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This work explores how cathedral musicians in eighteenth-century Mexico City relied on music and on their institutional affiliation to define their social place. In the tensions that brewed within New Spain's racial casta (or caste) system, people of mixed race increasingly competed for Spanish benefits and prerogatives.
Throughout Spanish colonial America, limpieza de sangre (literally, "purity of blood") determined an individual's status within the complex system of social hierarchy called casta. Within this socially stratified culture, those individuals at the top were considered to have the highest calidad-an all-encompassing estimation of a person's social status. At the top of the social pyramid were the Peninsulares: Spaniards born in Spain, who controlled most of the positions of power within the colonial governments and institutions. Making up most of the middle-class were criollos, locally born people of Spanish ancestry. During the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, Peninsulare intellectuals asserted their cultural superiority over criollos by claiming that American Spaniards had a generally lower calidad because of their "impure" racial lineage. Still, given their Spanish heritage, criollos were allowed employment at many Spanish institutions in New Spain, including the center of Spanish religious practice in colonial America: Mexico City Cathedral. Indeed, most of the cathedral employees-in particular, musicians-were middle-class criollos. In Playing in the Cathedral, author Jesús Ramos-Kittrell explores how liturgical musicians-choristers and instrumentalists, as well as teachers and directors-at Mexico City Cathedral in the mid-eighteenth century navigated changing discourses about social status and racial purity. He argues that criollos cathedral musicians, influenced by Enlightenment values of self-industry and autonomy, fought against the Peninsulare-dominated, racialized casta system. Drawing on extensive archival research, Ramos-Kittrell shows that these musicians held up their musical training and knowledge, as well as their institutional affiliation with the cathedral, as characteristics that legitimized their calidad and aided their social advancement. The cathedral musicians invoked claims of "decency" and erudition in asserting their social worth, arguing that their performance capabilities and theoretical knowledge of counterpoint bespoke their calidad and status as hombres decentes. Ultimately, Ramos-Kittrell argues that music, as a performative and theoretical activity, was a highly dynamic factor in the cultural and religious life of New Spain, and an active agent in the changing discourses of social status and "Spanishness" in colonial America. Offering unique and fascinating insights into the social, institutional, and artistic spheres in New Spain, this book is a welcome addition to scholars and graduate students with particular interests in Latin American colonial music and cultural history, as well as those interested in the intersections of music and religion.
PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • Twelve short stories that mark a turning point in the work of “one of the true American masters" (The New York Review of Books). “A writer of astonishing compassion and honesty … His eye is so clear, it almost breaks your heart.” —The Washington Post Book World A remarkable collection that includes the canonical titular story about blindness and learning to enter the very different world of another. These twelve stories “overflow with the danger, excitement, mystery and possibility of life.” —The Washington Post Book World
A sweeping story about obsession, mysticism, art, earthly desire, and the construction of a Cathedral in medieval Germany. At the center of this story is the Cathedral. Its design and construction in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in the Rhineland town of Hagenburg unites a vast array of unforgettable characters whose fortunes are inseparable from the shifting political factions and economic interests vying for supremacy. From the bishop to his treasurer to local merchants and lowly stonecutters, everyone, even the town’s Jewish denizens, is implicated and affected by the slow rise of Hagenburg’s Cathedral, which in no way enforces morality or charity. Around this narrative center, Ben Hopkins has constructed his own monumental edifice, a novel that is rich with the vicissitudes of mercantilism, politics, religion, and human enterprise. Fans of Umberto Eco, Hilary Mantel, and Ken Follett will delight at the atmosphere, the beautiful prose, and the vivid characters of Ben Hopkins’s Cathedral. “Cathedral is a brilliantly organized mess of great, great characters. It is fascinating, fun, and gripping to the very end.” —Roddy Doyle, Booker Prize–winning author of Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha “A varied cast of hugely engaging characters jostle for status, rising and falling according to the whims of pirates and Popes. An immersive, old-fashioned read that rattles along at a cracking pace.” —Richard Beard, author of Lazarus is Dead and The Day That Went Missing “Six hundred pages sounds long, but this deeply human take on a medieval city and its commerce and aspirations, its violent battles and small intimacies, never feels that way. This sweeping work is as impressive as the cathedral at its center.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review, PW Pick
T. S. Eliot's most famous drama, a retelling of the murder of the archbishop of Canterbury Murder in the Cathedral, written for the Canterbury Festival in 1935, was one of T. S. Eliot’s first dramatic achievements, and it remains one of the great plays of the century. It takes as its subject matter the martyrdom of Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, depicting the events that led to his assassination, in his own cathedral church, by the knights of Henry II in 1170. Like Greek drama, the play’s theme and form are rooted in religion, ritual purgation and renewal, and it was this return to the earliest sources of drama that brought poetry triumphantly back to the English stage at the time. "The theatre is enriched by this poetic play of grave beauty and momentous decision." —The New York Times
Mackey, winner of the 2006 National Book Award, presents his fourth volume in his ongoing great American jazz novel with no beginning or end.
