bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Stability and Crisis
Authors: Britnell Richard
Published: November 2023

Contrasts between the periods 1050–1300 and 1300–1520 are inclined to be exaggerated because of the superior information available for the later period, which enables fluctuations of all sorts to be identified with greater clarity. Yet there were real differences between the two periods, if only because the crises of 1300–1530 had such a deleterious effect upon the long-term development of population and arable farming. No single cause can account for the reduction in numbers in all parts of Britain and Ireland during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, even if epidemic disease outstrips all others in severity and the permanence of its impact. There were interludes of economic and demographic recovery, but recurrent crises repeatedly subverted earlier gains.
Kingdoms and Communities in Western Europe, 900-1300
Authors: Reynolds Susan
Published: November 2023

This study is an exploration of the collective values and activities of lay society in Western Europe between the tenth century and the thirteenth. Arguing that medieval attitudes and behaviour have been too readily defined in terms of hierarchical structures of government, clerical thought, or a narrow notion of kinship, the author instead places new emphasis on the horizontal bonds of collective association which permeated society in medieval England, France and Burgundy, Germany, the Netherlands, and Italy. By refocusing attention on the social and political values that characterized lay collective activity, this book offers a stimulating new approach to the history of medieval Europe. The second edition of this important study incorporates a substantial new introduction, which amplifies the arguments of the original edition and takes account of recent research. ON THE FIRST EDITION `all students of the Middle Ages and of collective organization will be indebted to Reynolds for this rich and original book. It will be a starting-point for discussion and the reference point for information', Times Literary Supplement.
Lay Collective Activity, 900-1300: A General View
Authors: Reynolds Susan
Published: November 2023

Many of the arguments set out in the preceding chapters are vulnerable to criticism from specialists in the various fields into which my subject has led me, so that the accumulation of errors may leave any general conclusions looking distinctly weak. In spite of that danger, I hope that it may be agreed that between 900 and 1300 lay society and government depended in a mass of different ways on the collective activities of a wide range of people; that this activity was undertaken as a matter of course in support of government, as well as in opposition to it; and that in all its aspects it reveals a very homogeneous set of values, which combined acceptance of inequality and subordination with a high degree of voluntary co-operation. These values, moreover, continued to dominate collective activity throughout the period. Although the twelfth and thirteenth centuries brought new forms of collective activity, clearer articulation of the duties owed to and by communities, and somewhat clearer expression of the values they embodied, the evidence of any fundamental change of values is surprisingly small. By 1300 there are hints of novelty, but no more: rash as it may seem to try to disentangle cause and effect on such a topic, it looks, in other words, as if new practice evoked new theory, not the other way round.
The Kingdom of France in the sixteenth century
Authors: Holt MackP
Published: November 2023

How do we define the French nation at the beginning of the sixteenth century? Is it even possible to think in such terms when the nation state, not to mention nationalism, are still nearly three centuries away? Moreover, in the year 1500 nearly one-fourth of the kingdom’s roughly 450,000 km2 had only been recently acquired in the previous fifty years. Five principal languages were spoken - French, Occitan, Basque, Breton, and Flemish-not to mention scores of local and regional dialects all across the kingdom. So, just what can the term ‘nation’ mean in the sixteenth century, when the state was based much more on the king’s sovereignty over his subjects rather than on a defined territory with fixed boundaries? If the nation of France in 1500 was simply all those people who declared Louis XII to be their sovereign king-that is, a community of people rather than a defined segment of real estate-what ties, if any, united these diverse people together into a community? For many scholars a nation can only be built upon a shared culture and common social organization, because the latter are universal and perennial while states and nations are not.
Religion and the sacred
Authors: Benedict Philip , Reinburg Virginia
Published: November 2023

Amid the patchwork of provinces that made up France in 1500, in a world where country folk were very different from town dwellers, the learned from the unlettered, and nobles from commoners, Christianity defined the country’s common culture like nothing else. For much of the Middle Ages the French kings had tolerated a small minority of Jews, but they had been definitively expelled in 1394. Small pockets of Waldensians (vaudois) lived in the hills of Dauphine and Provence. These dogged descendants of a heretical movement of the twelfth century remained loyal to their barbes (lay preachers). Their refusal to pray to saints, honour images, or submit to priests they considered immoral brought them intermittently afoul of the law. Still, they conformed to most features of the established religious order, regularly attending mass and receiving the sacraments.
Catholic reform and religious coexistence
Authors: Diefendorf Barbara , Reinburg Virginia
Published: November 2023

Until the middle of the sixteenth century, Christianity had been a major source of France’s common culture. But the dramatic growth of the Protestant movement, the division of French Christians into two separate confessions, and decades of civil war had undermined that collective identification with Christian symbols and practices. The Edict of Nantes, decreed by Henry IV and registered by the parlements, established a truce between Catholics and Huguenots, within the framework of Catholicism as the kingdom’s majority and officially established religion. The wording of the edict’s preamble refers obliquely to the collective religious life of all the king’s subjects.
Berkeley’s World
Authors: Stoneham Tom
Published: November 2023

