Any attempt to chart the early history of the cello, in whatever genre, inevitably founders on ambiguity of terminology. We accept that bass violins were widespread in Italy throughout the seventeenth century and that they existed in various sizes, the smallest tuned a fifth higher than the modern cello, but when was a violone, violoncino, basso da brazzo, bassetto di viola, violone piccolo or whatever a cello? This problem is inevitably aired elsewhere in this volume, but its most direct relevance is to the ensemble sonata for two or more melodic instruments, since by the time collections of solo compositions for a stringed bass and continuo appeared in print, composers (or at least publishers) had mainly settled on ‘violoncello’; there are no solo collections for violoncino. It would seem that ‘violoncello’ was first used with some frequency by Bolognese composers from Giulio Cesare Arresti's Sonate a 2, & a Tre. con la parte del violoncello a beneplacido (1665), but others in his immediate circle were still far from consistent. Giovanni Battista Vitali described himself as ‘suonatore di violone da brazzo’ on the title-pages of his publications but is referred to variously as a player of the ‘violoncino’ and ‘violonlino’ in the records of the Bolognese basilica of San Petronio; yet, after his appointment to the Court of Modena in 1674, the Church authorities advertised for a replacement, ‘being vacant the position of violoncello through the departure of Gio. Batt. Vitali’. Ten years later, the title-page of Domenico Gabrielli's Balletti reveals that he was ‘Sonatore di Violoncello in S. Petronio di Bologna’, even though the part-book is labelled ‘violone’.

Edward Albee had his roots in Off-Broadway. With Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, he moved to Broadway. Despite the deserved success of that play, it was not where he belonged. It is arguable that his work would have found a more receptive audience elsewhere. Certainly, an increasing number of writers turned not to the large-scale and increasingly expensive midtown theaters but to the Off-Broadway and Off-Off Broadway venues that sprang up, from the early 1960s onward. In a decade that privileged youth, that increasingly saw a challenge to conventional social structures, that witnessed social fragmentation along lines of race and gender, and that was defined by political and aesthetic revolt, the theater, as image and fact, seemed the natural focus of change. It was to be a theater that challenged the distinction between performer and audience, that stepped outside Cartesian logic and tapped into the unconscious as it rediscovered the expressive power of the body. Groups such as the Living Theatre, under the direction of Judith Malina and Julian Beck, and the Open Theatre, whose director was Joseph Chaikin, set themselves to explore the potential of the theater by deconstructing it into its component elements — movement, sound, the dialectics of performance. Their emphasis was on the actor. They were interested in liberating the voice, stressing physicality, generating powerful images, improvising, transgressing the supposed limits of theatrical expression. The audience they addressed was not one that attended Broadway plays.

Introduction

The cello sonata forged three avenues of development in the eighteenth century. The late seventeenth-century form, for cello and continuo, involving a cello as the principal melodist, persisted well into the third quarter of the eighteenth century. Harmonic support in the form of semi-improvised chords or the realisation of a prescribed figured bass was provided by a keyboard instrument (normally an organ or harpsichord), which could be joined or replaced by a plucked instrument (chitarrone or archlute); in addition, the bass line could be sustained, normally by another cello or, possibly, a gamba. The nomenclature for such works ranged from ‘sonata’ to ‘sinfonia’, ‘solo’, ‘trattenimento’, ‘divertimento’, ‘concertino’ and other such terms.

The sonata's second avenue of development, the so-called ‘accompanied sonata’, involved the cellist in a subordinate role to an obbligato keyboard. This type, which challenged the dominance of the sonata with continuo and eventually superseded it, began and ended essentially with the early sonatas of Beethoven and his contemporaries, giving way to the third avenue, the true duo sonata for two equal protagonists.

The Baroque

The cello sonata evolved first in northern Italy towards the end of the seventeenth century. Two different types emerged: the sonata da camera (‘chamber sonata’), which is essentially a suite of stylised dances; and the sonata da chiesa (‘church sonata’), the movements of which have no dance allegiances.

