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With an architectural heritage reaching back to the 17th century, buildings of the British Raj are to be found throughout India and are an integral, indeed predominant, feature of the subcontinent’s urban typology. If the representational associations embodied in the architecture of colonial institutions still retain a valued significance in present day India, it is the bungalow, that ubiquitous and richly eclectic form of housing that constitutes perhaps the most distinctive contribution of the Anglo Indian architectural heritage. However with its vernacular origins in the bānglā (the traditional Bengali hut), its formal metamorphosis during the Raj and indeed the persistence and development of the type in contemporary Indian building, the bungalow is also a classic instance of “Pan Indian” expression – that power of association, of appropriation to its own ends that Indian civilisation has consistently applied to outside influences. L’architecture du Raj britannique en Inde, dont le patrimoine remonte à la fin du XVIIe siècle, se rencontre dans toutes les régions du sous-continent – partie intégrante, voire prépondérante, de la typologie urbaine. Au-delà même des valeurs représentatives qui de nos jours encore sont associées aux genres de constructions légués par les institutions coloniales, c’est sans doute le bungalow, omniprésent et foisonnant d’éclectisme, qui constitue la contribution notoire de l’héritage architectural anglo-indien. Pourtant ses origines vernaculaires dans la hutte bengalie (le bānglā), sa métamorphose architectonique sous le Raj et d’ailleurs la persistance du genre dans l’actualité de l’habitat indien font du bungalow le cas type d’une expression pan-indienne, une preuve de plus de cette capacité d’assimilation, de détournement à ses propres fins, que la civilisation indienne a toujours su imposer aux influences extérieures.

As objects, tables are often overlooked in two senses. On one hand, they are so commonplace that we scarcely take note of them. Of course they stand in the middle of a dining room, or kitchen, or on the side of a couch: They have become part of an everyday landscape in which their surfaces seem to effortlessly cater to our (unconscious) needs, silently carrying and sorting our ephemera and our food, while stoically waiting on guests, who gather around them, taking their level tops for granted...

In Louis Malle’s 1962 Vie privée, Brigitte Bardot is placed into a fictional world where she plays a character, Jill, whose life closely resembles Bardot’s experiences as a celebrity. But the film, one of the few that Malle did not have total control over, developed a monstrous quality as its production mimicked the exaggerated life of Bardot. Fully financed by MGM and split between locations in Paris, Geneva, and Spoleto, Italy, the available versions of the film today include a poorly-dubbe...

In memoriam Philip Conisbee The Chester Dale Collection was well known and widely praised both in the United States and abroad in the interwar period. Chester Dale (1883-1962) and Maud Murray Dale (1875-1953) formed the core of this collection between1926 and1936, the year in which they opened their New York house as a semi-public gallery. The National Gallery of Art holds 322 works of art, about one-third of the original Dale collection. Among its highlights are Mary Cassatt’s The Loge, 1882...

The period between the Sack of Constantinople in1204 and c.1450 was a golden age of development for Northern European jewellery. Thousands of pieces of goldsmiths’ work were manufactured in the workshops of Paris, London and other centres of production. Their commission and manufacture was mediated through interrelated networks of clients, craftsmen and middlemen. Precious materials for the construction of objects were acquired from the furthest extents of the known world. Today we are left w...

The idea of prometheus (http://www.prometheus-bildarchiv.de) was born in 2001 to fulfil an important need for art history, archaeology and other cultural sciences that rely on the image as the main medium of discourse – a digital image archive for research and education. With considerable funding from the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research from 2001 to 2004, we were able to put the ideas into practice. Since 2002, prometheus has enabled a convenient search for images (550.000 a...

The use of windows in literature constitutes a long, multifaceted, and still growing literary tradition. As Gérard Wajcman points out, this can only partly be explained by the window’s primary function in our everyday life, its role as « fenêtre du besoin » which provides our house with a controllable amount of fresh air and light while preserving our need for security and warmness. More important for writers and artists of various genres has been the window’s function as « fenêtre du désir »...

Consider a window. Is it simply a void traversed by a line of sight? No. In Any case the question would remain: what line of sight – and whose? The fact is that the window is a non-object which cannot fail to become an object. As a transitional object it has two senses, two orientations: from inside to outside, and from outside to inside. Each is marked in a specific way, and each bears the mark of the other. Lefebvre’s point, that a window is more than a void traversed by a line of sight, is...

In 1665, the Great Plague swept through London, killing upwards of a quarter of the population. At the time, London was a metropolis of nearly half-a-million inhabitants. It was by far the largest and most important city in England, a thriving trade and financial center, blessed by a deep-water port and the proximity of the royal Court. As might be expected, along with London’s commercial success came social and economic divisions. By the mid-17th century, the wealthy had gravitated to centra...

Nell’articolare la posizione e il ruolo della parola nella canzone, già circa trentacinque anni fa Umberto Fiori rivendicava la specificità di ciò che definisce “il suono della parola” («queste sillabe cantate in questo modo da questa voce») mentre ne delineava l’efficacia in quanto prodotto di una pluralità di fattori: «sarà difficile “servirsi” delle parole nel rock, e sarà soprattutto difficile che le parole “servano”, finché le si concepisce come dei puri “veicoli” di un “contenuto” o fin...