Tom Stoneham offers a clear and detailed study of Berkeley's metaphysics and epistemology, as presented in his classic work Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, originally published in 1713 and still widely studied. Stoneham shows that Berkeley is an important and systematic philosopher whose work is still of relevance to philosophers today.
Berkeley’s World
Authors: Stoneham Tom
Published: November 2023

Berkeley held that reality consisted of two types of entity: minds and ideas. These two types of entity are related by perception: minds perceive ideas. Ideas depend for their existence upon standing in this relation to some mind; they are mind-dependent entities. Thus for ideas, i.e. for everything which is not a mind, to be is to be perceived.
The Sensible
Authors: Stoneham Tom
Published: November 2023

At the outset, Hylasand Philonous agree on a criterion of unacceptability in metaphysics, namely that someone ‘denies the reality of sensible things or professes the greatest ignorance of them’ (DHP1 173). Since Philonous does want to deny the reality of material things, he must address the important question: What do we perceive with our senses? He must find an answer to this question which is (a) sufficiently general to encompass everything we do or might perceive, and (b) sufficiently specific for Philonous to be able to prove something about all the sensible things, namely that they are none of them material, that they are all mind-dependent.
Beginnings: From Pythagoras to Plato
Authors: Kenny Anthony
Published: November 2023

The history of philosophy does not begin with Aristotle, but the historiography of philosophy does. Aristotle was the Worst philosopher who systematically studied, recorded, and criticized the work of previous philosophers. In the Worst book of the Metaphysics he summarizes the teachings of his predecessors, from his distant intellectual ancestors Pythagoras and Thales up to Plato, his teacher for twenty years. To this day he is one of the most copious, and most reliable, sources of our information about philosophy in its infancy. Aristotle offers a classification of the earliest Greek philosophers in

accordance with the structure of his system of the four causes.
How Things Happen: Physics
Authors: Kenny Anthony
Published: November 2023

In earlier chapters we saw how Greek thinkers, from Thales to Plato, developed an elaborate picture of the universe we live in. Though of great historic interest, their physical theories have been superseded by the progress of science, and can no longer offer us enlightenment about the world. The same is true of Aristotle’s world-picture; but in addition to physical speculation, Aristotle offered, to a much greater extent than any of his predecessors, a philosophical examination of underlying concepts that are basic to physical explanation of many different kinds. His philosophy of physics, unlike his physical system itself, contains much that remains of abiding interest.
God
Authors: Kenny Anthony
Published: November 2023

In Homer’s poems gods and goddesses figure prominently among the cast of characters. Zeus, the king of the gods, with his consort, Hera, and ten members of their extended family, including his daughter Athena, Aphrodite the goddess of love, and Poseidon the sea-god, all live together in a blissful abode on Mount Olympus. They take a keen partisan interest in the doings of the human heroes of the Iliad and the Odyssey. These gods and goddesses are simply human beings writ large, with all the emotions and vices of human beings. They interact both mentally and physically with ordinary humans, often with disastrous results. The only fundamental difference between gods and men is that men die while gods are immortal.
The State: Its Elements and Purposes
Authors: Finnis John
Published: November 2023

Aquinas’ most important treatment of political matters is perhaps his treatise on law (I-II qq. 90-108), a discussion shaped by a methodological decision and a theoretical thesis. The thesis is that law exists, locally or centrally, only in complete communities {perfec- tae communitates}. The methodological decision is to set aside all questions about which sorts of multi-family community are ‘complete’, and to consider a type, usually named civitas, whose completeness is simply posited. It is not a decision to regard the civitas as internally static or as free from external enemies. Revolutions and wars, flourishing, corruption, and decay are firmly on the agenda.
Politics I: Slavery
Authors: Kraut Richard
Published: November 2023

We must now turn to a topic that looms large in the remainder of Book I of the Politics: Aristotle’s attempt to show that the enslavement of certain kinds of people is just. That he defended an institution that is inherently debasing and often brutal is a deeply disturbing feature of his political thought, and our repugnance increases when we learn that his attempt to justify this practice played a significant role in its perpetuation. Two millennia after the Politics was written, Aristotle’s assertion that some people are slaves by their very nature figured prominently in debates in Spain about the legitimacy of enslaving indigenous peoples of the New World.1 And in the American South, the existence of slavery in Greece and Rome-and the defense of slavery in the Politics-gave comfort to apologists for this institution.
The Approach to Playing Baroque Sonatas Some General Points
Authors: Rowland-Jones Anthony
Published: November 2023

The performance of a piece of music is likely to be of more significance, and probably more effective, if the player knows what the music ‘wants of him’, what it is intended to communicate, what its purpose is. In his analysis of the meaning and use of the sonata in the Baroque era, Newman cites many contemporary opinions, all saying that the purpose of music is to please and move an audience, the delectation of the player not being a prime consideration. More specifically, instrumental music dissociated from a church or dramatic context is ‘for the refreshment of the ear at entertainments and assemblies’.
Sound and Expression: Handel’s Sonata in G minor
Authors: Rowland-Jones Anthony
Published: November 2023

