The Wind and Wind-Chorus Music of Anton Bruckner (Contributions to the Study of Music and Dance)

The Wind and Wind-Chorus Music of Anton Bruckner (Contributions to the Study of Music and Dance) Review

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This comprehensive study treats the wind works of Anton Bruckner as a complete genre and uses them to illustrate how the composer evolved in style throughout his career. A major nineteenth-century composer, organist, and church musician, Bruckner's compositional style changed dramatically in the early 1860s, dividing his career into two distinct parts. During his early career he immersed himself in the study of traditional musical principles including form, harmony, counterpoint, and orchestration. The second phase of his career, in which he composed the symphonies upon which much of his current reputation rests, was marked by his experimental approaches to harmony and tonality. Many of his early compositions exhibit landmarks of his later style. The wind instrument pieces incorporate the best aspects of both of Bruckner's styles and reflect the progress of his professional life.

Organized chronologically, the music is studied and classified within set time periods. Each wind work of a particular period is reviewed according to the historical circumstances contributing to its creation, its specific musical content, and its success as a musical work in relation to wind music and specifically to Bruckner's development. The analyses of Bruckner's compositions are enhanced by musical examples throughout the text.

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Self-Representation: Life Narrative Studies in Identity and Ideology (Contributions in Psychology)

Self-Representation: Life Narrative Studies in Identity and Ideology (Contributions in Psychology) Review

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This innovative work offers a new approach to the study of self-representation, drawing on both the older "study of lives" tradition in personality psychology and recent work in "narrative psychology." Gary S. Gregg presents a generative theory of self-representation, applying methods of symbolic analysis developed by cultural anthropologists to the texts of life-historical interviews. This model accounts for the continual shifting of identity among contradictory "surface" discourses about the self, as it shows how each discourse is defined as a reconfiguration of a stable cluster of "deep" structurally-ambigious elements. Gregg not only examines the nature of narrative, but also addresses more mainstream issues in cognitive science, such as: How is knowledge of the self and its social world represented? What are the elementary units of self-cognition? How are cognition and affect linked? After a brief introduction, the book raises critical questions about self-representation by presenting re-analyses of two famous case studies--Freud's "Rat Man" and "Mack and Larry" from The Authoritarian Personality--and initial observations from Gregg's fieldwork in Morocco. A theoretical chapter then introduces the notion of structured ambiguity, which enables a person to shift between identities by figure or ground-like reversals of key symbols and metaphors. Three original life-narrative analyses follow, which, with increasing complexity, develop the model via analogies to basic structures of tonal music. The work concludes with a theoretical chapter that reexamines the ideas of William James, George Herbert Mead, and Erik Erikson about the self's unity and multiplicity, and then summarizes a generative model. The book presents a compelling alternative to prevailing views of self-cognition and identity, and will be a valuable resource for courses in psychology, anthropology, and sociology, as well as an important tool for researchers and professionals in these fields.

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Language of Inequality (Contributions to the Sociology of Language)

Language of Inequality (Contributions to the Sociology of Language) Review

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The sociologist Morris Janowitz once said that the goal of theory is to make the obvious inescapable. By that criterion, this book contributes to theory. To be sure, its articles are about specific places and regions. Each tells about a particular situation. There is little or nothing of causal hypothesis and correlation, of typology and dimensions for comparative framework, or model building of other kinds. And such things should be a goal, whether we call the sphere of our activity 'sociology of language " 'sociolinguistics', 'ethnography of communication', or something else. But it is difficult to reach that stage of theory, when so many find the obvious quite escapable indeed.

This book contributes to theory, then, by helping to make palpable the pervasive linguistic inequality of our world. It is not that there are writers who deny that multilingualism exists, that standard languages exist, that language minorities exist, that languages sometimes are dominated, sometimes die. It is just that the part of the mind or the faculty which knows these things is isolated from the part that knows what is called 'theoretical linguistics'. Nor is this a new thing. It sterns from the beginnings of modern linguistics in the United States. The functional equality of all languages has been a tenet of the faith from the founders of structural linguistics to most practitioners of linguistics today. It is unacceptable in most respectable linguistic circles to suggest that one language is less capable in some respect than another, or that some users of a language are different in one or more abilities from other users. These facts of everyday experience, these realities of language use in so much of the world and every educational system, 'fade into air, into thin air', when linguists speak in their professional capacities as linguists.

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