Robert Faulkner – författare

Why do some children take up music, while others dont? Why do some excel, whilst others give up? Why do some children favour classical music, whilst others prefer rock? These are questions that have puzzled music educators, psychologists, and musicologists for many years. Yet, they are incredibly difficult and complex questions to answer. 'Music in our lives' takes an innovative approach to trying to answer these questions. It is drawn from a research project that spanned fourteen years, and closely followed the lives of over 150 children learning music - from their seventh to their twenty second birthdays. This detailed longitudinal approach helped the authors probe a number of important issues. For example, how do you define musical skill and ability? Is it true, as many assume, that continuous engagement in performance is the sole way in which those skills can be developed? What are the consequences of trends and behaviours observed amongst the general public, and their listening consumption. After presenting an overview and detailed case study explorations of musical lives, the book provides frameworks and theory for further investigation and discussion. It tries to present an holistic interpretation of these studies, and looks at their implications for musical development and education. Accessibly written by three leading researchers in the fields of music education and music psychology, this book makes a powerful contribution to understanding the dynamic and vital context of music in our lives.

A searching defense of great political leadership​The Case for Greatness is a spirited look at political ambition, good and bad, with particular attention to honorable ambition. Robert Faulkner contends that too many modern accounts of leadership slight such things as determination to excel, good judgment, justice, and a sense of honor—the very qualities that distinguish the truly great. And here he offers an attempt to recover “a reasonable understanding of excellence,” that which distinguishes a Franklin D. Roosevelt and a Lincoln from lesser leaders. Faulkner finds the most telling diagnoses in antiquity and examines closely Aristotle’s great-souled man, two accounts of the spectacular and dubious Athenian politician Alcibiades, and the life of the imperial conqueror Cyrus the Great. There results a complex and compelling picture of greatness and its problems. Faulkner dissects military and imperial ambition, the art of leadership, and, in the later example of George Washington, ambition in the service of popular self-government. He also addresses modern indictments of even the best forms of political greatness, whether in the critical thinking of Hobbes, the idealism of Kant, the relativism and brutalism of Nietzsche, or the egalitarianism of Rawls and Arendt. He shows how modern philosophy came to doubt and indeed disdain even the best forms of ambition. This book is a nuanced defense of admirable ambition and the honor-seeking life, as well as an irresistible invitation to apply these terms to our own times and leaders.

Concentration camp survivor, former Marxist-Leninist and Lithuanian patriot, Aleksandras Shtromas devoted his life to understanding totalitarianism and political change. He was a remarkably prescient thinker and is probably best known for his prediction of the fall of the Soviet Union, forecast at a time when the mighty empire seemed almost invincible. This posthumous collection of writings, edited by Robert Faulkner and Daniel J. Mahoney, addresses some of the topics that preoccupied Shtromas throughout his life, including totalitarian regimes, postcommunist transitions, the fates of the Baltic states, and the nature of political revolutions. Readers of Totalitarianism and the Prospects for World Order: Closing the Door on the Twentieth Century will encounter not just a learned and impressive scholar, but also a great man who confronted monstrous evils in his lifetime.

Concentration camp survivor, former Marxist-Leninist and Lithuanian patriot, Aleksandras Shtromas devoted his life to understanding totalitarianism and political change. He was a remarkably prescient thinker and is probably best known for his prediction of the fall of the Soviet Union, forecast at a time when the mighty empire seemed almost invincible. This posthumous collection of writings, edited by Robert Faulkner and Daniel J. Mahoney, addresses some of the topics that preoccupied Shtromas throughout his life, including totalitarian regimes, postcommunist transitions, the fates of the Baltic states, and the nature of political revolutions. Readers of Totalitarianism and the Prospects for World Order: Closing the Door on the Twentieth Century will encounter not just a learned and impressive scholar, but also a great man who confronted monstrous evils in his lifetime.

Within eight years of the death of George Washington in 1799, a biography of the President was written by John Marshall and published in five volumes. The abridged volume of 1849 is reproduced in this volume, with a foreword and notes by the editors and maps of battle campaigns.

A sparsely populated island in the North Atlantic recently made worldwide headlines in the Global Financial Crisis and for volcanic eruptions that caused unprecedented chaos to international air travel. Large contemporary audiences have formed very different images of Iceland through the vocal music and music videos of Björk and Sigur Rós. Just below the Arctic Circle, Icelandic men engage in more everyday vocal practices, where singing, literally for one's Self, is an everyday life skill set against a backdrop of unique natural, historical, economic and social phenomena. Their sagas of song and singing are the subject of this book. The original Icelandic Sagas - among the most important collections of medieval European literature - are valued for richly detailed portrayals of individual lives. This book's principle protagonists and collaborators share a heritage where Sagas remain central to national and local identity. While the oral traditions associated with them were largely overwhelmed by European romanticism just over a hundred years ago, ironically, this new vocal music became a key technology for national renewal. Written by an ’immigrant’ musician who lived in a remote Icelandic community for over twenty years, this volume focuses upon individual and collective stories about singing as personal and social work. Drawing upon everyday ethnographic and sociological studies of music, and emerging discourse about musical identity, the study uses anthropological, historical and musicological evidence in thinking about songs, singing and Self, and the genderedness of this particular singing practice.