Modernism, Functionalism, and Tradition: The Music of Friedrich Goldmann

Tempo ◽  
1995 ◽  
pp. 27-30
Author(s):  
Alastair Williams
Keyword(s):  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
The West ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Past ◽  
High Modernism ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Socialist Politics

The current reappraisal of tradition, along with an interest in a music that deals with concrete emotions and which has a direct appeal to audiences, sounds a certain resonance with the aesthetic doctrines that prevailed in the former communist bloc. A sense of history is vital to socialist politics, but the availability of a symphonic tradition to Soviet composers after a break with that heritage suggests a state of posthistoire; a condition normally associated with postmodernism. The postmodernist reappraisal of the past is anticipated by, for example, Shostakovich's complex and sometimes ironic relationship to the symphonic tradition. Conservative traditionalism in the East maintained to be a critique of high modernist principles; in the West, ironically, a turn to tradition is now put forward as an alternative to the same rationalist modernism. At the moment when the achievements of the historical avant-garde and of high modernism have become fully available to the former Eastern Europe, the former Western Europe is engaged with the reappraisal of tradition. Even where a modernist music did develop in Eastern Europe – as, for example, it did in Poland – it was followed by a move back to more traditional techniques. The consequence of this inclination is that composers such as Górecki and Pärt, who employ traditionally-based expressive languages, have shot onto centre stage. The point is that composers from the former communist bloc have already encountered many of the issues that now preoccupy some contemporary composers in the capitalist West.

From Black Death to Black Hole

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcin Piatkowski
Keyword(s):  
Economic Development ◽  
Black Hole ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Rule Of Law ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Black Death ◽  
European Continent ◽  
The Past

In this chapter I explain why Poland and most countries in Eastern Europe have always lagged behind Western Europe in economic development. I discuss why in the past the European continent split into two parts and how Western and Eastern Europe followed starkly different developmental paths. I then demonstrate how Polish oligarchic elites built extractive institutions and how they adopted ideologies, cultures, and values, which undermined development from the late sixteenth century to 1939. I also describe how the elites created a libertarian country without taxes, state capacity, and rule of law, and how this ‘golden freedom’ led to Poland’s collapse and disappearance from the map of Europe in 1795. I argue that Polish extractive society was so well established that it could not reform itself from the inside. It was like a black hole, where the force of gravity is so strong that the light could not come out.

scholarly journals Role of Creative Industries in the Post-Socialist Urban Transformation

2014 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 19-35 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tadeusz Stryjakiewicz ◽  
Michał Męczyński ◽  
Krzysztof Stachowiak
Keyword(s):  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Central And Eastern Europe ◽  
Creative Industries ◽  
Urban Transformation ◽  
The West ◽  
Local Networks ◽  
The Past ◽  
Path Dependent ◽  
Basic Features

Abstract Over the past two decades the cities in Central and Eastern Europe have witnessed a wide-ranging transformation in many aspects. The introduction of a market-oriented economy after half a century of socialism has brought about deep social, economic, cultural and political changes. The first stage of the changes, the 1990s, involved the patching up of structural holes left by the previous system. The post-socialist city had to face challenges of the future while carrying the ballast of the past. Rapid progress in catching up with the West transformed the city a great deal. Later on, the advent of the 21st century brought a new wave of development processes based, among other things, on creativity and innovation. Hence our contribution aims to explore the role of creativity and creative industries in the post-socialist urban transformation. The article consists of three basic parts. In the first we present the concept of a ‘creative post-socialist city’ and define the position of creative industries in it. We also indicate some similarities to and differences from the West European approaches to this issue. In the second part, examples from Central and Eastern Europe are used in an attempt to elucidate the concept of a ‘creative post-socialist city’ by identifying some basic features of creative actions /processes as well as a creative environment, both exogenous and endogenous. The former is embedded in different local networks, both formal (institutionalised) and informal, whereas the structure of the latter is strongly path-dependent. In the third part we critically discuss the role of local policies on the development of creative industries, pointing out some of their shortcomings and drawing up recommendations for future policy measures.

scholarly journals After zero hour: States as “custodians of universal human culture,” or “guardians of advanced art”

Muzikologija ◽  
2017 ◽  
pp. 41-57
Author(s):  
Melita Milin
Keyword(s):  
Opposite Direction ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Socialist Realism ◽  
Recent Past ◽  
The West ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Human Culture ◽  
Post War

The emergence of radically new, avant-garde movements in German music and throughout Western Europe after WW2 has often been seen as expressing a strivings to create on a tabula rasa, in order to create distance from the horrors of the recent past. In the countries of the communist bloc, the imposed ideology of socialist realism also created a sharp break, similar to that in the West, except that Zero Hour was conceived in quite a different fashion, as a move in the opposite direction from Western modernism. The case of post-war music in Yugoslavia is examined under the light of the fact that the country did not belong to either bloc.

