According to a widely held view in 20th- Century aesthetics, a music work is equivalent to the performances that conform to a certain score? And this notion complies with at least three requirements of a satisfactory ontology of the music work, or so it seems?1Thus, although a Beethoven manuscript would command a very high price, it is not very interesting as a unique phys…
Taking the advice of my inner Don, I decided to attend the sym-posium, “Don Giovanni and Casanova,” which is held every year in a different Italian city, this time in Venice. I go there with a young Polish woman, Emilia, a student of mine from many years ago. She is almost fifty now but is still as playful, and sometimes as acerbic, as she once was. The thea…
More than two hundred years ago, a theater journal from Hamburg reviewed a performance of The Marriage of Figaro. Its author was probably Bernhard Anselm Weber, a composer and music director. The evening’s entertainment left a deep impression on Mozart’s fellow musician:It is just as one would expect from Mozart: great and beautiful, full of new ideas a…
Philosophy tends to relegate senses to the realm of phe-nomenology and experience. By contrast, critical the-ory has gradually eroded the holy opposition between knowing and sensing to the extent that new speculative trends are now seeking to rebuild it. While the social sciences endeavour to frame sensing within socio- historical geneal ogies, …
In 1958, Suzuki Seitar? was a 35-year-old, lower-ranking, critically unrec-ognized contract director at Nikkatsu studios, despite the fact that he had already made fifteen feature-length program pictures. When he changed his professional name from “Suzuki Seitar?,” his birth name, to the more flamboyant “Suzuki Seijun,” no one in the press or film industry seems to …
The importance of the Woodstock Music and Art Fair cannot be overstated. Three days of music on a New York farm in August 1969 generated an ethos and a mythology (Denisoff, 1986); but was it merely a media contrivance? Depends upon who is asked. The importance is self-evident; the reason is elusive.Throughout the 1960s, popular music became increasingly reflec…
While Googling “Aristophanes” on the evening of a day like any other in spring 2020 during the Covid-19 crisis, I stumbled upon a 25-year-old Taiwanese rapper, Pan Wei Ju (???), who had taken the name of the ancient Greek play-wright after seeing him in a dream. An online reviewer com-ments: “With feminist subject matter [and] obse…
A decade ago, it was still somewhat conventional to start a study by writ-ing how “esports is a novel phenomenon.” As we write this introduction in 2021, that is no longer true. Today, more than a thousand studies have been published on esports, including several books and special issues. Moreover, the work is no longer conducted purely in the “game studies” related fields, bu…
Watership Down, the 1978 British cel-animated feature produced, directed and written by Martin Rosen, and the bestselling 1972 novel by Richard Adams on which it is based are indeed relatively anomalous. The novel is often considered uncategorizable: an adventure story about rabbits that might be a comfortable bedfellow with the works of Beatrix Potter and other children’…
The computer science department at Stanford University offers a course called Computer Graphics: Animation and Simulation. Many departments at other universities have offered a similar course, including the University of North Carolina, University of California, California Polytechnic, and Carnegie Mellon. A title like Animation and Simulation will sound to some like a betra…