Alfred Lorenz As Theorist And Analyst

Given the prominence of his name in the history of Wagnerian analysis, it is surprising that a detailed consideration and evaluation of the work of Alfred Lorenz (1868-1939) has never been attempted. While the basics of Lorenz\u27s approach are relatively straightforward and have long been common knowledge--the division of Wagner\u27s works into tonally unified poetic-musical periods, each shown to follow one of Lorenz\u27s formal types (most famously Bars and Bogens)--the philosophical and aesthetic bases for this approach have seldom been considered, resulting in a skewed portrayal of his work. Failure to consider the foundations of Lorenz\u27s work is symptomatic of a general blindness toward the ideological underpinnings which operate behind yet propel all scholarly inquiry.;What is needed is not an attempt to redo or rehabilitate Lorenz, but an evaluation balanced between an objective description of his system and an account of the ideologies shaping its development and reception. The first chapter, a biographical sketch of Lorenz, includes an account of his personal and professional relationship with National Socialism, and of the close ties between Nazism and Lorenz\u27s analytical methodology. The aesthetic and philosophical foundations of Lorenz\u27s approach are presented in the second chapter: a description of the Schopenhauerian expressive aesthetic position and its influence on the study of musical form in the early twentieth century. The central three chapters are concerned with the details of Lorenz\u27s method of analysis. A discussion of Lorenz\u27s views of such matters as musical form, the leitmotive, and the Gesamtkunstwerk (chapter three), is followed by a detailed explanation and exemplification of the method itself (chapters 4 and 5). The reception history of Das Geheimnis der Form bei Richard Wagner in the sixth chapter chronicles the radical shift in Lorenz\u27s reputation before and after the Second World War, and reveals the central role of ideology in this process. It is prefaced by a survey of the further development and extension of Lorenz\u27s method, both in the later volumes of Das Geheimnis der Form and in his non-Wagnerian analyses. The final chapter relates Lorenz to the aesthetic and analytical context presented in the second chapter, and concludes with an evaluation of his work and its influence

Holocene fluctuations in human population demonstrate repeated links to food production and climate

We consider the long-term relationship between human demography, food production, and Holocene climate via an archaeological radiocarbon date series of unprecedented sampling density and detail. There is striking consistency in the inferred human population dynamics across different regions of Britain and Ireland during the middle and later Holocene. Major cross-regional population downturns in population coincide with episodes of more abrupt change in North Atlantic climate and witness societal responses in food procurement as visible in directly dated plants and animals, often with moves toward hardier cereals, increased pastoralism, and/or gathered resources. For the Neolithic, this evidence questions existing models of wholly endogenous demographic boom–bust. For the wider Holocene, it demonstrates that climate-related disruptions have been quasi-periodic drivers of societal and subsistence change

Narrative Theory and Music; Or, the Tale of Kundry's Tale

In recent years, narrative theory has been an influential model for many writers on music. Things in musical syntax like repetitions, expectations, and resolutions make it tempting to speak of music as narrative, as an emplotment of events, yet such a model in fact involves more narrativization than narrative. It is perhaps more fruitful to focus upon the musical side of unambiguously narrative moments.In this paper, I want to try to integrate recent approaches to musical narration by suggesting that narrative in music is a performance which functions according to the logic of the supplement. My approach will be two-fold: first, I want to justify restricting the enquiry to pre-existing narratives set to music by considering the limitations of the emplotment model; second, I shall use Kundry's Act II narrative in Wagner's Parsifal as a magnet to attract a number of narrative approaches: some will stick and some will not

The Magic Wand of the Wagnerians: Musik als Ausdruck

As is well-known, throughout most of the nineteenth century the defence of Wagner's music was not undertaken on the same grounds on which it was attacked. Critics such as Ludwig Bischoff and Eduard Hanslick attacked Wagner's music for its alleged "formlessness" and harmonic illogicalities, while Wagner's partisans countered with appeals to vaguer criteria of beauty and truthfulness, couched generally in leitmotivic terms, often focusing on the so-called "symphonic web" of Wagner's late works. One particular strategy is encapsulated by the phrase "Musik als Ausdruck," which forms the basis of a number of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century monographs and articles about Wagner's works. Musical gestures were held to encode a particular emotional state and to reawaken that state in the listener, who would intuit the "meaning" of the gesture instinctively; within such an aesthetic, music was held to represent the essence of phenomenon, the "thing-in-itself."This article attempts to provide an account of the dual foundations of this aesthetic paradigm in philosophy and science, as manifested by Arthur Schopenhauer's Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung and by Friedrich von Hausegger's Die Musik als Ausdruck respectively, and suggests that the resulting position – as articulated by Hans von Wolzogen and Curt Mey – is not only incompatible with but also incomparable to that of the formalists. The reconciliation of these two positions would not take place until the 1920s and 1930s with the work of Alfred Lorenz

Theory's Children; or, The New Relevance of Musicology

The recent theoretical turn in musicology has made the discipline more relevant, both within the university itself, and in the larger society within which it is situated. I consider what this development may mean for younger scholars, both as graduate students and as new faculty members, and explore the paradox that critical theory is often attacked for its impenetrability, yet has allowed us to communicate more easily with our colleagues in other disciplines. Finally, I argue that the primary aim for music study in the twenty-first century should be an ethical one: the creation of whole, musical human beings, literate in, and accustomed to thinking about, musics, plural, rather than Music