Browsing by Subject "Aesthetics."
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Item The blending of African-American and European aesthetics in the guitar performance of British blues from 1965 to 1967.(2010-02-02T19:55:50Z) Kelly, Patrick T. (Patrick Thomas), 1965-; Boyd, Jean Ann.; Music.; Baylor University. School of Music.British blues guitarists emerging in the mid-1960s incorporated a musical vocabulary which borrowed heavily from recordings of the modern blues' African-American, postwar originators. Crucial differences in the way the British interpreted this material in their own recorded performances are reflective of deeply embedded aesthetics unique to their European musical heritage and cultural experience. Through the detailed analysis of transcribed performances by British guitarists in comparison to performances by the African-American guitarists they sought to emulate, the syntactical elements of these differences are observable. Using this comparative methodology, this study gathers evidence of the blending of European and African-American aesthetics in sample British blues guitar performances from 1965 to 1967. Placing this musical evidence into context amid the cultural and ideological currents affecting Great Britain during the mid-1960s offers insight to the societal and philosophical forces shaping this influential strand of blues development.Item Ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem : Wilfrid Ward and the art of Newman.(2013-09-24) Frank, Mary C., 1984-; Prickett, Stephen.; English.; Baylor University. Dept. of English.This dissertation investigates John Henry Newman's understanding of the imagination and its role in religious and aesthetic experience. Newman’s fictional and poetic works fell into the background in scholarly discussions of his life and works shortly after his death. This, I suggest, was in part because the relationship between art and orthodox religion became strained during the crisis precipitated by Catholic Modernism. The Church’s response to Modernism was an affirmation of the authority of the ecclesiastical hierarchy and a crackdown on intellectual activity outside of its supervision and control. Wilfrid Ward’s 1912 Life of Cardinal Newman, written under close scrutiny by the Catholic hierarchy during the Modernist controversy, established a precedent for the relative neglect of Newman’s fictional and poetic works. However, an examination of Newman’s treatment of the imagination and his exercise of it in his own poetry and fiction reveals the vital importance of this term to his mature understanding of religious experience. Though he begins with an attitude of suspicion toward the power of the imagination and advocates—even in his poetry—an attitude of contemptus mundi to counter the world’s siren song, he eventually comes to describe the imagination as the primary means by which the human mind encounters reality. Whereas in his early works he attempts to make great works of the imagination “safe” by requiring that they also express a standard of moral excellence, he gradually abandons this criterion to argue instead that the imagination is that which recognizes and submits to what exceeds it, whether that be divine and morally perfect or human and wildly unsafe. In either case, the act of submission has value in itself, by drawing the imaginer into relationship with something greater than him or herself and prompting a response of devotion and love. Therefore, Newman’s mature understanding of the imagination, emphasizing openness and the willingness to engage with what exceeds one’s control, goes directly to the heart of the deep anxieties of the late nineteenth-century Catholic Church.