"The Soul Unto Itself," a chamber music song cycle, was commissioned by the author, Rosa LoGiudice, and composed by William Clay, a doctoral candidate in composition at Arizona State University. The ...cycle was conceived and composed in the summer and fall of 2019. The chamber ensemble was a sextet comprised of Megan Law, mezzo-soprano, Kristi Hanno, clarinet, Emilio Vazquez, violin, Rittika Gambhir, bassoon, Nathaniel De la Cruz, double bass, and Rosa LoGiudice, piano, all based in Tempe, Arizona. The song cycle was premiered in a lecture recital on December 8, 2019 at Hammer and Strings Conservatory in Gilbert, AZ."The Soul Unto Itself" is a cycle of six songs based on poems of Emily Dickinson. The poems all have common themes of personal transformation achieved through the introspective observations of the poet. An unusual chamber ensemble was chosen to include instruments not commonly used in vocal chamber music in order to create a greater variety of musical colors and timbres. This project included the creation of the musical score, a live performance that was video recorded, and the research paper. This document discusses the process of working with the composer, rehearsing the music as it was being composed, and negotiating revisions necessary to make the music more effective in performance. Each song is discussed in detail, especially the connection between the music and poetry, the overall form of the song, revisions discussed and implemented, and important motivic relationships between the songs that unify the cycle. In summary, the process of collaborating with a composer is a rewarding experience for both the performers and the composer, as everyone is challenged to improve their craft and overcome obstacles to achieve a successful performance.
This essay establishes the Christian myth within Wilde’s three plays, calling attention to the gender politics that he fought against in the Victorian era. Through Salomé, A Woman of No Importance, ...and An Ideal Husband I will prove the Christological myth that each play adopts and establish Wilde’s ability to make the religion “transformational”. Wilde’s productions of characters like Salomé, Mrs. Allonby, Mrs. Arbuthnot, and Hester are examples of the “fallen woman” of Victorian England. The treatment of women by women will illuminate the passiveness of the Victorian Woman and their compliance with the patriarchal norm. This norm continues through the two “society plays”: A Woman of No Importance and An Ideal Husband, where aspects of progressive women versus married ones is concentrated on. Wilde uses his ability of language to show societal norms to convey Christological backgrounds. These plays portray multiple types of women: those who comply with the patriarchy and those who do everything in their power to usurp it. Wilde displays these differences through his storytelling, manipulating certain aspects of the Victorian era to expose negative traits of a patriarchal society.
Oates discusses why the artist's relationship to ethics is always problematic and paradoxical. In the artist's own experience, of course, art is fundamentally indefinable, unsayable; there is ...something sacred about its demands upon the soul, something inherently mysterious in the forms it takes, no less than in its contents.
Freakish belonging Yost, Julia
First things (New York, N.Y.),
11/2014
247
Journal Article
Applause was heard from admirers of his after-dark performance art-murder being the ultimate shock to bourgeois sensibilities. Murder as performance art was done first and best by a Jazz Age teenager ...named Richard Loeb, who with Nathan Leopold abducted and killed a child from his affluent Chicago neighborhood in 1924. ...spake Nietzsche in The Gay Science.
Wilde chose Thomas Griffiths Wainwright, a murderer and an accomplished art critic, as the subject of “Pen, Pencil and Poison,” and the authors argue that the connection between this piece and his ...“Chatterton” notebook is that “the subjects of both works were forgers, executing different varieties of such deceit for similar ends” (217). In this, the most complex and focused chapter of the book, they concentrate on literary forgers and critics such as James Payne Collier and William Henry-Ireland and explore questions of influence and identity, focusing on how Chatterton’s legacy and influence led Wilde to “redirect the vexed history of forging Shakespeare’s work with the advent of the ‘Romantic movement’” (292). Given these contributions, Bristow and Mitchell’s innovative study is a significant and welcome contribution to debates surrounding Wilde’s development as a writer of criticism, drama, fiction, and poetry, a contribution that redirects attention to the importance of Chatterton as a cultural icon throughout the nineteenth century and will open the door for further debate.
San Francisco: Well-curated City by the Bay Just as a bookshelf can jam together wildly different books, each book a small box opening onto a different world, so seemed the buildings of my city: ...every row of houses and shops brought near many kinds of abundance, opened onto many mysteries: crack houses, zen centers, gospel churches, tattoo parlors, produce stores, movie palaces, dim sum shops. -
The historian and critic John Addington Symonds (1840-1893) was the first thinker in Britain to develop an academic model of male homosexual identity. Previous work on Symonds has not fully ...understood his distinctive blend of scholarship and sexual identity; this article situates Symonds' thinking about homosexuality within a wider context of nineteenth-century ideas about the classics, modern history, ethics, religion, and science. It argues that intellectual and ethical concerns were more fundamental to Symonds' sense of self than sexual expression, and that they shaped his understanding of his own and others' sexuality.
Gemma Bovery, Posy Simonds’s graphic novel, is a parody of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, transposed into the end of the twentieth century. The narrator, seduced by Emma Bovary, whose romantic aspirations ...he shares, imagines that his neighbors, Charlie and Gemma Bovery, will experience the same fate as Flaubert’s characters and that life will imitate art, in accordance with Oscar Wilde’s hopes. He will realize that he was wrong. This novel induces us to reflect on reading and the relationship between literature and life. The film adaptation by Anne Fontaine somewhat distorts the book’s meaning, giving a unity of style and tone that the English writer had wanted to break down in order to draw closer to Flaubert’s novel.
