Charles Sheeler and the Cult of the Machine by Karen Lucic (review)

CURRENT LITERATURE I. Book Reviews BookReviewPanel:RudolfArnheim,Eva Belik,John Bowlt, John tv. Cooper, IgorV.Dolenko, ElmerDuncan, Robert S. Lansdon, Alan Lee,Joy TurnerLuke, David Pariser, Clifford Pickover, David Topper, Stephen Wilson. CHARLES SHEELER AND THE CULT OF THE MACHINE by Karen Lucie. Reaktion Books, London , U.K., 1991. 168 pp., illus. Paper,£10.95. ISBN: 0-948462-17-5. Reviewed I7yJohn Cooper, Pergamon Press, Headington Hill Hall, Oxford 0X3 OB~ us: Big, industrial machines have become symbolic of modern America, and large cities with their skyscrapers are the visible evidence of their potency. Karen Lucie presents one of the early iconographers of this machine age in a closely argued, well-documented monograph. Even in reproduction Sheeler's machines shine with vibrant beauty, purposeful; yet what struck me was that many resemble nothing so much as the monolithic brooding, threatening, merciless and unforgiving art ofToltec mid-America, created long before the machine age. This is, I think, an intimation of Sheeler's universality (and of his powerful presentation) in his role as a harbinger of the technological transformation of society, prefiguring the decay of heavy industry. This timely volume will surely contribute to a reassessment of Sheeler's place in early twentieth-century art. COGNITIVE FOUNDATIONS OF MUSICAL PITCH by Carol L. Krumhansl. Oxford Psychology Series No. 17. Oxford Univ. Press, New York, NY, U.S.A., 1990. 307 pp. Trade. ISBN: 0-19-505475-X. Reviewed I7yJohn H. Chalmers,Jr., 9411 Beckford Drive, Houston, TX 770992218 , U.S.A. Cognitive Foundations ofMusicalPitch is an account of more than a decade's worth of research on musical perception by Krumhansl and her colleagues . The major part of the book is devoted to work from her laboratory, though some earlier and collateral work by other investigators is discussed as well. Given the wealth of information in this book, a short review can only touch on the most important points. Krumhansl's primary research procedure is the 'probe tone' technique. A musical context is presented and subjects are then asked how well certain subsequent events, usually tones or chords, fit or agree with the preceding material. Variations of the contexts and the events constitute the experimental approach. The data are then analyzed mathematically to form conclusions. The first question addressed was whether listeners assign hierarchical functions to the tones of the major and minor modes. The experimental context was an incomplete ascending or descending major scale and the task was to choose which of 13 chromatic probe tones best completed the gamut. The subjects were university students of differing musical backgrounds . Not surprisingly, strong differences were found among the groups. Musically trained students rated the tonic of the major scale highest (on a 1-7 scale), followed by the fifth and major third. Less welltrained students favored the tonic, but did not differentially rank the other tones. Untrained students seemed sensitive only to proximity and chose the nearest note to the last tone presented. The results of the musically trained students were similar for all keys, and these data were therefore pooled to derive the 'major key profile', a hierarchical ranking of the tones of the scale. These experiments were repeated with complete major and minor scales, tonic triads, and simple cadences to the tonic. The results confirm the major-scale profile and allow Krumhansl to derive an analogous natural minor-scale hierarchy. In the minor mode, the hierarchical ordering is tonic, minor third, and fifth. Notes altered by a lI4-tone were also used as probes but were found to be assimilated to the neighboring chromatic pitches, especially if they were in a different octave from the scale tones. In a similar experiment, Jordan found that lI4-tone pitches were rated much lower than the chromatic set, but lis-tones were not. Correlations between the majorand minor-scale profiles and each of their transpositions were computed as measures of 'interkey' distances. The resulting distances were analyzed by Shepard's multi-dimensional scaling (MDS) algorithm. A four-dimensional solution was found; two of the dimensions corresponded to the cycle of fifths for major and minor scales while the other two dimensions depended upon the relative and parallel major-minor key relationships. The...