The recorder, or ‘flute douce’, cannot be regarded as an instrument ideally suited to playing sonatas. Because of its plangent articulation, and its intense yet pure and ethereal sound, the recorder was associated with scenes of ‘soft delight’, pastoral or garden settings, and other-worldly contexts. Except for the second and fourth Brandenburg Concertos, the Handel sonatas, and some of Telemann’s sonatas, trio sonatas, and other chamber music, the best Baroque music specifically written for the recorder is found within a literary or vocal milieu, such as episodes in Purcell’s Odes and theatre music and in Bach cantatas and Handel operas, where the sound of two recorders contrasts wonderfully with the presence of other instruments and voices. These are on the whole short passages and special occasions.
Ontologies of Music
Authors: Bohlman Philip V
Published: November 2023

Music may be what we think it is; it may not be. Music may be feeling or sensuality, but it may also have nothing to do with emotion or physical sensation. Music may be that to which some dance or pray or make love; but it’s not necessarily the case. In some cultures there are complex categories for thinking about music; in others there seems to be no need whatsoever to contemplate music. What music is remains open to question at all times and in all places. This being the case, any metaphysics of music must perforce cordon off the rest of the world from a privileged time and place, a time and place thought to be one’s own. Thinking—or even rethinking—music, it follows, is at base an attempt to claim and control music as one’s own.
The Institutionalization of Musicology: Perspectives of a North American Ethnomusicologist
Authors: Nettl Bruno
Published: November 2023

What is it that comes to the minds of musicians, music students, lovers of all types of music, members of the academic professions, when they hear or read the word ‘musicology’—or ‘Musikwissenschaft’ or ‘musicologie’ or ‘musicologia’ and so on? To some it suggests fascinating books and lectures from which one learns things one has never suspected about the music and composers one loves. To others it conjures up a kind of police force which sees to it that one learns about composers and their works, long past and perhaps distant, things quite irrelevant to one’s musical life in the present. To yet another audience, it is the voice of authority, a branch of knowledge that tells you what in music is good and worthy of hearing and what is bad and to be avoided.
Readiness to Sing: The Raw Material
Authors: Hemsley Thomas
Published: November 2023

Oh! How great a master is the heart! Confess it, my beloved singers, and gratefully own, that you would not have arrived at the highest Rank of the Profession if you had not been its pupils; own, that in a few lessons from it, you learned the most beautiful expressions, the most refined taste, the most noble action, and the most exquisite graces: own (even though it may seem incredible) that the heart corrects the defects of nature, since it softens the voice that is harsh, betters an indifferent one, and perfects a good one: own that when the heart sings you cannot dissemble, nor has truth a greater power of per suading: and, finally, make it known (for I cannot teach it), that from the heart alone you have learned that certain inde scribable charm which runs softly through all the veins and finally reaches the very soul. Although the way to the heart is long and rugged, and known only to a few, a studious application will, notwithstanding, master all difficulties.
Impulse, Intention, and the Anacrusis
Authors: Hemsley Thomas
Published: November 2023

I have already spoken about the raw material of singing in our tradition: the impulse to express feelings and emotions through vocal sound. It is not the same as the wish to sing the feeling that many people have when listening to a great singer ( ‘Oh! I would love to be able to do that ‘). It is some thing much more basic, much more instinctive, more directly linked to ‘the primaeval sounds and exclamations, with which men express their inner feelings and reactions to impressions from the world around them ‘ (Manen, Bel Canto). This primitive impulse, together with a high degree of vital energy, is the essential raw material of singing, and must be cultivated and strengthened; but if it is to be turned into art, it must be controlled and guided by the singer ‘s conscious intention. If the physical attributes of the singer are such as to make the voice strong and of an appealing character, then so much the better.
The Work of the Imagination: The Study of Vocal Music
Authors: Hemsley Thomas
Published: November 2023

The purpose, indeed the sole purpose, of training for the profession of singing is to improve the connection between the imagination and the sounds that eventually issue from the singer ‘s mouth. The more competent the singer, the closer will be that connection, and therefore the greater the extent to which the quality of the end-result will depend on the quality of the imaginative activity that initiated the whole process.
Pulse
Authors: Hemsley Thomas
Published: November 2023

Although I do not intend to quote him at length, I freely acknowledge my indebtedness to his book, on this, and in deed on many other, aspects of the art of interpretation. After all, although I am writing nearly a century later, and although styles of performance have changed, the qualities that are basic to all musical performance have not changed. The aspects of performance which change are a matter of fashion, and are largely superficial. The aspects which speak directly to our instincts and our feelings remain constant. The danger inherent in much modern concern with so-called ‘authenti city ‘ in performance practice, is that exaggerated concern with superficial aspects of musical performance-fashion can easily deflect performers from the musical and poetic essentials. In particular it can too easily lead them to forget that their prime purpose is to communicate the contents of whatever it is that they are playing or singing.
Preface
Authors: Manning Jane
Published: November 2023

