Stories of Tonality in the Age of François-Joseph Fétis explores the concept of musical tonality through the writings of the Belgian musicologist François-Joseph Fétis (1784–1867), who was singularly responsible for theorizing and popularizing the term in the nineteenth century. Thomas Christensen weaves a rich story in which tonality emerges as a theoretical construct born of anxiety and alterity for Europeans during this time as they learned more about “other” musics and alternative tonal systems. Tonality became a central vortex in which French musicians thought—and argued—about a variety of musical repertoires, be they contemporary European musics of the stage, concert hall, or church, folk songs from the provinces, microtonal scale systems of Arabic and Indian music, or the medieval and Renaissance music whose notational traces were just beginning to be deciphered by scholars. Fétis’s influential writings offer insight into how tonality ingrained itself within nineteenth-century music discourse, and why it has continued to resonate with uncanny prescience throughout the musical upheavals of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Stories of Tonality in the Age of François-Joseph Fétis

Arts & Photography

Christensen, Thomas

Music

University of Chicago Press

In 1952, John T. “Jack” Downey, a twenty-three-year-old CIA officer from Connecticut, was shot down over Manchuria during the Korean War. The pilots died in the crash, but Downey and his partner Richard “Dick” Fecteau were captured by the Chinese. For the next twenty years, they were harshly interrogated, put through show trials, held in solitary confinement, placed in reeducation camps, and toured around China as political pawns. Other prisoners of war came and went, but Downey and Fecteau’s release hinged on the United States acknowledging their status as CIA assets. Not until Nixon’s visit to China did Sino-American relations thaw enough to secure Fecteau’s release in 1971 and Downey’s in 1973.\nLost in the Cold War is the never-before-told story of Downey’s decades as a prisoner of war and the efforts to bring him home. Downey’s lively and gripping memoir―written in secret late in life―interweaves horrors and deprivation with humor and the absurdities of captivity. He recounts his prison experiences: fearful interrogations, pantomime communications with his guards, a 3,000-page overstuffed confession designed to confuse his captors, and posing for “show” photographs for propaganda purposes. Through the eyes of his captors and during his tours around China, Downey watched the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, and the drastic transformations of the Mao era. In interspersed chapters, Thomas J. Christensen, an expert on Sino-American relations, explores the international politics of the Cold War and tells the story of how Downey and Fecteau’s families, the CIA, the U.S. State Department, and successive presidential administrations worked to secure their release.

Lost in the Cold War: The Story of Jack Downey, America’s Longest-Held POW (A Nancy Bernkopf Tucker and Warren I. Cohen Book on American–East Asian Relations)

Biographies & Memoirs

Downey, Jack

Downey, John T.

Community & Culture

Columbia University Press

Rameau and Musical Thought in the Enlightenment (Cambridge Studies in Music Theory and Analysis, Series Number 4)

This is the first intellectual biography of the French composer and theorist Jean-Philippe Rameau. Rameau synthesised the vocabulary and grammar of musical practice into a concise scientific system, earning himself the popular title of 'Newton of the Arts'. Ranging widely over the musical and intellectual thought of the eighteenth century, Thomas Christensen is able to orient Rameau's accomplishments in the light of speculative and practical considerations of music theory as well as many of the scientific ideas current in the French Enlightenment. He shows how Rameau incorporates ideas ranging from neoplatonic thought and Cartesian mechanistic metaphysics to Locke's empirical psychology and Newtonian experimental science. Additional primary documents help clarify Rameau's fascinating and stormy relationship with the Encyclopedists, Diderot, Rousseau and d'Alembert.

Cambridge University Press

Arts & Literature

Despite the fact that she has fallen in love, Tita, the youngest of three daughters born to a tyrannical rancher, must follow tradition and stay home to care for her mother

Like Water for Chocolate: A Novel in Monthly Installments, With Recipes, Romances, and Home Remedies

Christensen, Carol

ESQUIVEL,LAURA

Literature & Fiction

Chivers North Amer

Like Water for Chocolate: A Novel in Monthly Installments With Recipes, Romances, and Home Remedies (Curley Large Print Books)

Genre Fiction

Offered a commission to illegally trap a rare Russian butterfly, J. decides to use the opportunity to smuggle his Russian lover, who has no papers, back into her homeland, but after she mysteriously vanishes in the port of Odessa, he spends his time waiting for her return, reading her letters, and hoping to find both the butterfly and his lost love.

Nocturnal Butterflies of the Russian Empire

Prieto, José Manuel

Literary

Grove Pr

The U.S.-Mexican War

Examines the events of the U.S.-Mexican War and how these conflicts have shaped political and cultural relations between the two countries throughout history

History

Americas

Bay books

Bridge to Understanding, highlights hundreds of the finest Asian paintings, sculptures, and textiles from the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco as well as the architecture of the new building itself. In the spring of 2003 the Asian Art Muesum—home to one of the world's most significant collections of Asian art—moved into a historic building, reconfigured by the renowned architect Gae Aulenti, in the dynamic heart of San Francisco. The occasion is an important event not only for the institution but also for the city, which now more than ever may serve as a bridge between East and West. Celebrating the museum's stunning new home, Bridge to Understanding showcases both the beauty of the building and the depth of the collection, highlighting many treasures that could not previously be displayed. Exploring the museum's role in promoting cross-cultural understanding, the text interweaves the history of the museum with the history of the city. it delves into the development, construction, and renovation of the building, which retains such historic features as a monumental beaux arts staircase, while adding a dramatic indoor / outdoor escalator, a new third level, and signature V-shaped skylights that illuminate an indoor courtyard designed by the architect on the model of an Italian piazza. Featuring a full-color gallery of Asian masterworks from the museum's collection, Bridge to Understanding confirms the museum's significance as one of the foremost institutions of Asian art in the world.

Bridge to Understanding: The Art and Architecture of San Francisco's Asian Art Museum - Chong-Moon Lee Center for Asian Art and Culture

History & Criticism

Asian Art Museum

The world of 1616 was a world of motion. Enormous galleons carrying silk and silver across the Pacific created the first true global economy, and the first international megacorporations were emerging as economic powers. In Europe, the deaths of Shakespeare and Cervantes marked the end of an era in literature, as the spirit of the Renaissance was giving way to new attitudes that would lead to the age of revolutions. Great changes were also taking place in East Asia, where the last native Chinese dynasty was entering its final years and Japan was beginning its long period of warrior rule. Artists there, as in many parts of the world, were rethinking their connections to ancient traditions and experimenting with new directions. Women everywhere were redefining their roles in family and society. Slave trading was relocating large numbers of people, while others were migrating in search of new opportunities. The first tourists, traveling not for trade or exploration but for personal fulfillment, were exploring this new globalized world. Thomas Christensen illuminates this extravagant age by focusing on a single riotous year. Woven with color images and artwork from the period, 1616 tells the surprising tales of the men and women who set the world on its tumultuous course toward modernity.

1616: The World in Motion

Military

Counterpoint

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Books by Christensen, Thomas