The preceding evaluations speak to the ever-present issue faced by those eighteenth- and nineteenth-century cellists who sought recognition as virtuosos: could their performances be as pleasing and acceptable to audiences as those of violinists? The accomplishments of such artists as Lanzetti, Jean-Pierre and Jean-Louis Duport, Romberg, Servais, Davidoff and Casals repeatedly proved that, indeed, the cello could easily match its smaller confrère in providing musical gratification. Yet to do so they, and other innovative and artistically creative players, had continually to recast themselves as the architects of modernisation as they searched for idiomatic performance techniques which allowed their music, in tandem with that of violinists, to be stretched, moulded, and refitted to conform with ever-changing stylistic requirements and regional preferences.

POETIC PESSIMISM AND PHILOSOPHICAL OPTIMISM

The Greek philosophers were not the first to reflect on the nature and limits of human knowledge; that distinction belongs to the poets of archaic Greece. In Book XVIII of the Odyssey, for example, the failure of Penelope's suitors to sense the disaster awaiting them prompts some famous remarks on the mental capacities of the species from the disguised Odysseus:

Here, as on other occasions in the Homeric poems, the thoughts of mortals reflect only their present experiences,- the events that lie ahead lie also beyond their powers of comprehension. Conversely, when the gods choose to endow an individual with superhuman powers of insight, his knowledge is distinguished by its vast range:

Until recently, most standard accounts of twentieth-century American theatre have virtually ignored Sophie Treadwell. At most, Treadwell’s bestknown play, the explosive 1928 drama Machinal, receives mention as a last gasp example of 1920s expressionism on the commercial Broadway stage. With a renewed attention to Machinal, however, first with its reappearance in print in an anthology in 1981 and then in prominent revivals by the New York Shakespeare Festival in 1990 and the Royal National Theatre in London in 1993, Treadwell has begun to attract more scholarly and artistic interest. With her theatre career spanning six decades, including the writing of forty plays in a variety of styles and subjects, as well as acting in, directing, and producing her own works for the Broadway stage, Treadwell may be viewed as one of America’s pioneering, early twentieth-century women dramatists. Her writings consistently examine the conditions of modern society which inhibit women’s personal struggles for independence and equality. Especially in her most experimental works, Machinal and For Saxophone, Treadwell may also be seen as one of the first American women playwrights to utilize non-realistic innovations in style and narrative to create a decidedly feminist aesthetic in the theatre.

Sophie Treadwell was born in Stockton, California in 1885. Her mother, Nettie Fairchild Treadwell, was part of a ranching family which helped settle the Stockton area. Her father, Alfred B. Treadwell, was of Mexican and European descent. His desertion of the family in favor of a career as a lawyer and elected judge in San Francisco severely disrupted Sophie’s formative years. Despite the fact that she would often spend summers in San Francisco with her father, Sophie frequently experienced embarrassment and humiliation over her mother’s persistent attempts to follow and reunite with Alfred.

As for so many early twentieth-century women writers, modernism for Susan Glaspell (1876-1948) was at once a blessing and a curse. It stimulated her best work, and then scorned her aesthetic. It incorporated her theatrical innovations, and proceeded to ignore their creator. It made her reputation, but only to repudiate it. In order to understand these seeming paradoxes, that slippery term, “modernism,” or, more accurately, “modernisms,” must be defined in its gendered American historical context before we turn to Susan Glaspell herself.

