This doctoral dissertation explores classical music performance from a curatorial perspective, reflecting upon and challenging the traditional configuration of performance environments. Beginning... Show moreThis doctoral dissertation explores classical music performance from a curatorial perspective, reflecting upon and challenging the traditional configuration of performance environments. Beginning with a consideration for the historical origins of absorbed attention and silence as the dominant mode of performing and hearing classical music, the subsequent chapters of this dissertation investigate alternatives to this mode by exploring artistic creations developed during this research. Informed by my combined experience as a curator and performer in the contemporary music field, these artistic creations use what I call ‘metaxical amplification’: the amplification of environmental sounds that are generally considered noise in the context of classical music performances, and that are therefore rarely considered in relation to the artistic experiences generated by these performances. Metaxical amplification proposes a reconfiguration of the performance environment and the ways in which attention unfolds within it. It also challenges a work-centred performance culture, since the performance mode emerging from this form of amplification is oriented towards the sonic exploration of musical environments through these works. More broadly, it propels the development of a practice in which musical interpretation, improvisation, and curatorial thinking are tightly interwoven. Findings are discussed in close dialogue with literature from various fields including sociology, philosophy, media theory, as well as through related examples from the fields of music, theatre, and the visual arts. Show less
This PhD thesis has studied the meeting practice of the Dutch States General to address the role of tradition and culture in times of political and institutional transition in the first half of the... Show moreThis PhD thesis has studied the meeting practice of the Dutch States General to address the role of tradition and culture in times of political and institutional transition in the first half of the 19th century. Dutch revisionist historians of the Revolutionary Era have emphasized the sense of rupture surrounding the year 1800. The Batavian revolutionaries, together with French Revolutionary and Napoleonic armies, caused a clear break between the ancien régime of the Dutch Republic and the 19th-century Kingdom of the Netherlands. Modern constitutions replaced the de- centralized government system of the Dutch Republic with a unitary state from 1798 onwards. When the Dutch regained their independence after the fall of Napoleon in 1813, the new state did not turn the clock back to 1795. In that respect, the Netherlands has been studied as a fine example of Reinhard Koselleck’s concept of Sattelzeit. Continuities, such as the name States General for the bicameral parliament, were merely invented traditions to hide the new institutions of the Restoration state. Notwithstanding obvious evidence of discontinuity, in political practice there was more continuity in the Netherlands during the transitional period from the 18th to the 19th century than historians have assumed. Show less
The Third Avant-garde investigates radical art manifestations in Southeast Asia, which took place around the mid-1980s, when postmodernism started to gain force in the region. It proposes that... Show moreThe Third Avant-garde investigates radical art manifestations in Southeast Asia, which took place around the mid-1980s, when postmodernism started to gain force in the region. It proposes that the advent of postmodernism in Southeast Asia is anchored in the materiality of traditional arts, an aspect that renders it different from its Western equivalent. The dissertation distinguishes two sets of postmodern manifestations: first, practices that use traditions in a celebratory way, and second, a set of works which use traditional arts radically. This study proposes that the second possibility manifests a double dismantle—first, against local patronizing forces that were enforcing artists to practice academic art and Western media (such as painting and sculpture), and second, a distancing attitude from Western art intelligentsia, who acted as ‘owners of the discourse’, and regarded ‘non-Western’ practitioners as followers rather than as trendsetters. For this investigation, the discipline of anthropology was called in, as was the art historical category of the avant-garde. The two approaches combined reveal how contemporary art from Southeast Asia that reprocesses traditional arts can be regarded as avant-garde. These gestures are novel, and result from practicing art in a certain location, and which is bound to a specific socio-political context. Show less
Producing the local: Javanese performance on Indonesian television explores how television represents Javaneseness, as a factor designed to catch and keep the attention of its putative... Show moreProducing the local: Javanese performance on Indonesian television explores how television represents Javaneseness, as a factor designed to catch and keep the attention of its putative audiences. Central is the question of how people make use of national, regional, local, public and private television in Indonesia – each in their own way and with their own goals – to represent the local and, in particular, how they construct images of Javaneseness through the production and dissemination of performance. Performance in Javanese has been used by the Indonesian television industry to achieve various purposes: to entertain and inform its audiences, to represent the local/the regional, to preserve and nurture the traditional and to build national culture, for persuasive (commercial or propaganda) aims, as a counter-voice of diversification towards global or Jakartan influences, and to express multiculturalism. These issues have been put into the framework of discursive practices about local, national and global cultures in the electronic audiovisual media in Indonesia. Three main themes structure the study: representing tradition, localizing persuasion and mediating the local. Above all, this dissertation is a plea for a more thorough study of the role of proximity in the production, dissemination and reception of local television programmes. Show less
