title: Ceuta

text: Spanish is the primary and official language of the enclave. Moroccan Arabic (Darija) is widely spoken. In 2021, the Council of Europe demanded that Spain formally recognize the language by 2023.


title: Ceuta

text: Christianity has been present in Ceuta continuously from late antiquity, as evidenced by the ruins of a basilica in downtown Ceuta and accounts of the martyrdom of St. Daniel Fasanella and his Franciscans in 1227 during the Almohad Caliphate.


title: Ceuta

text: The town's Grand Mosque had been built over a Byzantine-era church. In 1415, the year of the city's conquest, the Portuguese converted the Grand Mosque into Ceuta Cathedral. The present form of the cathedral dates to refurbishments undertaken in the late 17th century, combining baroque and neoclassical elements. It was dedicated to StMary of the Assumption in 1726.


title: Ceuta

text: The Roman Catholic Diocese of Ceuta was established in 1417. It incorporated the suppressed Diocese of Tanger in 1570. The Diocese of Ceuta was a suffragan of Lisbon until 1675, when it became a suffragan of Seville. In 1851, Ceuta's administration was notionally merged into the Diocese of Cádiz and Ceuta as part of a concordat between Spain and the Holy See; the union was not actually accomplished, however, until 1879.


title: Ceuta

text: Roman Catholicism is the largest religion in Ceuta. In 2019, the proportion of Ceutans that identify themselves as Roman Catholic was 60.0%, The next largest religion was Islam (36.7%).


title: Ceuta

text: Like Melilla, Ceuta attracts African migrants who try to use it as an entry to Europe. As a result, the enclave is surrounded by double fences that are high, and hundreds of migrants congregate near the fences waiting for a chance to cross them. The fences are regularly stormed by migrants trying to claim asylum once they enter Ceuta.


title: Ceuta

text: The University of Granada offers undergraduate programs at their campus in Ceuta. Like all areas of Spain, Ceuta is also served by the National University of Distance Education (UNED).


title: Ceuta

text: While primary and secondary education are generally offered in Spanish only, a growing number of schools are entering the Bilingual Education Program.


title: Ceuta

text: The government of Morocco has repeatedly called for Spain to transfer the sovereignty of Ceuta and Melilla, along with uninhabited islets such as the islands of Alhucemas, Velez and the Perejil island, drawing comparisons with Spain's territorial claim to Gibraltar. In both cases, the national governments and local populations of the disputed territories reject these claims by a large majority. The Spanish position is that both Ceuta and Melilla are integral parts of Spain, and have been since the 16th century, centuries prior to Morocco's independence from Spain and France in 1956, whereas Gibraltar, being a British Overseas Territory, is not and never has been part of the United Kingdom. Morocco has claimed the territories are colonies. One of the chief arguments used by Morocco to reclaim Ceuta comes from geography, as this exclave, which is surrounded by Morocco and the Mediterranean Sea, has no territorial continuity with the rest of Spanish territory. This argument was originally developed by one of the founders of the Moroccan Istiqlal Party, Alal-El Faasi, who openly advocated the Moroccan conquest of Ceuta and other territories under Spanish rule.


title: Ceuta

text: However Ceuta and Melilla are not under NATO protection since Article 6 of the treaty limits the coverage to Europe and North America and islands north of the Tropic of Cancer.


title: Ceuta

text: Legal experts have interpreted that other articles could cover the Spanish North African cities but this interpretation has not been tested in practice. On the occasion of NATO's Madrid Summit in 2022, the issue of the protection Cueta and Melilla was a prominent one with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg stating: "On which territories NATO protects and Ceuta and Melilla, NATO is there to protect all Allies against any threats. At the end of the day, it will always be a political decision to invoke Article 5, but rest assured NATO is there to protect and defend all Allies".


title: Ceuta

text: On 21 December 2020, following the affirmations of the Moroccan Prime Minister, Saadeddine Othmani, stating that Ceuta and Melilla "are Moroccan as the Sahara [is]", Spain urgently summoned the Moroccan ambassador to convey that Spain expects all its partners to respect the sovereignty and territorial integrity of its territory in Africa and asked for explanations of Othmani's words.


title: Dmitri Shostakovich

text: Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich (9 August 1975) was a Soviet-era Russian composer and pianist who became internationally known after the premiere of his First Symphony in 1926 and was regarded throughout his life as a major composer.


