Vocal Virtuosity, Value Creation, and the Transformation of Contemporary Gospel Music

Author(s):  
Nina C. Öhman

This chapter argues that virtuosic gospel vocal performance constitutes a medium of spiritual value creation that produces communal power and facilitates what can be described as a trade of musicality—of commercial exchange centered around sacred music. Dorinda Clark Cole is a renowned gospel vocalist. In this chapter, Clark Cole’s concert at the Samsung Experience showroom in the Time Warner Center at the Columbus Circle area of New York City provides a productive site from which to examine the commercialization of gospel music because it involves exchange relations between a musical community and a corporate sponsor. A closer focus on the relationship between gospel music and capitalism in this context challenges a dichotomized notion of how gospel music circulates in varied sacred and secular arenas that seemingly represent incommensurate, even contrasting, systems of value. Through a musical analysis and an exploration of corporate interests in the concert, value creation through musical performance in a commercial setting is shown to forge social relations and produce power that sustains the regenerative nature of gospel music.

Author(s):  
Paolo FESTA ◽  
Tommaso CORA ◽  
Lucilla FAZIO

Is it possible to transform stone into a technological and innovative device? The meeting with one of the main stone transformers in Europe produced the intention of a disruptive operation that could affect the strategy of the whole company. A contagious singularity. By intertwining LEAN methodologies and the human-centric approach of design thinking, we mapped the value creation in the company activating a dialogue with the workers and the management, listening to people, asking for ambitions, discovering problems and the potential of production. This qualitative and quantitative analysis conducted with a multidisciplinary approach by designers, architects and marketing strategists allowed us to define a new method. We used it to design a platform that could let all the players express their potential to the maximum. This is how the group's research laboratory was born, with the aim of promoting the relationship between humans and stone through product innovation. With this goal, we coordinated the new team, developing technologies that would allow creating a more direct relationship between man and surface, making the stone reactive. The result was the first responsive kitchen ever.


2005 ◽  
Vol 156 (8) ◽  
pp. 288-296
Author(s):  
Vittorio Magnago Lampugnani

In the first half of the 19th century scientific philosophers in the United States, such as Emerson and Thoreau, began to pursue the relationship between man and nature. Painters from the Hudson River School discovered the rural spaces to the north of New York and began to celebrate the American landscape in their paintings. In many places at this time garden societies were founded, which generated widespread support for the creation of park enclosures While the first such were cemeteries with the character of parks, housing developments on the peripheries of towns were later set in generous park landscapes. However, the centres of the growing American cities also need green spaces and the so-called «park movement»reached a first high point with New York's Central Park. It was not only an experimental field for modern urban elements, but even today is a force of social cohesion.


2018 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 265-272
Author(s):  
Venelin Terziev ◽  
Preslava Dimitrova

The social policy of a country is a set of specific activities aimed at regulating the social relations between different in their social status subjects. This approach to clarifying social policy is also called functional and essentially addresses social policy as an activity to regulate the relationship of equality or inequality in society. It provides an opportunity to look for inequalities in the economic positions of individuals in relation to ownership, labor and working conditions, distribution of income and consumption, social security and health, to look for the sources of these inequalities and their social justification or undue application.The modern state takes on social functions that seek to regulate imbalances, to protect weak social positions and prevent the disintegration of the social system. It regulates the processes in society by harmonizing interests and opposing marginalization. Every modern country develops social activities that reflect the specifics of a particular society, correspond to its economic, political and cultural status. They are the result of political decisions aimed at directing and regulating the process of adaptation of the national society to the transformations of the market environment. Social policy is at the heart of the development and governance of each country. Despite the fact that too many factors and problems affect it, it largely determines the physical and mental state of the population as well as the relationships and interrelationships between people. On the other hand, social policy allows for a more global study and solving of vital social problems of civil society. On the basis of the programs and actions of political parties and state bodies, the guidelines for the development of society are outlined. Social policy should be seen as an activity to regulate the relationship of equality or inequality between different individuals and social groups in society. Its importance is determined by the possibility of establishing on the basis of the complex approach: the economic positions of the different social groups and individuals, by determining the differences between them in terms of income, consumption, working conditions, health, etc .; to explain the causes of inequality; to look for concrete and specific measures to overcome the emerging social disparities.


