Re-Imagining Westphalia

2021 ◽  
pp. 145-198
Author(s):  
M.I. Franklin
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Electronic Music ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Karlheinz Stockhausen ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Miles Davis ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Sound Transformation ◽  
The Cold War

Chapter 5 focuses on a work from Karlheinz Stockhausen entitled Hymnen (Anthems). Stockhausen’s influence on the electronic music avant-garde, in classical and popular music domains, on those from his native Germany to the UK, the US, and elsewhere, is legendary. The techniques Stockhausen was refining were also being put to work by the Beatles, Miles Davis, and Frank Zappa, to name a few. Working with national anthems that are sampled and transformed, Hymnen is a landmark work that I argue is as much about “remembering” as it is a research-based experiment in the early years of electronic and acoustic sound transformation. This work, completed during 1960s, evokes the cold war years where space exploration, civil rights, and nuclear (dis)armament standoffs between the communist East and the capitalist West predominated. It is also the decade of Woodstock, political assassinations, civil rights, and antiwar movements in the US and around the world. Hymnen still has a lot to offer for contemporary explorations into the geopolitics of any music-politics nexus.

Native Americans in Cold War Public Diplomacy: Indian Politics, American History, and the US Information Agency

2012 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Andrew Denson
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Public Diplomacy ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Indian Politics ◽  
The Us ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War

This essay examines the depiction of Native Americans by the US Information Agency (USIA), the bureau charged with explaining American politics to the international public during the Cold War. In the 1950s and 1960s, the USIA broadcast the message that Americans had begun to acknowledge their nation's history of conquest and were working to redress old wrongs through an activist government. That message echoed the agency's depiction of the African American Civil Rights Movement and allowed the USIA to recognize Indian resistance to assimilation. It offered little room for tribal nationhood, however, during these early years of the modern American Indian political revival.

scholarly journals “We Are Not Copyists”: Socialist Networks and Non-alignment from Below in A. Philip Randolph’s Asian Journey

2019 ◽  
Vol 53 (2) ◽  
pp. 402-428
Author(s):  
Su Lin Lewis
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Soviet Bloc ◽  
Labor Movements ◽  
Trade Unionist ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Cultural Freedom ◽  
Hearts And Minds

Abstract In 1952, A. Philip Randolph, the head of America’s largest black union and a prominent civil rights campaigner, traveled to Japan and Burma funded by the American Committee for Cultural Freedom. In Asia, he encountered socialists and trade unionists struggling to negotiate the fractious divides between communism and capitalism within postwar states. In Burma, in particular, Western powers, the Soviet bloc, and powerful Asian neighbors used propaganda, aid missions, and subsidized travel to offer competing visions of development while accusing each other of new forms of imperialism and foreign interference. In such an environment, a battle for hearts and minds within Asian labor movements constituted the front lines of the early years of the Cold War. Randolph’s journey shows us how Asian socialists and trade unionists responded to powerful foreign interests by articulating an early sense of non-alignment, forged in part through emerging Asian socialist networks, well before this was an official strategy. The Asian actors with whom Randolph interacted in Japan and Burma mirrored his own struggles as a socialist, a trade unionist, and a “railway man” while furthering his campaign for civil rights at home. This article uses Randolph’s journey to examine parallels and divergences between African-American and Asian socialists and trade unionists during the early Cold War, an age characterized by deepening splits in the politics of the Left.

Stockhausen, Karlheinz (1928–2007)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Toop
Keyword(s):  
Electronic Music ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Graphic Notation ◽  
Karlheinz Stockhausen ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Public ◽  
Western Art ◽  
Post War ◽  
The One ◽  
German Composer

For much of the 1950s and 1960s, the German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen was an absolutely seminal figure within the European avant-garde. By the mid-1950s, every new work of his seemed to open up new perspectives for radical composing: key notions and genres such as serialism, electronic music, variable forms, and graphic notation were all crucially affected by his work. Of all post-war composers, Stockhausen best exemplifies Chateaubriand’s dictum that ‘‘the original writer is not the one who imitates no one, but he whom no one can imitate’’; whereas other major figures had hosts of epigones, Stockhausen’s huge influence largely involved his way of thinking about composition, which was constantly evolving and re-forming, rather than attempted emulations. At the same time, by the late 1960s he was also something of a cult figure in the pop/rock world, as witness his appearance on the cover of the Beatles’ ‘‘Sergeant Pepper’’ album. Yet from the mid-1970s, Stockhausen increasingly (though never totally) withdrew from the public eye, working for just over twenty-five years on a massive cycle of seven operas collectively entitled Licht [Light], involving about thirty hours of music––probably the most ambitious (completed) project in the whole of Western art music.

