In addition to the sonata and concerto, the cellist's concert repertory comprises four further principal areas: music for unaccompanied cello; short genre pieces for cello with orchestra or keyboard; variations; and transcriptions and fantasias. Many nineteenth-century solo works for the cello were composed by cellists, who were strongly influenced, particularly in the first half of the century, by the violin repertory. Travelling virtuosos such as Duport, Romberg, Servais, Franchomme, Piatti, Goltermann, Grüzmacher, Davidoff, Popper, Fitzenhagen, Klengel and Becker wrote for their own use and also to meet the rapidly growing demands of flourishing middle-class audiences; their aim was both to satisfy the public's taste, to entertain and to demonstrate their own technical prowess. Writing for solo cello was only a peripheral interest for most of the ‘front-line’ nineteenth-century composers, probably because of the perceived problems of balance between the cello, with its tenor range, and the expanding orchestra or developing piano.

Music for unaccompanied cello

Among the first to compose for unaccompanied cello were the Italians Giovanni Degli Antoni, Domenico Gabrielli and Domenico Galli. Degli Antoni's Ricercate Op. 1 (Bologna, 1687) comprises twelve unaccompanied ricercari, pedagogical works for the instrument which might also be used as a bass for harpsichord improvisation – seven include figured bass with this option clearly in mind. Although perfectly playable on the conventional four-stringed cello, Kinney's recommended use of a six-stringed instrument tuned like the bass viol, with the alternate tuning for the lowest string depending on the key, C (or D)–G–c–e–a–d1, has its advocates.

In the 1980s, a striking phenomenon occurred on the American stage. In an eight-year span, three women dramatists, Beth Henley, Marsha Norman, and Wendy Wasserstein, were awarded the Pulitzer Prize, approaching the total of five Pulitzers awarded to women for the previous sixty years. This same period saw the production of new plays by Tina Howe, Maria Irene Fornes, Emily Mann, Ntozake Shange, and Wendy Kesselman, among others, as well as the establishment of avant-garde, alternative women’s theatre companies, both in New York and around the country. In a 1992 New Republic article entitled “What Do Women Playwrights Want?” Robert Brustein refers to the “spate of plays by, for, and about women that have multiplied in the last decade,” saying that “in terms of numbers, if not in broadness of theme, American women playwrights now represent a significant movement that is surely unprecedented in history” (28). I would like to examine how three women playwrights, Henley, Norman, and Howe, drawing on realistic modes, use these traditional forms to dramatize feminist perspectives.

There is no question that Parmenides' poem was a watershed in the history of early Greek philosophy. No serious thinker could ignore his work. And yet it seems to pose insuperable problems for cosmology and scientific inquiry. The first generation to follow Parmenides includes thinkers who wished to continue the tradition of Ionian speculation. But how would they confront Parmenides? What would they make of him and what effect would his arguments have on their work? The first neo-Ionians, as they have been called, were Empedocles and Anaxagoras. Despite some salient differences, the two philosophers have much in common in their approach. They are near contemporaries, and as we shall see, they make similar moves in their approach to scientific speculation. Let us first examine the systems of Empedocles and Anaxagoras, and then discuss their responses to Parmenides.

EMPEDOCLES AND ANAXAGORAS

After warning us to seek a balance in our evaluation of sensory evidence (DK 31 B3), Empedocles goes on to identify the basic constituents of the universe and to develop a cosmology based on those constituents. There are four “roots,” (rizômata): earth, water, air, and fire (B6), which combine in whole-number ratios to form compounds.

Soul, sensation, and thought: a separate chapter could be devoted to each of these items. But, beyond considerations of space, there is a rationale for broaching them together, for these three notions are in some sense correlated. It is on certain aspects of this correlation that I shall focus. The first part of this chapter concentrates on the soul, and its relationship to the two other terms. The second part specifically will be devoted to the relationship between thought and the senses. Since an important aspect of the latter question bears on epistemology, some overlap with J. Lesher's contribution to this volume (Chapter 11) is unavoidable. However, I have tried to draw attention to “physiological” rather than epistemological problems. As it turns out, this emphasis may not be too artificial because, as we shall see, there is a question as to whether the early Greek philosophers' interests in the relationship between thought and the senses was not primarily physiological rather than epistemological, in a sense of the term “physiological” that remains to be spelled out.

