John Weaver and the Origins of English Pantomime: A Neoclassical Theory and Practice for Uniting Dance and Theatre

2001 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 191-214 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nancy Taylor
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Neoclassical Theory ◽  
The Past ◽  
Rare Combination ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century

Theatre historians have long acknowledged John Weaver as the father of English pantomime. In 1985, however, the foremost Weaver scholar, Richard Ralph, noted that no one had systematically studied Weaver's pantomime descriptions, printed in The Loves of Mars and Venus, nor had classical influences upon Weaver been sufficiently investigated.1 Scholarship in the past fifteen years has not filled these gaps; thus, this article begins an examination of these two areas of Weaver's work. They are especially significant because the pantomime descriptions and classical influences reveal that Weaver was a scholar-artist, a rare combination in his era, whose theories and practices deepened the interplay among the arts in early eighteenth-century England.2

Cultural Bases for Understanding Literature

PMLA ◽  
1953 ◽  
Vol 68 (2) ◽  
pp. 13-23
Author(s):  
Margaret Mead
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Oral Tradition ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
Contemporary World ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Farm Laborer ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Anthropological Research ◽  
A Chain

Among the variety of contributions which modern anthropological research might be able to offer to members of this Association, I plan to stress only one, that which anthropological studies of whole cultures can make to those whose task it is to cherish and cultivate the arts, and especially literature, in the contemporary world. Just because we, the anthropologists, specialize in primitive, usually quite small, societies and take as our focus communities of a few hundred people with an oral tradition which can be no more elaborate than the memories of those few, we are able to include within our study many aspects of human experience which the scholar dealing with a period or trend within a complex high civilization accepts on authority or takes for granted. Yet, to the extent that the scholar who works with the eighteenth century in England must so take for granted the economic arrangements of agriculture or the methods of child care in the nursery, he or she is cut off from watching the intimate interplay between the way a farm laborer is paid or a child rebuked and the images of sophisticated literature, within which these experiences of the poor or immature may be represented by a chain of transmuted images or an explicit counterpoint which cuts them off from the developed consciousness of the small literate elite who inherited and cultivated the literary tradition of the past. Short of time, and very often short of materials, historians have only recently thought it worth while to consider the “short and simple annals of the poor” or the life of children who were neither the subjects of later literary elaboration by a Samuel Butler or a Proust, nor had even the dubious claims of a Daisy Ashford.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
Quintin Colville ◽  
James Davey
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Political Influences ◽  
The Past ◽  
Current State ◽  
Naval History ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Many ◽  
Historical Profession

This introduction gives on overview of the sub-discipline of naval history since its emergence in the early eighteenth-century. It outlines the various social, cultural and political influences that have shaped the subject over the past three centuries, and discusses its relationship with the wider historical profession. The second half of the introduction sums up the current state of naval history, describing the many historiographies that now have a bearing on how the subject is conducted. Each contribution to the volume is introduced in this context, offering a precis of the chapters that follow.

XXI: Mortality in Magherafelt, County Derry, in the early eighteenth century reappraised

1982 ◽  
Vol 23 (89) ◽  
pp. 50-60 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Macafee ◽  
Valerie Morgan
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Demographic History ◽  
Historical Demography ◽  
The Past ◽  
Detailed Case ◽  
Tax Returns ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
Population Patterns

The study of Irish historical demography has long been an area of complexity and controversy; and the further back into the past the search for patterns and trends is pushed, the more the problems multiply. Much of the difficulty stems from the inadequacy and/or variability of the available sources. Hearth-tax returns, enumeration lists of various types, estate records and registers of baptisms, marriages and burials, all pose problems of interpretation and in addition, for any single area, they are likely to provide only fragmentary and discontinuous evidence. $$Largely because of these difficulties, only a limited number of detailed analyses of population patterns in specific areas as far back as the late seventeenth century and early eighteenth century have been attempted. Yet at the same time the work which has been done has made it apparent both that this is a crucial period in terms of demographic history and that only detailed case studies can provide the evidence necessary to enlarge upon our current very general understanding.

