figuration

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figuration

1. Music

a. the employment of characteristic patterns of notes, esp in variations on a theme

b. decoration or florid ornamentation in general

2. Art a figurative or emblematic representation

figuration

configuration

the ‘nexus of interdependencies between people’, the ‘chains of functions’ and ‘axes of tensions’ -both of cooperation and conflict – which can be identified in any social context (ELIAS, 1978). The concept is the central analytical concept of Norbert Elias 's FIGURATIONAL SOCIOLOGY. Elias rejects any model of Man as homo clausus – the closed or discrete individual. Equally, however, he also rejects purely structural forms of explanation. It is the model of the ‘dance’ or the ‘game’ which Elias suggests best illustrates the focus he seeks to achieve in social analysis. The ‘image of the mobile figurations of interdependent people on a dance floor (or playing a sport-game) which makes it easier to imagine states, cities, families and also entire social systems as figurations’ (ELIAS, 1939). See also CIVILIZING PROCESS, COURT SOCIETY.

Figuration

in music, the enrichment of a musical texture through the addition of melodic or rhythmic elements. In harmonic figuration, a voice, usually the bass, moves along the notes of a chord, producing a broken chord or harmonic ornament. The Alberti bass is a type of harmonic figuration. Rhythmic figuration involves the repetition of a single note, several notes of a chord, or an entire chord. In melodic figuration, turns or decorative figures, uniform in rhythm and frequently in melodic contour with the primary melodic line, are inserted between melodic phrases; these figures are close to melodic ornaments.

Since the 16th century melodic figuration has been used primarily when a melody is repeated at another pitch or on another instrument, in variations on the basso ostinato, and, in classical and romantic music, in the variational or reprise sections of a work. Melodic figuration also includes various types of discordant notes—suspended, passing, auxiliary, and changing notes.

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The fear of language is manifest in the very intensity of the reformers' scorn for the metaphoricity of transubstantiation and in their anxious effort to distinguish their own figuration from that of the poets and playwrights.

Language and History in the Reformation: Cranmer, Gardiner, and the Words of Institution

The implication, I think, is that the continued circulation of sodomitical innuendo surrounding James transforms the figure of the sodomite king -- with its direct assertion of royal corruption and its scandalous popular appeal -- from an unpublishable figuration of corrupt favoritism into a standard trope for the abuse of access.

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Focusing on the Noli me tangere, the Madonna with Eight Saints, and the Annunciation, he reveals their multivalent significance, treating the paintings as virtual figurations of theological speculation and vehicles for spiritual meditation.

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Embedded within his work is a long-standing dialogue between the island cultures of Crete and Ynys Mon: works are made with Welsh material in Greece and vice-versa, often acknowledging the remarkable geological similarities of the two island and extending to the study of Greek icon painting and its relation to figuration and abstraction.

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In Ghostly Figures: Memory and Belatedness in Postwar American Poetry, Ann Keniston reopens two topics that are central to thinking about poetry but that each present a number of potential snares for the scholar who aims to train a critical eye upon them: temporality and figuration.

Ghostly Figures: Memory and Belatedness in Postwar American Poetry

6- Anwar : Cette jeune pouliche qui reste sur des excellents resultats, ne fera pas le deplacement de Barika pour de la simple figuration mais bien au contraire pour tenter de bruler la politesse aux locaux de l'epreuve.

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The Museum Ludwig survey will feature roughly a dozen such works but also some 150 lesser-known pieces in which Baer developed and exceeded her earlier concerns: richly colored gouaches of provocative symmetries and patterns, small rectangular studies (with creased edges and notched corners that allowed her to figure out the workings of her wraparound compositions), watercolors that Baer used to imagine bold installations of paintings, and a nude from 1960 that anticipates the subtle figuration with which Baer left her signature austerity behind.

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Its oscillation between figuration and abstraction might even provoke a reexamination of aesthetic taxonomies.

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So elaborate is his application of color to represent the effects of light and shadow -- Yazici renders detail with acrylic pens -- that figuration, while realistic enough, is almost secondary.

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A fast piano figuration with accents that suggest staggering in the desert forms the introduction.

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I believe in times of conflict, figuration comes to the fore.

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C'est un pretexte pour concevoir un langage plastique relevant de la nouvelle figuration qui oscille entre la figuration allusive et l'abstraction expressive.