A game of mirrors: Western/Eastern European crime series and the struggle for recognition

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 119-134 ◽  
Author(s):  
Caius Dobrescu ◽  
Roxana Eichel ◽  
Dorottya Molnár-Kovács ◽  
Sándor Kálai ◽  
Anna Keszeg
Keyword(s):  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
The Other ◽  
Social Imaginary ◽  
Eastern European ◽  
The West ◽  
The Social ◽  
State Of Affairs ◽  
Struggle For Recognition ◽  
Correct Image

Our article focuses on a corpus of crime television series reflecting upon differences between western and eastern Europe – a phenomenon that we will address as the ‘West–East slope’. The series figure as instances of the struggle for recognition at the level of the social imaginary, between western and eastern Europe. Addressing the double logic of the western narrative on eastern Europe and the eastern narrative of western Europe, one of our main findings is that the recognition aesthetics of eastern Europe produced a multi-layered representation of the West varying from country to country. On the other hand in western productions, there is still a bias towards a more politically correct image of easternness, a state of affairs that is questioned by eastern European attempts to produce their original contents.

De-Orientalizing the Western Gaze on Eastern Europe

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 136-162
Author(s):  
Barbara Christophe
Keyword(s):  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
The Political ◽  
Traditional Role ◽  
The Past ◽  
Soviet Occupation ◽  
Publishing Houses

Comparing narratives of the Soviet occupation in 1940 in current textbooks by two leading Lithuanian publishing houses, I claim that Lithuanian textbooks offer diverging accounts, which mirror to a large extent the opposing mnemonic frames supported by two rival political camps. I also show that the same textbooks tame those differences by transcending the politically charged frames they have chosen in the first place, presenting, for example, the USSR as both villain and victim of the war. Considering the relevance of these findings for our understanding of dynamics of remembering in general and in the Lithuanian culture of memory in particular, I point out that embracing the political inherent in all acts of recalling the past does not necessarily lead to politicized, i.e. narrow-minded memories, and I reflect on what these mnemonic practices mean for reevaluating the traditional role of Eastern Europe as the backward other of Western Europe.

Deterrence, Defense, and Disengagement

1962 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 393-403 ◽  
Author(s):  
Glenn H. Snyder
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
No Value ◽  
Security Policy ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
New Technology ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Past ◽  
Actual Use ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Basic Position

Perhaps the central dilemma in national security policy is how to A reconcile the obvious potency of nuclear weapons for purposes of deterrence with their dubious utility as instruments of defense—i.e., for fighting a war at tolerable cost in case deterrence should fail. In prenuclear days, deterrence was more or less a function of an efficient capacity for defense, but with the new technology deterrence may be accomplished with capabilities and threats that do not correspond to the capabilities and strategies most suitable for rational military action. This dichotomy forms the leading theme of Deterrent or Defense, by Captain B. H. Liddell Hart, one of Britain's leading military analysts. The book is a collection of articles written mostly during the past three or four years, and concerned chiefly with military problems of NATO. As in many books of this sort, the articles overlap to some extent and are not always consistent. Leaving aside the inconsistencies for the moment, Liddell Hart's basic position can be stated briefly. Strategic nuclear airpower is useful for deterring an all-out nuclear attack on the United States or a full-scale conventional assault on Western Europe. But it has no value whatever for purposes of defense, because the inevitable result of the actual use of such weapons is simply “mutual suicide.” Even though it would be “lunacy” for the United States to initiate thermonuclear war in response to a Soviet attack in Europe, the Russians' fear of such a response probably is still strong enough to deter them from all but limited actions. Hence, the major problem facing NATO is to develop an effective non-suicidal defense against limited aggression. The book's greatest merit lies in its contribution to the solution of this problem.

scholarly journals Editorial: Time Travel

2017 ◽  
Vol 42 (3) ◽  
pp. 245-248
Author(s):  
PAUL RAE
Keyword(s):  
Social Economic ◽  
Time Travel ◽  
The West ◽  
American Power ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Past ◽  
Aesthetic Form ◽  
The World ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The Way

