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Alena Ledeneva invites you on a voyage of discovery, to explore society’s open secrets, unwritten rules and know-how practices. Broadly defined as ‘ways of getting things done’, these invisible yet powerful informal practices tend to escape articulation in official discourse. They include emotion-driven exchanges of gifts or favours and tributes for services, interest-driven know-how (from informal welfare to informal employment and entrepreneurship), identity-driven practices of solidarity, and power-driven forms of co-optation and control. The paradox, or not, of the invisibility of these informal practices is their ubiquity. Expertly practised by insiders but often hidden from outsi...
This book discusses how public cultural policies can relate to the principle political issue of democracy. Here, democratic cultural policies include ideas and ideologies, institutional structures, agents and interests, power, access and participation and distribution of economic resources. Contributors focus on analysing the relationship between a political system and culture and the arts as an empirical field. They critically consider questions such as: How do different democratic forms affect cultural policy consequences? Can cultural autonomy be combined with cultural democracy? How is cultural policy-making used as a political process and which interests are involved? What position does popular culture have in cultural policies? How does a former Soviet state like Lithuania handle the question of culture and democracy? What does it mean when UNESCO talks about cultural diversity? How did intellectuals act in cultural policy debates in France in the late 19th century? The volume also looks at whether the democratisation of culture is actually possible. This book was originally published as a special issue of the International Journal of Cultural Policy.
Barbara Lebrun traces the evolution of 'protest' music in France since 1981, exploring the contradictions that emerge when artists who take their musical production and political commitment 'seriously', cross over to the mainstream, becoming profitable and consensual. Contestation is understood as a discourse shaped by the assumptions and practices of artists, producers, the media and audiences, for whom it makes sense to reject politically reactionary ideas and the dominant taste for commercial pop. Placing music in its economic, historical and ideological context, however, reveals the fragility and instability of these oppositions. The book firstly concentrates on music production in Franc...
In this volume fifteen musicologists from five countries present new findings and observations concerning the production, distribution and use of music manuscripts and prints in seventeenth-century Europe. A special emphasis is laid on the Düben Collection, one of the largest music collections of seventeenth-century Europe, preserved at the Uppsala University Library. The papers in this volume were initially presented at an international conference at Uppsala University in September 2006, held on the occasion of the launching of The Düben Collection Database Catalogue on the Internet. For the first time, the entire collection had been made acessible worldwide, covering a vast number of musical and philological aspects of all items in the collection.
The volume is a collection of scholarly essays and personal responses that contextualizes Hamilton: An American Musical in various frameworks: hip-hop theatre and history, American history, musicals, contemporary politics, queer theory, feminism, and more. Hamilton is arguably the most important piece of American theatre in 25 years in terms of both national impact and shaping influence on American theatre. It is part of a larger history of American theatre that reframes the United States and shows the nation its face in a manner not before seen but that is resolutely true. With essays from a number of scholars, artists, political scientists, and historians, the book engages with generational differences in response to the play, transformations of the perception of the musical between the Obama and Trump administrations, youth culture, color-conscious casting, feminist critiques, comparisons with black-ish, The Mountaintop, Assassins, and In the Heights, as well as Hamilton's place in hip hop theatre.
'Sounds French' reveals how French society mediated the challenges of globalization through the consumption and production of popular music, itself increasingly an expression of globalized culture. As recorded music became more commonplace and crossed national boundaries in the second half of the twentieth century, French musicians and their audiences articulated new types of communal identities around popular music genres that reflected the impact of social, political, economic, and cultural transformations after the 1950s.
The transition to democracy that followed the death of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco in 1975 was once hailed as a model of political transformation. But since the 2008 financial crisis it has come under intense scrutiny. Today, a growing divide exists between advocates of the Transition and those who see it as the source of Spain’s current socio-political bankruptcy. This book revisits the crucial period from 1962 to 1992, exposing the networks of art, media and power that drove the Transition and continue to underpin Spanish politics in the present. Drawing on rare archival materials and over three hundred interviews with politicians, artists, journalists and ordinary Spaniards, including former prime minister Felipe Gonzalez (1982–96), Following Franco unlocks the complex and often contradictory narratives surrounding the foundation of contemporary Spain.
Qui n'a pas, à l'écoute d'un organum parisien, établi un rapport avec l'architecture des cathédrales gothiques, ou rencontré une telle comparaison dans un ouvrage traitant de musique ou d'histoire de l'art ? Ces rapports résultent de deux faits : d'une part, un remarquable parallélisme entre les événements marquants de la polyphonie parisienne et de l'architecture gothique, et d'autre part, la propension actuelle à percevoir de façon spontanée cette analogie. Cet ouvrage propose donc un nouvel examen de ce parallélisme historique en tenant compte de la perception actuelle, et en se basant sur les caractères concrets de l'architecture des cathédrales gothiques, de la polyphonie de Notre-Dame et du contexte culturel et intellectuel de l'époque. Basées sur la pensée scolastique, les analyses des compositions polyphoniques et des cathédrales gothiques d'Ile-de-France font ressortir des structures qui expliquent enfin que l'on perçoive entre ces oeuvres des liens organiques et esthétiques. Cet ouvrage propose un parcours inédit d'éléments historiques concrets vers l'organisation et la perception de créations centrales de l'art médiéval.
Popular music scholars have long been interested in the connection between place and music. This collection brings together a number of key scholars in order to introduce readers to concepts and theories used to explore the relationships between place and music. An interdisciplinary volume, drawing from sociology, geography, ethnomusicology, media, cultural, and communication studies, this book covers a wide-range of topics germane to the production and consumption of place in popular music. Through considerations of changes in technology and the mediascape that have shaped the experience of popular music (vinyl, iPods, social media), the role of social difference and how it shapes sociomusi...
This book argues for the importance of literature studies using the historical debate between the disinterested disciplines (“art for art’s sake”) and utilitarian or productive disciplines. Forgoing the traditional argument that literature is a unique spiritual resource, as well as the utilitarian thought that literary pedagogy promotes skills that are relevant to a post-industrial economy, Guiney suggests that literary pedagogy must enable mutual access between the classroom and the outside world. It must recognize the need for every human being to become a conscious producer of culture rather than a consumer, through an active process of literary reading and writing. Using the history of French curricular reforms as a case study for his analysis, Guiney provides a contextualized redefinition of literature’s social value.