The cultural and social conditions underlying Spanish poetry during the Civil War really originated in the early 1930s. The strained economic circumstances motivated by the world depression, as well as the increasing political ferment in Spain that culminated in the advent of the Republic in 1931, and in the ever-greater polarization between the right and the left from then until the war, led writers and readers to focus on social rather than aesthetic issues. In this climate, the search for timeless meanings which had typified the poetry of the 1920s now seemed irresponsible and escapist. The quest for “pure poetry” as well as the linguistic experimentation of vanguard writing were soon left behind, and many poets, including prominent members of prior generations, sought a poetry relevant to the times. This led to works more expressive and emotive on the one hand, and more concerned with social issues on the other. The exact nature of any social “commitment”varied greatly, from a general awareness of social circumstances to an advocacy of specific political and social positions. Still, the bonds between literature and social issues grew tighter (Cano, Poesía, p. 96).

Contemporary Spanish art is generally portrayed in histories as an uneven agglomeration of outstanding moments, boasting isolated figures of genius, and separated by periods of apathy. In contrast to the medieval era or the Golden Age, more recent art is largely disparaged. An exception is made, of course, for the works of a few major figures, though these products are often seen as heroic deeds of epic grandeur, conceived in a country that has otherwise failed to live up to its own glorious past tradition.

This is a conception that is both superficial and historiographically outmoded. Once a fuller understanding of the period in question is attained, a rich continuity of trends makes itself known, revealing numerous artists who not only represented their era masterfully but who also became figures of international standing in their own right. A history of European art would be incomplete if it claimed to value more than simple novelty or vanguardist movements, yet failed to take these artists into account.

Certainly by the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Spain was no longer the world power of a bygone era. She was instead a nation struggling to modernize, burdened with a backward economy, a weak bourgeoisie, social and political instability, and periods of isolation - circumstances which could hardly be expected to inspire a flourishing of the arts.

In Rus' the official conversion from paganism to Christianity took place in the tenth century. Paganism, thriving in the vast East European territory inhabited by different Slavic, Finno-Ugric, Lithuanian, and Turkic tribes was not an “organized” religion, which could be viewed as some kind of unified whole with common gods for all tribes or with a common level of world understanding. There were, instead, higher deities unifying the tribe or several tribes, and there were local deities, of particular settlements, and even of homes (for example, the house spirits or domovye).

With the adoption of Christianity in the population centers, only the higher deities, such as Perun (in Finno-Ugric Perkun, god of thunder and war), Veles (god of household animals and trade), and Dažbog (god of the harvest), were deposed. The “lesser” deities, the house gods, those imagined by the people to inhabit swamps, forests, rivers, and outbuildings, continued to be objects of worship – or, more exactly, superstition – into the twentieth century. Faith in them coexisted with belief in Christianity, just as superstitions continue to exist to the present day in different varieties of omens, fortune-telling, and so on.

The main impact on the Spanish publishing industry of the shift from dictatorship to democracy has been the creation of a literary scene led by market forces. The Franco regime, in its attempt to control cultural production through censorship, forced the publishing industry, like the other media, into an at least obliquely political role. The only publishers which could be said to cater to the market were those which, like Planeta, co-existed happily with the regime. However, the market was largely construed by them as a passive entity that would consume what it was given. Opposition publishers, notably Carlos Barral, tended to act as good-intentioned cultural mandarins decreeing what the public ought to want. Consequently they failed to reach the masses, except with the 1960s Latin American fictional “boom,” whose exhaustion by the early 1970s drove publishers to invent “the new Spanish novel” by commissioning a body of highly intellectual, largely unreadable novels by young writers.

Modernization arrived late and fitfully in Spain. Democratic government, secular philosophy, industrialization, urbanization, and social reform for women and the working classes only began to have a major role in Spanish life after the September Revolution of 1868. It is no coincidence that at the same time as Spain undertook social and ideological modernization, Spanish fiction picked up the thread it had dropped after the major accomplishments of the picaresque genre and Don Quijote in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The novel, a genre whose form and length equipped it to reflect multiple social phenomena, accompanied Spain on its belated journey into the modern era, recording it, critiquing it, and helping to shape it.

Standing out among the novelists who chronicled the rapid changes in Spanish social and political life after the ill-fated “Revolution” are Juan Valera, José María Pereda, Pedro Antonio de Alarcón, Benito Pérez Galdós, Emilia Pardo Bázan, Leopoldo Alas (“Clarín”), Armando Palacio Valdés, and Vicente Blasco Ibáñez. Their ideological positions are widely divergent, and in many ways their novelistic production of the period following the 1868 Revolution represents a national forum on the issues - the position of the bourgeoisie (the third estate) and the working classes vis-à-vis public policy and decision-making, the role of the church (especially the clergy) in public and private life, and women's place in society - foregrounded during the brief revolutionary period (1868-1875).