There is a huge diversity of bowed stringed instruments throughout the world. Their acoustical principles, however, are common. A bow is drawn across a taut string. Friction between the bow and the string excites the string into vibration. The string has particular vibrational properties which make it an ‘ideal’ musical signal source, but unfortunately its small size renders it practically inaudible. The string is therefore connected to some form of resonator, which is traditionally a wooden box (as in the case of the cello), a stretched animal skin or a gourd. The function of the resonator box is to vibrate in sympathy with the strings. The larger surface area of the box interacts readily with the surrounding air, creating sizeable pressure fluctuations which we hear as sounds.

This chapter aims to provide a brief introduction to cello acoustics and to add sufficient detail to the above simple model to explain various features of practical importance to players. The last thirty years have witnessed intense activity in the study of the acoustics of stringed musical instruments. In the case of bowed stringed instruments, work has concentrated almost exclusively on the violin, and readers interested in pursuing the subject further are directed to several standard works on the subject. In many respects, the differences between violins and cellos are simply a matter of scale, the acoustical principles being the same in both cases. However, the increased body size and heavier strings and structure bring particular problems associated with starting transients and wolf-notes, both of which will be discussed later.

Early American dramatists worked within a set of dramatic forms and theatrical traditions inherited from England. The most important comedic forms were sentimental comedy, social comedy, comic opera, and satire. Among theatrical traditions transmitted from England was the acceptance of women as playwrights: comedies by English women writers were among the most popular works in the theatres of early America. Early in the history of the new nation, American writers began using and reshaping drama to represent specifically American identities, experiences, and perspectives. While the American context offered new opportunities, however, it also presented unique obstacles. Strong antitheatrical attitudes, based on religious opposition to acting and cultural opposition to elite art forms, combined with thinly populated cities and scarcity of resources to make establishment of theatre difficult in the United States. To counter antitheatricalism, or perhaps merely to address unsophisticated audiences, writers of early American comedies assume a highly didactic tone and focus closely on issues of national identity. They present incidents in American history, demonstrate the dimensions of American citizenship, and exhort the audience to feelings of patriotism.

As a young girl growing up in Brooklyn, and later in New York, Wendy Wasserstein experienced the conspicuous double standards between boys and girls that ignited her feminist instincts. While her brother received Richard Halliburton’s Complete Book of Marvels - a travel guide to spectacular places around the world - for his Bar Mitzvah, she was reading Eloise and Madeline. And, to instill a sense of feminine etiquette in her daughter, her mother sent her to the Helena Rubinstein Charm School. Moreover, to make her well rounded, she enrolled her in the June Taylor School of Dance. If that were not bad enough, when Wendy showed up everyday in the same work shirt at the Calhoun School on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, the headmistress would call her mother to tell her that she should get dressed up and wear pink (Bennetts, “An Uncommon Dramatist,”). Indeed, she has always felt angry about the importance placed on women’s appearance.

The marginalization of women also became apparent to her in the television shows she was watching as a girl in the fifties. Her favorite television show, Bachelor Father, depicting a debonair, suave small screen “Cary Grant,”convinced her that she would “rather wear a dinner jacket than perform the routine housewife duties of Mrs. Danny Thomas, Mrs. Father Know Best, or especially June Cleaver.”She felt compelled to find a female counterpart for the bachelor father, “a woman who possessed all the vitality of a Broadway musical, whose charms would beguile even Helena Rubinstein, and who never closed herself off from the possibility of adventure”(Wasserstein, Bachelor Girls, 6). Consequently, she became fascinated by Doris Day films, films about bright, self-motivated, charming, willful women, who approached life with guts and gusto.

