The Book of Requiems, 1450-1550

Few western musical repertories speak more to the imagination than the Requiem mass for the dead. The Book of Requiems presents in-depth essays on the most important works in this tradition, from the origins of the genre up to the present day. Each chapter is devoted to a specific Requiem, and offers both historical information and a detailed work-discussion. Conceived as a multi-volume essay collection by leading experts, The Book of Requiems is an authoritative reference publication intended as a first port of call for musicologists, music theorists, and performers both professional and student.

The formation and development of pediatrics and pediatric education in Primorye

The article presents historical information about the development of pediatrics and pediatric education in Primorsky Region. It started from the establishment of the pediatric faculty of the Vladivostok Medical Institute in 1969 to the present day. Main directions of scientific and pedagogical activities of pediatric profile departments are highlighted. The departments were reorganized in 2016 into the Institute of Pediatrics; departments of normal and pathological physiology, pathological anatomy, and foreign languages. The article also indicates those people who were at the origins of pediatrics and pediatric education in Primorye.

Incorporating historical information to improve extreme sea level estimates

Extreme value analysis seeks to assign probabilities to events which deviate significantly from the mean and is thus widely employed in disciplines dealing with natural hazards. In terms of extreme sea levels (ESLs), these probabilities help to define coastal flood risk which guides the design of coastal protection measures. While tide gauge and other systematic records are typically used to estimate ESLs, combining systematic data with historical information has been shown to reduce uncertainties and better represent statistical outliers. This paper introduces a new method for the incorporation of historical information in extreme value analysis which outperforms other commonly used approaches. Monte-Carlo Simulations are used to evaluate a posterior distribution of historical and systematic ESLs based on the prior distribution of systematic data. This approach is applied at the German town of Travemünde, providing larger ESL estimates compared to those determined using systematic data only. We highlight a potential to underestimate ESLs at Travemünde when historical information is disregarded, due to a period of relatively low ESL activity for the duration of the systematic record.

SHIRSHOV INSTITUTE OF OCEANOLOGY. TO THE HISTORY OF THE BUILDING: THE PAST. PRESENT. A POSSIBLE FUTURE

The article tells about the buildings in which Shirshov Institute of Oceanology of the Russian Academy of Sciences (IO RAS) was previously and is now located. Historical information is given in detail, with a description of the design of the Institute building, the process of its construction and the results of the implementation of this bold and unusual architectural project for that time. The text of the article is accompanied by illustrations – old and modern photographs of the Institute and drawings. Part of the history of the Institute is captured in an excerpt from the book by P.A. Stunzhas “Institute of Oceanology: my Home and my Work” (2016). Information about the past, as well as the modern Institute and the project of a possible future building was prepared on the basis of official documents of the Institute.

Some Considerations

This chapter offers thoughts about origin and function of the Jovian Narrative. The Jovian Narrative is a composite text in which various narratives about Julian and Jovian circulating in northern Mesopotamia and the Syriac-speaking world were combined. The Jovian Narrative is part of the Syriac tradition of Christian discourse of imagination, and the author is likely to have made use of various Syriac narrative traditions. Edessa is in all probability the Christian intellectual center where most of these texts were produced, and the Jovian Narrative most likely had its origin in Edessa. For the composition of his text, the composer is likely to have made use of various Syriac narrative traditions as well as historical information. The compilation of the Jovian Narrative as a cohesive text should probably be seen against the background of the religious and geopolitical policy of the emperor Justinian (527–565). Under his reign the Roman–Persian military conflict flared up again in all vehemence after many years of peaceful coexistence between the two empires. Furthermore, the Jovian Narrative intervenes on an eschatological level in the conflict between Chalcedonians and non-Chalcedonians in the reign of Justinian. Jovian is presented as the eschatological realization of the ideal Christian emperor, who represents a return to the orthodox ideal as it existed under Constantine.