The music enthusiast probably knows Spanish music principally because of the well-recorded early masters, a few modern composers, and several international stars. Lovers of opera and song know of the many great Spanish voices, including those of nineteenth-century Manuel García (for whom Rossini wrote a role in his Barber of Seville) and of his famous daughters María Malibrán and Pauline Viardot-García. Today's best voices include Victoria cle los Ángeles, Teresa Berganza, Montserrat Caballé, José Carreras, Plácido Domingo, Alfredo Krause, and Pilar Lorengar. Music fans will know of the work of the great Spanish instrumentalists such as Pablo Sarasate (violin), Nicanor Zabaleta (harp), Paco de Lucía, Emilio Pujol, Regino Sainz de la Maza, Andrés Segovia, and Francisco Tárrega (guitar), José Iturbi, Alicia de Larrocha, Ricardo Viñes, and Miguel Zanetti (piano), and Pau Casals (cello). They will likewise be familiar with the conducting of Ataúlfo Argenta and Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos.

The period 1868 to 1936 was witness to a political and social struggle between left and right and the inability of politicians to create a viable democratic system which would respond to the demands of all the people and the diverse regions of Spain. The history of the poetic developments in the same period is also one of a confrontation between a traditionalist and Catholic outlook and one that is progressive, impatient of aesthetic strictures, profoundly skeptical, and élitist. The former seeks a consensus from above, the second is subversive of the consensus and offers its own intellectual aesthetic agenda from the margins. The first is undynamic, reactionary, resistant to change. The second is dissident, deconstructive of the status quo and anxious for new aesthetic goals, profoundly transgressive in its engagement with the taboos of Catholic Restoration society: cultural diversity, individuality, sexuality and sensuality, nonrational states of mind, aesthetic subversion and inversion. The contrast is a striking one manifest in two statements.

Background material

Introduction

Among the Slavs, as among many other peoples, cultural identity tends to be defined by language: in a way that would be difficult for a Québequois, a Mexican, or an American to understand, to be Russian is primarily to have Russian as one’s mother tongue. This is especially true in a preliterate society with its limited comprehension of time and space, but remains substantially accurate as a society develops into a modern nation. Historical and geographical awareness, the ability to respond to psychological and aesthetic dimensions of literature, the challenge and pleasure of intellectual interchange, even the possibility of truly understanding non-verbal experience like music and art - all are mediated by language. Some, perhaps exaggerating, have averred that the form of our language determines the form of our thought, while others, more convincingly, maintain that language is the primary modeling system through which we view all our surroundings and through which all other systems must be filtered. At the very least, it is obvious that language plays an essential role in culture, and in defining culture. This is especially true of Russian cultural history.

Russian and Slavic

Russian, like Belorussian and Ukrainian, is an East Slavic language, distinct from West and South Slavic. West Slavic includes Polish, Czech and Slovak, Sorbian, and a few minor or extinct languages, while South Slavic includes Slovene, Serbian and Croatian, Bulgarian, and (since 1945) Macedonian. At the end of the first millennium ad, the three territorial groups were already distinct from each other, but had not yet separated into the individual languages we know today. At this time, for example, there was no separate Russian, Ukrainian, or Belorussian language, but a linguistically more or less homogenous East Slavic language, spoken with only minor dialectal differences from the Novgorod-Pskov area in the North to Kiev in the South.

Arguably the single most important event in the history of cinema in Spain after 1975 was the official abolition of censorship in 1977, thus bringing to an end a system that allowed the state censor to cut or destroy a film during shooting and at pre- and post-shooting stages. The prime movers behind Franco's censors were the Catholic church. With the secularization of the state under the new constitution, the church's fading influence over the population as a whole (by 1991 only 49 percent of the population considered themselves practicing Catholics) was quickly reflected in the cinema's eager neglect of all the old taboos. Since 1975 the church itself has forfeited the kind of reverential treatment which it had enjoyed under the ancien régime in pious films like Marcelino pan y vino (Marcelino Bread and Wine, Vajda, 1954) or Balarassa (Nieves Conde, 1950). Films like Padre nuestro (Our Father, Regueiro, 1985) took a more jaundiced view - almost approaching in tone the satirical treatment of the clergy in nineteenth-century novels like La Regenta (The Regent's Wife) - of the working lives of Spanish priests.