title: Dmitri Shostakovich

text: Shostakovich achieved early fame in the Soviet Union, but had a complex relationship with its government. His 1934 opera "Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk" was initially a success, but eventually was condemned by the Soviet government, putting his career at risk. In 1948 his work was denounced under the Zhdanov Doctrine, with professional consequences lasting several years. Even after his censure was rescinded in 1956, performances of his music were occasionally subject to state interventions, as with his Thirteenth Symphony (1962). Shostakovich was a member of the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR (1947) and the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union (from 1962 until his death), as well as chairman of the RSFSR Union of Composers (1960–1968). Over the course of his career, he earned several important awards, including the Order of Lenin, from the Soviet government.


title: Dmitri Shostakovich

text: Shostakovich combined a variety of different musical techniques in his works. His music is characterized by sharp contrasts, elements of the grotesque, and ambivalent tonality; he was also heavily influenced by neoclassicism and by the late Romanticism of Gustav Mahler. His orchestral works include 15 symphonies and six concerti (two each for piano, violin, and cello). His chamber works include 15 string quartets, a piano quintet, and two piano trios. His solo piano works include two sonatas, an early set of 24 preludes, and a later set of 24 preludes and fugues. Stage works include three completed operas and three ballets. Shostakovich also wrote several song cycles, and a substantial quantity of music for theatre and film.


title: Dmitri Shostakovich

text: Shostakovich's reputation has continued to grow after his death. Scholarly interest has increased significantly since the late 20th century, including considerable debate about the relationship between his music and his attitudes to the Soviet government.


title: Dmitri Shostakovich

text: Born at Podolskaya Street in Saint Petersburg, Russian Empire, Shostakovich was the second of three children of Dmitri Boleslavovich Shostakovich and Sofiya Vasilievna Kokoulina. Shostakovich's immediate forebears came from Siberia, but his paternal grandfather, Bolesław Szostakowicz, was of Polish Roman Catholic descent, tracing his family roots to the region of the town of Vileyka in today's Belarus. A Polish revolutionary in the January Uprising of 1863–64, Szostakowicz was exiled to Narym in 1866 in the crackdown that followed Dmitry Karakozov's assassination attempt on Tsar Alexander II. When his term of exile ended, Szostakowicz decided to remain in Siberia. He eventually became a successful banker in Irkutsk and raised a large family. His son Dmitri Boleslavovich Shostakovich, the composer's father, was born in exile in Narym in 1875 and studied physics and mathematics at Saint Petersburg University, graduating in 1899. He then went to work as an engineer under Dmitri Mendeleev at the Bureau of Weights and Measures in Saint Petersburg. In 1903, he married another Siberian immigrant to the capital, Sofiya Vasilievna Kokoulina, one of six children born to a Siberian Russian.


title: Dmitri Shostakovich

text: Their son, Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich, displayed significant musical talent after he began piano lessons with his mother at the age of nine. On several occasions, he displayed a remarkable ability to remember what his mother had played at the previous lesson, and would get "caught in the act" of playing the previous lesson's music while pretending to read different music placed in front of him. In 1918, he wrote a funeral march in memory of two leaders of the Kadet party murdered by Bolshevik sailors.


title: Dmitri Shostakovich

text: In 1919, at age 13, Shostakovich was admitted to the Petrograd Conservatory, then headed by Alexander Glazunov, who monitored his progress closely and promoted him. Shostakovich studied piano with Leonid Nikolayev and Elena Rozanova, composition with Maximilian Steinberg, and counterpoint and fugue with Nikolay Sokolov, who became his friend. He also attended Alexander Ossovsky's music history classes. In 1925, he enrolled in the conducting classes of Nikolai Malko, where he conducted the conservatory orchestra in a private performance of Beethoven's First Symphony. According to the recollections of the composer's classmate, :


title: Dmitri Shostakovich

text: Shostakovich stood at the podium, played with his hair and jacket cuffs, looked around at the hushed teenagers with instruments at the ready and raised the baton. ... He neither stopped the orchestra, nor made any remarks; he focused his entire attention on aspects of tempi and dynamics, which were very clearly displayed in his gestures. The contrasts between the "Adagio molto" of the introduction and "Allegro con brio" first theme were quite striking, as were those between the percussive accents of the chords (woodwinds, French horns, pizzicato strings) and the momentarily extended piano in the introduction following them. In the character given to the pattern of the first theme, I recall, there was both vigorous striving and lightness; in the bass part there was an emphasized pliancy of tenderly threaded articulation. ... Moments of these sorts ... were discoveries of an improvised order, born from an intuitively refined understanding of the character of a piece and the elements of musical imagery embedded in it. And the players enjoyed it.


