Eugenius Aristides Nisbet played a critical role in Georgia's secession from the United States. Elected as a delegate to Georgia's 1861 secession convention, Nisbet introduced a resolution in favor of severing ties with the Union, and he led the committee that drafted his state's secession ordinance. Nisbet was a trained lawyer who had served on the Georgia Supreme Court, and his legal training shaped the way that he viewed secession. He believed that the Constitution did not give states the right to dissolve the Union; instead, this power rested solely in the people, and he framed the resolution and ordinance accordingly. Thanks in part to Nisbet, it was the “people of the State of Georgia” who “repealed, rescinded and abrogated” their ratification of the Constitution in 1788.

Souvent classé comme un argot obsolète des bouchers de la Villette, le louchébem, l’argot des bouchers de Paris, continue de se pratiquer beaucoup plus qu’on ne le croit. Cependant, il faut s’inquiéter de sa vitalité en raison du nombre sans cesse décroissant des bouchers traditionnels. Même si on peut citer quelques auteurs, force est de constater que l’argomuche a suscité peu de travaux. Ce projet documentaire, la première grande étude de terrain sur le louchébem, intègre les témoignages de 201 bouchers, interrogés sur leur lieu de travail (les boucheries artisanales de Paris et de sa petite couronne) à l’aide d’un questionnaire sociolinguistique, principal outil à notre disposition. Cet article en présente les premiers résultats : il rappelle d’abord le procédé de formation de cet argot à clé et esquisse l’histoire, ou plutôt l’origine, du louchébem ; il décrit ensuite la démarche méthodologique mise en œuvre pour recueillir les données et s’entretenir avec les bouchers ; enfin il identifie et analyse les fonctions pour lesquelles on utilise actuellement le louchébem dans la communauté linguistique que constitue la corporation bouchère parisienne.

For Dmitri Shostakovich, reaching the heights of the Soviet musical establishment proved easier than staying there. He triumphed with his Fifth Symphony of 1937, which marked the composer's return to official favour after the denunciation of his second opera and third ballet. Following that success, Shostakovich faced the problem of the sequel: whether or not, in the Sixth Symphony, to repeat, refute, or re-inscribe. I propose Shostakovich first thought about going big with his new project, composing a grand text-based score about Lenin, and then considered going small, grounding the first movement in folk fare and mixing light genres in the others. But in the end, he chose a more experimental approach. The Sixth Symphony collapses boundaries, both semantic and syntactic, pulling them back from a fixed state into a play of possibilities.

This article demonstrates how migration formed a process of memory construction in the work and thought of Russian émigré composer Arthur Lourié (1891–1966). It analyses Lourié’s song cycle Recollection of Petersburg, composed over two decades and across four countries, providing close readings of music and poetry and exploring the network of intertextual connections the cycle activates. Lourié has proven a difficult subject because of the diversity of aesthetic positions he took from decade to decade. Recollection allows us to trace a line of continuity as he passed through these incarnations, revealing an aesthetics of accumulation and arrangement with origins in Acmeist poetics. This aesthetics, in turn, served as a coping strategy for Lourié’s life in emigration, as he sought to order the voices of memory and escape the flow of time. Lourié’s case will contribute to our understanding of the profound impact of migration on music in the twentieth century.

In this article I examine localized cultural change that nevertheless serves as an applied instance of broader change. Focusing mostly on British, white male musicians and music writers active in the improvised and experimental music scenes of the UK (and, to a lesser extent, United States and Europe) across the 1970s and early 1980s, I identify clear shifts in taste, attitude, and practice. These shifts arc across what Ben Piekut calls the ‘mixed avant-garde’ of the 1960s to what I describe as the ‘unpop avant-garde’ of the late 1970s and 1980s, in which influences from popular and non-Western music play more significant roles than before and liminal, quasi-popular practices such as noise are in the emergence. I trace the appearance of the unpop avant-garde through independent music publications from the period, most prominently Microphone, Musics, Collusion, Impetus, and Re/Search, using these published scene discourses as barometers of the musical atmosphere of the time.