Heartened by the fact that New Vocal Repertory, in its recent new edition (Clarendon Press: Oxford, 1994), seems to be in regular use in leading music colleges and private practice, I have chosen a second batch of less familiar twentieth-century songs and song cycles suitable for general use. It appears that teachers and singers find it helpful for someone to test the water before they plunge into the bewildering whirlpool of contemporary vocal music, with its vastly diverging styles, idioms, and levels of difficulty. The blanket term ‘modern music’ is still used too vaguely. The musical difficulties experienced with certain atonal pieces written in the early part of the century by such great composers as Schoenberg and Webern, and the disconcertingly innovative notation of ‘experimental’ music of the sixties and seventies, have perhaps inhibited further exploration.
Dream Songs
Authors: Bennett Richard Rodney
Published: November 2023

This composer’s mastery of so many forms and types of music is deservedly admired. The breadth of his experience as a performer in widely varying styles enhances his ability to produce apt and eminently practicable music for all occasions. A large output of works suitable for young performers or amateurs should not, however, lead anyone to imagine that he is a lightweight. His authority is displayed equally in his large-scale symphonic and operatic works as in his music for film, or his jazz-influenced pieces. This is versatility at the very highest level and performers and audiences alike are the beneficiaries.
Three Songs
Authors: Cresswell Lyell
Published: November 2023

The New Zealand-born composer Lyell Cresswell, now resident in Edinburgh, has become established as an original and vital force in Scottish musical life, yet his music, always bold and individual, retains a strong identification with his heritage. His solo-voice piece ‘Prayer for the Cure of a Sprained Back’ sets a Maori prayer, and the type of vocalizing required is far from Western traditions. His stature as a composer of power and integrity is now receiving the recognition it deserves, and his development over the years has been most impressive.
Childhood Fables for Grownups (Set 1)*
Authors: Fine Irving
Published: November 2023

The early death of Irving Fine robbed American musical life of a rewarding and assured composer, who would by now have come to be revered as a major figure. His work is of the highest quality, rigorously imagined and strong in character. These delightful songs represent the composer in his lighter vein, but there is no sacrifice of compositional intensity. The first set of four are relatively modest in scale, but the later two songs are altogether more ambitious, and demand much of the performers. Each set can be performed separately, but the whole sequence constitutes an exciting and substantial addition to the general repertory.
Drei Lieder Aus ‘Der Struwwelpeter’
Authors: Hobbs Christopher
Published: November 2023

Christopher Hobbs belongs, with Howard Skempton and others, to a group of British composers associated with the late Cornelius Cardew, who, in the sixties, were especially concerned with preserving and developing the connection between the Arts and International Socialism. Inspiration was found in the examples of Brecht and others, who deliberately eschewed the idea of the artist, including the classical composer and performer, as representative of an elite’ or middle-class culture. New music had certainly become polarized in what now seems an unhealthy way, and those whose styles were consciously accessible were often unjustly neglected by the musical establishment.
Ten Songs
Authors: Wesley-Smith Martin
Published: November 2023

The Australian composer Martin Wesley-Smith has the rare attribute of being able to write music that is immediately accessible, witty, and often hilarious. A self-confessed eclectic, he also has a great gift for words, and an original mind, combining a perpetually youthful outlook with a burning commitment to political and environmental issues.
Banquo’s Buried (1982) Cry Cock-a-Doodle-Doo!
Authors: Bauld Alison
Published: November 2023

This composer’s dramatic gifts are always evident in her work. Early professional experience as an actress in her native Australia, and an appetite for a wide range of cultural influences, especially the literary and visual art forms, equip her ideally to express herself with eloquence and flair. Although her music may appear relatively simple in its appearance on the page, it is highly disciplined and conceived with a very clear idea as to its interpretation, although she is keen to help a performance develop through the rehearsal period, and is not afraid to discard, adapt, and fine-tune details right up to the first performance.
Childhood Fables for Grownups (Set 2)*
Authors: Fine Irving
Published: November 2023

This song and its companion have considerable musical weight and sophistication, despite the light-hearted subjects, and the accompaniments are even more demanding technically than Set 1. Simpler melodic elements, as found in the first set, are developed in a more advanced musical idiom, and voice parts are a little more showy. However, generally speaking, the pianist bears the brunt of the responsibility for the interpretation.