Metaphors of Time and Modernity in Bach

2012 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 154-190 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bettina Varwig
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Alternative Model ◽  
Time History ◽  
Johann Sebastian Bach ◽  
Historical Inquiry ◽  
Close Attention ◽  
Social Conventions ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century

Narratives of music and modernity have been prominent in musicological writings of the past decade, and the place of Johann Sebastian Bach within these narratives has formed the subject of stimulating debates. Recent studies by Karol Berger and John Butt have aimed to integrate Bach's Passion compositions into broadly conceived philosophical frameworks, in Berger's case focusing specifically on changing perceptions of time from a premodern sense of circular stasis to a modern linear idea of progress. This article proposes an alternative model of historical inquiry into these issues by presenting a detailed look at attitudes to time in early eighteenth-century Protestant Leipzig. My approach reveals a complex constellation of conflicting ideas and metaphors that encompass notions of time as both circular and linear and evince a particular concern for the question of how to fill the time of one's earthly existence productively. In this light, pieces like Bach's St. Matthew Passion and Georg Philipp Telemann's Brockes Passion can be understood to have offered a range of different temporal experiences, which depended on individual listening attitudes, performance decisions, and surrounding social conventions. I argue that only through paying close attention to these fluid and often incongruous discourses can we gain a sufficiently nuanced picture of how music may have reflected and shaped early eighteenth-century conceptions of time, history, and eternity.

ANTONIO VIVALDI AND THE SUBLIME SEASONS: SONORITY AND TEXTURE AS EXPRESSIVE DEVICES IN EARLY EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ITALIAN MUSIC

2017 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 265-283 ◽  
Author(s):  
NICHOLAS LOCKEY
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Emotional Impact ◽  
Historical Significance ◽  
Antonio Vivaldi ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Four Seasons ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
Italian Music ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Powerful Demonstration

ABSTRACTAntonio Vivaldi's cycle of violin concertos dramatizing the four seasons marked a substantial shift in the way that the seasons were depicted in the arts. Moving away from religious and mythological allegory, they exemplify a growing interest in descriptive representation of nature's power and in humanity's complex physical and emotional relationship with elements beyond its control. Positing new connections to Arcadian reform ideals of verisimilitude, this article addresses important questions concerning Vivaldi's pairing of sonnets with concertos and the aesthetic factors behind his choice of narrative topics to depict in the music. The article also demonstrates how Vivaldi used diverse textures and sonorities to create powerful contrasts that heighten the emotional impact of the aural imagery while underlining recurring expressive and pictorial motifs throughout the cycle. These last aspects, in particular, provide a new understanding of the historical significance of Vivaldi'sFour Seasonsas a powerful demonstration of both the expressive potential of the concerto genre and the still underappreciated art of orchestration during the early eighteenth century.

Memoirs, Memory, and Historical Experience

1994 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 103-119 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gabriel Motzkin
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Paradigm Shifts ◽  
Historical Science ◽  
Historical Experience ◽  
History And Memory ◽  
The Past ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
Subjective Truth

The ArgumentAgainst the idea that modern historiography developed in the eighteenth century as a completely new way of looking at the past, this paper argues that modern historical science borrowed its sense of experience from seventeenth-century memoirs. However, seventeenth-century rnemorialists made very different as sumptions than modern historians about the relations between time, memory, and history. One consequence of their introduction of lived subjectivity into the depiction of the past was a debate in early eighteenth-century France about the relations between history and fiction, some arguing that fiction is a better way of grasping the subjective truth of the past. These debates about the relations between history and memory and between history and fiction have resurfaced recently. The historical moods that are one context for paradigm shifts share common motifs, such as a sense of defeat, of distance between the present and the immediate past, and a need for consolation through the elaboration of a new mode of experiencing the past.

