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The pleasure gardens of 18th-century London

By David Blackwell

A popular form of aristocratic entertainment in mid-eighteenth-century London was to stroll round the city’s ornamental pleasure gardens, both those at Vauxhall (launched in 1732 with a masked gala) and its more fashionable rival, Ranelagh Gardens (opened in 1742 and now the site of the annual Chelsea Flower Show). For two shillings and sixpence, patrons at Ranelagh could escape the squalor of the city streets to promenade around the ornamental lake and manicured walkways, watch masquerades, marvel at the Chinese Pavilion and firework displays, enjoy the fountains and street entertainers, and, in its shadier corners, perhaps indulge in a romantic assignation or two (it was, Edward Gibbon wrote, ‘the most convenient place for courtships of every kind’).

Image courtesy of the Oxford University Press sheet music department.

Central to the entertainment at these pleasure gardens was musical performance. In April 1749 Handel’s Music for the Royal Fireworks was rehearsed at Vauxhall Gardens; such was the attendant throng (some 12,000 people) that the central arch of the newly built London Bridge collapsed, causing a three-hour traffic jam of carriages. At Ranelagh concerts took place in the magnificent rococo rotunda, which measured 120 feet across and in winter was lit and heated by enormous fireplaces built into its main support. In June 1765 patrons were dazzled by the virtuosity of the nine-year-old Mozart, who performed some of his own keyboard compositions.

More typical musical entertainment was orchestral music, consisting of dances and the sort of interval music commonly heard at London theatres, and a vast array of songs and ballads — tuneful, easy on the ear, but mostly instantly forgotten and barely lasting from one season to the next. Much of the music performed at the gardens was written by contemporary British composers such as Thomas Arne, Henry Heron, Starling Goodwin and his son William, and James Hook. Hook alone wrote over 2000 songs for performance at the gardens at Marylebone and Vauxhall, the most famous of which was ‘Sweet Lass of Richmond Hill’.

At the larger pleasure gardens there was also, strange as it may seem to us now, the post of Organist, occupied by many of the leading players of the day, who served at major London churches on Sundays and entertained a more secular audience at the gardens during the week. Yet this is perhaps not so surprising; the organ music of these composers has a strong affinity with much early and mid-eighteenth-century instrumental music — attractive melodies, clear harmonies, sequences, and strong progressions — and as such is instantly pleasing and appealing. While organs on the continent at this time were developing into mighty machines of great sophistication with pedalboards, several manuals, and a considerable numbers of stops, the English organ was a much more modest affair and invariably without pedals. Taking advantage of this, and perhaps aiming for the widest possible market, many contemporary collections were advertised as suitable for organ or harpsichord or pianoforte, and the music therefore met the demands of both church and home.

And so a string of English composers created a repertoire of instantly attractive keyboard music that was tuneful, expressive, and full of grace and charm. This music delighted eighteenth-century audiences, as they walked and admired the pleasure gardens of London; it can equally entertain us some 250 years later.

David Blackwell is Head of Music Publishing at Oxford University Press. A selection of the music discussed is newly published by OUP in 18th-century English Organ Music: A Graded Anthology, in four volumes (1, 2, 3, 4), compiled and edited by David Patrick. David Patrick is firmly established himself as a recital organist, accompanist (organ, harpsichord, and piano), and conductor throughout the UK and Europe.

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The good, the bad, the missed opportunities: UK government

By Christopher Adam, David Cobham, and Ken Mayhew

Popular perceptions of governments’ economic records are often shaped by the specific events that precipitate their downfall. From devaluation crises in the 1960s, through industrial relations in the 1970s, to the debacle of the poll tax in the 1990s, governments in the UK have often fought (and lost) elections on defining events—not all of which are of their own making. So it was with the last Labour government in the UK, which left office in 2010 facing the charge that its reckless fiscal expansion and lack of attention to financial regulation had left the UK unusually vulnerable to the effects of the global financial crisis. This charge provides a powerful justification of the Coalition government’s austerity strategy and constrains Labour’s ability to articulate a credible macroeconomic alternative.

The latest issue of the Oxford Review of Economic Policy goes behind this political narrative to provide a detailed, scholarly, and non-partisan assessment of the economic record of the Labour government. Leading UK economists trace the development of Labour’s economic policy-making across the key domestic areas and evaluates the impact of these changes on economic performance.

The result is an assessment that is more nuanced and substantially more complex than current political narratives admit. It describes a government that could point to some substantial economic achievements in the decade up to the outbreak of the global financial crisis. The NHS was delivering outcomes that were comparable to Britain’s main competitors; labour markets were probably more flexible than before, with unemployment at historically low levels; productivity converged to levels in major competitor countries; while poverty, particularly child poverty, had diminished.

Nonetheless, the economy had become increasingly skewed towards the lightly regulated financial sector, inequality remained deeply entrenched (particularly at the top end of the distribution), educational outcomes did not seem to have been much improved by the efforts and expenditures applied, while labour market policy had entrenched too much low-end, low-cost production.

To what extent did these conditions, and the policy choices that brought them about, exacerbate the severity of the recession and how many of the gains that were achieved in the period from 1997 to 2007 are likely to endure? It is still too early to address the question of legacy, though as time goes on responsibility for the current state of the economy lies more and more with the successor government, but on the question of causality, while different (macroeconomic and regulatory) policy choices during Labour’s first decade might have reduced the depth of the recession in 2009–10, it is highly unlikely that they could have eliminated it. Moreover, had Labour’s policy measures taken in response to the crisis during its final 18 months in office been sustained we might well have seen an outcome with less recession, less deficits, and less debt.

