What’s Emotional Labour Got to Do With It? On the Indefensibility of a Sociological Concept

‘Entitled narratives with regard to sex and partnership, whether from the manosphere or from some claiming the mantle of feminism, mostly reveal all too vividly exactly why the writers in question remain single.'

cafeamericainmag.com/whats-emotio...

What’s Emotional Labour Got to Do With It? On the Indefensibility of a Sociological Concept

‘One view says that men are emotionally stunted and women do all the emotional labour;...the manosphere claims that women demand endless attention and validation and men do all the emotional adjustment'

cafeamericainmag.com/whats-emotio...

What’s Emotional Labour Got to Do With It? On the Indefensibility of a Sociological Concept

‘customers do not pay solely for e.g. transport, information, or an abstract legal transaction; they equally pay for reduced uncertainty, reassurance, tact, confidence cues, de-escalation, and other aspects of an emotional atmosphere.'

cafeamericainmag.com/whats-emotio...

What’s Emotional Labour Got to Do With It? On the Indefensibility of a Sociological Concept

‘Much of what I play in live concerts involves conveying intense emotional experiences...Yet I would never dream of calling this “emotional labour” in a pejorative sense...why should many other professions be treated as fundamentally different?'

cafeamericainmag.com/whats-emotio...

What’s Emotional Labour Got to Do With It? On the Indefensibility of a Sociological Concept

‘If all forms of adaptation are a form of alienation...then most forms of adult life can be framed as oppressive. Grievance can then be switched on at a whim, with a smile rendered as coercion, patience as exploitation'

cafeamericainmag.com/whats-emotio...

What’s Emotional Labour Got to Do With It? On the Indefensibility of a Sociological Concept

'selective expression, calibration, suppression, tact, ritual and role-play all play significant roles in social interactions..The urge to defend an “authentic” real self only truly makes sense if one lives in a state of isolation akin to that of a hermit.'

cafeamericainmag.com/whats-emotio...

What’s Emotional Labour Got to Do With It? On the Indefensibility of a Sociological Concept

My new piece for Café Anéricain - interrogating the concept of ‘emotional labour’ both as formally used in sociology, and in journalistic writing, including from frustrated single columnists of both sexes.

cafeamericainmag.com/whats-emotio...

Kurtág on stage again after his second big birthday concert with its conductor, András Keller

Very pleased to read that a settlement has been reached in the Martin Speake case and that views which do not coincide with those of the ‘woke’ on racial issues are recognised as protected.

www.trinitylaban.ac.uk/blog/announc...

"[W]e do live in systems that reward conformity, discourage awkward questions and quietly reshape categories so that certain answers no longer appear..." Professor Sir Anthony Finkelstein, President of City St George's, University of London, on ideological conformity in academia.

The Soviet Census of 1937 ... a story of truth, lies, and consequences

When power demands validation, truth becomes dangerous. Terrific piece by Anthony Finkelstein: open.substack.com/pub/profseri...

City v-c backs Sullivan Review on gender question in research Failure to use biological sex as ‘basic variable’ will make research ‘weaker and less reliable’, says City St George’s head Anthony Finkelstein

Failure to use biological sex as ‘basic variable’ will make research ‘weaker and less reliable’, says City St George’s head Anthony Finkelstein

#highered #academicsky

Very moving performance of #Messiaen Quatuor tonight Madeleine Mitchell @ianpace.bsky.social @antoineami.bsky.social & Joseph Spooner

Managed to hear some of Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez on Times Radio, unfortunately. I had shut this pet hate out of my mind - I used to use this as an exemplar of the music of post-Civil War Spain in my Music, Fascism, Communism module. Total ‘Viva España’ kitsch. Tagging @evamoreda.bsky.social

Really enjoyed the celebration of Christopher Fox’s 70th @fantasticdrfox.bsky.social with terrific performances by @ianpace.bsky.social Also trying to remember the last time I heard Schoenberg’s Drei Klavierstücke in concert…

Tonight at 19:00 at @CityStGeorges - my concert for the 70th birthday of @fantasticdrfox.bsky.social . With music of Schoenberg, Feldman, Walter Zimmermann and Jobina Tinnemans.

www.citystgeorges.ac.uk/news-and-eve...

Photo: Madeleine Mitchell, Joseph Spooner Anthony Friend and Ian Pace perform Messiaen Quartet for the end of time

Tues 27 Jan 7-9pm Riverhouse Barn Arts #Walton-on-Thames #Messiaen Quatuor pour la fin du temps with @ianpace.bsky.social @anthonyfriend.bsky.social & Joseph Spooner, preceded by the companion play by @jessicaduchen.bsky.social Tx www.riverhousebarn.co.uk/events/13968... #LondonChamberEnsemble

I do think this would be more worthwhile than the crude nationalist/exceptionalist models which still have a lot of currency. But this may not be acceptable to some who have so much invested in such political views.

Please do read the full article! (42/42)

… Xenakis, Ligeti and Penderecki, and many others. The tradition of Young, Reich, Riley, Glass is just one of these. And some of these different ‘branches’ often meet and create new hybrid traditions. I hope to write this history at some point. (41)

From these, a whole range of directions can be identified meaningfully, including the work of Duchamp and Dada, Varèse, Antheil, Messiaen, Orff and Schaeffer, Cage, Feldman and Wolff, Scelsi, Radulescu and musique spectrale, N.A. Huber, Stiebler, Thomas Marco, … (40)

Furthermore, I proposed abandoning the term ‘minimal music’ in favour of a new centrality of ‘temporal suspension’ (related to Adorno’s concept of ‘Verräumlichung des Zeitverlaufs’), whose most pronounced manifestations stem from Satie, Stravinsky and integral serialism. (39)

On this basis, I argue that the European/American, modernist/minimalist model, clearest in Schwarz, should be abandoned alongside other simplistic dualisms, and assumptions of easy linear traditions of influence, allowing instead for tree-like historical models. (38)

Furthermore, Andriessen’s idiom becomes increasingly more uncompromising and acerbic at the same time as the Americans were softening their approach. All things told, it is clearly insufficient to view Andriessen as just an appendage to American minimal music. (37)

The influence of US minimal music is clearest in Andriessen’s De Staat (1976) and Hoketus (1977) (though really the use of unisons by Frederic Rzewski). But works like Il Duce (1973) can be heard in direct opposition to Reich’s It’s Gonna Rain and Come Out. (36)

There is little doubt of Andriessen’s frequently expressed hostility to a range of *German* traditions (above all Wagner, Mahler, Schoenberg) but that should not be equated to a hostility to the modernist project, of which he was and is a part. (35)

Andriessen loved much jazz and was also very interested from an early stage in the ‘experimental’ work of Cage et al. But he and his work cannot be easily separated from the wider European post-war modernist tradition, and especially his own teacher Luciano Berio. (34)

Andriessen’s own view of the US and US culture mirrors what wider scholars identify in the post-war Netherlands: initial admiration, warmth and fascination following the liberation of Europe, Marshall Plan and Dutch NATO membership, but more critical during the Vietnam War. (33)

Part 2 of my piece looks at how Andriessen’s work has been critically and historically conceived since it first came to prominence. The most important points are the following: the influence of US minimal (and other) music is undeniable, but that of Stravinsky no less so. (32)

Fink, Taruskin and Ross attempt to pathologise European minimalism as somehow a distortion of the real thing, in an ugly manner, almost like a warning against cultural miscegenation. (31)