Alchemy and Counterpoint in an Age of Reason

1998 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 201-243 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Yearsley
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Belief System ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Age Of Reason ◽  
Previous Generation ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Aesthetic

This essay demonstrates the importance of alchemy to the theory and practice of learned counterpoint as articulated in the writings of a group of early eighteenth-century German musicians, in particular, those of canon enthusiast and alchemist Heinrich Bokemeyer (1679-1751). While leading eighteenth-century theorists such as Johann Mattheson argued vigorously against the persistence of occult beliefs in music, the correspondence of J. G. Walther with Bokemeyer reveals a lively discourse on the principles of Hermeticism in conjunction with the exchange of counterpoint manuscripts, one of the most important of which was Johann Theile's Musicalisches Kunstbuch. The title and contents of this collection, as well as the pictorial and contrapuntal features of another of Theile's creations, the Harmonischer Baum, suggest further links with alchemy. In 1723-24, Bokemeyer became engaged in a dispute with Mattheson over the merits of canon; this debate was published as "Die canonische Anatomie" in Mattheson's periodical Critica musica. Bokemeyer's lengthy defense of learned counterpoint draws heavily on alchemical metaphors and Hermetic concepts. Bokemeyer would later become a member, along with J. S. Bach, of Lorenz Mizler's Societät der Musicalischen Wissenschaften. Bokemeyer may have seen in Bach's Canonic Variations (BWV 769), presented to the society on Bach's admission in 1747, a reflection of the aesthetic principles articulated in "Die canonische Anatomie." While learned counterpoint's role in composition and pedagogy diminished in the years following the publication of "Die canonische Anatomie," midcentury theorists such as F. W. Marpurg continued to explore the complex workings of canon, but they did so as enlightened encyclopedists holding none of the occult views that had informed the musical belief system of Bokemeyer and the counterpoint devotees of the previous generation.

scholarly journals Tessinarna i Venedig

2009 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 7
Author(s):  
Martin Olin
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Civic Life ◽  
Royal Palace ◽  
The Arts ◽  
First Choice ◽  
Art Works ◽  
The Alps ◽  
Lasting Impression ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
The City

<p>The Tessins in Venice</p><p>Foreign royalty and other travelers visiting Venice in the early eighteenth century encountered a flourishing of the arts. This vibrant artistic life could be transposed to new settings, as a number of Venetian painters worked for courts north of the Alps. When the statesman and <em>connoisseur</em> Carl Gustaf Tessin, Swedish Ambassador to Vienna, visited Venice in 1736, it was with the intention of hiring a decorative painter for the new royal palace in Stockholm. His first choice was Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, but his services proved to be too costly for the Swedes. Tessin did, however, buy art works, among them easel paintings by Tiepolo, Giuseppe Nogari and Francesco Zuccarelli. Anton Maria Zanetti helped Tessin survey the artistic landscape of his city and later became his agent. Carl Gustaf Tessin was not the first Tessin in Venice. His father and grandfather had also visited and documented Venetian architecture in drawings and notes. Marble floors in Venetian buildings left such a lasting impression on Nicodemus Tessin the Elder that he incorporated their patterns in his floor designs for Drottningholm Palace. In his travel notes from 1688, Nicodemus Tessin the Younger is critical of Venetian architecture, but writes enthusiastically about the city&rsquo;s theatre and civic life.</p>

scholarly journals The Womack, Gilbert, and Pearson Sites: Early Eighteenth Century Tunican Entrepots in Northeast Texas

1996 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frank Schambach
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
New Paradigm ◽  
The Past ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century

For the past few months, I have been working on a detailed response to a paper by James Bruseth, Diane Wilson, and Timothy Perttula published in the fall issue of Plains Anthropologist. There, these authors challenge my Sanders entrepot hypothesis and my new paradigm for the Mississippi period archeology of the Arkansas Valley, claiming that the Sanders focus, as propounded by Alex D. Krieger, is alive and well, so much so that they have renamed it the Sanders phase to ready it for service in the 1990s and beyond.

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