Taking Labour’s period in government as a whole, what is striking is that despite unprecedented electoral success the government appeared unwilling or unable to move beyond or away from (as opposed to finding a way forward within) the uncritically pro-market thinking which had come to dominate Westminster and Whitehall since the 1980s. In that sense, the mistakes and missed opportunities of government arose largely from ‘overdoing’ the (necessary) compromises involved in New Labour, rather than from anything that could be regarded as the Old Labour elements in its own inheritance (which had, in any case, been marginalized). This inflexibility, combined with the government’s reluctance to articulate what kind of society and economy it wanted to see develop in Britain and how it thought its policies would contribute to that, meant that policy-making under Labour was arguably unnecessarily constrained. It has also detracted from a clear understanding and appreciation of its economic record.

Christopher Adam is Professor of Development Economics at the University of Oxford, whose current research interests include the macroeconomics and growth of low-income countries, especially those of Africa. David Cobham is professor of economics at Heriot-Watt University and specialises in monetary policy. Ken Mayhew is Professor of Education and Economic Performance at the University of Oxford and Director of SKOPE, an ESRC research centre on skills, knowledge, and organisational performance. They are the authors of the paper ‘The economic record of the 1997–2010 Labour government: an assessment’, recently published in the Oxford Review of Economic Policy.

Each issue of the Oxford Review of Economic Policy concentrates on a current theme in economic policy, with a balance between macro- and microeconomics, giving a valuable appraisal of economic policies worldwide. While the analysis is challenging and at the forefront of current thinking, articles are presented in non-technical language to make them readily accessible to all readers (such as government, business and policy-makers, academics, and students). It is required reading for those who need to know where research is leading.

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Image credit: Tony Blair visiting Poland, April 2007. By the Polish President’s Office [GFDL 1.2], via Wikimedia Commons

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How courteous are you at court?

By Anatoly Liberman

“Pussy-cat, pussy-cat, where have you been? I’ve been to London to look at the Queen,/ Pussy-cat, pussy-cat, what did you there?/ I frightened a little mouse under the chair.” Evidently, our power of observation depends on our background and current interests. Being a linguist, I care more about words than about things and would like to understand why court rhymes with short, while the first syllable of courteous has the vowel of curtain. By the way, some dictionaries record two pronunciations of courteous: with -urt and with -ort after c-. The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology (1966) is one of them. Since none of the books I consulted explains the existence of two variants, I will risk a suggestion of my own in the hope that someone may come up with a better one.

We may begin with court. The word appeared in Middle English as a borrowing from Anglo-French. Its etymon is Latin curtem (accusative), from cortem “yard, enclosure,” a contraction of cohortem “enclosure, company, crowd” (whence cohort). Old French had cort. The digraph ou in court, familiar from Modern French cour and Modern Engl. court, indicated long u (the sound as in  Engl. shoe, who, too). In English, seemingly some time around 1500, French long u became a more open vowel (that is, long o, approximately as in British Engl. law), which in English is retained to this day. Course and source have the same spelling, and their phonetic history was similar. The loss of r in the r-less dialects of English did not affect the preceding vowel.

Our next station is courtesy, which has also been recorded with two pronunciations. Middle Engl. court appeared as a competitor of Germanic yard. If there had been no Norman Conquest, yard would probably have taken over the senses of the French noun (compare German Hof and Russian dvor “yard”: both mean “yard” and “court”). As a consolation prize, English has the tautological compound courtyard. But the word courtesy so clearly belongs to good manners and courtly behavior that, given the Norman domination, the concept had to come from French. Old French curtesie, like Modern French courtoisie, had stress on the last syllable, and in my opinion this circumstance was of decisive importance in the fortune of the English borrowing. In English, such words gradually shifted stress to the beginning, though the process took centuries, and vacillation never ended. Most of us are aware of variant pronunciations in exquisite, recondite, vagary, formidable, capitalist, and others. As far as courtesy is concerned, initial stress has won a complete victory. In English, middle syllables are not articulated with the distinctness typical of French and tend to disappear in casual speech.

Suppression of middle syllables in long words is common, ordinary process. I highlighted ordinary, because of all such words it has undergone the most radical change. The somewhat slipshod pronunciation ord’nary will leave most of us indifferent. But its whole middle has been destroyed by rapid pronunciation, so that its etymological doublet ornery (an American creation) came into being. Not only is ornery an almost unrecognizable offspring of ordinary; the development of its meaning, from “commonplace” to “stubborn; ugly” causes surprise. Usually phonetic changes in the so-called allegro speech are less drastic. For instance, some people make a distinction in their pronunciation of medicine: if the reference is to the art of healing, they retain all three syllables, but medicine “medication, drug” emerges as medsin.

Courtly manners

Several centuries ago, reformers of English spelling, who also taught what they believed was the correct — and the only correct — pronunciation (those people are known as othoepists; stress on the second syllable), resented the loss of middle vowels. The variant medsin brought forth such a statement: “That so gross a vulgarism should gain ground in our language, is an imputation on our national taste” (John Walker, 1732-1807). Many people believed and still believe that refinement presupposes a perfect match between a word’s written image and its phonetic shape: if a letter is written, it allegedly should be pronounced (thus, often is preferable to of’n). As to vulgarisms, fortunately or unfortunately, wilderness always conquers culture. In linguistics this process is called the history of language and keeps people like me employed.

