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Albright, Daniel

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Albright

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Daniel

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Albright, Daniel

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Now showing 1 - 10 of 20
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    Yeats, Pound, Asia, and the Music of the Body
    (2012-07-25) Albright, Daniel
    In June 2009 news appeared concerning a 33,000-year-old flute, found in a cave in southern Germany, made of the wing bone of a griffon vulture. The idea that the most profound art comes from the innermost recesses of the body was familiar to the Modernist poets, such as William Butler Yeats and Ezra Pound. Yeats’s play The Herne’s Egg concerns a flute made from a heron’s thigh-bone, and Yeats liked the bone’s perspective on human life: in one poem wrote of looking at the bitter old world through a hole bored in a hare’s collar-bone, and in another poem he wrote, “He that sings a lasting song / Thinks in a marrow-bone.” Pound (a composer as well as a poet) also examined the deep resonances of flute music: in his opera Le testament, the brothel music is played by a nose flute, and in a number of his Chinese poems flutes play uncanny roles. For example, in his translation from Li Po, “The River Song,” the nightingales’ song mixes into the sound of the flute, as if artifice and nature had attained a perfect counterpoint, a metaphysical unison; and in Canto 90 the flute tone comes hoi chthonioi, a Greek term meaning “the earth-born”—as if it were the music of spirits of the underworld. For both Yeats and Pound, flute music is at once the most celestial, the most unearthly of sounds, and also the expression of the bloodiest, most carnal life.
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    Modernism’s Melos
    (Poetry in Review Foundation, 2011) Albright, Daniel
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    Yeats, A Vision, and Art History
    (한국예이츠학회 [The Yeats Society of Korea], 2011) Albright, Daniel
    Yeats worried that his poetry might be destroyed if he wandered too far down what he called the hodos chameliontos, the chameleon road, in which the imagination became so replete, overstimulated, that it kept producing images in such profusion that the images became unintelligible. In a number of passages deleted from his plays, we can see Yeats experimenting with these wild profusions of images. In the art historical writings he studied, Yeats found visual analogues to the hodos chameliontos in the world of Persian art.
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    One Sees What One Sees
    (Harvard University Press, 2009) Albright, Daniel
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    Golden Calves: The Role of Dance in Opera
    (Oxford University Press, 2006) Albright, Daniel
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    The Witches and the Witch: Verdi's Macbeth
    (Cambridge University Press, 2005) Albright, Daniel
    The witches in Shakespeare’s Macbeth equivocate between the demons of random malevolence and ordinary (if exceptionally nasty) old women; and both King James I, whose book on witchcraft may have influenced Shakespeare, and A. W. Schlegel, whose essay on Macbeth certainly influenced Verdi, also stress this ambiguity. In his treatment of Lady Macbeth, Verdi uses certain musical patterns associated with the witches; and like the witches, who sound sometimes tame and frivolous, sometimes like incarnations of supernatural evil, Lady Macbeth hovers insecurely between roles: she is a hybrid of ambitious wife and agent of hell.
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    Kurt Weill as Modernist
    (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000) Albright, Daniel
    Kurt Weill seems the opposite of a Modernist when compared with Schoenberg, or with the fictitious composer Adrian Leverkühn in Mann’s Doktor Faustus–composers who seem furiously to reject the warm-hearted, gemütlich aesthetic of much nineteenth-century art. But in such works as Die Dreigroschenoper and Der Jasager, Weill, like Thomas Mann himself, shows himself a Modernist of a sophisticated sort by devising a new sort of irony, an irony that does not reject bourgeois values but instead dwells in an interspace between derision and warmth.
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    Berlioz's Romeo et Juliette: Symphonic Metamorphoses on a Theme by Shakespeare
    (Taylor & Francis, 2000) Albright, Daniel
    Examines Hector Berlioz's attempt to intensify the symphonic nature of the symphony through his 1839 'Romeo et Juliette." Berlioz's illustration of the moving but faintly meretricious nature of opera by providing a thrilling operatic conclusion to his symphony in the form of a cliche; Operatic beginning and ending of "Romeo et Juliette."
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    The Diabolical Senta
    (Oxford University Press, 2005) Albright, Daniel
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    Heine and the Composers
    (Poetry in Review Foundation, 2009) Albright, Daniel