In 1798 Robert Morris-"financier of the American Revolution," confidant of George Washington, former U.S. senator-plunged from the peaks of wealth and prestige into debtors' prison and public ...contempt. How could one of the richest men in the United States, one of only two founders who signed the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation,andthe Constitution, suffer such a downfall?This book examines for the first time the extravagant Philadelphia town house Robert Morris built and its role in bringing about his ruin. Part biography, part architectural history, the book recounts Morris's wild successes as a merchant, his recklessness as a land speculator, and his unrestrained passion in building his palatial, doomed mansion, once hailed as the most expensive private building in the United States but later known as "Morris's Folly." Setting Morris's tale in the context of the nation's founding, this volume refocuses attention on an essential yet nearly forgotten American figure while also illuminating the origins of America's ongoing, ambivalent attitudes toward the superwealthy and their sensational excesses.
Barrie Cabena’s Sonata Festiva (1971) highlights SLIDE, a chord progression familiar from the neo-Riemannian and twentieth-century Russian music-theoretic literatures. Diverse expressions of SLIDE ...involve chord pairs, single chords, and melodic lines in textural, tonal, and formal contexts, leading to contemplative, energetic, comedic, and triumphant effects. Aspects of pitch-class set theory help to relate SLIDE to other harmonic phenomena in the work.
This article argues that the EU response to the pandemic, the Next Generation EU (NGEU), dubbed a “Hamiltonian moment” for Europe, can be better understood if compared to the US under the Articles of ...Confederation. The key aspect of the original Hamiltonian moment was the assumption of states’ debts after the Union was given tax power. None of this happened with the NGEU. The EU was not given any significant new sources of revenue, apart from some environmental levies, and was only allowed to borrow more on the financial markets to finance new fiscal solidarity mechanisms. In the US, this kind of borrowing power gave rise to monetary financing of the debt and enormous inflation. Instead of backing the enlarged borrowing powers with a fiscalization process leading to tax powers, the EU created a hybrid system of temporary, limited quasi-fiscalization in the form of the NGEU, which has legitimacy gaps. Simultaneously, the EU introduced enhanced fiscal regulation with conditionalities in the form of the new European Semester (an annual EU cycle of economic and fiscal coordination) tied to the allocation of the NGEU funds. Additionally, the EU has only promised to work in the future on various forms of revenue needed to pay the new debt. Hence, I will show that the NGEU could be better described as a “Morrisian moment” for Europe, as Robert Morris, the superintendent of finance of the US (1781–1784), was the very first finance minister of a similar kind of a union, with the power to borrow but no power to tax, governed by the unanimity rule in fiscal matters, which led to the failure of his proposals for national revenue.
From 1964 to 1965, Robert Morris made a series of lead relief sculptures, which have been almost completely excluded from the literature on his work, even though they comprise one of the largest ...groups in his oeuvre. This essay argues that the leads express key epochal anxieties from 1960s America regarding materiality, labour and 'social abstraction'. It tracks a consistent ambivalence within the leads, which oscillate between presenting invisible forces or troubling abstractions, and resisting them through literal materiality or nostalgic associations. The leads - and related works including Morris's performance War (1963) - are linked with socio-political issues including the 'military industrial complex' and the rise of automation. Morris's reliefs are also contextualized in relation to his better known minimal sculptures, broad trends amongst his contemporaries, and the work of Marcel Duchamp and Jasper Johns.
Haskins talks about Buddhism. For Robert Morris, Buddhism encourages listeners to cultivate undivided attention as music unfolds from moment to moment; the attending listener notes events as they ...pass, but is not caught by particular feelings or thoughts, nor does she indulge the familiar temptation to reify the music as a semi-rigid object whose trajectory--expressive, structural, or rhetorical--remains more or less the same from one performance to the next. Indeed, Morris proposes that, through sheer attention, a listener can develop new ways of perceiving time, not only to perceive a thing-in-itself but to become one with it.
The radical creator was expected to provide works to assist children in becoming rational and capable adults, ready to change society and work toward a more progressive and equal future for all. ...Martin Lawrence was closely allied with the Communist Party of Great Britain but had a major influence on British children's literature, being the first publisher of the influential historical children's novelist Geoffrey Trease. The realistic and strangely terrifying images of dolls as soldiers, including a depiction of a military execution, are as Reynolds says, "far beyond the experiences and understandings of most children" (45), but they succeed in linking the ideas of children, toys, and play.
Mailman talks about Robert Morris's recreation park-music. Morris, professor and chair of the Eastman School's Composition Department, composed for the outdoors before. Eastman's student-run New ...Music ensemble, Ossia, performed his first outdoor work, Playing Outside, in Webster Park in 2001. This time it's the world premiere of Morris's second outdoor work: Coming Down to Earth. Judging from the attendance, the applause, and the grapevine, the audience and the composer of Playing Outside seemed to agree: Webster Park provides an ideal environment for listening to New Music.
