Though Fernando Pessoa is not widely known as a political poet, we may be familiar with the political commentary explicit in some of his works. In four political sonnets dating from 1905 (but only fully published in 1995), the poet criticizes the mockery of Russia by British journalists, calls the colonization of Ireland and the Transvaal “a s…[Read more]

This co-authored piece introduces our co-edited volume ‘Dreams of Germany’. It explores how, where and by whom notions of ‘musical Germanness’ have been constituted in the modern era, and to what effect. Picking up on ideas first explored systematically by Celia Applegate and Pamela Potter in their 2002 collection ‘Music and German National…[Read more]

O livro Fernando Pessoa—The Poet With Many Faces, de autoria de Hubert D. Jennings, é a primeira biografia pessoana em Inglês. Originalmente escrito na década de 1970, o livro deveria ter sido impresso em 1974, mas a Revolução dos Cravos interrompeu os planos editoriais. O dactiloscrito, encontrado numa garagem em Joanesburgo, na África do Sul,…[Read more]

Recursion may have an important place in cognitive processes. Recursive theoretical models may also seduce the theorist to false abstractions and pseudo-explanations. This is observed in some versions of musical and linguistic formalism, which share a common rationalist-idealist background; paradigmatically, in Chomsky’s controversial M…[Read more]

Lerdahl and Jackendoff’s Generative Theory of Tonal Music (1983) is an attempt to transform music theory into a theory of musical understanding by adopting the formal method and psychological premises of Generative Grammar, along with some Schenkerian elements. It has failed to fulfil its promise mainly because, like Schenker theory, it is…[Read more]

Review of “René d’Harnoncourt and the Art of Installation” By Michelle Elligott. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2018. 176 pp. Hardcover. $45.00. ISBN 978-1-63345-050-9.

A period of six months (Dec. 2017 to Jun. 2018) saw the launch of three digital platforms dedicated to the works of Fernando Pessoa, raising the number of such projects to seven published in a decade. Considering this virtual proliferation as a milestone for Pessoan studies, this article aims to reconstruct, at least as a sketch, the history of…[Read more]