A key signature of A flat is given, but there is a modal E flat feeling to the opening music. Appropriately there is considerable legato writing.
Despondent Nonsenses
Authors: Grant Julian
Published: November 2023

A perfectly proportioned miniature cycle of six songs, this should be very popular indeed with performers and audiences. It is not quite as simple to sing as may at first appear, because of the many subtleties of nuance and phrasing. Julian Grant’s work is always a pleasure to encounter, and his special knowledge and experience in dramatic forms is a great asset to the impact of his vocal works. He already has several operatic successes to his credit, including some outstandingly imaginative works for young people.
Fatal Harmony
Authors: Hellawell Piers
Published: November 2023

This is a brief but delightfully lyrical setting of a much-loved poem. It makes a lovely showpiece for a singer of strong musical gifts, and a fine sense of relative pitch. The vocal writing is in long spans and moves in decorative figures for much of the time. The music is divided into three sections, and the composer envisages two different ways of presenting the piece: either in its entirety, or with each section interspersed with other works.
Un Colloque sentimental (A Sentimental Conversation)
Authors: Matthews Colin
Published: November 2023

This is a lovely work by one of our most sensitive and versatile composers. it seems beautifully balanced in structure, although the composer, somewhat surprisingly, reveals, in his note at the front of the score, that the three central songs of the five were in fact written between 1971 and 1978 for ‘private pleasure’. ‘Le Jet d’eau’ is the composer’s earliest surviving piece. Eventually he had the idea of expanding them into a cycle, by enclosing them within the two unequal parts of the setting of Verlaine’s celebrated poem of the title. He has, on his own admission, also taken certain liberties with the texts, making several omissions and alterations to suit his personal responses to the special world of nineteenth-century French poetry.
The Golden Kingdom, Op. 33 (1979-83)
Authors: Matthews David
Published: November 2023

The Matthews brothers (cf. Colin Matthews Un Colloque sentimental) continue to produce some of the most rewarding work to come from the middle generation of British composers, yet their styles could hardly be more different. David, the elder, has a special fondness for the voice, and has written a good number of song cycles, some with orchestra. He unashamedly favours a lush romanticism, and creates a rich palette of vocal and instrumental colours set in warmly sensuous harmonic textures. This cycle of nine songs is a particularly beguiling compilation of varied settings, written over a number of years, and bound into a satisfying and nicely constructed whole.
The Witches’ Song*
Authors: Bauld Alison
Published: November 2023

Singing unaccompanied is of course a great test of musicianship and ability to pitch accurately and maintain tuning. Without the unfair advantage of perfect pitch it is difficult to envisage the singer managing this piece without the aid of a pitch-pipe or tuning-fork, but this could be used as a theatrical prop, obviously not furtively, and would be well in keeping with the natural eccentricity of the setting and characters.
Time Past N
Authors: Emmerson Simon
Published: November 2023

A work for voice and electronics might seem to indicate a specialized and somewhat rarefied taste, but this hauntingly beautiful work is immediately accessible in its firm tonality and logical construction. It is based throughout on a single hexachord and its transposition. Mellifluous vocal lines, consisting of syllabic fragments from the well-loved text (Sonnet XXX), range widely within the chosen pitch framework, and variety is provided by decorative melismas in the form of grace-notes.
Songs from the Exotic
Authors: Weir Judith
Published: November 2023

Judith Weir continues to delight us with the freshness of her ideas and her firm grasp of practicalities. She has discovered how to write accessible music that is not at all facile or superficial: a rare feat. Her musicianship is completely at one with her literary imagination and her sense of fun-also, her innate good taste. These gifts enable her to steer close to the areas of pastiche and parody without losing her individuality, or offending purists. Since the highly original, much-admired solo opera King Harald’s Saga (1979) she has written many more vocal works, including three full-scale operas, and her instinct for vocal writing is even more assured.
Abendlied
Authors: Buckley John
Published: November 2023

John Buckley is one of the most gifted and assured of the middle generation of Irish composers, and is deservedly enjoying an increasing international reputation. His music is richly cosmopolitan, showing the influence of major Continental masters such as Messiaen. This cycle makes a fine recital item, but none the less calls on considerable reserves of stamina from both singer and pianist. The vocal tessitura is consistently high, there are constant demands on breath capacity, and the ability to sustain long notes in the upper register is exhibited to the full.
Awa Herea (Braided Rivers)
Authors: Whitehead Gillian
Published: November 2023

A truly outstanding piece by one of the most consistently rewarding representatives of New Zealand’s art and culture. Gillian Whitehead has long been admired for her poetic vision, natural musicality, and craftmanship. Resident in Britain for many years, she now divides her time between Australia and New Zealand. Her output includes several operas and many other vocal chamber works, and all these show her exceptional lyrical and dramatic gifts. A real performers’ composer, she has often collaborated with New Zealand poets, most particularly Fleur Adcock.
Dominant to Tonic
Authors: Pratt George
Published: November 2023

The progression from dominant chord (V) to tonic chord (I) is the most powerful in Western tonal music. In its most emphatic form, it appears at the end of phrases, with both chords in root position, with a seventh added to V. Ycu will probably be familiar with this already, as the perfect cadence.