One of the most forbidding and yet rewarding challenges in a substantive internationalization of arts scholarship is accounting for the experience and passage of time. The extent to which developments in theatre and performance over the past 150 years have been tied up with the larger social, economic and technological transformations reflexively understood as ‘modernity’ is a key reason an international journal readership is able to find interest and value in scholarship on performances they may not have seen, that are practised in places they have never been. At the same time, any such research – it is tempting to say ‘from outside the West’, but in fact the requirement holds everywhere – must register how the work under discussion complicates an otherwise oversimplified narrative of developmental modernity. This narrative treats a homogenized industrial and postindustrial ‘West’ as having led the way and established a model for how other parts of the world would modernize subsequently. The assumption is quickened in discussions of art because arguably one characteristic of those transformations as they happened in numerous centres of Euro-American power was the role that artists played in giving them aesthetic form and expressing their meanings. This is prominent in the emergence of modernism and the avant-garde, and it is logical that in recent times scholars of modernism have been particularly energetic in questioning the developmental narrative and demonstrating not only how such phenomena were constitutively reliant on processes elsewhere, but also how artistic developments everywhere both informed each other (often inequably) and manifested local and highly contingent characteristics.

scholarly journals 1989 as a Lens for the Communist Past and Post-communist Future

2009 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 289-302 ◽  
Author(s):  
JEFFREY KOPSTEIN
Keyword(s):  
Eastern Europe ◽  
European Integration ◽  
Significant Variation ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Central And Eastern Europe ◽  
The Past ◽  
Antecedent Conditions ◽  
Proximate Factors ◽  
Communist Past ◽  
The Impact

AbstractPolitical scientists have documented significant variation in political and economic outcomes of the 1989–91 revolutions. Countries bordering on western Europe have become relatively democratic and economically successful, with both democracy and wealth dropping off as one moves east and south. Explanations for this variation and the replication of an older pattern on the Eurasian landmass have moved farther and farther into the past. Yet in moving to the longue durée, more proximate events such as the revolutions of 1989, the demise of communism and even the communist experience itself recede into the background and are themselves accounted for by antecedent conditions. The article discusses how two more proximate factors helped to change older patterns in central and eastern Europe: the impact of communist modernisation and the prospect of European integration.

Introduction

2006 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 369-372
Author(s):  
NICHOLAS CANNY
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Preferences ◽  
The West ◽  
The Past ◽  
National Archives ◽  
Public Record ◽  
The Moment ◽  
National Libraries ◽  
First Time ◽  
The Relationship

This Focus addresses the relationship between historians and the societies they serve, particularly since the later nineteenth century when, for the first time, historians began to define themselves as a distinct professional group. One of the conclusions that emerges from the four case studies pursued here is that the independence of judgement which professionalism implies, founders the moment it is perceived by a wider public that historians are no longer providing them with the moral guidance they expect from those who have studied their pasts. It is also shown that the challenges and responses did not prove identical in any two sets of circumstances. This introduction also makes reference to general challenges to which individual contributors do not necessarily refer, but which have impacted on the work and independence of all historians.Historians, both now and in the past, have been aware that what they write is, of necessity, influenced by their personal circumstances as also by their political and social preferences. Perhaps out of recognition of this, some writers of history in all centuries, and possibly from every culture, have celebrated their ability to shape policy in the present by citing experiences from past times. Then, in the nineteenth century, as governments in the west established Public Record Offices, National Archives and National Libraries, it came to be accepted in that part of the world that historians were professionals who, having undertaken a prescribed course of training, were uniquely equipped to assess how politicians and diplomats in the past had conducted their business.

NATO After Tito

Worldview ◽  
1980 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 11-12
Author(s):  
L. Thomas Walsh
Keyword(s):  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Wishful Thinking ◽  
Southwest Asia ◽  
The West ◽  
The Balkans ◽  
Center Stage

While the eyes of the West rivet upon Soviet expansionism in Southwest Asia, another drama moves to center stage in the Balkans.There is considerable wishful thinking, particularly in Western Europe, about the Soviets' inability to engage their forces in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran, maintain their defenses against China, and still cause difficulty in Eastern Europe after the death of Yugoslavia's president, Josip Tito. This is the same kind of rationalization that for two decades lulled the West into letting its defenses erode to a scandalous level.

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