Courtesy shared the fate of medicine, but with graver consequences, similar to those we observe in the shortening of ordinary. Deprived of the middle syllable, courtesy turned into a new word, namely curtsey ~ curtsy (older, and still in dialects, even curchy ~ curchie; compare the change of Portsmouth to Porchmouth, hardly by folk etymology, for port + mouth makes sense, but what is porch + mouth?). Courtesy would have become courtezy if it had stuck to its etymon, but it probably fell under the sway of jealousy, fantasy, heresy, and the like and entered the Standard with a voiceless consonant. Unlike its parent (courtesy), the first vowel of curtsy does not alternate with -or-. After much meandering we may now return to the main question of this post: How did the first syllable of courteous acquire a vowel different from that of court?

As mentioned above, the sources I consulted provide no answer, and in search of help I decided to see what happened to curtain. Few interesting details transpired. Old French cortine (from Latin cortina) yielded Middle Engl. cortine and curtine. Obviously, the modern form curtain goes back to curtine. The eighteenth-century adjective curt is Latin curtus without the ending -us. Curtail added nothing to what I knew. So I am left with my question: Why do courtesy and courteous have the vowel of curt rather than of court?

Here is what I think. Old French -ur- was expected to become -or-. But for a long time French borrowings containing more than one syllable were stressed on the end, and perhaps ur, with its long u in unstressed syllables, was shortened and did not become or. Later the groups ur, er, and ir merged in the English vowel we today have in bur(r), her, and sir. If my hypothesis is correct, the pronunciation courteous and courtesy as curteous and curtesy is historically justified, while the competing variants, hardly ever heard today, had no basis in the old language and appeared because people wanted to align the derivatives with the word court, so in a way as the product of what is called hypercorrection. I would be most pleased to hear the verdict of specialists in the interaction of Old French and Middle English. If my explanation is correct, they will probably call it trivial. I too find it trivial but wonder why no book on the history of English and no English etymological dictionary mentions it. Too obvious? Not worthy of discussion? Hardly so. And if I am wrong, I’ll be happy to learn the truth.

Anatoly Liberman is the author of Word Origins…And How We Know Them as well as An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology: An Introduction. His column on word origins, The Oxford Etymologist, appears on the OUPblog each Wednesday. Send your etymology question to him care of blog@oup.com; he’ll do his best to avoid responding with “origin unknown.”

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Image credit: “Le Menuet” oil on Canvas by Nicolas Lancret. CC-BY-NC-ND via WikiGallery.

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Why Edward Snowden never had a right to asylum

By Geoff Gilbert

There is nothing that complicated about the Edward Snowden case, but it does involve several overlapping areas of law, international and domestic, and commentators seem to assume there is some sort of accepted hierarchy. The starting point is that he is accused of violating some US domestic criminal law by revealing the activities of the US security service’s surveillance operations as a consequence of prior employment for a contractor to the NSA. When his disclosures came to light, he was in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. It is at this point that the complexity of the overlapping legal regimes first generated confusion. The allegation of criminal activity prompted the United States to seek his extradition; Edward Snowden started to explore the possibility of seeking asylum to avoid prosecution in the United States. The processes were parallel, but distinct.

The easiest aspect of the confusion to remedy is that relating to asylum. International law does not grant a right to asylum, but at best Article 14 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) — not legally binding in an of itself — provides for a right to seek and enjoy asylum. Indeed, while much of the UDHR was incorporated in the legally binding International Covenants on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, and Civil and Political Rights, Article 14 made it into neither, so only if it has achieved customary status can one find a binding obligation to allow him to even seek asylum. Asylum itself is in the grant of the state and depends on domestic laws and procedures.

There are multiple extradition aspects to this case. First, extradition generally requires some form of agreement between the requesting and requested states, initially between the US and the HKSAR and now Russia. There is an extradition arrangement with HKSAR in force since 1998, but none with Russia. Moreover, if he were to be offered asylum, there would be nothing to stop the US filing a request with that state if there was some form of agreement between them. Extradition arrangements are specific to each agreement, but there are some generic concepts, such as extradition crimes, double criminality, and the political offence exception.

In Edward Snowden’s case, those three elements raise some particular issues. It is beyond the scope of this piece to explore the domestic US law he might have violated, but the facts and offences would have to be criminalized under the law of the requested state as much as the US before extradition could be permitted. Moreover, extradition treaties generally exempt from surrender those accused of offences of a political character. Courts in different countries have interpreted the political offence in different ways, but it is never enough to have a political motivation. Further, while espionage (if that is indeed what Edward Snowden is alleged to have committed) may seem the archetypal political offence, it has received a mixed reception in the courts depending in part, according to some case law, on whether he might have gained any financial benefits. Finally, more modern extradition treaties often include human rights guarantees such that surrender cannot be granted to the requesting state, the US, if the alleged fugitive’s rights would be violated. While the extremes of the Bush regime’s activities in Guantànamo are not something Edward Snowden need fear, the requested state might feel the need to impose conditions on the type and maximum length of any prison sentence following a conviction. The United States does not allow individuals to petition for international review of its domestic decisions, so the onus is on the requested state to establish such protection in advance (see Judge v Canada).