Much of our little information on Zeno's life comes from the prologue of Plato's Parmenides. Most scholars accept Plato's statement that when Socrates was “very young” (though old enough to engage in philosophical debate) Zeno was forty and Parmenides was sixty-five (Parm. 127a-b). The setting of the Parmenides is the quadrennial Great Athenaia, and the best guesses for its dramatic date are 454 B.C. when Socrates was 15 and 450 B.C. when he was 19. Also, Plato's statement that “Zeno was of a good height and handsome to see; the story goes that he had been Parmenides' young lover” (127b) is perfectly possible, though not otherwise attested. Even if the setting of the Parmenides is historically plausible, the notorious unreliability of Plato's reports on earlier philosophers makes it unwise to take much else of what he says on trust. The conversation in the Parmenides certainly did not take place, and we may fairly doubt that Socrates met the philosophers from Elea. Further, Plato indicates that Zeno's treatise was unknown in Athens prior to the dramatic date of the Parmenides (127c), but he also implies that it was written many years earlier, and he says it had been circulated (apparently soon after its writing) without Zeno's authorization (I28d) – claims that although not actually contradictory are hard to reconcile.

Any attempt to chart the early history of the cello, in whatever genre, inevitably founders on ambiguity of terminology. We accept that bass violins were widespread in Italy throughout the seventeenth century and that they existed in various sizes, the smallest tuned a fifth higher than the modern cello, but when was a violone, violoncino, basso da brazzo, bassetto di viola, violone piccolo or whatever a cello? This problem is inevitably aired elsewhere in this volume, but its most direct relevance is to the ensemble sonata for two or more melodic instruments, since by the time collections of solo compositions for a stringed bass and continuo appeared in print, composers (or at least publishers) had mainly settled on ‘violoncello’; there are no solo collections for violoncino. It would seem that ‘violoncello’ was first used with some frequency by Bolognese composers from Giulio Cesare Arresti's Sonate a 2, & a Tre. con la parte del violoncello a beneplacido (1665), but others in his immediate circle were still far from consistent. Giovanni Battista Vitali described himself as ‘suonatore di violone da brazzo’ on the title-pages of his publications but is referred to variously as a player of the ‘violoncino’ and ‘violonlino’ in the records of the Bolognese basilica of San Petronio; yet, after his appointment to the Court of Modena in 1674, the Church authorities advertised for a replacement, ‘being vacant the position of violoncello through the departure of Gio. Batt. Vitali’. Ten years later, the title-page of Domenico Gabrielli's Balletti reveals that he was ‘Sonatore di Violoncello in S. Petronio di Bologna’, even though the part-book is labelled ‘violone’.

Introduction

The cello sonata forged three avenues of development in the eighteenth century. The late seventeenth-century form, for cello and continuo, involving a cello as the principal melodist, persisted well into the third quarter of the eighteenth century. Harmonic support in the form of semi-improvised chords or the realisation of a prescribed figured bass was provided by a keyboard instrument (normally an organ or harpsichord), which could be joined or replaced by a plucked instrument (chitarrone or archlute); in addition, the bass line could be sustained, normally by another cello or, possibly, a gamba. The nomenclature for such works ranged from ‘sonata’ to ‘sinfonia’, ‘solo’, ‘trattenimento’, ‘divertimento’, ‘concertino’ and other such terms.

The sonata's second avenue of development, the so-called ‘accompanied sonata’, involved the cellist in a subordinate role to an obbligato keyboard. This type, which challenged the dominance of the sonata with continuo and eventually superseded it, began and ended essentially with the early sonatas of Beethoven and his contemporaries, giving way to the third avenue, the true duo sonata for two equal protagonists.

The Baroque

The cello sonata evolved first in northern Italy towards the end of the seventeenth century. Two different types emerged: the sonata da camera (‘chamber sonata’), which is essentially a suite of stylised dances; and the sonata da chiesa (‘church sonata’), the movements of which have no dance allegiances.

