Rationalizing Culture

Anthropologist Georgina Born presents one of the first ethnographies of a powerful western cultural organization, the renowned Institut de Recherche et de Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM) in Paris. As a year-long participant-observer, Born studied the social and cultural economy of an institution for research and production of avant-garde and computer music. She gives a unique portrait of IRCAM's composers, computer scientists, technicians, and secretaries, interrogating the effects of the cultural philosophy of the controversial avant-garde composer, Pierre Boulez, who directed the institute until 1992. Born depicts a major artistic institution trying to maintain its status and legitimacy in an era increasingly dominated by market forces, and in a volatile political and cultural climate. She illuminates the erosion of the legitimacy of art and science in the face of growing commercial and political pressures. By tracing how IRCAM has tried to accomodate these pressures while preserving its autonomy, Born reveals the contradictory effects of institutionalizing an avant-garde. Contrary to those who see postmodernism representing an accord between high and popular culture, Born stresses the continuities between modernism and postmodernism and how postmodernism itself embodies an implicit antagonism toward popular culture.

Anthropologist Georgina Born presents one of the first ethnographies of a powerful western cultural organization, the renowned Institut de Recherche et de Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM) in Paris. As a year-long participant-observer, Born studied the social and cultural economy of an institution for research and production of avant-garde and computer music. She gives a unique portrait of IRCAM's composers, computer scientists, technicians, and secretaries, interrogating the effects of the cultural philosophy of the controversial avant-garde composer, Pierre Boulez, who directed the institute until 1992. Born depicts a major artistic institution trying to maintain its status and legitimacy in an era increasingly dominated by market forces, and in a volatile political and cultural climate. She illuminates the erosion of the legitimacy of art and science in the face of growing commercial and political pressures. By tracing how IRCAM has tried to accomodate these pressures while preserving its autonomy, Born reveals the contradictory effects of institutionalizing an avant-garde. Contrary to those who see postmodernism representing an accord between high and popular culture, Born stresses the continuities between modernism and postmodernism and how postmodernism itself embodies an implicit antagonism toward popular culture.

An engaging argument about what experimental music can tell us about being human. In Experimenting the Human, G Douglas Barrett argues that experimental music speaks to the contemporary posthuman, a condition in which science and technology decenter human agency amid the uneven temporality of postwar global capitalism. Time moves forward for some during this period, while it seems to stand still or even move backward for others. Some say we’re already posthuman, while others endure the extended consequences of never having been considered fully human in the first place. Experimental music reflects on this state, Barrett contends, through its interdisciplinary involvements in postwar science, technology, and art movements. Rather than pursuing the human's beyond, experimental music addresses the social and technological conditions that support such a pursuit. Barrett locates this tendency of experimentalism throughout its historical entanglements with cybernetics, and in his intimate analysis of Alvin Lucier’s neurofeedback music, Pamela Z’s BodySynth performances, Nam June Paik’s musical robotics, Pauline Oliveros’s experiments with radio astronomy, and work by Laetitia Sonami, Yasunao Tone, and Jerry Hunt. Through a unique meeting of music studies, media theory, and art history, Experimenting the Human provides fresh insights into what it means to be human.

"New Makers of Modern Culture takes into full account the rise and fall of reputation and influence over the last twenty-five years and the epochal changes that have occurred: the demise of Marxism and the collapse of the Soviet Union; the rise and fall of postmodernism; the eruption of Islamic fundamentalism; the triumph of the Internet. Containing over eight hundred essay-style entries, and covering the period from 1850 to the present, New Makers includes artists, writers, dramatists, architects, philosophers, anthropologists, scientists, sociologists, major political figures, composers, film-makers and many other culturally significant individuals and is thoroughly international in its purview. With its global reach, New Makers of Modern Culture provides a multi-voiced witness of the contemporary thinking world. The entries carry short bibliographies and there is thorough cross-referencing. There is an index of names and key terms."--Publisher's description