Extradition and deportation are two different processes, although both remove an individual from a state. In the latter case, however, the domestic immigration law simply requires a non-national to depart and there need be no required destination, except that only the state of nationality has an obligation to receive anyone in normal circumstances and Edward Snowden is still a US national. One area of law that does affect deportation is international refugee law under the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and its 1967 Protocol. Refugees cannot be subjected to refoulement to the frontiers of a territory where their life or freedom would be threatened. However, to be a refugee, the applicant has to have a well-founded fear of persecution for one of five grounds, including political opinion, and Edward Snowden does not fear persecution, rather prosecution. The law itself is not persecutory and is not being applied only because he is in political disagreement with the surveillance procedures. Furthermore, Article 1F of the 1951 Convention excludes from refugee status those with respect to whom there are serious reasons for considering that they have committed a serious non-political crime, but that would just rehearse the earlier debates on political offences.

Finally, one comes to the issue of asylum. Asylum is in the grant of the state. Ordinarily one seeks it on the territory of the relevant country, although states in Central and South America accept applications in their embassies. The Julian Assange case shows that Ecuador, at least, applies that outside the region. So far, Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Bolivia have offered Edward Snowden asylum if he can get there from Moscow. States are at liberty to let anyone they please in to their territory. It can be presumed that if they grant him asylum, they would not extradite him to the US if they received a request; all three states have extradition arrangements with the US. However, all three are democracies and a subsequent government may not feel obliged to respect that grant. Cesare Battisti had been given asylum in France, but when the Sarkozy regime threatened to send him back to Italy, he ended up fleeing to Brazil where his eventual protection depended on the President, not the courts.

Geoff Gilbert is a Professor and Head of School in the School of Law and Human Rights Centre at the University of Essex. He has been Editor-In-Chief of the International Journal of Refugee Law (Oxford University Press) since 2002. He was founding Director of Studies for the Thematic Refugees and Human Rights Course from 2005-2007 with the UNHCR; Director of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) training program for judges on combating torture in Serbia and Montenegro; and Special Adviser to the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights on the ‘Treatment of Asylum Seekers, 2006-07’.

The International Journal of Refugee Law serves as an essential tool for all engaged in the protection of refugees and finding solutions to their problems. It regularly provides key information and commentary on today’s critical issues, including: the causes of refugee and related movements, internal displacement, the particular situation of women and refugee children, the human rights dimension, restrictive policies, asylum and determination procedures, populations at risk, and the conditions in different countries.

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Test your knowledge of nutrition, health, and economics

Now more than ever, health is one of the most important political issues for countries all over the world. As policies are brought in to tackle health problems, such as obesity, malnutrition, and food access, scholars look at what role economics plays in health and nutrition.

To address this question, we have put together a virtual issue on Nutrition, Health, and Economics, comprised of ground-breaking articles from across our online, books, and journals programs. With a wide range of content addressing topics as varied as school lunches and regional food crises, the aim of this virtual issue is to bring together the best research in the field of nutrition, health, and economics, and make it available to the public.

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The Nutrition, Health, and Economics Virtual Issue from Oxford Journals brings together content from across journals, books and online products published by Oxford University Press on the topic of nutrition, health, and economics. We hope that you find it a useful and interesting resource. We will be producing more issues like this on a range of topics in the future, so don’t forget to sign up to our database to keep informed!

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How do you study large whales?

By Kathleen E. Hunt

Wildlife physiology—the study of the inner workings of an animal’s body, such as its reproductive hormones, stress responses, fat reserves, and much more—has historically depended heavily on the ability to capture an animal, assess its body condition, obtain a blood sample, and release the animal unharmed for further study. For almost all animal species, this is possible. Species ranging from elephants to tiny birds can be safely captured, restrained, anesthetized if need be, a blood sample taken, and subsequently released. This traditional “capture-and-sample” approach has been the basis of almost all studies of wildlife physiology. But there is one frustrating exception: large whales.

The large whales, or “great whales” as they’re sometimes called, include most baleen whales (blue, fin, sei, humpback, grey, right, bowhead, and several more) and also one toothed species, the sperm whale. Perhaps no group of mammals on earth is as difficult to study. They spend most of their time below the water surface, they are difficult to find, and difficult to follow. They are too large to be kept in captivity. Perhaps most frustrating for physiology studies, there is simply no practical method of capturing a large whale alive to perform basic measurements or to get a blood sample. This has had profound consequences for our knowledge of whale physiology. It is difficult even to tell if a female is pregnant; it’s difficult to tell whether an whale might be highly stressed, or dangerously thin, or whether it has an infectious disease. It’s sometimes difficult even to determine an individual’s sex.

Such physiological information is of more than academic interest. Many whale populations are endangered, and few have fully recovered from the era of commercial whaling. Virtually all whale populations today are increasingly affected by a variety of human impacts that include global climate change (along with associated changes in prey base and in polar ice cover), chronic noise exposure (for example, from seismic exploration, commercial shipping, or military sonar), contaminant exposure, vessel strikes, fishing gear entanglement and more. Many of these factors can cause detrimental physiological effects, such as chronic elevations in stress hormones, reductions in the percentage of females that cycle or that become pregnant, and increased vulnerability to infectious disease. Without the classic capture-and-sampling tools to study these physiological effects, it has been very difficult to study the conservation impacts of human disturbance on large whales.

Humpback whales in Juneau, Alaska

Fortunately, marine mammal researchers are a persistent and creative lot. Over the past two decades, the marine mammal research community has devised a variety of inventive methods to tease bits of physiological information from large whales without the need to capture them. In a review paper that I and my colleagues have recently published in the new open-access journal Conservation Physiology, we describe four types of “alternative” samples that can yield valuable physiological information from large whales: photographic analysis, biopsy dart samples, fecal sample, and respiratory samples.

