Arts, Volume 13, Issue 3 (June 2024) – 7 articles

Tchaikovsky enjoyed composing Yevgeni Onegin. He expressed his fulfillment in a famous letter to Sergey Taneyev. What could his enthusiasm convey about the content of the project? Music criticism has taken Tchaikovsky’s words as proof for the thesis that the opera is connected to autobiographical circumstances. In this mode of thinking, the quality of Tchaikovsky’s music is the result of the composer’s identification with the subject matter. Despite the objection of several Tchaikovsky scholars, the autobiographical paradigm remains very much alive in the reception of Tchaikovsky’s music. As an alternative, Tchaikovsky scholarship has explored a hermeneutical approach that would link his music to its context in Russian society and culture. In this paper, I present another possible reaction to Tchaikovsky’s statement: an exploration of the composer’s approach to musical characterization. Analysis of some key scenes reveals that the definition of characters and situations by musical means is more precise than standard interpretations of the opera would concede. This discovery may lead to a new assessment of characterization as a critical tool to refine the definition of Tchaikovsky’s position in European music history. The method may be applied to examples outside his operatic output, such as Serenade for Strings and the Fifth Symphony. Full article

This paper contextualizes Okudzhava’s song “And We to the Doorman” (AWD), initially marginal in the Soviet poetic mainstream. It explores its shifts in tone, irregular rhythms, colloquial language, and semi-criminal undertones. AWD’s structure, with uneven stanzas and no clear refrain, reveals underlying symmetry and recurring themes. The meter is predominantly iambic but varies. Unconventional verse endings and various rhyme schemes, including distant chains, characterize its prosody. The narrative touches on social cohesion and class conflict. The style reflects a challenging attitude toward privilege, employing rhetorical devices and indirect threats. The melody aligns with thematic elements, featuring repetitive patterns and a spoken quality. Semantically, AWD presents an ambiguous message on class struggle and moral issues. In sum, this analysis uncovers Okudzhava’s song’s formal complexities, thematic nuances, and stylistic innovations. Full article

Shostakovich’s direct quotation from the Odessan street song “Bagels, Buy My Bagels!” (Bubliki, kupite bubliki!) in his Second Cello Concerto Op. 126 (1966) featured an unusual style, even in relation to some of his other compositions referencing popular and Jewish music. The song is widely known as one of the icons of the Odessa underworld. Shostakovich’s use of this melody as one of the main leit-themes of the Concerto can be compared to the use by the non-Jewish Andrei Sinyavsky of the Jewish pseudonym Abram Tertz, a bandit from the Odessa underworld—the only locus of freedom to tell the truth in a totalitarian society. The time of Shostakovich’s address to this song remarkably coincided with the famous Soviet trial of Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuly Daniel in the fall of 1965 and their final sentencing (February 1966) to years in a Gulag camp. The dramaturgy of Shostakovich’s Concerto, written in the same spring of 1966, demonstrates the transformation of the theme of “Bagels” into a tragic image. The totality of circumstantial evidence suggests that this opus could be the composer’s hidden tribute to the feats of Russian heroic writers. Full article

How have funding, art education, and politics affected the development of performance and interdisciplinary art? In England in particular, performance as an experimental and radical art practice developed largely from underground activities, political action and a range of art forms. Funding bodies, colleges and art institutions eventually accommodated, albeit to a limited extent, this activity. As financial circumstances were sometimes difficult, artists often provided their own support structures and organisations. Some of these became established as they became successful. Performance art split from the theatrical and became defined as live art. In more recent times, conditions shifted again, and critical, experimental, or avant-garde theatre, film, music, etc., found refuge within contemporary art. Performance however, became increasingly confined and restricted by: the regulatory and academic requirements within universities; the need for evidence for some form of public or social purpose by funding bodies; and the increasingly hostile social and political circumstances. This research draws partly from personal experience and reflects on cultural conditions since the 1970s. Full article

Joaquin Sorolla’s Social Realist work Sad Inheritance! provides the grounds for this cross-sectional case study into Social Realism in Spain, Spanish politics at the turn of the twentieth century, and affect theory in art. By formally analyzing this work, presenting its differing receptions in France and Spain, and discussing the identity crisis that Spain experienced at the end of the twentieth century, all within the frame of Jill Bennett’s conception of practical aesthetics and affect in art, this article will show how Sorolla produced an image that had differing valences of affect depending on the context in which it was viewed. Through his singular pictorial strategies, Sorolla successfully created an image that was political and sentimental, controversial and appealing, fraught with emotion, and ultimately affective. Full article

The article is devoted to the musical context of the works of James Joyce and Vladimir Nabokov. Joyce’s Ulysses, one of the most important literary texts of the twentieth century, is filled with musical allusions and various musical techniques. The chapter “Sirens” is the most interesting in this context as it features a “musical” form and contains a large number of musical quotations. The myth of the singing sirens, recreated by Joyce in images and characters from the modern world, encapsulates the idea of erotic seduction, bringing threat and doom to the seduced. Joyce offers a new version of the sea world filled with music, creating a system of musical leitmotifs and lexical patterns within the text. Developing the themes of temptation, the danger that temptation entails, doom, uniting with the vital forces of the world, and loneliness, Joyce in “Sirens” reveals the semantics of music, showing the specific nature of its effect on listeners. Vladimir Nabokov, who praised Ulysses and devoted a lecture to “Sirens”, is much less musical than Joyce. However, he, like Joyce, also refers to the images of singing sirens and the accompanying images of the aquatic world. One of the central, meaning-making signs in his work is the “Sirin complex”, his pseudonym. This sign, which refers to a large number of pretexts, refers in particular to the lilac (siren’) and to the mythological “musical” sirens. As in Joyce’s work, sirens are present in his texts as mermaids and naiads, or as figures of seducers who fulfil their function and bring doom. Joyce and Nabokov are also united by the presence of recurrent leitmotifs, lexical patterns, and the presence of auditory impressions in their text that are evoked by the sound of the everyday world. Full article

This paper aims to highlight examples of artistic motifs common throughout Egyptian history but augmented in novel ways during the 27th Dynasty, a time when Egypt was part of the Achaemenid empire and ruled by Persian kings. These kings represented themselves as traditional pharaohs within Egypt’s borders and utilized longstanding Egyptian artistic motifs in their monumental constructions. These motifs, however, were manipulated in subtle ways to send targeted messages to audience(s) of this art. Art historians tend to situate visual styles and motifs within the longue durée of artistic tradition and pick a singular, official, and centralized perspective to narrate the history and reception of that art. In the case of Egypt, this perspective is often that of the king, and there is an assumption that there was a monolithic message sent to his people. But we are not dealing with a homogenous people; a diverse population would have had varied reactions to and interpretations of this visual signaling. By highlighting both the augmentation of traditional motifs undertaken by the Achaemenid administration and the multiplicity of perspectives they held for their audience(s), we can better understand ancient art as being dynamic in function and interpretation, rather than as a static snapshot of carbon-copied royal authority. Full article