Much of the exuberance of American nineteenth-century literary culture arose from the belief that art and life are indivisible. As Ralph Waldo Emerson, who greatly influenced Glaspell, concludes in “The Poet”(1842), “The poets are thus liberating gods … They are free, and they make free”(236). Although Emerson addressed his exhortations to “men,”women, too, believed that their writings would and should affect the lives of their compatriots. One of the major goals of the so-called domestic and sentimental novelists of mid-century was to evoke feeling or “sentiment”in their readers, but feeling was the means to an end, not the end itself. In her “Concluding Remarks”to her best-selling Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), Harriet Beecher Stowe admonished her readers, “There is one thing that every individual can do, - they can see to it that they feel right”(624), and then act upon that feeling to end slavery. When Abraham Lincoln addressed Stowe in 1863 as “the little lady who made this big war,”his condescending comment did acknowledge that Stowe’s art moved her readers to profound change in American life.

Peter Taylor has had two separate careers, one, stretching from the mid-1950s to the mid-1980s, as a writer of short stories, the other, commencing in 1986 with A Summons to Memphis, as a novelist. The métier of his stories is upper-middle-class life in middle Tennessee. He has a special gift, in such stories as “A Wife of Nashville” and “Cookie,” for portraying the complicated relationships between upper-middle-class white families and their African American cooks. He also is a master of tales of delicate grotesquerie and sexual uneasiness in such stories as “A Spinster’s Tale,” and “Venus, Cupid, Folly, and Time,” tales that owe some of their strangeness of atmosphere to Carson McCullers but that are also presented with a restraint and understatement unlike that of any other writer of the Southern tradition. Finally, in such stories as “Heads of Houses,” and “In the Miro District,” Taylor captures generational conflicts that are also cultural conflicts, and, since the children are usually less self-consciously Southern than the adults, regional conflicts as well.

In A Summons to Memphis, Taylor also treats a generational quarrel that is also a regional one, in that the entanglement of the protagonist’s family history is also an entanglement with his native region, and fleeing the former is a way of fleeing the latter. The novel provides a metaphorical way of describing the literary predicament of a belated generation of Southern novelists, a generation that must sever its consuming ties with the Renascence generation but must also risk its vitality as novelists if it succeeds in breaking the tie.

When Eudora Welty was a young woman just out of the University of Wisconsin and Columbia Business School, she briefly was a “publicity agent, junior grade” for the Works Progress Administration, and in that capacity she traveled over the eighty two counties of Mississippi, bringing her Kodak with her on bookmobile routes, into juvenile courts, and into Holiness Churches. Republishing those photographs many years later in One Time, One Place (1971) - she pointedly calls them “snapshots,” not only to make clear the casual and amateurish way she took them but also to make clear the relaxed, personal, one-on-one quality of the relationship between the people on both sides of the lens - she reflects that although these pictures were taken in the depth of the Depression, she was grateful that her beginner’s luck gave her what a more practiced method could not have given, “the blessing of showing me the real State of Mississippi, not the abstract state of the Depression.” In particular, she finds that the pictures she took conveyed more about their subjects than any thesis about the South she might have been attempting to prove.

Introduction

Although it is the noblest and most profound in tone of the violin family, the cello is probably the youngest member and certainly the most recently perfected in form and proportion. Although its large size makes it particularly vulnerable to damage, its design (as with its smaller relatives, the violin and viola) has given it a remarkable longevity, and instruments made three hundred years ago are still used and treasured by discerning players.

The cello is a mechanically simple but acoustically complex instrument. (See Fig. 1.1.) The four tapered tuning pegs for adjusting the strings, tuned C–G–d–a, are made usually from hard rosewood (dalbergia latifolia) or boxwood (buxus sempervirens) for durability, and project laterally from a backward-curving pegbox. Proportionally, the pegbox is much broader than that of the violin, in order to accommodate thicker strings, and has distinctive squared shoulders at the lower end. At the upper end is the scroll, a Baroque adornment which is a characteristic feature of all the instruments of the violin family. The slope of the pegbox tensions the strings across the ebony nut, which is slotted to locate and raise them just clear of the surface of the ebony fingerboard, against which the strings are stopped by the fingers of the left hand.