Author(s):  
William Wheeler

This chapter looks at a postsocialist fishery in Kazakhstan to explore the relationship between property rules designed to manage natural resources, and practices of resource exploitation. The Aral Sea is famous for its desiccation over the second half of the twentieth century, which stemmed from Soviet irrigation projects; in 2006 a World Bank/Republic of Kazakhstan project restored a small part of the sea, and fish catches have recently recovered somewhat. In this chapter, based on ethnographic and archival research, I explore the disjuncture between formal rules and practice to address debates about the management of common-pool resources. Within the nomadic economy, in contrast to livestock, fish were not property objects; over the colonial, Soviet and post-Soviet periods, they became objects of economic value in different ways, mediating different sorts of social relations. Turning to the contemporary property regime, I suggest that formal rules matter, but in unintended ways.


Author(s):  
Qingyu Zhou ◽  
Qinwen Yu ◽  
Xin Wang ◽  
Peiwu Shi ◽  
Qunhong Shen ◽  
...  

This study aimed to analyze the changes in the 10 major categories of women’s healthcare services (WHSs) in Shanghai (SH) and New York City (NYC) from 1978 to 2017, and examine the relationship between these changes and maternal mortality ratio (MMR). Content analysis of available public policy documents concerning women’s health was conducted. Two indicators were designed to represent the delivery of WHSs: The essential women’s healthcare service coverage rate (ESCR) and the assessable essential healthcare service coverage rate (AESCR). Spearman correlation was used to analyze the relationship between the two indicators and MMR. In SH, the ESCR increased from 10% to 90%, AESCR increased from 0% to 90%, and MMR decreased from 24.0/100,000 to 1.01/100,000. In NYC, the ESCR increased from 0% to 80%, the AESCR increased from 0% to 60%, and the MMR decreased from 24.7/100,000 to 21.4/100,000. The MMR significantly decreased as both indicators increased (p < 0.01). Major advances have been made in women’s healthcare in both cities, with SH having a better improvement effect. A common shortcoming for both was the lack of menopausal health service provision. The promotion of women’s health still needs to receive continuous attention from governments of SH and NYC. The experiences of the two cities showed that placing WHSs among policy priorities is effective in improving service status.


Author(s):  
Dörte Schmidt

Abstract The article discusses how new developments in the notation of contemporary music were negotiated within the framework of the Darmstadt Summer Courses and which interests and actors played a role in this. The first part examines the publications and publication projects that emerged in the context of the Notation conference in 1964. The focus is on the interests of institutions such as the International Music Council and the International Association of Music Libraries, in whose name the New York publisher Kurt Stone attempted to persuade the International Music Institute Darmstadt to cooperate and, following on from the debates there, to systematically record various forms of notation together. In a second step, the content of the debates at the conference is examined, with a particular focus on the different and sometimes conflicting perspectives of interpreters and composers. Numerous connections to fundamental aesthetic discussions of the time can be worked out, in particular to the relationship between the composer’s intention and interpretation, which was renegotiated in a form of notation that was individualized to the extreme. Finally, with a view to later discussions, this topic is pointed to the question of the relationship between morphology and musical structure, exemplified by positions of Wolfgang Rihm (1982), Klaus Huber (1988) and John Cage (1990).


Author(s):  
Rachel Herold ◽  
Rachel Boykan ◽  
Allison Eliscu ◽  
Héctor E. Alcalá ◽  
Maciej L. Goniewicz

Nicotine and cannabis use are common among adolescents and may be associated with behavioral problems, poor academic outcomes and use disorders. The goals of this analysis were the following: (1) Describe the influence of friends’ nicotine and cannabis smoking and vaping on self-reported use. (2) Describe the relationship between friends’ nicotine and cannabis use on participants’ urinary biomarkers of nicotine (cotinine) and cannabis (11-nor-9-carboxy-Δ⁹tetrahydrocannabinol=THC-COOH). This is a secondary analysis of survey and biomarker data collected in adolescents aged 12–21 between April 2017 and April 2018, in Long Island, New York. Bivariate and multivariable analyses were conducted using SPSS 26. A cutoff value of ≥10 ng/mL was used to signify recent usage for urinary cotinine and THC-COOH levels. Over one-third of the 517 surveyed adolescents reported using tobacco and one-third reported using cannabis. A significant relationship between friends’ substance use and self-use was found. For both tobacco and cannabis, over 90% (p < 0.01) of participants with urinary biomarker levels above cutoff had friends who used the respective substance. Friends’ nicotine and friends’ cannabis use were each independently associated with urinary biomarker levels for those substances (for nicotine, beta = 88.29, p = 0.03; for cannabis, beta = 163.58, p = 0.03). Friends’ use of nicotine and cannabis is associated with adolescents’ intake, as well as the physiological exposure to those substances. These findings underscore the importance of including peer influence in the discussion with adolescents about tobacco and cannabis use.


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