scholarly journals Re-imagining Operatic "Objects": Commentary on Neumann's Phenomena, Poiesis, and Performance Profiling: Temporal-Textual Emphasis and Creative Process Analysis in Turandot at the Metropolitan Opera

2018 ◽  
Vol 12 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 272
Author(s):  
Georgia Volioti

Objects come in all sorts of shapes, sizes and forms. The notion of musical works as objects, represented by their written scores, has proved to be effete and limiting to the study of music as diverse social-cultural practice and performed craft. The past two decades have witnessed considerable efforts to renew conceptual and methodological tools, and Neumann's study makes a valuable contribution to this effect. This commentary responds to some issues raised by Neumann's article in relation to the notion of musical "object". Specifically, I retrace the shift from a score-based to a process-oriented musicology geared towards performances, placing the concerns of contemporary opera studies within this broader disciplinary change. I consider some implications of technology in mediating new operatic objects for discourse. Finally, I reflect on some of the inherent dangers of objectifying performance in empirical analyses.

2018 ◽  
Vol 12 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 247
Author(s):  
Joshua Neumann

Amidst discussions regarding the nature of a musical work, tensions within and between score- and performance-based approaches often increase ideological entrenchment. Opera's textual and visual elements, along with its inherently social nature, both simultaneously complicate understanding of a work's nature and provide interdisciplinary analytical inroads. Analysis of operatic performance faces challenges of how to interrogate onstage musical behaviors, and how they relate to both dramatic narrative and an opera's identity. This article applies Martin Heidegger's dichotomy of technē and poiēsis to relationships between scores, performances, and works, characterizing works as conceptual, and scores and performances as tangible embodiments. Opera scholarship relies primarily upon scores, creating a lacuna of sound-based examinations. Adapting analyses developed in CHARM's "Mazurka Project," this essay incorporates textual considerations into tempo hierarchy as a means of asserting each performance's nuanced uniqueness and thus provides a window into performers' creative processes. Interviews with the performers considered in this study confirmed postulations derived from analyzing temporal-textual emphases. This approach is adaptable to other expressive elements employed in creating a role onstage. In addition to the hybrid empirical-hermeneutic application, the datasets created in this approach could be valuable as ground truth in machine learning applications.


2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-57 ◽  
Author(s):  
Louis Laberge-Côté

Over the past four years I have developed The Porous Body, a teaching philosophy that promotes the practice of heightened physical and mental malleability in dance training by following four fundamental guiding principles: flow, playfulness, metaphor and paradox. As my process deepened, I wondered: what would happen if I applied The Porous Body to my choreographic practice? How might this framework prove fruitful during a creative process? What kind of choreographic work would emerge from this experiment? This article is an artist’s reflection on an artistic experiment; it describes the first choreographic process to which I applied The Porous Body’s guiding principles, and which led to the creation and performance of edged, a solo work exploring the porous edges between inner/outer, planned/unplanned, control/surrender, pleasure/struggle and terror/courage.


2021 ◽  
pp. 002216782110129
Author(s):  
James R. Regan

Over the past 50 years, a new type of worker emerged in companies across America called the “knowledge worker.” It was a kind of worker that was first envisioned by Peter Drucker in 1959 in his book The Landmarks of Tomorrow: A Report on the New “Post-Modern” World. Drucker in describing the work of a knowledge worker said, “Productive work in today’s society and economy is work that applies vision, knowledge and concepts—work that is based on the mind rather than on the hand . . . Educated people are the “capital” of a developed society” (p. 120). In 2005, Davenport stated that there were approximately “36 million knowledge workers in the United States, or 28 percent of the labor force . . . and they tended to be closely aligned with the organization’s growth prospects” (pp. 6-7). This story reflects one person’s three-decade long journey, as a knowledge worker, in the world of high technology searching for humanistic beliefs as inscribed by the eupsychian philosophy of Abraham Maslow. Herrmann stated that the organizations along the way were similar in that they all reflected “systems of meanings, places of cultural practice and performance, and of domination, resistance, and struggle.”


2018 ◽  
Vol 12 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 269
Author(s):  
Daniel Barolsky

This commentary situates Neumann's research within the existing literature on musicological ontologies of the musical work as well as scholarship on the analysis of performance and recordings. The response focuses on the interdisciplinary strength of the author's method while offering a few caveats about the analytical tools used. Although Neumann ventures into an under-explored territory (i.e. the analysis of operatic voices), I urge the author not to isolate this analysis from other elements of performance, including both visual content and listening experience


2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (5) ◽  
pp. 685-707 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amna Batool ◽  
Farid Menaa ◽  
Bushra Uzair ◽  
Barkat Ali Khan ◽  
Bouzid Menaa

: The pace at which nanotheranostic technology for human disease is evolving has accelerated exponentially over the past five years. Nanotechnology is committed to utilizing the intrinsic properties of materials and structures at submicroscopic-scale measures. Indeed, there is generally a profound influence of reducing physical dimensions of particulates and devices on their physico-chemical characteristics, biological properties, and performance. The exploration of nature’s components to work effectively as nanoscaffolds or nanodevices represents a tremendous and growing interest in medicine for various applications (e.g., biosensing, tunable control and targeted drug release, tissue engineering). Several nanotheranostic approaches (i.e., diagnostic plus therapeutic using nanoscale) conferring unique features are constantly progressing and overcoming all the limitations of conventional medicines including specificity, efficacy, solubility, sensitivity, biodegradability, biocompatibility, stability, interactions at subcellular levels. : This review introduces two major aspects of nanotechnology as an innovative and challenging theranostic strategy or solution: (i) the most intriguing (bare and functionalized) nanomaterials with their respective advantages and drawbacks; (ii) the current and promising multifunctional “smart” nanodevices.