The fingerboard is glued to the neck, which is carved in one piece with the pegbox and scroll from maple (acer pseudoplatanus). It has a curved top in cross-section, usually with a flattened area beneath the C string to allow for the wider vibration of this, the heaviest string. The fingerboard increases in width from the nut to permit wider string spacing at the bridge, allowing easier movement of the bow in string-crossing. The neck joins the body of the cello at the root, which extends to the full depth of the ribs, whilst the fingerboard extends further above the body.

The Native American poet Simon Ortiz (Acoma Pueblo) describes the decade of the 1960s as “inspirational,” “creative,” and “invigorating,” because it was a “worldwide phenomenon of third-world peoples decolonizing themselves and expressing their indigenous spirit, especially in Africa and the Americas.” And, Ortiz argues, this “process of decolonizing includes a process of producing literature.” Describing “the condition of the Chicano” in 1972, Luis Valdez, the director of the radical Teatro Campesino, writes, “Our people are a colonized race, and the root of their uniqueness as Man lies buried in the dust of conquest. In order to regain our corazon, our soul, we must reach deep into our people, into the tenderest memory of their beginning.” And then he quotes the poet Alurista:

What many Native American, Asian American, and Chicano writers learned from the experiences of the 1960s is that literature has a crucial role to play in the formation of ethnic identity and the creation of ethnic pride. Asked to compare the so-called Native American Renaissance to the “Harlem Renaissance in black writing,” N. Scott Momaday pointed to Dee Brown’s best-selling revisionist historical account Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (1970), researched and written during the 1960s, as a water-shed; according to Momaday, the publication of Brown’s book created “a sudden disposition to understand the experience of the American Indian. The kind of burgeoning that we’re talking about really happened in the publishing world rather than in any sort of social or political arena.”

Protagoras and Gorgias are the most significant of the early sophists. Although philosophy as we understand it was not their chief business, they taught views and methods of argument that have fascinated subsequent philosophers. In their own context they exhibit the spirit of the new learning, the cultural and intellectual revolution of the fifth century B.C. in Greece. This revolution - or, rather, the reaction against it - is illustrated in Aristophanes' comic play, The Clouds, by a character enrolling in a sophistic school in order to learn the “unjust argument.” This, he has heard, can win a jury's favour for the worst of offenders. The syllabus, he finds, involves science as well as rhetoric, both laughable in this satire. What is not laughable is the popular animosity against the school that leads to its incineration (at least one student included), a grim sign of the strong feelings that would later contribute to the death of the man whose name Aristophanes uses for the leader of his imaginary school - Socrates.

Tennessee Williams’s sense of an oppressive social world, of the diminishing space available to the embattled self, was a product partly of conscience and partly of paranoid vision, but it was shared by his fellow writers. O’Neill’s Yank, trying to embrace the animal when his body is bent to adjust to the mechanical; Miller’s Willy Loman, scattering his seed — literal and symbolic — on the stony ground of his backyard; and Laura Wingfield, defeated by the typewriter and retreating to the cold purity of her glass animals, are all examples of the human defeated by the mechanical. It is a matter, too, of space: the cage and the stokehold of O’Neill, the enclosed backyard of Miller, and the cellular living units of Williams all embody a drastic shrinking, a radical diminution of possibilities that lies at the heart of the work of all these writers. American rhetoric is one of expanding frontiers, proliferating possibilities, unformed selves, economically and politically free individuals. American reality, as portrayed in their work, is constrictive, disillusioning, and deforming.

America is a failed Utopia, an impossible project, built on a Puritan rhetoric of recoverable innocence and an enlightenment polemic of perfectability. It is the grandiloquent nature of America’s promise to itself, and to a world to which it offered itself as a great experiment, that provoked a literature of disillusionment and betrayal. That strain is strong in a drama characterized by its oppositional stance. Thus, O’Neill suggests that his plays have in essence been concerned with the sacrifice of individual to material values; Williams, that his characters are romantics in an unromantic world.