Photographs and biopsy darts have long been used in whale research, but are increasingly being used in novel ways. Rigorous quantitative analysis of lateral and overhead photographs is providing information on body outline (reflecting blubber stores), skin condition, and rates of vessel strike injuries and net entanglement. Biopsy samples (small skin-and-blubber samples obtained with a crossbow dart) are often used for genetic studies and contaminant measures, and now are also being analyzed with new techniques that can yield information on reproduction, immune response and stress exposure. Examples include pregnancy diagnosis via progesterone levels in the blubber, and analysis of stress-associated proteins obtained from skin cells.

The two other sample methods, fecal sample analysis and respiratory vapor analysis, are relatively novel. Both these sample types are “left behind” by the whale, freely released to the environment and available to any researcher who can devise some way of scooping them up. Collection methods have been quite creative, ranging from remote-control helicopters that fly over exhaling whales to specially trained scat-sniffing dogs that stand on the bow of a boat and sniff out floating fecal samples. Both types of samples are turning out to be very informative. For example, a long-term study on fecal samples from North Atlantic right whales has demonstrated that feces contain reproductive hormones that correlate very well with the animal’s gender, age (immature vs mature) and reproductive state (e.g. pregnant vs. lactating), as well as stress-associated hormones that correlate significantly with exposure to environmental stressors such as shipping noise. Respiratory vapor analysis is a newer technique and is still in its infancy, but early reports indicate that respiratory samples (or “blow samples”, as they are often called) probably contain a huge variety of measurable compounds, including many hormones, immune-related peptides, DNA, respiratory microbes, and more. Studies on human breath suggest that mammalian respiratory samples may contain almost everything that is in a blood sample¬—just at much lower concentrations. To date, blow samples have been collected successfully from several species of large whales, including North Atlantic right whales, humpback whales, and gray whales, and further studies are underway to optimize the collection techniques and refine the analytic methods.

Further research and development of all four of these sampling approaches—fecal samples, respiratory samples, biopsy dart samples, and photographs—has the potential to revolutionize studies of large whale physiology. It may at last be possible to study the inner biology of these elusive, magnificent animals without ever having to capture them.

Dr. Kathleen E. Hunt is a Research Scientist at the New England Aquarium, Boston. Her projects include fecal hormone analysis and respiratory vapor analysis of right whales and humpback whales, stress physiology of sea turtles, and effects of climate change on bowhead whales and Arctic birds. She is a co-author of the paper ‘Overcoming the challenges of studying conservation physiology in large whales: a review of available methods’, which is published in the journal Conservation Physiology.

Conservation Physiology is an online only, fully open access journal published on behalf of the Society for Experimental Biology. Biodiversity across the globe faces a growing number of threats associated with human activities. Conservation Physiology publishes research on all taxa (microbes, plants, and animals) focused on understanding and predicting how organisms, populations, ecosystems, and natural resources respond to environmental change and stressors.

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Image credit: Humpback whales in Juneau, Alaska. Photo by nophun201 [Creative Commons License CC-BY-SA-2.0] via Wikimedia Commons.

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                Related StoriesHow do you know if ‘bad’ art really is bad?The coming of age of international criminal justiceLe 14 juillet 

How do you know if ‘bad’ art really is bad?

By Aaron Meskin, Margaret Moore, Mark Phelan, and Matthew Kieran

Are the bad art pictures on Tumblr really bad or are they just unfamiliar? Would we come to like them more — and judge them as better — if we looked at them more? In order to answer these questions, we need to consider the mere exposure effect.

The mere exposure effect is a psychological phenomenon whereby repeated exposure to a stimulus enhances people’s attitudes towards it. In a 2003 study, psychologist James Cutting briefly exposed undergraduate psychology students to canonical and lesser-known Impressionist paintings (the lesser-known works were exposed four times as often), with the result that after exposure, subjects preferred the lesser-known works more often than did a group of students who had not been exposed. Cutting concluded that mere exposure explains a great deal about the formation of artistic canons. If he’s right, then repeated viewing of the ‘bad art’ on Tumblr might make you like it more.

We reported findings suggesting that increased exposure to art works does not necessarily make people like them more. Instead, the quality of an art work remains at the heart of its evaluation. We repeatedly exposed study groups to two sets of paintings (by the English Pre-Raphaelite painter John Everett Millais, and the American ‘Painter of Light’ Thomas Kinkade) before asking them to express a degree of liking for them. Although Millais is a well-respected artist, Kinkade’s work has been described as “a kitsch crime against aesthetics” and “so awful it must be seen to be believed.” We found that people liked Kinkade’s paintings less after they had been exposed to them. This was not the case with the Millais paintings. In our view, this suggests that exposure does not work independently of artistic value.

From the Museum of Bad Art: “Lucy in the Field With Flowers” ; “Sunday on the Pot with George” ; “Eileen” by R Angelo Le. GNU Free Documentation License via Wikimedia Commons.

So are these works of art on Tumblr bad?

In one sense, this is a really tricky question. There might be a whole bunch of different reasons someone tags a particular piece as bad art. For example, a work might fail to conform to ordinary expectations about art. Or it might be morally challenging, disturbing, or even ethically questionable. Labelling a picture bad may not be a simple matter; many different kinds of things might be meant by displaying a work as ‘bad’ art. But in another sense, the question is pretty straightforward. Is the picture any good?

If the results of our experiment are right, then we have a way of figuring out the answer, a rough and ready test that is at least indicative of what the answer should be in any given case. If something is bad art, then it seems as though repeated exposure will make people like it less. If not, repeated exposure should make people like it more.

