This thesis is an analytical exploration of the influence of medieval theology on contemporary scholastic traditionalist polemics within Sunni Islam. Intra-Sunni sectarian polemics as an emerging area of study is relatively untouched as opposed to sectarian violence. A detailed mapping of the theological terrain from the genesis of Sunni ‘orthodoxy’ and the perennial tensions within the classical theological tradition and how they have manifested parochially into the contemporary scholastic traditionalist trends of the Barelwi, Deobandi, Ahl-i-Ḥadīth and Wahhābī within the backdrop of the Sufi-Salafi contestation of Sunni authenticity is timely. Concern regarding growing extremism prompted Muslim Ulama, academics and political leaders to create unity initiatives such as the Amman Message and the Sunni Pledge in dealing with this problem and also delineating ‘orthodoxy’. The theological basis for these neo-credos can be explained as doctrinal ‘minimalism’. Minimalism is a growing social construction of scholastic traditionalists through which the warring factions are attempting to salvage the historical continuity with ‘orthodoxy’ and placate Sunni infighting. The thesis aims to examine the theological veracity of the minimalism project and explore its doctrinal, methodological and ethical facets. Polemicism and excommunication is the current state of affairs within Sunni theological discourse. Minimalism is deemed as the antidote to this problem.

This thesis presents the history of opera productions which have been staged by the National Theatre Opera Company in the Kolowrat Theatre during last fifteen years. The author reflects the problems of staging chamber operas in general and, by analysing several productions, she points out certain possibilities of using the chamber space for staging operas.

The American poet Susan Howe (1937-present) began her career as a visual artist, but owing to a dearth of information about her early collages it has been difficult to say anything substantive about how they might have shaped her poetic practice. In 2010, she placed her collages on archive. Along with a number of personal interviews with Howe, this heretofore unavailable material has enabled me to consider Howe's subsequent work in a new light and to establish significant links between her early visual aesthetics and the poetics of bibliography, historiography, and elegy for which she is now known. Howe's collages, like her poetry, focus on details that are at risk of vanishing from cultural memory and printed record. For this reason, I argue that her work evinces an 'elegaic materialism', or a way of reading, viewing, and thinking about texts that is attuned to loss. If “history is the record of the winners,” as Howe says, then one way of rescuing marginalized perspectives is by regarding manuscripts as drawings, thereby rescuing the concrete particulars deemed irrelevant by editors and historians. As Howe's late work turned increasingly toward elegy, her early aesthetic contributed to a nuanced poetics of personal loss and to a series of astonishing new formal tropes. The Introduction to this thesis discusses Howe's materialism in the context of current literary theory and textual scholarship. Chapter 1 concerns itself with Howe's art historical context. Chapter 2 analyses a selection of her word-drawings. Chapter 3 considers Howe's transition to poetry. Chapter 4 addresses her turn to archival documents in her middle period. Chapter 5 looks at the influence on Howe of documentary film, especially in connection with the task of representing a lost loved one, and Chapter 6 discusses her two most recent elegies, The Midnight and THAT THIS. A Coda completes the circle by once more considering Howe in the context of the visual arts at the moment she was selected to exhibit at the 2014 Whitney Biennial.

[pt] Figura-chave da chamada arte conceitual, o artista norte-americano Dan Graham iniciou sua trajetória artística em meados da década de 1960 muito por acaso. Convidado por amigos, tornou-se sócio da John Daniels, galeria em Nova York bastante ativa, mas de vida breve. Falido, viu-se obrigado a retornar à casa de seus pais em Nova Jersey. Durante a viagem de trem, pôde observar a nova cidade. Dessa experiência surgiu Homes for America, notório ensaio fotográfico sobre as habitações em massa dos subúrbios norte-americanos, que integra um primeiro conjunto de trabalhos do artista destinados a revistas. Algum tempo depois, Graham ingressou na Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Halifax, dando início a um período em que seu interesse se volta para o vídeo, a performance e a instalação, interrompido por Public Space/Two Audiences, trabalho realizado para a Bienal de Veneza de 1976 que impõe ao artista uma autocrítica. A despeito de seu êxito, Graham reconhece que a instalação se aproximara em demasia do conceito de cubo branco. Como saída para o impasse, adotou a ideia de plano da cidade, passando a propor projetos de intervenção urbana até iniciar, no começo dos anos 80, seus pavilhões. Levando em conta a obra de Graham, ampla e diversa em seus meios, a tese é monografia que tem por objetivo realizar um estudo analítico sobre a prática do artista, definida, a meu ver, nos termos de um modelo crítico-conceitualista. / [en] Key figure of the so-called conceptual art, the North American artist Dan Graham began his artistic career in the mid-1960s quite by chance. Invited by friends, he became a partner of the John Daniels, a gallery in New York very active, but short-lived. Bankrupt, he was forced to return to his parents home in New Jersey. During the train ride, Graham can saw the new city. From this experience came Homes for America, notorious photographic essay on mass tract housing of North American suburbs, which is part of a first set of works for magazines. A while later, Graham joined the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Halifax, starting a period in which your interest turns to video, performance and installation, interrupted by Public Space/Two Audiences, work done for the Venice Biennale in 1976 that impose the artist self-criticism. Despite its success, Graham recognizes that the installation was near of the concept of the white cube. As out of the impasse, he adopts the idea of city plan, going to propose urban interventions projects, starting in the early 80s their pavilions. Considering Graham s work, broad and diverse in its mediums, the thesis is a monograph that aims to carry out an analytical study of the practice of the artist, defined, in our view, in terms of a critical-conceptualist model.

