Two Pietàs in different media, the first by French painter William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825–1905) and the second by Swedish composer Lisa Streich (1985-), permit an examination of the Pietà trope itself by laying open a range of its symbolic aspects. Bouguereau’s Pietà (1876) is discussed in terms of the grief and joy that are both presen…[Read more]

In April 2010, the Guildhall School of Music recognized German composer Helmut Lachenmann’s expertise in extended instrumental techniques, inviting him to give the keynote speech at a research day dedicated to contemporary performance practice; in May, he had a Fellowship of the Royal College of Music conferred upon him for his achievements as a…[Read more]

Reflections on the significance of the sudden announcement, in autumn 2016, of the imminent departure of Emma Rice as Artistic Director of Shakespeare’s Globe. Contemporary Theatre Review 27.1, Backpages.

Review of Medici Women: Portraits of Power, Love, and Betrayal by Gabrielle Langdon

Chapter in Witwenschaft in der frühen Neuzeit: fürstliche und adlige Witwen zwischen Fremd- und Selbstbestimmung

Chapter 8 in The Single Woman in Medieval and Early Modern England: Her Life and Representation

Ch 5 of Grief and Gender, 700-1700

Chapter 10 in Growing Old in Early Modern Europe: Cultural Representations

Chapter in Women and Portraits in Early Modern Europe: Gender, Agency and Identity

Afterword of Widowhood and Visual Culture in Early Modern Europe

Ch. 13 of Widowhood and Visual Culture in Early Modern Europe

Introduction to Widowhood and Visual Culture in Early Modern Europe

Live performance lacks the durability of art practices such as photography, film and
painting, and so definitions of ‘live’ acts have traditionally been formulated in terms
of ‘transience’ and ‘disappearance’. In this context the archive and archival documents
are often described as the antithesis of performance’s ontology. An archive’s pri…[Read more]

Recent opera repertoire has seen a wide variety of styles in opera composition. Marco Polo represents a rather unique corner of this wide variety. Tan Dun explores a capacious array of influences in this work. Starting from his own roots, Chinese traditional music, he explores European art tradition to some extent. Tan Dun also touches the styles…[Read more]

Death doom metal or death/doom emerges as a distinct style in early 1990s mostly focused in northern England. This style or, tentatively, sub-genre of doom may be argued to be a leisure space for participants in this culture. Dark leisure theory attempts to describe non-mainstream leisure activity, and even though it started in criminological and…[Read more]

In the post-modern era, the domination of repetition in aesthetics allows for deeper meaning to be conveyed with limited musical material. The repetition, within Sigmund Freud’s interpretation in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), becomes a ‘repetition-compulsion’ that resonates beyond the aural recurrences. Obsession inherent in depre…[Read more]

Doom (metal) has been seen as the ‘slower’ -in more than one sense- sibling in metal music in general. The slowness can be argued to be true for some cases within doom and this slowness, prominently in musical terms but alongside other angles, can be the defining factor of a portion of doom music. For example, while funeral doom may be argued to…[Read more]

Doom metal music and culture have been under the influence of 1970s hippie ideologies from the beginning with the music of Black Sabbath. Tony Iommi in an interview from 2011 suggests that Black Sabbath has been using the label ‘doom’ since its early days. While during early stages of doom music, this influence or interaction took both tra…[Read more]

Melancholy, death, and the darker thought spectrum should not be considered separate from black metal at any point through its history. In contrast however, depressive suicidal black metal (DSBM) took these themes further in terms of their crudity, and more importantly it fixated on the ideas of death and suicide. The birth pangs of this style are…[Read more]

Death plays an important role in human life, and there have been many theories about how this inevitability affects human thought, and social life. According to anthropological studies, death and death-related phenomena, including rituals, music, the meaning of death, are based on the originating cultures. This makes depressive suicidal black…[Read more]