American Idol
Essay - 4 pages - Arts and art history
In its first season, American Idol garnered the attention of 22.77 million viewers on the finale night. The last season—the show's fifth—36.38 million people tuned in to witness Taylor Hicks take home the ultimate title of American Idol (Wikepedia.com). Hicks, a stocky, gray-haired...
Smells Like Lautréamont's Spirit
Tutorials/exercises - 5 pages - Arts and art history
In 1790, Immanuel Kant published an essay that read as complicated as the art he sought to promote. “Critique of Judgment” serves as the ultimate philosophy of aesthetics, proclaiming “Genius is the talent (or natural gift) which gives rule to art” (Kant 150). Kant's...
Breakaway (A continuation of "AmericanIdle")
Essay - 4 pages - Arts and art history
To the surprise of fans and American Idol producers alike (in varying degrees of delightful glee and ghastly shock), Clarkson's second album conveyed an entirely different message than the first. Entitled Breakaway, the music simply delves deeper than the playful bubbles at the surface of all...
Ragtime
Tutorials/exercises - 4 pages - Arts and art history
Ragtime is an American musical genre that was most popular during the first twenty years of the 20th century. It is a dance form that is written in 2/4 or 4/4 time, where there is a walking bass that plays legato on beats 1-3 and staccato chords played on 2-4 beats in the right hand. A big...
The Recovery of Music
Essay - 3 pages - Arts and art history
To experience music as it is exactly is a great thing, but a difficult thing. Being an audience to a piece of music does not ensure such experience, and in fact the performers of music themselves can experience music. Bystanders and composers also experience music in unique ways. All of these...
Doctor Faustus and Renaissance Humanism
Essay - 4 pages - Arts and art history
The introduction to Christopher Marlowe's The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus in The Norton Anthology of English Literature describes the play's protagonist as “an overreacher, striving to get beyond the conventional boundaries established to contain the human will” (990). While...
Bach vs Sousa
Essay - 2 pages - Arts and art history
Throughout history there have been an infinite number of composers. These composers range in time period from the 1600s to present day and their styles of music range from classical to rock ‘n' roll. Two of the most influential composers of all time are Johann Sebastian Bach and John...
Schnittke
Essay - 2 pages - Arts and art history
Schnittke was born in the Soviet Union in 1934 into a Russian Jewish family. The father was a German Jew from the Baltic area, and the mother was a Catholic from Germany. Given this, his first language was German. In 1945 for three years, he lived and studied in Vienna where he heard much of the...
Sample Music Review
Essay - 1 pages - Arts and art history
The Legendary Pink Dots, featuring members of Skinny Puppy, played the Howlin' Wolf on Saturday, June 12th. Upon scanning the stage and seeing the medley of performers, I knew it would be an interesting show. The saxophone player, dressed in a purple and orange suit, a rather average-looking...
Alfred Schnittke in Retrospect
Essay - 2 pages - Arts and art history
“For almost thirty years I repeatedly saw one and the same dream: I would arrive in Vienna at long last. I would feel really happy, for I was returning to the most serene time of my life.” In this quote, Alfred Schnittke, in the final years before his death, recaps his pleasant times...
The Rise of Choral Polyphony in Burgundy
Essay - 7 pages - Arts and art history
In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, there was a flourishing of culture in the Netherlands with the rise of humanism and the patronage of the Dukes of Burgundy. With the advances in trade and commerce, there was also a general prosperity which contributed to the wealth of artistic...
Critical Theory: theatre and post-structuralism
Essay - 6 pages - Arts and art history
Post-structuralism derives from philosophy , ‘ a discipline which has always tended to emphasise the difficulty of achieving secure knowledge about things' (Barry;1995:63) .Philosophical writing, although following the structure thesis, anti-thesis then a synthesis of both, always comes...
Theater and audience perception in a postmodern perspective
Essay - 9 pages - Arts and art history
« The genuinely postmodern work forces us to recognise that reality is something other than our formulations of it, and that those formulations are therefore constructs » (Jean-François Lyotard). Investigate and interrogate the urge in performance theatre to radically restructure audience...
Live technologies in theatrical performance in a post modern perspective
Essay - 8 pages - Arts and art history
How does the use of live technologies in theatrical performance comment on our own positioning in a post-industrial technologically based society? How does this in turn exemplify some of the concerns of the postmodernists? Postmodern cinema is rich in intertextual references, and is often...
Xu Beihong: pioneer of Chinese Realistic Painting?
Essay - 9 pages - Arts and art history
Xu Beihong (1895-1953) was a native of Yixing in Jiangsu Province. His father, from whom he learned painting in his childhood, was also a painter. At the age of 20, Xu went to Shanghai to sell his paintings. In 1918, at the invitation of Cai Yuanpei, he went to Peking University to work as an...
Edward Munch (Norwegian, 1863-1944) : Madonna (1895-1902)
Essay - 6 pages - Arts and art history
Madonna is one of Munch's most popular images. It is a mix between a controversial image linked to a controversial artist, and a transcendent representation of women through different aspects. These are reflected in the different titles that had the painting: Madonna, Conception, Loving Woman,...
The Representation of the Struggle for Rights in Contemporary Aboriginal Painting
Essay - 4 pages - Arts and art history
Art is vital for history, as monuments, sculptures, paintings and literary works of art are often the only remaining testimony about ancient times. When dealing with modern or contemporary events, a greater amount of non-artistic material is available; yet art is still important as it can reflect...