New Makers of Modern Culture is the successor to the classic reference works Makers of Modern Culture and Makers of Nineteenth-Century Culture, published by Routledge in the early 1980s. The set was extremely successful and continues to be used to this day, due to the high quality of the writing, the distinguished contributors, and the cultural sensitivity shown in the selection of those individuals included. New Makers of Modern Culture takes into full account the rise and fall of reputation and influence over the last twenty-five years and the epochal changes that have occurred: the demise of Marxism and the collapse of the Soviet Union; the rise and fall of postmodernism; the eruption of Islamic fundamentalism; the triumph of the Internet. Containing over eight hundred essay-style entries, and covering the period from 1850 to the present, New Makers includes artists, writers, dramatists, architects, philosophers, anthropologists, scientists, sociologists, major political figures, composers, film-makers and many other culturally significant individuals and is thoroughly international in its purview. Next to Karl Marx is Bob Marley, next to John Ruskin is Salmon Rushdie, alongside Darwin is Luigi Dallapiccola, Deng Xiaoping runs shoulders with Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva with Kropotkin. Once again, Wintle has enlisted the services of many distinguished writers and leading academics, such as Sam Beer, Bernard Crick, Edward Seidensticker and Paul Preston. In a few cases, for example Michael Holroyd and Philip Larkin, contributors are themselves the subject of entries. With its global reach, New Makers of Modern Culture provides a multi-voiced witness of the contemporary thinking world. The entries carry short bibliographies and there is thorough cross-referencing. There is an index of names and key terms.

In his 1985 book The Idea of Music: Schoenberg and Others, Peter Franklin set out a challenge for musicology: namely, how best to talk and write about the music of modern European culture that fell outside of the modernist mainstream typified by Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern? Thirty years on, this collected volume of essays by Franklin’s students and colleagues returns to that challenge and the vibrant intellectual field that has since developed. Moving freely between insights into opera, Volksoper, film, festival, and choral movement, and from the very earliest years of the twentieth century up to the 1980s, its authors listen with a ‘critical ear’: they site these musical phenomena within a wider web of modern cultural practices - a perspective, in turn, that enables them to exercise a disciplinary self-awareness after Franklin’s manner.

This book assesses the influence and reception of many different forms of guitar playing upon the classical guitar and more specifically through the prism of John Williams. Beginning with an examination of Andrés Segovia and his influence upon Williams’ life’s work, a further three incisive chapters cover key areas such as performance, perception, education and construction, considering social and cultural contexts of the guitar over the past century. A final chapter on new directions in classical guitar examines the change in reception of the instrument from the mid-1970s to the present day, and Williams’ impact upon what might be termed ‘standard classical guitar repertoire’. With in-depth discussion of the cultural and perceptual impact of Williams’ more daring crossover projects and numerous musical examples, this is an informative reference for all classical guitar practitioners, as well as scholars and researchers of guitar studies, reception studies, cultural musicology and performance studies. An online lecture by the author and a transcript of the author’s interview with John Williams are also available as e-resources.

America is entering a new age of economic discord, warns Robert E. Kuenne. In addition to a panoply of other structural economic troubles, the nation must now confront unprecedented demands for the kind of "distributive justice" that will meet the needs of the elderly, handicapped, and impoverished. Furthermore, American society faces the pressing problems of the disadvantaged with no explicit code of economic justice. Claims to various kinds of government entitlements are based increasingly on appeals to "economic justice," but no real national agreement exists on what that expression means. In this ambitious work, Kuenne sets out to remedy this want of consensus. After an extensive evaluation of earlier thinking about distributive justice, Kuenne proposes a new theory, "dualistic individualism," that is consistent with the American ethos of political and economic liberalism. He then frames a formal Bill of Economic Rights and Obligations, which defines proper governmental conduct in the economic terrain as the American Constitution does in the political. Defending a form of governmental policy that strikes a balance between the egoistic and compassionate elements of American individualism, Kuenne also considers the practical tasks of program implementation, and goes on to assess the feasibility of meeting concrete redistributive goals over the next thirty years. His thorough investigation of one of the country's most urgent predicaments could do much to stimulate debate over the ad hoc and unprincipled distributive policies that now prevail in the United States. Originally published in 1993. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.