Documents found
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1021.
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1022.
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1024.More information
AbstractThe author examines the sacred dimension in Claude Vivier's universe by appealing to the life, the writings and the works in general, and in particular to his “ritual of death,” the opera Kopernikus. Two aspects of the sacred are envisaged in this article, that of the ‘numinous' and the ‘marvellous.' In Vivier, the life and the works influence eachother reciprocally, oscillating between the numinous (the impetus for life) and the marvellous (impetus for works), between two mental representations, that of sacrifice (from the Latin sacrare, ‘to devote to a divinity') and ecstasy (from the Latin extasis, ‘to be outside of oneself'; ‘to lose one's mind'; ‘rapture'). Agni, the composer's double, the central figure of the opera (and the only named character), evokes the numinous associated with the concept of sacrifice. Alice, the shadow of Agni, symbol of the constantly sollicited imagination, represents the marvellous associated with the concept of extasy. Between the numinous and the marvellous, sacrifice and ecstacy, existence and art, a void takes shape which music is called upon to fill.
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1025.More information
The adepts of serial music since the end of the 1950s seemed destined to ally themselves with structuralist thought—the broadly defined intellectual movement that profoundly marked the social sciences and humanities. The importance of the metaphor of language to the serialist project of Pierre Boulez in particular seemed sufficient to pave the way towards a conceptual alliance between avant-garde music and structuralist thought. Nevertheless, Claude Lévi-Strauss's acerbic pronouncements on serial music as well as musique concrète that appeared in the famous “Overture” to The Raw and the Cooked (1964) made it clear that Lévi-Strauss was no friend of the serialist project. Drawing on recent research by Jean-Jacques Nattiez, Nicolas Donin, and Frédéric Keck, this article will argue that the serialist compositional project of the postwar era, embodied primarily in the figure of Pierre Boulez, can be considered “structuralist” in the sense of the intellectual movement promulgated by Claude Lévi-Strauss, despite the latter's denunciation of serial music.
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1027.
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1028.
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1030.