Canonization

Scholars have addressed the tendency of U.S. symphony orchestras to perform the works of relatively few composers. While many highlight this phenomenon, others note that the nature and extent of this conformity can shift over time, as reliance on the works of certain composers decreases and allows the works of newly heralded composers to be heard. Drawing on the work of DiMaggio and others, we derive hypotheses about field-level factors influencing both phenomena. We analyze more than 86,500 performances given by twenty-seven major U.S. symphony orchestras between 1842 and 1969. Our findings indicate that three factors spur the introduction of new composers into orchestral repertoires: the increased performance capabilities of symphony orchestras, the expanded resources for new music, and the proliferation of music programs among U.S. colleges and universities. We also find that one of these factors reduces the conformity of orchestral repertoires: the increased performance capabilities of orchestras. Our exploratory analyses, then, offer lessons about the organization of the musical canon.

I recently saw a local band playing in San Francisco whose name is “Or,
The Whale,” an in-joke for Melvilleans, or perhaps part of a tradition
going back to the late 1960s, when another local band named itself
Moby Grape. (They played, incidentally, in the Castro, not far from the bar
Moby Dick, creating a kind of Melville enterprise zone.) That once unpopular
novel has had a surprising influence on popular music, ranging from Led
Zeppelin’s fifteen-minute drum solo indulgence titled “Moby Dick” to the
techno-musician Moby (Richard Melville Hall), who claims to be distantly
related to the author. In the late 1960s, the record label of the folk-rock group
the Turtles was called White Whale, presaging a contemporary indie band of
the same name. Before the digital age, one could find numerous Moby Disc
record stores in the Northeastern United States, and even a Moby Disques near
the Panth´eon in Paris, which one imagines would have amused Melville. The
musician-artist Laurie Anderson staged a performance piece inspired by Moby-
Dick, and Stanley Crouch situated Melville’s opus as a proto-jazz novel for its
improvisational verve. Emblematically, it is as if Moby-Dick can be “played”
in many keys, or is amenable to many arrangements. However, as I elaborate,
almost all references to Melville in popular culture rely on Moby-Dick and a
few other sources whose useful indeterminacy or ambiguity allows them to be
adapted to as many uses as artists and critics can devise.

In the United States, Melville is known in the popular imagination for
relatively few works: the “B” trilogy of “Bartleby,” “Benito Cereno,” and “Billy
Budd”; and the well-known but not necessarily well-read Moby-Dick. (In the
nineteenth-century, Typee was popular partly through its notoriety, but has
receded from public consciousness). On the other hand, relatively few, perhaps
even within the academy, read Mardi, the almost wholly ignored Israel Potter
and Clarel, and to some degree Pierre and The Confidence-Man. A useful context
might be to think of film adaptations of Melville’s work: one could contrast
numerous Hollywood productions of Moby-Dick with Leos Carax’s intriguing
but singularly inaccessible French adaptation of Pierre, POLA X (an acronym
for Pierre Ou Les Ambigu¨ıt´es X, referencing the fact that Carax filmed his tenth
screenplay, though perhaps, as with the amplifiers in Spinal Tap, he should
have gone to eleven). It is hard to imagine that contemporary Hollywood
would bring Pierre to the screen.

Uredili: Daniel Patafta - Nedjeljka Valerija Kovač; Zbornik radova četvrtog, međunarodnog, znanstvenog skupa Franjevački velikani o sv. Nikoli Taveliću, održanom u Šibeniku, 20. i 21. listopada 2017. // Collection of papers from the scientific conference The Great Franciscans on St. Nikola Tavelić, held in Šibenik, 20th and 21st October 2017., Zagreb 2019.