Neural dynamics of causal inference in the macaque frontoparietal circuit

ABSTRACTNatural perception relies inherently on inferring causal structure in the environment. However, the neural mechanisms and functional circuits that are essential for representing and updating the hidden causal structure and corresponding sensory representations during multisensory processing are unknown. To address this, monkeys were trained to infer the probability of a potential common source from visual and proprioceptive signals on the basis of their spatial disparity in a virtual reality system. The proprioceptive drift reported by monkeys demonstrated that they combined historical information and current multisensory signals to estimate the hidden common source and subsequently updated both the causal structure and sensory representation. Single-unit recordings in premotor and parietal cortices revealed that neural activity in premotor cortex represents the core computation of causal inference, characterizing the estimation and update of the likelihood of integrating multiple sensory inputs at a trial-by-trial level. In response to signals from premotor cortex, neural activity in parietal cortex also represents the causal structure and further dynamically updates the sensory representation to maintain consistency with the causal inference structure. Thus, our results indicate how premotor cortex integrates historical information and sensory inputs to infer hidden variables and selectively updates sensory representations in parietal cortex to support behavior. This dynamic loop of frontal-parietal interactions in the causal inference framework may provide the neural mechanism to answer long-standing questions regarding how neural circuits represent hidden structures for body-awareness and agency.

Historiographic Metafiction and the Metaphysical Detective in Roberto Bolaño’s Amulet

Roberto Bolaño’s Amulet explores the writing of history as an attempt to construct a narrative from a multitude of unreliable and conflicting sources. As a result, any attempt at historiography is also plagued by the problems of representation found in literature. More particularly, not unlike detective fiction, history is concerned with identifying the inspirations and actions of its players and with revealing the truth about an episode or series of episodes, using historical information, all of which may or may not be reliable. By examining the relationship between the historical and the fictional in Amulet this paper will discuss Bolaño’s use of the tropes of metaphysical detective fiction and how they help foreground the difficulties posed by historical facts by reinventing them in fiction. This will, in turn, highlight the intersection between detective fiction and historiographic metafiction and how by combining these two genres writers can reimagine historical contexts and find new meanings and significance.

Интерпретации «Хайтармы» А. Спендиаряна в творчестве современных исполнителей республики Татарстан

This article presents two musical arrangements of "Haytarma" from A. Spendiaryan's suite "Crimean Sketches" (part 1), performed by Kazan musicians and composers - R.E. Ilyasov for the "Kazan Nury" folk instrument orchestra and R.Yu. Abyazov for the "La Primavera" string chamber orchestra. A brief historical information about the work of A. Spendiaryan connected with the Crimean Tatar music is given. Also presented is material about the peculiarities of the Crimean Tatar folk dance "haitarma", about its different musical variants. This work will be useful to a wide range of professional musicians, as well as researchers of the Crimean Tatar folk music.

Zu den Heiligennamen „Bartholomäus“ und „Johannes“ im Siebenbürgisch-Sächsischen, die auf biblische Heilige und deren Geburtstage zurückgehen

The article initially covers the historical information regarding two biblical saints „Saint Bartholomew“ and „John the Baptist“ and their birthdays. In vernacular documents from 1900 to 1980 inclusively, the Transylvanian-Saxon names „Bartholomew“ and „John“ were related to the respective saint. The vernacular documents show that their birthdays were playing a role in seasonal determination for peasant work as well as being used in descriptive country sayings, in idioms and in traditional customs. The case examples are taken from the Transylvanian-Saxon Dictionary, the North Transylvanian Dictionary, as well as relevant specialist and vernacular literature.

The chivalric tomb in fifteenth-century Portugal

The fifteenth-century Portuguese nobility was a proud and image-conscious social group that transformed tombs into opportunities for self-promotion. Manifesting changing conceptualizations of history and agency, the nobility’s elaborately sculpted sepulchres also reveal the means of successful social advancement in this society. The ruling dynasty of Avís encouraged the chivalric ethos of the long fifteenth century to exert control over the powerful nobility and validate their expansionist agenda in Africa. This profoundly shaped the visual idiom of funerary sculpture, resulting in the emergence of the ‘chivalric tomb’ in Portugal. Taking advantage of the blurred lines between chivalry and politics and between history and propaganda, Portuguese aristocrats began to manipulate their posthumous images to construct enduring, positive legacies in the public imagination. Aristocratic Portuguese tombs remain virtually untapped sources of social-historical information, particularly through their display of consistent commemorative strategies ranging from genealogical epitaphs to figural portrayals of Africans. Drawing on extensive fieldwork and archival research and offering a close examination of these monuments through visual, literary and historical evidence, this article explores the artistic intersection of death and memory in late medieval Portuguese society and elucidates how aristocratic funerary monuments performed a persuasive, as well as memorial, function.