In order to assess Helmut Lachenmann's characterization of (his) music as an ‘existential experience’ this article focuses on a specific aspect of many of his compositions: stretches of near-silence and minimized musical activity such as reduced dynamics and gestures which contrasts the surrounding material. I argue that in the case of his early vocal compositions Consolation I and II (1967 and 1968) these ‘meta-musical fermatas’ relate to a key portion of each work's text in order to encourage self-reflection on the part of the listener. My analyses reveal the influence of Luigi Nono and Karlheinz Stockhausen, particularly in terms of word-setting and of the works’ spiritual and political messages. I further trace the changes undertaken in these compositions and in Lachenmann's commentaries for them over the following decade. I suggest these changes relate to political events in Germany occurring between 1968 and 1977 which also led to the conception of Lachenmann's ‘music with images’, Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern.

This article explores the anglicisation of the Scots language between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, focusing on the variation between the orthographic clusters <quh-> and <wh-> found in relative and interrogative clause markers. Using modern statistical techniques, we provide the most comprehensive empirical analysis of this variation so far in the Helsinki Corpus of Older Scots (Meurman-Solin 1995). By combining the techniques of Variability-Based Neighbour Clustering (Gries & Hilpert 2008, 2010, 2012) with mixed-effects logistic regression modelling (Baayen et al.2008), we uncover a different trajectory of change than that which has previously been reported for this feature (Meurman-Solin 1993, 1997). We argue that by using modern methods of data reduction and statistical modelling, we can present a picture of language change in Scots that is more fine-grained than previous studies which use only descriptive statistics.

The notion of a shared history across the Mediterranean is central to a number of Spanish-Moroccan musical collaborations, which draw on the notion of convivencia: the alleged peaceful coexistence between Christians, Jews, and Muslims in medieval Spain. In this article, I explore the relationship between a ‘musical’ convivencia and Moroccan immigration in Spain, focusing on two prominent case studies: Macama jonda (1983) and Inmigración (2003). Spanning a twenty-year period, I argue that these two productions illustrate shifting responses to Moroccan immigration at distinct historical moments: the post-Franco era and post-9/11. These two productions illustrate the malleability of the convivencia myth, employing it for distinct social and political purposes. I argue that Macama jonda and Inmigración should be read as products of shifting political and cultural relations between Spain and Morocco, and Spain's negotiation of its Muslim past.

Concluding his discussion of bee reproduction in Book 3 of Generation of Animals, Aristotle makes a famous methodological pronouncement about the relationship between sense perception and theory in natural history. In the very next sentence, he casually remarks that the unique method of reproduction that he finds in bees should not be surprising, since bees have something ‘divine’ about them. Although the methodological pronouncement gets a fair bit of scholarly attention, and although Aristotle's theological commitments in cosmology and metaphysics are well known, scholars have almost universally passed over the comment about bees and divinity in silence. This paper aims to show why that comment is no mere throwaway, and offers an exploration and elaboration of the ways in which divinity operates even at fairly mundane levels in his natural philosophy, as an important Aristotelian explanation for order, proportion and rationality, even in the lowest of animals.

Despite Nono's and Carter's opposing views, divergent compositional aesthetic, and applicability of twelve-tone music, the two composers shared their admiration for the works of the Second Viennese School. In this article, I examine Carter's 1957 and Nono's 1956 analyses of Schoenberg's pivotal twelve-tone work: Variations for Orchestra, Op. 31 (1926–28). The study offers a rare opportunity to look at the same piece analysed by two composers with unique points of view. Completed only a year apart, the analyses illuminate aspects of Schoenberg's work that each composer found most compelling and applicable to their own works. Thus, these analyses, combined with sketches housed at the Paul Sacher Stiftung (Basel), the Library of Congress (Washington, DC), and the Fondazione Archivio Luigi Nono (Venice), not only shed light on Schoenberg's system, but also become a valuable tool for tracking both Carter's and Nono's compositional processes, showing how Schoenberg influenced two schools of thought.

In February 1959 East Germany fêted the legacy of Felix Mendelssohn with a week-long celebration. Like earlier festivals honouring composers such as Handel, these festivities provided a site for working out in practical terms abstract theories of the ethico-political value of the Germanic cultural heritage to a socialist German state. Yet, discourse surrounding the Festwoche indicates a unique approach to such negotiations. Debates surrounding the festival are analysed, including publications in journals and newspapers as well as speeches, in order to demonstrate that the circumstances surrounding the Mendelssohn festivities fomented remarkably diverse responses to issues pertaining to the value of the musical heritage and to Mendelssohn's place within that heritage. Further, the problems Mendelssohn's life and work presented led one of the most important musicologists in the GDR – Georg Knepler – to embrace a radically Marxian (rather than Marxist–Leninist) account of the significance of the composer's music to East German audiences.