2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 7-25
Author(s):  
Karolina Diallo

Pupil with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. Over the past twenty years childhood OCD has received more attention than any other anxiety disorder that occurs in the childhood. The increasing interest and research in this area have led to increasing number of diagnoses of OCD in children and adolescents, which affects both specialists and teachers. Depending on the severity of symptoms OCD has a detrimental effect upon child's school performance, which can lead almost to the impossibility to concentrate on school and associated duties. This article is devoted to the obsessive-compulsive disorder and its specifics in children, focusing on the impact of this disorder on behaviour, experience and performance of the child in the school environment. It mentions how important is the role of the teacher in whose class the pupil with this diagnosis is and it points out that it is necessary to increase teachers' competence to identify children with OCD symptoms, to take the disease into the account, to adapt the course of teaching and to introduce such measures that could help children reduce the anxiety and maintain (or increase) the school performance within and in accordance with the school regulations and curriculum.


Author(s):  
Konrad Hirschler

This chapter deals with how the Islamic historical writing of the Middle Period developed directly from the early Islamic tradition, and its legacy remained deeply inscribed into the ways history was written and represented between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries. However, as historians started to develop new styles and new genres, they turned to previously neglected aspects of the past, their social profile changed, and the writing of history became a more self-conscious, and to some degree self-confident, cultural practice. Most importantly, those issues that had motivated earlier historians, such as the legitimacy of the Abbasid Caliphate, declined in significance and historians of the Middle Period turned to new and more diverse subjects.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 81
Author(s):  
Kristina C. Backer ◽  
Heather Bortfeld

A debate over the past decade has focused on the so-called bilingual advantage—the idea that bilingual and multilingual individuals have enhanced domain-general executive functions, relative to monolinguals, due to competition-induced monitoring of both processing and representation from the task-irrelevant language(s). In this commentary, we consider a recent study by Pot, Keijzer, and de Bot (2018), which focused on the relationship between individual differences in language usage and performance on an executive function task among multilingual older adults. We discuss their approach and findings in light of a more general movement towards embracing complexity in this domain of research, including individuals’ sociocultural context and position in the lifespan. The field increasingly considers interactions between bilingualism/multilingualism and cognition, employing measures of language use well beyond the early dichotomous perspectives on language background. Moreover, new measures of bilingualism and analytical approaches are helping researchers interrogate the complexities of specific processing issues. Indeed, our review of the bilingualism/multilingualism literature confirms the increased appreciation researchers have for the range of factors—beyond whether someone speaks one, two, or more languages—that impact specific cognitive processes. Here, we highlight some of the most salient of these, and incorporate suggestions for a way forward that likewise encompasses neural perspectives on the topic.


Author(s):  
Viktoriia Chokhrii ◽  

The article is devoted to the consideration of problematic aspects of the implementation of administrative responsibility for non-payment of child support, is used in the form of socially useful work. In particular, the essence of this type of administrative penalty is revealed. The study focuses on the problematic issues that arise in the implementation of the imposed administrative responsibility in the form of socially useful work. A number of problems concerning the legal application of Article 183-1 of the Code of Ukraine on Administrative Offenses (hereinafter – the Code of Administrative Offenses) and ways of their solution have been outlined. Amendments to the current legislation of Ukraine are proposed in order to improve the implementation of resolutions in cases of administrative offenses. In particular, it is proposed to monitor the workload of the staff of the territorial bodies of the State Executive Service in Ukraine and analyze their staffing standards and functional responsibilities for the preparation of materials under Article 183-1 of the Code of Administrative Offenses. In addition, it was proposed to improve the organization of the performance of socially useful work by local governments by conducting appropriate explanatory work and methodological assistance to local governments in organizing the solution of this issue. The article proposes to transfer control functions to the executive body, and to improve the duty imposed on local governments to provide socially useful work is to improve, including amendments to the labor legislation of Ukraine. It is noted that when drawing up an administrative offense or making a decision in the case, it is necessary to find out the presence or absence of circumstances that for good reasons made it impossible for the debtor to pay child support, or the existing alimony arrears for the past period. The expediency of development of methodical recommendations for local self-government bodies concerning the order of definition and performance of socially useful works is substantiated.


Author(s):  
L Thomas, P Rajeev, P C Sanil

India is one of the major producers and consumer of cardamom. The export performance of cardamom has witnessed several changes over the past few decades. This paper analyses the trends and performance of cardamom commodity from India. Using secondary data from the Spices Board and the Ministry of Commerce along with international trade data from the United Nations International Trade Statistics Database, the trend in the domestic production and export markets is clearly drawn out. The changes in Revealed Comparative Advantage in cardamom exports over the years is used to study the level and changes in the export competitiveness of the commodity. The study identifies a revival in export competiveness in the recent years along with an increase in the share of global cardamom exports. The highly concentrated production of cardamom, the preference for Indian cardamom in Middle East economies and the revival of export competitiveness can benefit the Indian cardamom producers. The study argues for strengthening research investments in cardamom for sustaining and enhancing the benefits from cardamom exports from the country.


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