Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
By Philip Furia
Today marks the 116th anniversary of the birth of Ira Gershwin, lyricist and brother to composer George Gershwin. There are many fascinating details about Ira, ten of which are collected here.
1. When Ira was growing up, he held a lot of odd jobs, one of which was shipping clerk at the B. Altman department store housed in the same building where today Oxford University Press has its offices.
By Ted Gioia
I first met Dave Brubeck when I was in my twenties, and writing my book on West Coast jazz. Dave deeply impressed me, and not just as a musician. How many celebrities have a marriage that lasts 70 years? I think Dave is the only one. He was a very caring family man, a good dad and husband – never a given in the entertainment industry. He was a pioneer on civil rights, threatening to cancel concerts when faced with complaints about his integrated band.
By David Sugarman
This recording of my lengthy interview with H.L.A. Hart (1907–1992) has been resurrected from my audio tapes and given new life. Dusted and digitalized, the result is something quite beautiful. Here is Hart in his own words recorded in 1988, reviewing his life, his work, and his significance. The interview presents Hart as three individuals: legal philosopher, interviewee, and critic. The recording adds another dimension to our understanding of Hart that must be incorporated into our collective memory.
2012 has been a poignant year for avant-garde music. German composer Hans Werner Henze passed away in October at age 86; a little over a week later American composer Elliott Carter passed away at the age of 103. The late John Cage was, as Musical America put it, “feted beyond his own wildest dreams” this year in celebration of his birth centenary. All three of these composers wrote music that challenged listeners to reconsider the boundaries of what qualifies as music.
By Professor Jane Edwards
As a music therapy scholar, teacher, and practitioner for more than 20 years, I have been able to learn from many sources about the crucial role our early years play in our lives. The ability to reflect on challenges experienced in our adult lives by linking back to childhood experiences is an essential aspect of the way that many music therapists practice. Rather than using descriptions of family histories to apportion blame, the therapist tries to understand the current experience of the patient and their worldview through the lens of past experience, to see if there is some way to make sense of self-destructive behaviours, or difficulties experienced in creating meaningful and satisfying relationships with others.
By Reinhold Heller
The German artist Otto Dix — born this day in 1881 — drew a remarkable image of himself in 1924 (the tenth anniversary of the beginning of World War I), simply rendered in bold lines of India ink, caricature-like in its exaggerated simplicity. In the drawing we see Dix as he gazes directly out at us through squinting eyes, sporting a small curving mustache, a cigarette dangling from his lips, wearing a battered steel helmet and tattered uniform while carrying a heavy machine gun.
Perhaps Dickens’s best-loved work, Great Expectations tells the story of young Pip, who lives with his sister and her husband the blacksmith. He has few prospects for advancement until a mysterious benefaction takes him from the Kent marshes to London. Pip is haunted by figures from his past — the escaped convict Magwitch, the time-withered Miss Havisham and her proud and beautiful ward, Estella — and in time uncovers not just the origins of his great expectations but the mystery of his own heart. Here is a sequence of podcasts with Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, editor of the Oxford World’s Classics edition of Great Expectations.
St Andrew, the patron saint of Scotland, is rather a mysterious figure; very little is actually known about his life. Meanwhile, St Andrew’s Day, on 30th November, is well-established and widely celebrated by Scots around the world. The bestselling Oxford Dictionary of Quotations and the Little Oxford Dictionary of Quotations include quotes from a wide-range of people, on an even wider-range of subjects. Here are some contributions from some of Scotland’s most treasured wordsmiths.
By Terza S. Lima-Neves
For a relatively unknown small island nation in West Africa with a population of half a million people, Cape Verde enjoys a rich and lively music scene. This archipelago of ten islands and former Portuguese colony is a nation historically affected by drought and famine, leading to a very sizable global immigrant community. Many of Cape Verde’s musicians either live abroad or were born in countries such as Portugal or the United States, the host country of the largest community of Cape Verdeans outside of Cape Verde.
By Jim Cullen
As anyone vaguely familiar with his work knows, Day-Lewis is legendary for the extraordinary variety of characters he has played, and the vertiginous psychological depth with which he has played them. I first became aware of Day-Lewis in early 1985, when, in the space of a week, I watched him portray the priggish Cecil Vyse in the tony Merchant-Ivory film adaptation of E.M. Forster’s Room with a View and then saw him play Johnny, the punk East End homosexual, in Stephen Frears’s brilliantly brash My Beautiful Launderette.
>By Liz Wollman
One of the largest — and, I admit, most disappointing — revelations I had while researching 1970s adult musicals for my book, Hard Times: The Adult Musical in 1970s New York City, was just how tame they all ended up being. Sure, there was frank talk about sex in most adult musicals. There were also a lot of naked bodies on display.
By Gordon Thompson
Fifty years ago, the Beatles recorded their arrangement of “Please Please Me,” a lilting lover’s complaint transformed into a burst of adolescent adrenaline. On 26 November 1962, after repeated attempts to capture just the right balance of frustration and anticipation, George Martin informed them over the studio intercom that they had just recorded their first number-one disc. But the path to the top of the charts would not be easy.
November is National Pomegranate Month and we thought it’d be interesting to highlight the fascinating history of this fruit. Here are some fun facts from The Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America, Second Edition, edited by Andrew F. Smith. Plus, the “Pomegranates” entry in the Encyclopedia by David Karp.
By Dennis Baron
A publisher of digital textbooks has announced a utility that will tell instructors whether their students are actually doing the assigned reading. Billed as a way to spot low-performers and turn them around before it’s too late, CourseSmart Analytics measures which pages of their etexts students have read and exactly how long that took.
There is an urgent argument for the need to rethink animal welfare, untinged by anthropomorphism and claims of animal consciousness, which lack firm empirical evidence and are often freighted with controversy and high emotions. With growing concern over such issues as climate change and food shortages, how we treat those animals on which we depend for survival needs to be put squarely on the public agenda. Marian Stamp Dawkins seeks to do this by offering a more complete understanding of how animals help us.
By Stephen Davies
Young children take to painting, singing, dancing, storytelling, and role-playing with scarcely any explicit training. They delight in these proto-art behaviors. Grown-ups are no less avid in extending such behaviors, either as spectators or participants. Provided we have a generous view of art, we all engage routinely and often passionately with it.