De moeite waard om door te geven (Worth passing on) is a book about traditions. To be precise: about the remonstrant tradition. The Remonstrant Church is a small Dutch, liberal protestant... Show moreDe moeite waard om door te geven (Worth passing on) is a book about traditions. To be precise: about the remonstrant tradition. The Remonstrant Church is a small Dutch, liberal protestant denomination. It once knew prosperous growth, but it has been in decline since the last quater of the twentieth century. At least: if the numbers and the vitality of churchmembers are the measure. Because also when traditions don’t thrive and prosper there are people that think they are worthwhile. It is about them and the congragation where they find a spiritual home. The last part is about confessions. Remonstrants are very precise in these matters. They are expressions of their very differentiated worldviews, where the personal and the communal are securely kept apart. Show less
In this thesis, the (mal) functioning of the Senegalese state in the context of conflict (the Casamance crisis) is analyzed through four domains namely local administration, the security sectors,... Show moreIn this thesis, the (mal) functioning of the Senegalese state in the context of conflict (the Casamance crisis) is analyzed through four domains namely local administration, the security sectors, the borders and the communication domain where high ‘state density’ is expected in order to maintain its authority and sovereignty. However, the grip of the state on the social body remains weak and its powers are very limited in these sectors leading to necessary and continuous negotiations with other actors (traditional leaders, rebels, NGO, etc.), which sometimes are a serious threat to the state’s authority and are a symptom of its fragility. By using the metaphor of a sponge, hence the concept of “the Spontex State”, I demonstrate that, paradoxically, states in Africa in general, and the Senegalese state in particular, are keen to strategize their weakness. Their sponge-like characteristics permit a form of retractability. It allows absorbing and resisting forces that contest its power. Its retractability helps the state to avoid, at least partially, more serious confrontations with various actors. The capacity of retention and retraction of the sponge, reflected in the state, leads to great flexibility, through which the state sustains it grip and, ultimately, reinforces its overall authority. Show less
This book explores chronologically, for the first time, the representation and redefinition of Indonesia__s regional cultures through recording media, from the introduction of the gramophone record... Show moreThis book explores chronologically, for the first time, the representation and redefinition of Indonesia__s regional cultures through recording media, from the introduction of the gramophone record through the current video compact disc (VCD) era, taking as case study the Minangkabau ethnic group. Based on extensive fieldwork and historical research, the author follows the Dutch East Indies colonial society__s initial encounter with recording media and the later adoption and social uses of various types of recording media among the Minangkabau of West Sumatra and its diaspora. The transformation of Minangkabau culture and identity that came with the extensive reproduction of Minangkabau cultural sounds on commercial recordings is examined. This transformation was facilitated by the West Sumatran recording industry, founded in the early 1970s along with the spread of the audio-cassette in Indonesia. The author describes the workings of the West Sumatran recording industry and how its products become the preferred medium of cultural expressions of the Minangkabau ethnic group to hold on to its identity and existence in the face of a changing world. The representations of Minangkabau culture in regional commercial recordings explored in this study demonstrate the use of recording media technology by a local society to contextualize and maintain the viability and existence of their culture and identity, whose features are changing, adaptive, and fluid Show less
Combining extant literature with archival and archaeological evidence, photo albums and oral interviews, eponymous names and witty sayings, folksongs and participant observation; this study,... Show moreCombining extant literature with archival and archaeological evidence, photo albums and oral interviews, eponymous names and witty sayings, folksongs and participant observation; this study, covering from 1880 to 1980, wrote a history of Yorubaland as seen through dress. Also subsumed in this study was a history of Yorùbá dress, especially its place in the construction of Yorùbá ethno-national identity. Yorùbá people conceived dress as an assemblage of modifications and/or supplements to the human body. These included coiffed hair and coloured skin, pierced ears and scented breath, etc. Underlying this conceptualization was the requirement of being an Omoluabi, an ethical category defined as a conglomeration of moral principles such as being lofty in spoken words and respectful, having good mind towards others and being truthful, possessing lofty character and being brave, hardworking and being intelligent, including having a good dress sense. All these formed Yorùbá individual and group identity (Yorùbáness) as well as what Yorùbá dress was all about. To be a Yorùbá man or woman was therefore to dress well and to dress well was to be a Yorùbá man or woman. Understood in this way, Yorùbáness therefore was impossible without Yorùbá dress and Yorùbá dress was impossible without Yorùbáness. Show less
The title of this study raises questions about the meaning and the significance of the words 'modernity', 'tradition' and 'Political Islam' in contemporary Iran. The purpose of this study is to... Show moreThe title of this study raises questions about the meaning and the significance of the words 'modernity', 'tradition' and 'Political Islam' in contemporary Iran. The purpose of this study is to reveal true meanings of the thoughts and practises of the post-revolution Iranian elites and intellectuals, in relations to and alongside the social events, to emphasize the existence of a modernisation process in the institution of state and the moderate re-interpretation of Islam in the religious establishment, which together have given rise to the distinctly Iranian features of political development. This study shall be in a socio-historical setting because political changes and social events in contemporary Iran are difficult to identify and impossible to understand unless their roots are discovered in their true locations. Show less