scholarly journals Looking Back at the Audience: The RSC & The Wooster Group’s Troilus and Cressida (2012)

2014 ◽  
Vol 11 (26) ◽  
Author(s):  
Aneta Mancewicz
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
Cultural Differences ◽  
Performance Practices ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Troilus And Cressida ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Looking Back

AbstractThe controversy around the RSC & The Wooster Group’s Troilus and Cressida (Stratford-upon-Avon 2012) among the spectators and critics in Britain revealed significant differences between the UK and the US patterns of staging, spectating, and reviewing Shakespeare. The production has also exposed the gap between mainstream and avant-garde performance practices in terms of artists’ assumptions and audiences’ expectations. Reviews and blog entries written by scholars, critics, practitioners, and anonymous theatre goers were particularly disapproving of The Wooster Group’s experimentation with language, non-psychological acting, the appropriation of Native American customs, and the overall approach to the play and the very process of stage production. These points of criticism have suggested a clear perception of a successful Shakespeare production in the mainstream British theatre: a staging that approaches the text as an autonomous universe guided by realistic rules, psychological principles, and immediate political concerns. If we assume, however, that Troilus and Cressida as a play relies on the dramaturgy of cultural differences and that it consciously reflects on the notion of spectatorship, the production’s transgression of mainstream patterns of staging and spectating brings it surprisingly close to the Shakespearean source.

8. Hate crime

2021 ◽  
pp. 211-235
Author(s):  
Angus Nurse ◽  
Mark Walters
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Hate Crime ◽  
Minority Groups ◽  
Social Issues ◽  
The Public ◽  
Homophobic Violence ◽  
The Us ◽  
Civil Rights Movements ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Uk

This chapter addresses hate crimes, which are complex, as these offences can be linked to both personal gain or even profit, as well as concepts such as ‘difference’ and ‘othering’. This area of criminology came about primarily because the civil rights movements in the US and the UK raised the profile of racist and (later) homophobic violence so that they became important political and social issues. The chapter looks at a range of different types of hate crime, including offences based on prejudice towards victims because of their disability, race or ethnicity, religion or beliefs, sexual orientation, and gender identity. It also identifies some of the factors that can affect these offences in ways that are not immediately obvious. These elements include the influence politicians can have, especially when using language that excludes minority groups and portrays them as a threat to the public or as somehow being ‘Other’ (different and arguably not to be trusted).

The Shiraz Arts Festival: Western Avant-Garde Arts in 1970s Iran

Leonardo ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 20-28 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Gluck
Keyword(s):  
Electronic Music ◽  
John Cage ◽  
Islamic Revolution ◽  
Karlheinz Stockhausen ◽  
Iannis Xenakis ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Peter Brook ◽  
Merce Cunningham ◽  
Arts Festival ◽  
Theater Directors

Iran in the 1970s was host to an array of electronic music and avant-garde arts. In the decade prior to the Islamic revolution, the Shiraz Arts Festival provided a showcase for composers, performers, dancers and theater directors from Iran and abroad, among them Iannis Xenakis, Peter Brook, John Cage, Gordon Mumma, David Tudor, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Merce Cunningham. A significant arts center, which was to include electronic music and recording studios, was planned as an outgrowth of the festival. While the complex politics of the Shah's regime and the approaching revolution brought these developments to an end, a younger generation of artists continued the festival's legacy.

The Flames of Anticommunist Revolution

2018 ◽  
pp. 12-27
Author(s):  
Kyle Burke
Keyword(s):  
The United States ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Conservative Movement ◽  
Common Cause ◽  
The Us ◽  
The World ◽  
Us Government ◽  
Freedom Fighters ◽  
The Cold War

The anticommunist international emerged in the early years of the Cold War. As many right-leaning movements around the world grew dissatisfied with the US government and its response to the apparently rising tide of communism, they sought common cause with each other. In the United States, activist Marvin Liebman, an erstwhile socialist turned fierce anticommunist, labored tirelessly to link the burgeoning US conservative movement to new allies abroad. Journeying through Asia, Latin America, and elsewhere, Liebman bonded with an array of right-wing groups, especially the Asian People’s Anti-Communist League and the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations. Through these connections, leading US conservatives grew convinced that homegrown forces—especially paramilitaries they called “freedom fighters”—were in the vanguard of an unfolding international revolution.