Here is a particular case you might like to try for yourself. We are in the process of doing some online follow-ups to our first experiment. One artist we came across and considered for providing stimuli for our follow up experiments was Armen Eloyan. Critics have said of Eloyan’s work that “paint seems to have been squeezed directly onto canvas, unmixed, and harnessed into lines, with the juvenile impulsiveness. This flagrancy of taste suggests that Eloyan equates this badness with a sort of transgressive agency.”

The trouble is that after a while these paintings grew on us. We thought some of them variously smart, funny, quirky, or just plain bizarre. But most importantly of all we started to like them. So we ditched them as stimuli for our experiment. Why? Well if they were bad, at least on our criteria, we should have started to like them less. See what you think.

Aaron Meskin, Margaret Moore, Mark Phelan, and Matthew Kieran are the authors of “Mere Exposure to Bad Art” (available to read for free for a limited time) in the British Journal of Aesthetics. Aaron Meskin is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Centre for Aesthetics at the University of Leeds. He is the author of numerous journal articles and book chapters on aesthetics and other philosophical subjects. He co-edited Aesthetics: A Comprehensive Anthology (Wiley-Blackwell, 2007) and The Art of Comics: A Philosophical Approach (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012). Margaret Moore is a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Tennessee. She works on issues in philosophy of music, aesthetics, and the philosophy of mind. Mark Phelan is Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Cognitive Science at Lawrence University in Wisconsin. He specializes in the philosophies of mind and language. Papers he has written or co-authored have appeared in journals such as Mind & Language, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, The British Journal of Aesthetics, Philosophical Studies, and Philosophical Topics. Matthew Kieran is Professor of Philosophy and the Arts at the University of Leeds. He is the author of Revealing Art, numerous articles on art and morality and is editor or co-editor of several anthologies. He has run workshops at Tate Britain and appeared on the BBC and Channel 4. He is currently a Leverhulme Research Fellow working on the philosophical psychology of creativity. The research for this paper was conducted as part of the AHRC funded 3 year research project on ‘Method in philosophical aesthetics: the challenge from the sciences’.

Founded in 1960, the British Journal of Aesthetics is highly regarded as an international forum for debate in philosophical aesthetics and the philosophy of art. The Journal is published to promote the study and discussion of philosophical questions about aesthetic experience and the arts.

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Image credits: (1) “Lucy in the Field With Flowers”, Museum of Bad Art. GNU Free Documentation License via Wikimedia Commons. (2) ”Sunday on the Pot with George.” Museum of Bad Art. GNU Free Documentation License via Wikimedia Commons. (3) ”Eileen,” by R Angelo Le. Museum of Bad Art. GNU Free Documentation License via Wikimedia Commons.

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The ghost of Sherlock Holmes

By Douglas Kerr

The ghost of Sherlock Holmes started life (if that’s the word) early. Conan Doyle sent the detective plunging over the Reichenbach Falls in the grip of Professor Moriarty in “The Final Problem”, published in the Strand magazine in December 1893. The following year, music-hall audiences were joining in the chorus of a popular song, written by Richard Morton and composed and sung by H. C. Barry.

“Sherlock, Sherlock,”


You can hear the people cry,


“That’s the ghost of Sherlock Holmes,”


As I go creeping by.


Sinners shake and tremble


Wherever this bogie roams,


And people shout, “He’s found us out,


It’s the ghost of Sherlock Holmes.”

Sherlock Holmes has proved one of the most resilient of all literary characters, and the career of his ghost furnishes a proof of the afterlife to warm the heart of a Spiritualist like his creator. The dark years after Reichenbach were relieved for the detective’s admirers with the debut in 1899 of William Gillette’s stage play Sherlock Holmes, which adapted material from a number of the Conan Doyle stories. Gillette played the role of Holmes some 1300 times over three decades, accessorizing the character onstage with the now iconic deerstalker hat, pipe, and magnifying glass. When Gillette asked Conan Doyle if Holmes might be married in the stage adaptation, the author cabled in reply: “You may marry or murder or do what you like with him.” This is a licence that has been joyfully accepted by later conjurors of the great detective’s ghost.

Chief among these was Conan Doyle himself, who brought Holmes back for a pre-Reichenbach adventure in The Hound of the Baskervilles in the Strand in 1901, and then explained in “The Adventure of the Empty House” that his hero had not after all died. Holmes’s adventures, sixty in all, continued until 1927. Meanwhile, exchanging ectoplasm for celluloid, since Sherlock Holmes Baffled in 1903 the great detective had embarked on an active spectral life in the cinema. Notable among film Holmeses was the splendid Basil Rathbone, who played the part in fourteen Hollywood films between 1939 and 1946, supported by Nigel Bruce as a decidedly dim Watson. In the Rathbone films the question of what literary critics call reaccentuation becomes an issue. At first, Rathbone’s Holmes films have a familiar Victorian setting of fogbound streets, gaslight and hansom cabs.  But later, Holmes, miraculously unageing, becomes his audience’s contemporary, continuing his adventures in an age of air travel, plastic surgery and Nazi saboteurs. It is an anachronistic spirit that lives on in the hi-tech TV Sherlock.

As if there were not enough in the original character for an actor to feast on, later film Holmeses have included a drug-addicted paranoiac, a drunken actor, a lovesick schoolboy, a bungling incompetent, an action hero, and a mouse.

Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes, c. 1930

Meanwhile readers were tending the detective’s afterlife in different ways, as Holmes became the inspiration for many of the classic detectives of the 1920s and 1930s. The future theologian and detective author Ronald Knox, while still a student at Oxford, wrote “Studies in the Literature of Sherlock Holmes”, which is a pretty good proto-structuralist analysis of the tales at the same time as being a spoof of the academic criticism of the time. It became the trigger for what Dorothy L. Sayers, another Conan Doyle admirer and detective-story practitioner, called “the game of applying the methods of the Higher Criticism to the Sherlock Holmes canon”. There was a good deal of this in the interwar years, often written with a distinctly high-table sense of what’s amusing, and it  became entangled with the related game of pretending John Watson was the author of the Holmes stories, and Arthur Conan Doyle merely his editor or literary agent. Enthusiasts congregated in branches of the Baker Street Irregulars, giving themselves the names of characters from the stories, and discussing contentious matters such as the location of Watson’s war wound, and where Sherlock Holmes went to school. It’s hard to imagine a similar interest in the backstory of Dorothea Brooke or Charles Bovary.

No other fictional detective – in fact no other literary character – has had such a vigorous and varied afterlife. Where after all are the Sons of Father Brown, the Bellona Clubmen, or the Friends of Hercule Poirot? With the character in the public domain, there are more Sherlock Holmes stories being written today than ever before. Through the mediumship of new authors, Holmes has been summoned from the grave (or from his bee-keeping retirement in Sussex), to rejoin battle with the diabolical Professor Moriarty, to meet Oscar Wilde and Queen Victoria and Sigmund Freud and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and to solve – and in at least one case to commit – the Whitechapel Murders of Jack the Ripper.

For many people , who starred in the meticulously “period” Granada TV series between 1984 and 1994, is the definitive Holmes. But there are modern audiences who may never have heard of Conan Doyle, for whom Holmes is the action hero Robert Downey Jnr in the Guy Ritchie films, or Benedict Cumberbatch in the brilliantly modernized Sherlock, or Jonny Lee Miller in the CBS series Elementary, with his companion Dr Joan Watson.

Holmes has benefited from today’s fashion for neo-Victorian novels. New media and the internet have only given him a new lease of posthumous life. Holmes stories have been subject to mash-up, where the original text is spliced with new material or married to a different genre (like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies). Anyone for Shreklock? Holmes is a natural for steampunk, stories set in an alternative-history, parallel-universe Victorian world. Holmes and Watson are favourites in slash fiction, where a gay relationship is imagined between fictional characters, and new online stories developed about them, ranging from the pornographic to the sweetly romantic. In comics and cartoons, pastiche and merchandise and scholarly books, Holmes’s soul goes marching on.

Why does the character continue to haunt us? If we really knew the secret of Holmes’s immortality, perhaps we could all be best-selling authors. Conan Doyle himself could not quite understand his detective’s appeal. But some aspects of his unique fascination seem clear enough. With his cerebral triumphs and his imaginative eccentricity, he offers a beguiling combination of science and poetry: the poetry humanizes the science and the science seems to anchor the poetry in the real world. Armed with a magnifying glass or mobile phone, we recognize in Holmes an inhabitant of modernity, of our world. Finally, Sherlock Holmes is no more a singular character than is Don Quixote. He belongs in an interdependent partnership. In afterlife as in life, the ghost of Sherlock Holmes would be lost without the ghost of Dr Watson.

Douglas Kerr is Professor of English at the University of Hong Kong. He is the author of Conan Doyle: Writing, Profession, and Practice.

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Image credit: Photograph of Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes [public domain]. Via Wikimedia Commons.

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Captive Nations Week

By Kate Pais

A commemoration that is not as well known, every third week of July is Captive Nations Week. Officially signed into law by President Eisenhower and the United States in 1959, the week is meant to bring recognition to the many countries that have been oppressed by non-democratic governments. Of course in the 1950s, lawmakers had communism specifically in mind. The Cold War had widespread political ramifications, and the map and quotations (from The Cold War in the Third World, edited by Robert J. McMahon) below highlight the regions that were deeply affected by the conflict between the Soviet Union and United States.

A map edited to show the reach of the Cold War across the globe. Image edited from a blank map of the world, 2005. From Roke. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Latin America


“The Latin American Cold War started in 1947 when a series of coups and conservative backlashes fueled by rising anti-Communism closed a brief but consequential continent wide democratic opening…. A number of the Cold War’s signal events took place: the CIA’s 1954 coup against Guatemalan president Jacobo Arbenz, the 1959 Cuban Revolution, the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, the following year’s missile crisis, John F. Kennedy’s intervention to prevent Cheddi Jagan from coming to power in Guyana, Lyndon B. Johnson’s 1965 invasion of the Dominican Republic, the 1973 overthrow of Chilean president Salvador Allende, and the Iran-Contra scandal of the 1980s.” –Greg Grandin, New York University

Africa


“The Cold War’s ideological dimensions greatly influenced the expression of anticolonial sentiment, in organizational as well as ideational terms, and subsequently also the domestic agendas of many African leaders after independence. As the Ghanaian president Kwame Nkrumah told an audience in New York in 1958, ‘We cannot tell our people that material benefits and growth and modern progress are not for them. If we do, they will throw us out and seek other leaders who promise more… Africa has to modernize.’” –Jeffrey James Byrne, University of British Columbia

The Middle East


“The Middle East held 60% of the world’s known oil reserves, access to which was essential to global industrial development in the postwar era. …The Cold War further polarized [this] region. In the 1950s, U.S. support for conservative states like Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Iraq combined with Soviet support for Egypt and Syria to exacerbate an existing inter-Arab split. From the late 1960s on, Cold War rivalries were increasingly mapped onto the Arab-Israeli and Iranian-Iraqi disputes, intensifying each.”  –Salim Yaqub, University of California, Santa Barbara

