To perform a musical score implies the transformation of a symbolically coded text into vibrant sound. In Performing by the Book? a carefully selected cadre of artist-researchers dissects this delicate act in critical ways. Offering first-hand insights into the notational, structural and interpretative challenges faced by musicians in dealing with texts of all kinds, the chapters traverse the spectrum between the Middle Ages and the age of Stockhausen. In a harmonious blend of scholarly allur...

Laurent-Benoît Dewez (1731-1812), court architect to Charles of Lorraine, was the most outstanding architect of his time in the Southern Low Countries. After studying in Italy and serving in the eminent office of Robert Adam in London, Dewez developed a personal, classical style that came to embody the “Eglise Belgique” under the Austrian Habsburgs. He designed numerous castles, abbeys, and churches across Belgium, but time has not been kind to his legacy: of his 80 architectural project...

Little is known about the African women who came to Europe from the 1870s onwards, nor do we dare to imagine them as wealthy, elegantly dressed individuals with refined tastes and fluent in several languages. The Krio Fernandino represented a multisited, multilocal, transnational, transcontinental and Afropolitan community that lived between Africa and Europe from the late 19th century onwards. This book explains how the Krio Fernandino, and particularly their women, transcended the barriers ...

Hidden within the millions of panels and magazine pages collected by Alain Van Passen, a devoted Belgian comics collector active from the earliest days of the comics clubs, lies a long-forgotten history of vibrant, surrealist, and even ‘visionary’ images. His pristine collection, built over decades of searching and exchanging comics, offers unprecedented insight into the diverse trajectories of twentieth-century popular publishing. Focusing on comics magazines published between 1935 and 1...

It is no coincidence that a historical figure such as Patrice Emery Lumumba, independent Congo’s first prime minister, who was killed in 1961, has lived in the realm of the cultural imaginary and occupied an afterlife in the arts. After all, his project remained unfinished and his corpse unburied. The figure of Lumumba has been imagined through painting, photography, cinema, poetry, literature, theatre, music, sculpture, fashion, cartoons and stamps, and also through historiography and in p...

Reading African cities into contemporary theory - reprint of a richly illustrated reference work.

In their internationally acclaimed publication 'Kinshasa: Tales of the Invisible City', anthropologist Filip De Boeck and photographer Marie-Françoise Plissart provide a history not only of the physical and visible urban reality that Kinshasa presents today, but also of a second, invisible city as it exists in the mind and imagination of its inhabitants. They bring to light a mirroring reality l...