Nono, Luigi (1924–90)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carola Nielinger-Vakil
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Electronic Music ◽  
Music Theater ◽  
Karlheinz Stockhausen ◽  
Major Work ◽  
Second Viennese School ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Political Music ◽  
Pierre Boulez ◽  
Law Degree

Luigi Nono stands out as one of the most uncompromising modernist composers of the Italian avant-garde. Together with Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez, Nono was one of the leading representatives of integral serialism in Europe after 1945. Nono is further known for his political music theater, his innovative spatial use of electronic music and live-electronics, avant-garde and microtonal instrumental writing, and an exceptionally lyric and communicative application of complex compositional procedures. Luigi Nono was born into a wealthy Venetian family just after Mussolini came to power. Toward the end of World War II, Nono began to study composition with G Fr Malipiero at the Venice conservatoire (1943–5) while completing a law degree at Padova University (1942–7). At the conservatoire, Bruno Maderna’s influential composition tutorials sparked a life-long interest in Renaissance polyphony and the works of the Second Viennese School. Equally fundamental was Hermann Scherchen’s conducting course (Venice, 1948). Luigi Dallapiccola’s lyric serialism was another formative influence at this time. Nono’s first major work, the Variazioni canoniche sulla serie dell’op.41 di Arnold Schönberg, was premiered under Scherchen at the Darmstadt New Music Courses in 1950. Together with Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez, Nono subsequently established himself as one of the leading composers of integral serialism.

The Accidental Political Advantages of a Nonpolitical Book Program

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victoria M. Grieve
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Cultural Diplomacy ◽  
The United States ◽  
Early Years ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Us ◽  
Us Government ◽  
Written Word ◽  
The Cold War

In the early years of the Cold War, the US government devoted substantial energy and funds to using books as weapons against the Soviet Union. Books and the principles they represented were to counter Soviet accusations of American materialism and spread American ideals around the globe. Founded in 1952, Franklin Books Program, Inc. was a gray propaganda program that operated at the nexus of US public–private cultural diplomacy efforts. USIA bureaucrats believed Franklin successfully carried out diplomatic objectives by highlighting the positive aspects of American culture and those who ran Franklin emphasized the “nonpolitical” aspects of cultural diplomacy, many of which directly targeted children. Franklin’s textbooks and juvenile science books cultivated a literate population friendly to the United States, reaching out to foreign young people through books, which like art, seemed to transcend the written word and represent abstract ideals of freedom and democracy.

Reclaiming Technology

2019 ◽  
pp. 105-138
Author(s):  
Jennifer Iverson
Keyword(s):  
Information Theory ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Electronic Music ◽  
Conceptual Foundation ◽  
Information Theoretic ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Core Concepts ◽  
Military Innovations ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Technological Limitations

In the transition from World War II to the Cold War, military innovations were domesticated and repurposed for civilian, scientific, and cultural advancement. Information theory is one such discourse—birthed from Shannon’s wartime cryptography work at Bell Labs—that burgeoned outward in a series of connected, interdisciplinary spirals in the 1950s. The WDR studio was a locale where wartime “technology” (defined broadly to include ideas) was reclaimed for cultural gain. After the initial experiments of the early 1950s, composers found themselves hemmed in by technological limits and unhappy with the serial, pointillist music they had so far made. Enter Meyer-Eppler, a former Nazi communications researcher turned phonetics scientist and electronic music expert, whose information-theoretic teachings helped composers solve their problems in several ways: to understand when their music had been too information dense; to incorporate gestures, approximations, and perceptible shapes; and to circumvent the technological limitations of the studio. The core concepts of information theory—perception, sampling and continuity, and probability—became the foundation for much mid-1950’s music from a range of composers in the studio and beyond. Working cooperatively, scientists, technicians, and composers participated in a process of culturally reclaiming information theory from its wartime origin, making it the conceptual foundation for 1950’s avant-garde music.

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