title: Dmitri Shostakovich

text: On 20 March 1925, Shostakovich's music was played in Moscow for the first time, in a program which also included works by his friend Vissarion Shebalin. To the composer's disappointment, the critics and public there received his music coolly. During his visit to Moscow, Mikhail Kvadri introduced him to Mikhail Tukhachevsky, who helped the composer find accommodation and work there, and sent a driver to take him to a concert in "a very stylish automobile".


title: Dmitri Shostakovich

text: Shostakovich's musical breakthrough was the First Symphony, written as his graduation piece at the age of 19. Initially, Shostakovich aspired only to perform it privately with the conservatory orchestra and prepared to conduct the scherzo himself. By late 1925, Malko agreed to conduct its premiere with the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra after Steinberg and Shostakovich's friend Boleslav Yavorsky brought the symphony to his attention. On 12 May 1926, Malko led the premiere of the symphony; the audience received it enthusiastically, demanding an encore of the scherzo. Thereafter, Shostakovich regularly celebrated the date of his symphonic debut.


title: Dmitri Shostakovich

text: After graduation, Shostakovich embarked on a dual career as concert pianist and composer, but his dry keyboard style was often criticized. Shostakovich maintained a heavy performance schedule until 1930; after 1933, he performed only his own compositions. Along with , Grigory Ginzburg, Lev Oborin, and Josif Shvarts, he was among the Soviet contestants in the inaugural I International Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw in 1927. Bogdanov-Berezhovsky later remembered:


title: Dmitri Shostakovich

text: , who heard Shostakovich play his Chopin programs before he went to Warsaw, said that his "anti-sentimental" playing, which eschewed rubato and extreme dynamic contrasts, was unlike anything he had ever heard. called Shostakovich's playing "profound and lacking any salon-like mannerisms."


title: Dmitri Shostakovich

text: Shostakovich was stricken with appendicitis on the opening day of the competition, but his condition improved by the time of his first performance on 27 January 1927. (He had his appendix removed on 25 April.) According to Shostakovich, his playing found favor with the audience. He persisted into the final round of the competition but ultimately earned only a diploma, no prize; Oborin was declared the winner. Shostakovich was upset about the result but for a time resolved to continue a career as performer. While recovering from his appendectomy in April 1927, Shostakovich said he was beginning to reassess those plans:


title: Dmitri Shostakovich

text: After the competition, Shostakovich and Oborin spent a week in Berlin. There he met the conductor Bruno Walter, who was so impressed by Shostakovich's First Symphony that he conducted its first performance outside Russia later that year. Leopold Stokowski led the American premiere the next year in Philadelphia and also made the work's first recording.


title: Dmitri Shostakovich

text: In 1927, Shostakovich wrote his Second Symphony (subtitled "To October"), a patriotic piece with a pro-Soviet choral finale. Owing to its modernism, it did not meet with the same enthusiasm as his First. This year also marked the beginning of Shostakovich's close friendship with musicologist and theatre critic Ivan Sollertinsky, whom he had first met in 1921 through their mutual friends Lev Arnshtam and Lydia Zhukova. Shostakovich later said that Sollertinsky "taught [him] to understand and love such great masters as Brahms, Mahler, and Bruckner" and that he instilled in him "an interest in music ... from Bach to Offenbach."


title: Dmitri Shostakovich

text: While writing the Second Symphony, Shostakovich also began work on his satirical opera "The Nose", based on the story by Nikolai Gogol. In June 1929, against the composer's wishes, the opera was given a concert performance; it was ferociously attacked by the Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians (RAPM). Its stage premiere on 18 January 1930 opened to generally poor reviews and widespread incomprehension among musicians. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Shostakovich worked at TRAM, a proletarian youth theatre. Although he did little work in this post, it shielded him from ideological attack. Much of this period was spent writing his opera "Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk", which was first performed in 1934. It was initially immediately successful, on both popular and official levels. It was described as "the result of the general success of Socialist construction, of the correct policy of the Party", and as an opera that "could have been written only by a Soviet composer brought up in the best tradition of Soviet culture".


title: Dmitri Shostakovich

text: Shostakovich married his first wife, Nina Varzar, in 1932. Difficulties led to a divorce in 1935, but the couple soon remarried when Nina became pregnant with their first child, Galina.


