The Tyranny Of Taste

Bálint András Varga is perhaps the world's most respected interviewer of living composers. For The Courage of Composers and the Tyranny of Taste: Reflections on New Music, Varga has confronted thirty-three composers with quotations carefully chosen to elicit their thoughts about an issue that is crucial for any serious creative artist: How can one find courage to deal with the sometimes tyrannical expectations of the outside world? The result is an imaginary roundtable at which we encounter fresh, revealing, previously unpublished statements from such world-renowned composers as John Adams, Friedrich Cerha, George Crumb, Sofia Gubaïdulina, Georg Friedrich Haas, Giya Kancheli, György Kurtág, Helmut Lachenmann, Libby Larsen, Robert Morris, and Wolfgang Rihm. Also represented are composers who are becoming more prominent with the passing years -- Chaya Czernowin, Pascal Dusapin, and Rebecca Saunders -- as well as conductor-composer Michael Gielen, festival director Nicholas Kenyon, and music critics Paul Griffiths and Arnold Whittall. In The Courage of Composers and the Tyranny of Taste, composers and other insightful individuals comment on choices made, traps avoided, unforeseen consequences, proud accomplishments, occasional regrets: the whole range of experiences central to artistic creativity. Bálint András Varga isthe acclaimed author of György Kurtág: Three Interviews and Ligeti Homages; Three Questions for 65 Composers; and From Boulanger to Stockhausen: Interviews and a Memoir (all available from University of Rochester Press).

How do countries acquire their distinctive features and appearance, their look or style? In this study, Jules Lubbock answers this question by focusing on Britain, with its characteristic terraced houses, Georgian squares, postwar slab blocks and Victorian floral ornamentation. Lubbock traces the fierce debates over consumerism, good design and town planning that have raged in Britain since the Elizabethan period, investigating how the design of buildings and possessions - domestic as well as official - becomes an issue of public policy and controversy.

"While recognizing a "progressive ethos" - a mixture of idealistic vision and pragmatic reforms that characterized the period - Chambers elaborates the role of civic volunteerism as well as the state in achieving directed social change. He also emphasizes the importance of radical and conservative forces in shaping the so-called "Progressive Era.""--BOOK JACKET.

Between 1700 and 1830, men and women in the English-speaking territories framing the Atlantic gained unprecedented access to material things. The British Atlantic was an empire of goods, held together not just by political authority and a common language, but by a shared material culture nourished by constant flows of commodities. Diets expanded to include exotic luxuries such as tea and sugar, the fruits of mercantile and colonial expansion. Homes were furnished with novel goods, like clocks and earthenware teapots, the products of British industrial ingenuity. This groundbreaking book compares these developments in Britain and North America, bringing together a multi-disciplinary group of scholars to consider basic questions about women, men, and objects in these regions. In asking who did the shopping, how things were used, and why they became the subject of political dispute, the essays show the profound significance of everyday objects in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world.

Today’s architecture has failed the body with its long heritage of purity of form and aesthetic of cleanliness. A resurgence of interest in flesh, especially in art, has led to a politics of abjection, completely changing traditional aesthetics, and is now giving light to an alternative discussion about the body in architecture. This book is dedicated to a future vision of the body in architecture, questioning the contemporary relationship between our Human Flesh and the changing Architectural Flesh. Through the analysis and design of a variety of buildings and projects, Flesh is proposed as a concept that extends the meaning of skin, one of architecture’s most fundamental metaphors. It seeks to challenge a common misunderstanding of skin as a flat and thin surface. In a time when a pervasive discourse about the impact of digital technologies risks turning the architectural skin ever more disembodied, this book argues for a thick embodied flesh by exploring architectural interfaces that are truly inhabitable. Different concepts of Flesh are investigated, not only concerning the architectural and aesthetic, but also the biological aspects. The latter is materialised in form of Synthetic Neoplasms, which are proposed as new semi-living entities, rather than more commonly derived from scaled-up analogies between biological systems and larger scale architectural constructs. These ’neoplasmatic’ creations are identified as partly designed object and partly living material, in which the line between the natural and the artificial is progressively blurred. Hybrid technologies and interdisciplinary work methodologies are thus required, and lead to a revision of our current architectural practice.

This volume charts the rise of consumer culture in Europe during the 17th and 18th centuries. Essays are included on France and Holland, but the focus is primarily on Britain. Themes discussed include art markets, collecting and display, and are set alongside those of value and luxury.

The Companion provides an accessible critical survey of Western visual art theory from sources in Classical, Medieval and Renaissance thought through to contemporary writings.

With this richly illustrated history of industrial design reform in nineteenth-century Britain, Lara Kriegel demonstrates that preoccupations with trade, labor, and manufacture lay at the heart of debates about cultural institutions during the Victorian era. Through aesthetic reform, Victorians sought to redress the inferiority of British crafts in comparison to those made on the continent and in the colonies. Declaring a crisis of design and workmanship among the British laboring classes, reformers pioneered schools of design, copyright protections, and spectacular displays of industrial and imperial wares, most notably the Great Exhibition of 1851. Their efforts culminated with the establishment of the South Kensington Museum, predecessor to the Victoria and Albert Museum, which stands today as home to the world’s foremost collection of the decorative and applied arts. Kriegel’s identification of the significant links between markets and museums, and between economics and aesthetics, amounts to a rethinking of Victorian cultural formation. Drawing on a wide range of sources, including museum guidebooks, design manuals, illustrated newspapers, pattern books, and government reports, Kriegel brings to life the many Victorians who claimed a stake in aesthetic reform during the middle years of the nineteenth century. The aspiring artists who attended the Government School of Design, the embattled provincial printers who sought a strengthened industrial copyright, the exhibition-going millions who visited the Crystal Palace, the lower-middle-class consumers who learned new principles of taste in metropolitan museums, and the working men of London who critiqued the city’s art and design collections—all are cast by Kriegel as leading cultural actors of their day. Grand Designs shows how these Victorians vied to upend aesthetic hierarchies in an imperial age and, in the process, to refashion London’s public culture.