Ruth Katz

The Egalitarian Waltz

One need not be an anthropologist or a cultural historian to remark that social dancing these days seems to isolate the individual in a trance-like self-absorption which virtually disconnects him from the world and even from his partner. Indeed, the dance of the day—like other art forms—is often a good reflection of the values of a given time and place. Todays developments, both in the dance and in society, provide more than the usual scholarly justification for looking back to one of the earliest manifestations of individualism and escape in the dance and its association with the values of liberty, equality and uncertainty which followed upon the French Revolution. The dance was the waltz; the dancers, at first, were the middle classes, soon to be joined by both upper and lower classes; the time and place are Central Europe, and soon the whole Western world, at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

Rhythmic Patterns Reflecting Cognitive Constraints and Aesthetic Ideals

Abstract This paper focuses on basic rhythmic patterns in terms of their contribution to the characterization of various styles that reflect different aesthetic ideals, and thereby to link the fields of cognition and musicology. The aesthetic ideal is realized in various ways; the one examined here concerns the degree of definability (in comparative rather than precise quantitative terms) of the rhythmic organization, which may be manifested on various levels of musical organization. To this end, we examined three issues. (1) We compared some of the principles that govern the rhythmic “raw material” of classical Western and Arab music and poetry. (2) We conducted an experiment on perception and identification of three types of basic rhythmic patterns in Western tonal music. The experimental patterns were based on the bare minimum required for the perception of rhythm (the ratio between only two durations), but took into account the other parameters (intensity and pitch) that may be involved in the degree of definability of identification of the patterns. The findings of the experiment revealed hierarchies between the patterns and between the parameters, as well as the conditions for their degree of definability and their contributions to the characterization of style. (3) In light of all this, we examined a number of musical examples from diverse Western styles that illustrate the various appearances of the rhythmic patterns examined. For purposes of comparison, we also present examples from Arab musical literature.

Evaluating culture: World music and fusion food

The problem of how to adapt criteria of evaluation to stylistic change will always be with us. Our current era of multiculturalism, postmodernism and globalism, however, confounds the problem almost beyond recognition. Multiculturalism, an heir of cultural relativism, asks us to withhold our evaluation, insisting that all cultures and subcultures deserve to be analyzed only from within themselves, postmodernism has virtually embraced dissonances and incoherence, while globalism promotes a mix-and-match of elements from a medley of cultures. Is there any basis for universal criteria of evaluation? How do/can critics cope? Examples are drawn from ‘world music’, foreign films, and changing fashions in food.