Paradoxically, it is logical to begin with endings. Tonal music is always being driven on in a forward direction until it reaches a cadence, a point of repose. But if you do not know where you are going, you cannot know what route to take to get you there. So a composer must conceive cadence points in advance, albeit probably subconsciously, before the preceding music, which goes to those cadences, can be fully invented.
Interlude I: The Major–Minor Misapprehension
Authors: Pratt George
Published: November 2023

We can easily be led to believe that major and minor are very different from each other. Books of scales and arpeggios, studied assiduously by instrumentalists and required for examinations, set out ‘major’ on one page, ‘minor’ on another. Works are described, verbally and in print, as being in given modes as well as keys. In a sense this is misleading to a student of harmony: it suggests a degree of restraint which does not exist.

On the largest scale of a whole work, changes of mode may be frequent and, at times, extensive. Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony actually contains more music in C major than in C minor. Although the C minor opening is an essential preparation for the C major of the Finale, it might be better considered as a work ‘on C’ rather than as the ‘symphony in C minor’ which is its usual description.
Closing the Circle
Authors: Pratt George
Published: November 2023

A complete circle of perfect fifths, based in turn on all 12 notes of the chromatic scale, reduces the concept of dominant relationships to absurdity, as you will see by reading and playing Ex. 7a:

The addition of a passing minor seventh at each step increases the headlong plunge from one chord to the next: every one is both the tonic resolution of its preceding dominant seventh and, simultaneously, the dominant seventh of its succeeding tonic (Ex. 7b):

Apart from its tedious predictability, this sequence is too long for the mind to retain much idea of a key-centre, of a point from which it departs and to which it returns. Play it fast and rhythmically enough, and you may discover a sense of repose as you return to the first chord. More slowly, however, it becomes a matter of indifference where the chain is broken: it could as easily go on to infinity, or fall off the lower end of your finite keyboard, as stop on any particular chord.
More Colourful Dominants: Augmented and Neapolitan Sixths
Authors: Pratt George
Published: November 2023

Another crop of colourful chords, best thought of as constructions on the second-level dominant, II, are the so-called augmented sixths.

The modifications to the diatonic chord are quite acute:

The third is sharpened to become major, and thus a temporary leading note which will rise.

The fifth is flattened to become diminished, and thus bound to resolve downwards, the shortest available distance.

The minor seventh is present, and naturally falls too.

The minor ninth is also included in one version and, of course, falls. as the semitone below is the nearest note in the following chord.
Transatlantic Romanticism and Parliamentary Reform
Authors: Giles Paul
Published: November 2023

The purpose of this chapter is to consider ways in which the schism between Britain and America affected the construction of English romanticism in the early nineteenth century and how events across the Atlantic helped to shape social and political reforms in the 1820s and 1830s. By parliamentary reform, I mean not only the reform of Parliament itself, culminating in the Great Reform Act of 1832 which enfranchised about one-fifth of the adult male population, but also the other major reforms enacted by Parliament around this time: in 1828 the repeal of the Test and Corporation Laws, which had discriminated against Dissenters by making membership of the Church of England ‘a Qualification for certain Offices and Employments ‘, and in 1829 the introduction of the Roman Catholic Relief Act, which effectively granted Catholic Emancipation by enabling Daniel O ‘Connell to take up his seat as MP for County Clare, to which he had been elected the previous year.
The First Cold War: Anglo-American Literature and the Oregon Question
Authors: Giles Paul
Published: November 2023

Relations between Britain and the United States in the middle years of the nineteenth century moved away from the accusations of sedition that had characterized the immediate aftermath of the Revolutionary war towards a situation in which transatlantic imperial rivalries began to come more sharply into focus. The 1830s and 1840s were marked by both political and geographical instability, since it was not until 1846 that Britain formally relinquished a claim to large areas of the Pacific Northwest that make up the present-day United States.
Aestheticism, Americanization, and Empire
Authors: Giles Paul
Published: November 2023

By the 1890s, the main focus of Atlantic republicanism in Britain had shifted, so that its front line was no longer a classical theory of democratic representation but the increasing power and importance of the transatlantic marketplace. This power threatened to usurp by more circuitous means the stable social hierarchies of Victorian Britain. In this sense, the interrelationship of the Aesthetic Movement with aspects of parody and burlesque, such as we see foreshadowed in Clough ‘s work, brings into question the influence of America on fin de siècle English culture more generally.
Great Traditions: Modernism, Canonization, Counter-Reformation
Authors: Giles Paul
Published: November 2023

During the course of the nineteenth century, cultural relations between Britain and the United States were shaped by a number of conflicts in which the two countries were on opposite sides: the aftermath of the Revolutionary wars, the war of 1812, the dispute over Oregon. This was followed by the American Civil War, in which Britain was not directly involved, but whose outcome served to enhance federal power and thus to pose an increasing threat to British imperial dominion.
Postmodernist Fiction and the Inversion of History
Authors: Giles Paul
Published: November 2023