What are the lessons of Russian culture, what does it have to offer us and our time? Fortunately, Russian cultural studies have a rich history - including the works of Nikolai Berdiaev, Pavel Miliukov, George Vernadsky, Nicholas Riasanovsky, Wladimir Weidle, Georges Florovsky, Dmitry Chizhevsky, James Billington, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Dmitry Likhachev (who is a contributor to this volume and a link to the earlier tradition), and more recently Alain Besançon, Yury Lotman, Caryl Emerson, Katerina Clark, Boris Groys, Mikhail Epstein, Irina Paperno, Boris Uspensky and Geoffrey Hosking among others - that offers orientation and points of engagement in answering such questions. In spite of a rich diversity of approaches that have changed over time and in reaction to historical and social context, these and other cultural analysts most often depend on certain basic vantage points they assume in common, whether in part or in whole. They are: the language origins of a culture, its geographic location, its religious and ideological attachments, and its broadly based folk ethos. Yet other points of view exist in aesthetic texts that are equally open to history and later uses by cultural observers but that have some material permanence in their media of transmission.

In any history of Russian film questions about boundaries arise, directly or by implication. The subject cannot include all of the production of the Russian Empire, the old Soviet Union, and the Commonwealth of Independent States. Nonetheless, Aleksandr Dovzhenko, among the Fathers of Soviet film, is a fact of the Russian and Ukrainian cinemas; Mikhail Chiaureli, in the Stalinist generation, a fact of the Georgian and Russian cinemas; and later, Sergei Paradzhanov, from the generation that came to artistic maturity after Stalin’s death, of the Armenian, Ukrainian, Georgian, and Russian cinemas. Iakov Protazanov is a pre-revolutionary filmmaker and a post-revolutionary one. The work of film artists in emigration or temporarily working in France, Germany, the United States, and elsewhere enters into various constructions of the subject. Ivan Mozzhukhin, Andrei Tarkovsky, and Andrei Konchalovsky are candidates for inclusion in histories in international contexts.

Questions about genres also arise. Avant-garde Soviet film challenged the dominant narrative models of bourgeois audiences, along with the conventions of film viewing. Agitprop in the twenties erased the boundaries between fiction and fact. Film became not a fiction or a document, but a tool in the reconstruction of reality; Sergei Eisenstein’s films about revolution in the twenties and even Aleksandr Medvedkin’s about collectivization in the thirties were part of this tradition.

Saxophone technique consists of the physical actions required to play the instrument – a simple definition, but this is nevertheless a very wide and often daunting subject, both because of the large number of actions and parts of the body used in playing, and because of the bewildering variety of styles and idioms in which the chameleon-like saxophone family of instruments is used. However, I believe that it is possible to identify a few important common fundamental principles, and that observations can be made with regard to saxophone technique which are widely applicable throughout the members of the saxophone family and across all styles of playing.

A framework of approach: breaking music down and using models

Instrumental technique does not exist in a vacuum. Rather, it is one aspect of musical performance; others include phrasing, interpretation within an historical and stylistic context, and of course sheer flair for communicating with listeners. It is a cliché that music is like a language, yet the analogy is a useful one. Like music, spoken language has both spoken and written forms; it can express ideas ranging from banal to profound, can be used either improvisationally or in set forms such as poems, stories, plays, novels or speeches, and there is a performance aspect to speech which we see most obviously in actors. In speech the simplest unit is the word, enunciated by a variety of vocal and oral actions. Words are connected by conventions of grammar into meaningful arrangements (phrases, sentences, paragraphs) which communicate ideas, large or small, of a practical or artistic nature.

A history of the saxophone in jazz is in many ways a history of jazz itself, inasmuch as many of the essential protagonists, those who took style and aesthetics forward, were saxophonists. This is also a story from the twentieth century, of an art form born in the early years and fast-forwarded through many of the changes that classical music history took much longer to experience. Perhaps that is in its nature as an oral art form, relying much more on spontaneous composition than on the written work for posterity. Jazz artists tend to be creators rather than interpreters, and consequently as much will be made in this chapter of performers' creativity as of their technical skills.

The story of jazz in the twentieth century is a story of music in the United States, of black and white popular culture. Latterly, Europe becomes important. Throughout, male domination of the creative process is self-evident. It is hoped that all of the significant saxophonists in jazz will be mentioned here – although some will be disappointed that their favourites have not been included. Rather than follow each career extensively, I have tried to indicate major soloists, along with the main features of their stylistic contributions.

Early soloists

The development of the saxophone in jazz from that of a negligible bit-player, through tonal feature, to essential requirement, includes influencing factors both from within jazz and from wider society. The early jazz ensemble evolved into front line and rhythm section instruments, where the front line consisted of cornet, trombone and clarinet, whilst the rhythm section used piano/banjo/guitar, tuba/string bass and drums. The rhythm section as a functional unit (bass – harmonic rhythm; drums – decorative percussion; piano – harmonic filling and clarification) remained fairly constant up to the 1970s, once the banjo had disappeared and the string bass eased out its brass cousin. The front line, however, was to undergo regular upheaval.