In the introduction to The Sound of Poetry/The Poetry of Sound, Marjorie Perloff declares, «Poetry inherently involves the structuring of sound», but «however central the sound dimension is to any and all poetry, no other poetic feature is currently as neglected». Redressing this may be one of the functions of this collection, to which I am happy to contribute. I am a firm believer in the centrality of sound to poetry, whether in effects such as those of Verlaine’s Chanson d’Automne, Les sang...

Since the beginning of my research on Vocal Performance Art it has always fascinated me how intensely the pioneering singer-composer-performers of this discipline have been seeking for new approaches to the cognitive unconscious. It has been a crucial experience to many of them, (1) that through the body voice, or voice of the body, there would be a direct connection to a non-verbal universal language that wouldn’t need any translation, and (2) that the body voice would have a direct link to ...

This book examines the nature of musical performance. In it, Dorottya Fabian explores the contributions and limitations of some of these approaches to performance, be they theoretical, cultural, historical, perceptual, or analytical. Through a detailed investigation of recent recordings of J. S. Bach's Six Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin, she demonstrates that music performance functions as a complex dynamical system. Only by crossing disciplinary boundaries, therefore, can we put the aural experience into words. A Musicology of Performance provides a model for such a method by adopting Deleuzian concepts and various empirical and interdisciplinary procedures. Fabian provides a case study in the repertoire, while presenti ng new insights into the state of baroque performance practice at the turn of the twenty-first century. Through its wealth of audio examples, tables, and graphs, the book offers both a sensory and a scholarly account of musical performance. These interactive elements map the connections between historically informed and mainstream performance styles, considering them in relation to broader cultural trends, violin schools, and individual artistic trajectories. A Musicology of Performance is a must read for academics and post-graduate students and an essential reference point for the study of music performance, the early music movement, and Bach’s opus. In memory of my father, Otto Somorjay. Your appreciation of performing musicians and your love of listening to music have been life-long inspirations. Thank you!

International audience; Par cette question, Debussy s’interroge sur l’existence d’un humour qui serait purement endogène, c’est-à-dire circonscrit dans des procédés uniquement musicaux. L’objet de cet article est de traquer un tel humour et de prolonger ce questionnement sur le cas particulier des musiques atonales de la deuxième moitié du XXe siècle, lesquelles, ayant pris leur distance face aux conventions musicales séculaires, se privent de la possibilité d’en tirer parti à des fins comiques.

What is a collector? Although the French term collectionneur was first officially recorded in the dictionary in 1789*, its definition covers a range of different practices: for some, the main emphasis is on an item's subjective value, whilst others focus more closely on the accumulation and selection process. Whether they collect shells, stamps, butterflies or works of art, collectors share a number of things in common. However, those who support “emerging” art have a more varied set of practices than those generally observed in their counterparts. In addition to simply being a buyer, the contemporary art collector has the ability to influence the artistic life, especially through the material support provided to artists and by contributing to the construction of artistic value. This particular characteristic is all the more notable as the collector's involvement in artistic life is not solely the prerogative of a narrow wealthy elite, as the collector profiles here demonstrate. Indeed it seems that collector practices may fall anywhere across a scale which ranges from the acquisitive collector, motivated by the desire to possess a work, to the actor collector, for whom the actual acquisition of a work is merely the expression of his willingness to contribute to the vitality of the artistic scene. * « Collector, -s (n). One who collects. Collection, -s (n). A number of objects gathered together under a common theme. A beautiful collection of paintings, books, antiques, medals, plants, shells, etc. » Dictionnaire de l’Académie française, 1789 (7th edition). Qu’est-ce qu’un collectionneur ? Si le nom a fait officiellement son entrée dans le dictionnaire en 1789*, sa définition recouvre des pratiques différentes : certaines approches mettent en avant la valeur subjective attachée à l’objet, tandis que d’autres soulignent l’importance du processus d’accumulation et de sélection. De nombreux traits semblent pouvoir définir communément les collectionneurs, quel que soit l’objet de la collection, coquillage, timbre, papillon ou encore œuvre d’art. Toutefois, les collectionneurs qui soutiennent l’art « en train de se faire » se distinguent par des pratiques plus variées que celles usuellement relevées chez leurs homologues. En effet, en plus d’être acquéreur, le collectionneur d’art contemporain est susceptible d’agir sur la vie artistique, notamment grâce au soutien matériel apporté aux artistes et en contribuant à la construction de la valeur artistique. Cette particularité est d’autant plus notable que l’engagement du collectionneur n’est pas l’apanage d’une seule élite fortunée, comme le montre la typologie des profils de collectionneurs établie ici. Il apparaît en effet que les pratiques de collectionneurs se déploient le long d’un continuum allant du collectionneur acquéreur, mû par le besoin de posséder une œuvre, au collectionneur acteur, pour lequel l’acquisition n’est que l’expression de sa volonté de contribuer à la vitalité de la scène artistique. * « Collectionneur, euse. s. (on prononce les deux ). Celui, celle qui fait des collections. Collection. s. f. réunion de plusieurs objets qui ont ensemble quelque rapport. Il a une belle collection de tableaux, de livres, d’antiques, de médailles, de plantes, de coquilles, etc. » Dictionnaire de l’Académie française, 1789 (7e édition).