Edited by: Daniel Patafta and Nedjeljka Valerija Kovač

Song translation is one of the most creative and swiftly-moving kinds of translation as it is highly governed by artistic, cultural, aesthetic, and communicative priorities rather than linguistic correspondence. Interlingual song covers, in particular, are generally translated by musician-translators making their translational decisions across national, cultural, musical borders, borderlines, norms, and conventions, which usually makes the content of the lyrics a secondary issue. Today, songs and their interlingual cover versions are circulated mainly in digitized forms through online platforms, which gives them a far-reaching, multimodal and dynamic nature as they become accessible generally through popular culture. The multiplicity of modes and cultures involved in this fast circulation allows for cultural hybridity and heterogeneity, making the semantic or linguistic superiority of the source text impossible since the originality of the swiftly-travelling "source" becomes questionable. Song translations, therefore, require an artistic creativity that may function not in "a target culture" but in "a travel across cultures." The present study uses the notion of creative mediation (Paker 2011; Paker 2014; Paker 2015) to address song translations. Furthermore, the notion of translational recanonization is coined and explained to address the various ways in which a text or a cultural artifact can be recanonized within a national or transnational, literary or cultural canon. The notion is proposed and used to address the reintroduction of cultural artifacts into canons while they travel across cultures, eras, and genres. The corpus involves a popular interlingual song cover which-when its roots are scrutinized and genealogy uncovered-leads to an odyssey from the ancient world of Plutarch, through the poetry of C.P. Cavafy to a Leonard Cohen song and further to its interlingual song cover performed by the Turkish arabesk icon Müslüm Gürses. This odyssey reveals that the nature of song translation tends to require a process of creative mediation which may sometimes function as translational recanonization, a concept that may allow researchers to view intercultural, cross-cultural, and translational phenomena from a recanonization perspective, as this empirical genealogical analysis aims at illustrating. The study also discusses the possibility of a multimodal turn in translation studies and its relation to (re)canonization.

As the visionary Benedictine Hildegard of Bingen died in 1179, she left a great amount of writings and knew a fame of holiness which had largely developed when she was alive. After her death, her surroundings wanted to obtain the official acknowledgement of her sanctity, and Gregory IX (in a bull dated 27.I.1227) ordered the opening of an inquiry with her canonization in sight. But Hildegard's canonization did not succeed, despite two requests from Gregory IX and then one from Innocent IV in 1243. Different assumptions about this failure can be formulated, but the genuine reason of it escapes us.<br />Nevertheless, Hildegard was considered afterwards as a saint, and a monk called Gebeno, from the Cistercian abbey of Eberbach, plaid a great part in it. In 1220 he made up a compilation of her prophecies out of their contexts and named it Speculum futurorum temporum.This Speculum knew a huge success, and in very different contexts — especially in religious conflicts — many writers leant on Hildegard as a supreme warrant of orthodoxy, repeating the formula set forth by Gebeno, papa libros ejus canonizavit.<br />So this paper examins the reasons and consequences of using a verb with such a heavy meaning : at that time, it is more and more applied to persons, as the papal exclusiveness imposes itself in the field of official acknowledgement of holiness. In the particular case of Hildegard, the so-called papal approval of her books confered her prophecies, for posterity, a greater deal of orthodoxy, which durably counterbalanced the failure of the saint's canonization.

The original article, written in Arabic by HH Pope Shenouda III, was published in Watani, 18 August 1991, in celebration of the forty-year anniversary of the departure of his mentor Archdeacon Habib Girgis. I published my first translation of that article in Watani International, 26 August 2001, p2, in celebration of the fifty-year anniversary of Habib Girgis. Then published this improved translation in Watani International, 25 August 2013, in celebration of the canonization of St. Habib Girgis by the Coptic Orthodox Church Holy Synod on 20 June 2013.

http://preo.u-bourgogne.fr/textesetcontextes/index.php?id=1086 
This study investigates the promotion of saints' cults and the controls imposed on them both in Germany and Rome in the first half of the eighteenth century. It attempts to understand why and how a counter-reformation rhetorical approach which no longer reflected the state of inter-confessional affairs came to be re-employed by secular and ecclesiastical authorities in German areas, whereas this approach was hardly, if at all, used in Rome for the same canonisation processes.

Cette contribution examine la promotion du culte de certains saints et les contrôles imposés à la vénération de ces saints en Allemagne et à Rome dans la première moitié du XVIII e siècle. Il s'agit de comprendre comment et pourquoi une rhétorique selon la mode contre-réformiste ne reflétant plus l'actualité inter-confessionnelle a été 'recyclée' sous la plume des autorités séculières et ecclésiastiques dans les pays germaniques alors que, dans les mêmes procès en canonisation, cette approche a été peu ou pas utilisée à Rome.

Cette contribution examine la promotion du culte de certains saints et les controles imposes a la veneration de ces saints en Allemagne et a Rome dans la premiere moitie du XVIIIe siecle. Il s’agit de comprendre comment et pourquoi une rhetorique selon la mode contre-reformiste ne refletant plus l’actualite inter-confessionnelle a ete ‘recyclee’ sous la plume des autorites seculieres et ecclesiastiques dans les pays germaniques alors que, dans les memes proces en canonisation, cette approche a ete peu ou pas utilisee a Rome.