Johannes Möller's 2014 composition Shenandoah Fantasy for Two Guitars, is a theme and variations on the American folksong Oh Shenandoah and is the composer's only work dedicated to American music. An informed performance of this work requires biographical information. Since no scholarly work on this composer is currently available, this paper includes Möller's biographical information, compositional background and performance suggestions. This information was acquired through a recorded video interview with the composer that covered his early education as a guitarist and composer, his formal conservatory training, career accomplishments, influences that informed the piece, and suggestions for performance practice. The insight gained through this interview reveals its main influences as the Romantic Fantasy, American Minimalism, Keith Jarret's harmonization of Oh Shenandoah, American country and bluegrass music, and the sounds of American folk instruments. These are the subjects of the body of this paper. In addition to an overview of some scholarly writing on the styles which influence the piece, some solutions are offered at the end of the paper to aid in the performance of difficult passages. The intent of these solutions is to make the piece easier for the left and right hand, without sacrificing those musical elements that represent its influences. This is currently the only scholarly work available for Shenandoah Fantasy for Two Guitars and its composer.

Contained herein is a close examination of self-awareness and self-portraiture as it applies to the works of artist Jeffrey Hoffman. Water, frozen into various forms and combined with natural elements of wood, slowly melt over an indeterminable amount of time, each droplet documented as the process transforms the elements. Through this process, we see change. We see time. We see truth. This documentation of change and time through natural elements is where the artwork comes full circle. Working with new media to explore man's interconnectivity to life, energy, and the cosmos, he produces time based installations, photographs, videos, and sculptures that serve as both existential metaphors and Tantric symbols. With the use of digital cameras and video, a record is created by which the disintegration which occurs from the unseen forces of gravity, heat and time upon sculptures made from natural elements and ice is examined. In its sculptural form, his work can be categorized as Installation art and Performance art due to its evolving nature. Each piece is intended to either change over time or to have that change halted by another temporal force like that of flowing electricity. The possibility of allowing varying levels of self-awareness to emerge through self portraiture is also examined. The existential, as well as the metaphysical, can be present in a physical form when the form is imbued with evidence of an evolutionary process. In many ways, the work serves as a self portrait. It is a means for Hoffman to examine his own existentialism as a student of the modern western world and life.

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Ce document présente le processus en recherche-création de l’album Imaginaire Drumscape et de son adaptation en performance audiovisuelle conçu dans le cadre d’une maîtrise en composition électroacoustique. Développé dès 2012 sous le pseudonyme Black Givre, ce projet solo s’inscrit dans la continuité historique de l’esthétique répétitive intrinsèque aux musiques expérimentales minimalistes américaines, au krautrock allemand et au cinéma structuraliste. Souhaitant renouveler ma méthodologie en contexte de création, d’improvisation et de performance en concert après plus de dix années d’activités, j’ai développé une batterie augmentée d’un dispositif audiovisuel interactif intégrant avec un ordinateur, des capteurs, des synthétiseurs ainsi que des outils de traitements visuels et audionumériques. Ce nouvel instrument offre une plus grande flexibilité dans son utilisation et permet de s’adapter à différents contextes créatifs de manière innovante. Les compositions Imaginaire Drumscape et Perturbation réalisées pour l’album avec mon dispositif découlent de l’élaboration d’une nouvelle méthode interactive et créative offrant la possibilité de concevoir de riches conceptions sonores percussives. La cohabitation d’univers eurythmiques, composés de paysages sonores, de sons de synthèse et de batterie répétitive s’avère propre à ma démarche. Mes expérimentations sous la forme de routines pragmatiques de comprovisation ont généré les ébauches préparatoires à la réalisation d’une session d’enregistrement audiovisuelle en studio. Lors de cette session, les matériaux nécessaires aux étapes inhérentes à la composition de l’album ont été produits. En situation de concert, l’interprétation d’Imaginaire Drumscape a bénéficié de l’adaptabilité caractéristique de mon instrument. / This document presents the research-creation process of the Imaginaire Drumscape album and its adaptation into an audiovisual performance designed as part of a master's degree in electroacoustic composition. Developed in 2012 under the pseudonym Black Givre, this solo project is part of the historical continuity of the repetitive aesthetic intrinsic to American minimalist experimental music, German krautrock, and structuralist cinema. In a desire to renew my methodology in the context of creation, improvisation, and performance after more than ten years of activity, I developed an augmented drumkit (hyperinstrument) by use of an interactive audiovisual device. The device integrates with a computer, sensors, synthesizers as well as visual and audio-digital processing tools. This new instrument offers greater flexibility in its use and makes it possible to adapt to different creative contexts in an innovative way. The compositions Imaginary Drumscape and Perturbation made for the album with my device stem from the development of a new interactive and creative method, offering the possibility of conceiving rich percussive sound designs. The cohabitation of eurythmic universes composed of soundscapes, synthetic sounds, and repetitive drums prove to be specific to my approach. My experiments in the form of pragmatic comprovisation routines generated the preparatory sketches for the realization of an audiovisual recording session in the studio. During this session, the materials necessary for the steps inherent in the composition of the album were produced. In a concert situation, the interpretation of Imaginaire Drumscape benefits from the characteristic adaptability of my instrument.