The preceding evaluations speak to the ever-present issue faced by those eighteenth- and nineteenth-century cellists who sought recognition as virtuosos: could their performances be as pleasing and acceptable to audiences as those of violinists? The accomplishments of such artists as Lanzetti, Jean-Pierre and Jean-Louis Duport, Romberg, Servais, Davidoff and Casals repeatedly proved that, indeed, the cello could easily match its smaller confrère in providing musical gratification. Yet to do so they, and other innovative and artistically creative players, had continually to recast themselves as the architects of modernisation as they searched for idiomatic performance techniques which allowed their music, in tandem with that of violinists, to be stretched, moulded, and refitted to conform with ever-changing stylistic requirements and regional preferences.

POETIC PESSIMISM AND PHILOSOPHICAL OPTIMISM

The Greek philosophers were not the first to reflect on the nature and limits of human knowledge; that distinction belongs to the poets of archaic Greece. In Book XVIII of the Odyssey, for example, the failure of Penelope's suitors to sense the disaster awaiting them prompts some famous remarks on the mental capacities of the species from the disguised Odysseus:

Here, as on other occasions in the Homeric poems, the thoughts of mortals reflect only their present experiences,- the events that lie ahead lie also beyond their powers of comprehension. Conversely, when the gods choose to endow an individual with superhuman powers of insight, his knowledge is distinguished by its vast range:

Until recently, most standard accounts of twentieth-century American theatre have virtually ignored Sophie Treadwell. At most, Treadwell’s bestknown play, the explosive 1928 drama Machinal, receives mention as a last gasp example of 1920s expressionism on the commercial Broadway stage. With a renewed attention to Machinal, however, first with its reappearance in print in an anthology in 1981 and then in prominent revivals by the New York Shakespeare Festival in 1990 and the Royal National Theatre in London in 1993, Treadwell has begun to attract more scholarly and artistic interest. With her theatre career spanning six decades, including the writing of forty plays in a variety of styles and subjects, as well as acting in, directing, and producing her own works for the Broadway stage, Treadwell may be viewed as one of America’s pioneering, early twentieth-century women dramatists. Her writings consistently examine the conditions of modern society which inhibit women’s personal struggles for independence and equality. Especially in her most experimental works, Machinal and For Saxophone, Treadwell may also be seen as one of the first American women playwrights to utilize non-realistic innovations in style and narrative to create a decidedly feminist aesthetic in the theatre.

Sophie Treadwell was born in Stockton, California in 1885. Her mother, Nettie Fairchild Treadwell, was part of a ranching family which helped settle the Stockton area. Her father, Alfred B. Treadwell, was of Mexican and European descent. His desertion of the family in favor of a career as a lawyer and elected judge in San Francisco severely disrupted Sophie’s formative years. Despite the fact that she would often spend summers in San Francisco with her father, Sophie frequently experienced embarrassment and humiliation over her mother’s persistent attempts to follow and reunite with Alfred.

As for so many early twentieth-century women writers, modernism for Susan Glaspell (1876-1948) was at once a blessing and a curse. It stimulated her best work, and then scorned her aesthetic. It incorporated her theatrical innovations, and proceeded to ignore their creator. It made her reputation, but only to repudiate it. In order to understand these seeming paradoxes, that slippery term, “modernism,” or, more accurately, “modernisms,” must be defined in its gendered American historical context before we turn to Susan Glaspell herself.

Much of the exuberance of American nineteenth-century literary culture arose from the belief that art and life are indivisible. As Ralph Waldo Emerson, who greatly influenced Glaspell, concludes in “The Poet”(1842), “The poets are thus liberating gods … They are free, and they make free”(236). Although Emerson addressed his exhortations to “men,”women, too, believed that their writings would and should affect the lives of their compatriots. One of the major goals of the so-called domestic and sentimental novelists of mid-century was to evoke feeling or “sentiment”in their readers, but feeling was the means to an end, not the end itself. In her “Concluding Remarks”to her best-selling Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), Harriet Beecher Stowe admonished her readers, “There is one thing that every individual can do, - they can see to it that they feel right”(624), and then act upon that feeling to end slavery. When Abraham Lincoln addressed Stowe in 1863 as “the little lady who made this big war,”his condescending comment did acknowledge that Stowe’s art moved her readers to profound change in American life.