‘Americanization ‘, Jonathan Zeitlin has written, ‘should be understood not as a neutral analytical concept but rather as a contested historical project. ‘ As we have seen, there have been many different versions of Americanization within English cultural history since the 1780s, ranging from Wordsworth ‘s fear that the Great Reform Act would transform sturdily independent MPs into ‘slavish Delegates ‘ to Gissing ‘s concern that American commerce would overwhelm the local markets of late Victorian London.
Archaeologies of English Renaissance Literature
Authors: Schwyzer Philip
Published: November 2023

This study draws on the theory and practice of archaeology to develop a new perspective on the literature of the Renaissance. Philip Schwyzer explores the fascination with images of excavation, exhumation, and ruin that runs through literary texts including Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet, Donne’s sermons and lyrics, and Thomas Browne’s Hydriotaphia, or Urne-Buriall. Miraculously preserved corpses, ruined monasteries, Egyptian mummies, and Yorick’s skull all figure in this study of the early modern archaeological imagination. The pessimism of the period is summed up in the haunting motif of the beautiful corpse that, once touched, crumbles to dust. Archaeology and literary studies are themselves products of the Renaissance. Although the two disciplines have sometimes viewed one another as rivals, they share a unique and unsettling intimacy with the traces of past life – with the words the dead wrote, sang, or heard, with the objects they made, held, or lived within. Schwyzer argues that at the root of both forms of scholarship lies the forbidden desire to awaken (and speak with) the dead. However impossible or absurd this desire may be, it remains a fundamental source of both ethical responsibility and aesthetic pleasure.
Introduction
Authors: Schwyzer Philip
Published: November 2023

In Shakespeare‘s Henry V, the Archbishop of Canterbury proposes a strikingly archaeological metaphor for the relationship between the present and the past. Victory in France, he promises his king, will ‘make your chronicle as rich with praise | As is the ooze and bottom of the sea | With sunken wrack and sumless treasuries’ (1.2.163–5). This, then, is what it means to go down in history. For Canterbury, the past is a matter of depth. More precisely, it is deep matter. The past is literally what lies beneath, embodied in material artefacts bearing witness to bygone triumphs and disasters. But the Archbishop‘s archaeological metaphor is also an oddly pessimistic one. Like Walter Benjamin‘s ‘angel of history’, he seems to perceive history as an unremitting series of shipwrecks, ‘one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage’.1 The treasures of time may entice the imagination, but scattered on the inaccessible ocean floor, they are of no practical use to anyone.
‘Mummy is Become Merchandise’ Cannibals and Commodities in the Seventeenth Century
Authors: Schwyzer Philip
Published: November 2023

Yet in those huge structures and pyramidal immensities, of the builders whereof so little is known, they seemed not so much to raise sepulchres or temples to death, as to contemn and disdain it, astonishing heaven with their audacities, and looking forward with delight to their interment in those eternal piles … Yet all were but Babel vanities. Time sadly overcometh all things, and is now dominant, and sitteth upon a sphinx, and looketh unto Memphis and old Thebes, while his sister Oblivion reclineth semisomnous on a pyramid, gloriously triumphing, making puzzles of Titanian erections, and turning old glories into dreams. History sinketh beneath her cloud. The traveller as he paceth amazedly through those deserts asketh of her, who buildeth them? and she mumbleth something, but what it is he heareth not.1
Readers of the Lost Urns Desire and Disintegration in Thomas Browne‘s Urn-Burial
Authors: Schwyzer Philip
Published: November 2023

In the second half of the fifth century ad, a distinctive method of burial began to be practised in eastern and central England. Following cremation, the fragmented bones and ashes of the dead were deposited in urns, which were buried in shallow pits.1 The urns, shaped by hand rather than wheel-made, were often decorated with simple or elaborate patterns, composed of horizontal lines, chevrons, bosses, and stamps (Fig. 9). They bore no inscriptions, though some of the design elements, the stamps in particular, may have carried political, religious, or heraldic significance.2 In addition to burnt bone and ashes, the urns frequently contained small grave-goods such as brooches, beads, tweezers, and combs—items that were either cremated with the body on the pyre or added subsequently to the urn (Fig. 10). Cremation cemeteries were frequently very large, containing as many as 2,000 burials, suggesting that these burial grounds served an extensive territory rather than a single community. A significant number of these large sites turn out to lie near to places of previous Roman settlement, and Roman artefacts were occasionally recycled for use in such burials.3
Substance Abuse and Substance Dependence
Authors: Brüne Martin
Published: November 2023

The abuse of psychotropic substances represents a maladaptive pattern of behaviour that is associated with recurrent failure at work, school or home. Recurrent and continuing substance abuse is usually accompanied by physically hazardous behaviour and often leads to legal problems. Surprisingly, substance abusers continue consumption in spite of mounting social, interpersonal, or financial problems.
Beckett and Badiou
Authors: Gibson Andrew
Published: November 2023