Wittman Ah Sing, the protagonist of Maxine Hong Kingston’s novel Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (1989), has a problem. Named for the great poet of American individualism and steeped in American cultural history, Wittman wants to be a latter-day Jack Kerouac, but to his chagrin, he comes to realize that the real Kerouac would never have seen him as a protégé. To Kerouac, Wittman could only have been another Victor Wong, preserved for posterity in Kerouac’s novel Big Sur (1962) as “little Chinese buddy Arthur Ma.” In other words, Wittman wants to be an American Artist — he wants to carve a place for himself in American cultural history — but finds that first he must disengage himself from the subordinate place that American culture has made for him on the basis of his ethnicity.

Wittman’s manic narrative registers the pain of being caught between two cultures, of being increasingly drawn away from the Chinese culture of his ancestors, which he admires, by the dominant, mainstream culture of Whitman, Kerouac, Marilyn Monroe, and the University of California at Berkeley, which he also admires. Wittman wants to define an identity for himself that can truly be called “Chinese American,” but to do so he must prevent his Chinese inheritance from being transformed into a safely exotic form of cultural residue: he must prevent the “Chinese” from being marginalized by the “American.” Wittman’s goal is to create a form of public art that can redefine what it means to be “Chinese American” — redefine it for himself, his community, and the larger culture of which both he and his community are a part.

David Mamet is no less fascinated by personal and national psychosis than Sam Shepard. His America also is cracking apart. Like Shepard, he is drawn to a male world of encoded violence and stresses the all but unbridgeable gulf between the sexes. He, too, is fascinated by myths that have collapsed into fantasy, finds in Hollywood a paradigm of tainted dreams, and offers bleak portraits of American alienation. Like Shepard, he peoples his stage with urban cowboys and dramatizes the collapse of language in the face of experience. Sexual Perversity in Chicago has something of the brittle energy of The Tooth of Crime; The Woods offers a requiem for love not very different in spirit from Fool for Love. Mamet’s characters, like Shepard’s, inhabit a burned-over land in which the past exists only as buried fragments, echoes of half-forgotten myths. Shepard’s True West, in which two brothers trash their mother’s home, is echoed in Mamet’s American Buffalo, in which a character trashes a junk store. The peep show in Paris, Texas is reminiscent of that in Edmond. There are also clear differences, however.

There is, behind Mamet’s American Buffalo and Glengarry Glen Ross, a consistent critique of American values, of a promise that has become the basis of betrayal, of a spirit of enterprise that has degraded in the direction of crime. History exists and is invoked but has no functional value. Something has disrupted a moral continuity. His America, once invented by a gentleman farmer, is now reinvented by petty criminals (American Buffalo), depressives (Edmond), and confidence tricksters (Glengarry Glen Ross and The Shawl).

INTRODUCTION

Justice was a major topic of debate at Athens during the period that extends from Aeschylus' Eumenides (456 B.C.), with its celebration of the inauguration of the court of the Areopagus, down to the trial and death of Socrates (399 B.C.), memorialized in Plato's Apology. Historians, dramatists, orators, and philosophers provide a range of perspectives and evidence on one of the crucial issues of the age. In the earliest Greek literature human justice had been very closely linked to divine justice and power, but in the fifth century, the time of tribunals and popular assemblies, what chiefly attracts attention is justice purely in the human sphere. Questions are raised about its origin, its connection with nature and truth, its performance, the conditions that can guarantee its development, and the forces that generate its opposite - coercive power, violence, and injustice.

In order to acquire a general idea of the terms in which these issues were explored at the end of the fifth century, it is enough to read the speeches Plato puts into the mouths of Glaucon and Adeimantus at the beginning of book two of his Republic. These speeches provide the best introduction to our theme because they exemplify the cultural background against which Plato develops his great project in this dialogue. Before turning to details, a few words are necessary on some of the questions that emerge in the preceding book.