A collection of ethereal stories from the last of the great Francophone Belgian fantasists First published in French in 1983, The Cathedral of Mist is a collection of stories from the last of the great Francophone Belgian fantasists: distilled tales of distant journeys, buried memories and impossible architecture. Described here are the emotionally disturbed architectural plan for a palace of emptiness; the experience of snowfall in a bed in the middle of a Finnish forest; the memory chambers that fuel the marvelous futility of the endeavor to write; the beautiful woodland church, built of warm air currents and fog, scattering in storms and taking renewed shape at dusk, that gives this book its title. The Cathedral of Mist offers the sort of ethereal narratives that might have come from the pen of a sorrowful, distinctly Belgian Italo Calvino. It is accompanied by two meditative essays on reading and writing that fall in the tradition of Marcel Proust and Julien Gracq. Paul Willems (1912-97) published his first novel, Everything Here Is Real, in 1941. Three more novels and, toward the end of his life, two collections of short stories bracketed his career as a playwright.
“This is a gorgeous, lyrical, hilarious, important book. . . . Read this and you may find yourself instinctively beginning to heal old wounds: in yourself, in others, and just maybe in the cathedral of the wild that is our true home.”—Martha Beck, author of Finding Your Own North Star Boyd Varty had an unconventional upbringing. He grew up on Londolozi Game Reserve in South Africa, a place where man and nature strive for balance, where perils exist alongside wonders. Founded more than eighty years ago as a hunting ground, Londolozi was transformed into a nature reserve beginning in 1973 by Varty’s father and uncle, visionaries of the restoration movement. But it wasn’t just a sanctuary for the animals; it was also a place for ravaged land to flourish again and for the human spirit to be restored. When Nelson Mandela was released after twenty-seven years of imprisonment, he came to the reserve to recover. Cathedral of the Wild is Varty’s memoir of his life in this exquisite and vast refuge. At Londolozi, Varty gained the confidence that emerges from living in Africa. “We came out strong and largely unafraid of life,” he writes, “with the full knowledge of its dangers.” It was there that young Boyd and his equally adventurous sister learned to track animals, raised leopard and lion cubs, followed their larger-than-life uncle on his many adventures filming wildlife, and became one with the land. Varty survived a harrowing black mamba encounter, a debilitating bout with malaria, even a vicious crocodile attack, but his biggest challenge was a personal crisis of purpose. An intense spiritual quest takes him across the globe and back again—to reconnect with nature and “rediscover the track.” Cathedral of the Wild is a story of transformation that inspires a great appreciation for the beauty and order of the natural world. With conviction, hope, and humor, Varty makes a passionate claim for the power of the wild to restore the human spirit. Praise for Cathedral of the Wild “Extremely touching . . . a book about growth and hope.”—The New York Times “It made me cry with its hard-won truths about human and animal nature. . . . Both funny and deeply moving, this book belongs on the shelf of everyone who seeks healing in wilderness.”—BookPage
A nomad fashion's a home that’s meant to be built and rebuilt. A family tears down an old house and erects a new one in its place. Even the Eiffel Tower wasn’t meant to be anything more than temporary. As humans, we don’t always build things to endure the test of time. Built to Last brings together the award-winning author and artist David Macaulay’s creative, exacting thinking about buildings and designs that were crafted with a strength of structure and purpose that defy the everyday: Castle, Cathedral, and Mosque. This gorgeous volume includes newly researched information about each building and how it was built. And, for the first time ever, the Caldecott Honor–winning Castle and Cathedral appear in full color—with stunning new drawings that enrich the reader’s understanding of these structures, and capture intriguing new perspectives and details. Just as the buildings themselves were created to last, our interest in the structures themselves, the people who created them, and the purposes for which they were made endures as well. This impeccably researched volume—a necessary addition to the bookshelf of anyone interested in architecture—celebrates this spirit of endurance and serves as a reminder that building well and leaving something of consequence behind, whether a building, a design, or an idea, is still of the utmost importance.
Contrasting the civilization that produced the starkly modernist "cube" of the Great Arch of La Defense in Paris with the civilization that produced the "cathedral" Notre Dame, Weigel argues that Europe's embrace of a narrow secularism has led to a crisis of morale that is eroding Europe's soul.