South Asia


“Cold War aid competition in South Asia had set a pattern that would apply not just throughout South Asia’s Cold War, but across the whole Third World. South Asia had been the entry point for serious Soviet-American competition in the Third World, leading to the era of ‘competitive coexistence’ that began in the 1950s-a competition that included both economic and military assistance. By the early 1960s, China joined the race, which was again a process that began in South Asia. Events in South Asia helped precipitate the Sino-Soviet split- a long-running ideological battle that was first clarified by differences over Tibet and India.” –David C. Engerman, Brandeis University

China


“China’s revolutionary policies changed East Asia into a main battlefield of the Cold War. Although the Cold War’s logical emphasis should have been Europe and although America’s primary enemy was the Soviet Union, policymakers in Washington widely believed that compared with Moscow, Beijing was a more daring, and therefore, more dangerous enemy. This perception justified America’s continuous military intervention in East Asia after the Korean War, eventually leading to its involvement in the Vietnam War.” –Chen Jian, Cornell University

Southeast Asia


“The Cold War in Southeast Asia was not simply a geopolitical competition between the United States, Soviet Union, and China, but also an ideological contest rooted in divergent visions of modernity and social change, in which the direction of decolonization, development, and state building served as a key terrain of conflict. …The newly independent and decolonizing states of Southeast Asia not only had to navigate the shoals of superpower conflict, but also had to create viable states, pursue economic development, and construct postcolonial national identities.” –Brad Simpson, University of Connecticut

Kate Pais joined Oxford University Press in April 2013. She works as a marketing assistant for the history, religion and theology, and bibles lists.

The Cold War in the Third World, edited by Robert J. McMahon, provides fresh and synthetic interpretations of the Cold War’s impact on the Third World by some of the world’s leading scholars on the subject. Robert J. McMahon is the Ralph D. Mershon Distinguished Professor of History at Ohio State University. He is the author, among other works, of Cold War on the Periphery: The United States, India, and Pakistan, The Limits of Empire: The United States and Southeast Asia since World War II, and The Cold War: A Very Short Introduction.

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Lullaby for a royal baby

By Meghann Wilhoite

Not only does Will and Kate’s royal wee one now have an ASDA parking spot, there’s another nice surprise awaiting his or her arrival: a specially-composed lullaby, called “Sleep On”. It’s a sweet little tune, written by Welsh composer Paul Mealor (who also wrote music for the couple’s wedding) with lyrics by Brendan Graham. The song is included on Hayley Westenra’s latest album, a collection of lullabies called Hushabye.

Click here to view the embedded video.

While a lullaby’s lyrics often “instill cultural values” and/or “incorporate the fears of the parent” (as the Grove definition puts it), musically speaking lullabies are characterized by quietude and simplicity. Indulge me while I expound upon some of the song’s more charming features:

Instruments


Certainly a lullaby—at least, one that’s truly intended to soothe a baby to sleep—is no time to be innovative, and so we have a very expected group of instruments playing, all of which can produce a gentle timbre. A harp plays throughout, while bowed violins and a pizzicato double bass fill out the sound; a flute adds variety to the second verse. By way of contrast, just imagine if the song had been recorded using a group of electric guitars using distortion pedals!

Vocal Melody


The melody is pleasantly balanced, the verse notes falling mostly downwards, the chorus notes rising mostly upwards until the little phrase at the end where it falls back down again. The overall phrase structure is also perfectly symmetrical, as the time it takes to get to “sleep”, “keep”, “strong”, and “long” in the first verse and chorus is four bars of 3/4 each.

Harmonies


Could it get any simpler? The song employs only three chords, which are also the most “stable” chords within the key – consonant chords that communicate comfort. In roman numeral terms, the song moves between I, IV and V; or, in the key of B-flat major, B-flat, E-flat and F. Here’s a little video of me demonstrating a condensed version of the song’s chord pattern on the guitar (please excuse my clumsy picking):

Click here to view the embedded video.

Something that I don’t demonstrate in the video (mainly because I don’t know how to play it on the guitar) is the nice little change in the bass line that happen on the words “strong” and “long” in the chorus, where the note “A” is played where “F” usually goes. For a brief moment this makes the bass line smoother (a step instead of a leap between the notes), and, as the leading tone of B-flat major, it also pull us irresistibly “home” to the main note of the key.

For me, the allure of the lullaby is the elusive promise of a deep, uninterrupted night of sleep, from which you wake refreshed and in love with the world. Here’s hoping that, sooner rather than later, for Kate’s sake at least, that the new baby learns how to “sleep on” through the night.

P.S. For fun have a listen to this lullaby-afied Ramones song:

Click here to view the embedded video.

And the original:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Meghann Wilhoite is an Assistant Editor at Grove Music/Oxford Music Online, music blogger, and organist. Follow her on Twitter at @megwilhoite. Read her previous blog posts on Sibelius, the pipe organ, John Zorn, West Side Story, and other subjects.

Oxford Music Online is the gateway offering users the ability to access and cross-search multiple music reference resources in one location. With Grove Music Online as its cornerstone, Oxford Music Online also contains The Oxford Companion to Music, The Oxford Dictionary of Music, and The Encyclopedia of Popular Music.

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Image credit: child cradle with toys hanging around, shot with a very shallow depth of field. © dimamorgan12 via iStockphoto.

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