Beckett and Badiou offers a provocative new reading of Samuel Beckett’s work on the basis of a full, critical account of the thought of Alain Badiou. Badiou is the most eminent of contemporary French philosophers. His devotion to Beckett’s work has been lifelong. Yet for Badiou philosophy must be integrally affirmative, whilst Beckett apparently commits his art to a work of negation. Beckett and Badiou explores the coherences, contradictions, and extreme complexities of the intellectual relationship between the two oeuvres. It examines Badiou’s philosophy of being, the event, truth, and the subject and the importance of mathematics within his system. It considers the major features of his politics, ethics, and aesthetics and provides an explanation, interpretation, critique, and radical revision of his work on Beckett. It argues that, once revised, Badiou’s version of Beckett offers an extraordinarily powerful tool for understanding his work. Badiou and Beckett are instances of a vestigial or melancholic modernism; that is, in the teeth of a contemporary culture that dreams ever more ambitiously of plenitude, they commit themselves to a rigorous concept of limit and intermittency. Truth and value are occasional and rare. It is seldom that the chance event arrives to disturb the inertia of the world. For Badiou, however, it is the event and its consequences alone that matter. Beckett rather insists on the common experience of intermittency as destitution. His art is a series of limit-figures, exquisitely subtle and nuanced forms for a world whose state of seemingly rigid paralysis is also always volatile, delicately balanced.
Badiou (i): Being, Event, Subject, Truth
Authors: Gibson Andrew
Published: November 2023

Badiou aims to reassert the significance of philosophy in an age that has lost a sense of its importance. We no longer know what philosophy is or what its purposes should be. We confuse it with the postmodern sophistries that run from Nietzsche and Wittgenstein to Derrida, Lyotard, Rorty, and Vattimo. We conflate it with other concerns: art, science, politics, psychoanalysis. We oscillate between deconstructing its past and anticipating its future forms. Above all, perhaps, we have surrendered philosophy to time, to a history we can no longer believe it transcends. Provoked by a century of disaster, our epoch announces the end of philosophy and claims to be ‘liquidating’ its archaisms (CS, 70). Badiou, however, wants rather to proclaim the end of ‘the end’.
Badiou (ii): Politics, Ethics, Aesthetics
Authors: Gibson Andrew
Published: November 2023

The account of Badiou’s philosophy that I have given so far raises an obvious question. Being is irreducibly inconsistent. In an actually infinite universe, there is always what I have called a wobble or a play in Being. This is what makes the event possible. But why, then, is Badiou’s world not more like Deleuze’s? Why are events rare? Why is the world not as full of events in Badiou’s later as in his early work? The answer lies in the concept of the State. This has both an ontological and a political significance. Badiou does not define it solely in political terms: Spinoza’s God is an example of it. As we have seen, nature is another. But, not surprisingly, the concept of the State becomes starkly clear in relation to the political sphere. I shan’t be offering an exhaustive account of Badiou’s politics.
Badiou, Beckett, and Contemporary Criticism
Authors: Gibson Andrew
Published: November 2023

Badiou’s accounts of Beckett dispute the emphases of a whole critical tradition. This tradition has too often turned Beckett into an absurdist or existentialist, a nihilist or tragic pessimist. In doing so, it has effectively always contemplated Beckett as its own opposite, as the negative to the unrelenting positivity of its own discourse. In its very admiration of Beckett, the tradition has declared its distance from him. That distance is also the measure of its own worldliness. It has invariably adopted the point of view of the proprietor, for whom possessions are ‘the sole proof of being and sense’ (CS, 331). For Badiou, the great founding principle of philosophy is resistance to injustice, which is always resistance to the world as it is.
Radical Minimalism, Moderate Contextualism
Authors: Korta Kepa , Perry John
Published: November 2023

Cappelen and Lepore’s (hereafter, ‘‘CL’’) book Insensitive Semantics faces issues involved in reconceptualizing the nature of and boundaries between semantics and pragmatics in the light of the phenomenon often called ‘‘pragmatic intrusion’’. The received theory might have been expressed this way. Semantics determines what is said ; that is, the proposition that is expressed by an utterance is determined by the conventional meanings of the words used and compositional rules for combining words. Pragmatics takes as its input what is said and, taking into consideration facts about the particular utterance (and possibly some other conventions), determines what has been conveyed and what speech acts have been performed, largely by considering the communicative and other perlocutionary intentions of the speaker.
How and Why to be a Moderate Contextualist
Authors: Maitra Ishani
Published: November 2023

Much recent work in the philosophy of language has focused on the extent to which what linguistic expressions express depends upon context. It is (relatively) uncontroversial that some expressions are context-sensitive, for instance, indexicals like ‘I’, and demonstratives like ‘this’. But there is little agreement beyond this point. On some views (the Minimalist views), there is not much context-sensitivity in the language that goes beyond these uncontroversially context-dependent expressions. On other views (the Radical Contextualist views), context-sensitivity is everywhere in language. And on yet other views (the Moderate Contextualist views), the truth lies somewhere in between these extremes. (I shall offer more precise renderings of these views in what follows.)