt une importance grandissante. Paradoxalement, dans ce contexte, nous avons un besoin accru de frontières multiples, précisément pour articuler la relation entre le local et le mondial

The self obscure : the influence of Dante on Beckett

Beckett has continually alluded to Dante throughout his career. This thesis traces the extent of the influence of Dante on Beckett, and interprets Beckett in the light of that influence. Dante figures in Beckett’s two major critical works, "Dante... Bruno. Vico.. Joyce" and Proust. In the essay on Joyce Beckett gives his own definitions of the three post-mortal states. In the essay on Proust, Beckett defines the artistic process as a descent toward the essence. The early fiction and poetry is distinct from the later works in that the allusions to Dante are more frequent and more obvious. The anti-hero of More Pricks than Kicks is Belacqua Shuah. Belacqua’s eponym appears in the Ante-purgatory (Purg. 4) where he is pictured reliving his life before ascending to the scourges of the Mountain. Belacqua's foetal state, called the "Belacqua bliss" in Murphy, is the state to which all of Beckett's characters aspire, from Shuah to the lone searcher in The Lost Ones. Beckett uses the Commedia as an ironic frame of reference in Watt, as he does in Three Novels: Molloy is infernal, Malone Dies purgatorial and The Unnamable paradisal. The Commedia is also used inversely, to indicate the regress into hell, for each of the four narratives in Three Novels represents the same story told at four different levels of abstraction. These levels correspond to the four allegorical levels on which Dante said his poem could be interpreted. In Beckett's work, however, there is no ultimate level of abstraction, and each word his narrators speak removes them further from the essential nothingness they wish to express. In the trilogy Beckett's major debt to Dante is to the third canto of the Inferno, especially that section which describes those in the Vestibule of hell. Dante shows these sinners as having never lived, and therefore without hope of death. Dante places them on the threshold of judgement, as are Beckett's characters, who all wait to be judged. The essence of damnation in Beckett's cosmos is that there is no damnation. Godot and Endgame are not overtly Dantesque. The allusions to Dante in the former suggest an ancient order which no longer obtains, yet which still governs the tramps' lives. How It Is is the most obviously Dantesque of Beckett's works, as the allusions to the mud of the third and fourth circles of Inferno indicate: life is hell. The Lost Ones is also obviously Dantesque. The rubber cylinder is a metaphor for the work of art, the only value of which is the possibility it holds of transcendence. Ironically, the lost ones cannot go beyond it. This thesis concludes that the allusions to Belacqua indicate a shift in attitude, from one which admitted hope to one of despair. In a world without the Logos, the allegorist (for such is the tradition in which Beckett writes) can achieve only confusion. His only hope is that by writing continually he can abstract his being to its essential nothingness. Because Beckett's art responds to the tradition epitomized by the Commedia, and because he has continually invoked Dante as his standard, the study of Beckett in terms of Dante provides the clearest view of his art.Arts, Faculty ofEnglish, Department ofGraduat