title: Dmitri Shostakovich

text: On 17 January 1936, Joseph Stalin paid a rare visit to the opera for a performance of a new work, "Quiet Flows the Don", based on the novel by Mikhail Sholokhov, by the little-known composer Ivan Dzerzhinsky, who was called to Stalin's box at the end of the performance and told that his work had "considerable ideological-political value". On 26 January, Stalin revisited the opera, accompanied by Vyacheslav Molotov, Andrei Zhdanov and Anastas Mikoyan, to hear "Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District". He and his entourage left without speaking to anyone. Shostakovich had been forewarned by a friend that he should postpone a planned concert tour in Arkhangelsk in order to be present at that particular performance. Eyewitness accounts testify that Shostakovich was "white as a sheet" when he went to take his bow after the third act.


title: Dmitri Shostakovich

text: The next day, Shostakovich left for Arkhangelsk, where he heard on 28 January that "Pravda" had published an editorial titled "Muddle Instead of Music", complaining that the opera was a "deliberately dissonant, muddled stream of sounds ...[that] quacks, hoots, pants and gasps." Shostakovich continued his performance tour as scheduled, with no disruptions. From Arkhangelsk, he instructed Isaac Glikman to subscribe to a clipping service. The editorial was the signal for a nationwide campaign, during which even Soviet music critics who had praised the opera were forced to recant in print, saying they "failed to detect the shortcomings of "Lady Macbeth" as pointed out by "Pravda"". There was resistance from those who admired Shostakovich, including Sollertinsky, who turned up at a composers' meeting in Leningrad called to denounce the opera and praised it instead. Two other speakers supported him. When Shostakovich returned to Leningrad, he had a telephone call from the commander of the Leningrad Military District, who had been asked by Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky to make sure that he was all right. When the writer Isaac Babel was under arrest four years later, he told his interrogators that "it was common ground for us to proclaim the genius of the slighted Shostakovich."


title: Dmitri Shostakovich

text: On 6 February, Shostakovich was again attacked in "Pravda", this time for his light comic ballet "The Limpid Stream", which was denounced because "it jangles and expresses nothing" and did not give an accurate picture of peasant life on a collective farm. Fearful that he was about to be arrested, Shostakovich secured an appointment with the Chairman of the USSR State Committee on Culture, Platon Kerzhentsev, who reported to Stalin and Molotov that he had instructed the composer to "reject formalist errors and in his art attain something that could be understood by the broad masses", and that Shostakovich had admitted being in the wrong and had asked for a meeting with Stalin, which was not granted.


title: Dmitri Shostakovich

text: The "Pravda" campaign against Shostakovich caused his commissions and concert appearances, and performances of his music, to decline markedly. His monthly earnings dropped from an average of as much as 12,000 rubles to as little as 2,000.


title: Dmitri Shostakovich

text: 1936 marked the beginning of the Great Terror, in which many of Shostakovich's friends and relatives were imprisoned or killed. These included Tukhachevsky, executed 12 June 1937; his brother-in-law Vsevolod Frederiks, who was eventually released but died before he returned home; his close friend Nikolai Zhilyayev, a musicologist who had taught Tukhachevsky; his mother-in-law, the astronomer Sofiya Mikhaylovna Varzar, who was sent to a camp in Karaganda; his friend the Marxist writer Galina Serebryakova, who spent 20 years in the gulag; his uncle Maxim Kostrykin (died); and his colleagues Boris Kornilov and Adrian Piotrovsky (executed).


title: Dmitri Shostakovich

text: Shostakovich's daughter Galina was born during this period in 1936; his son Maxim was born two years later.


title: Dmitri Shostakovich

text: The publication of the "Pravda" editorials coincided with the composition of Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony. The work continued a shift in his style, influenced by the music of Mahler, and gave him problems as he attempted to reform his style. Despite the "Pravda" articles, he continued to compose the symphony and planned a premiere at the end of 1936. Rehearsals began that December, but according to Isaac Glikman, who had attended the rehearsals with the composer, the manager of the Leningrad Philharmonic persuaded Shostakovich to withdraw the symphony. Shostakovich did not repudiate the work and retained its designation as his Fourth Symphony. (A reduction for two pianos was performed and published in 1946, and the work was finally premiered in 1961).


title: Dmitri Shostakovich

text: In the months between the withdrawal of the Fourth Symphony and the completion of the Fifth on 20 July 1937, the only concert work Shostakovich composed was the "Four Romances on Texts by Pushkin".


title: Dmitri Shostakovich

text: The composer's response to his denunciation was the Fifth Symphony of 1937, which was musically more conservative than his recent works. Premiered on 21 November 1937 in Leningrad, it was a phenomenal success. The Fifth brought many to tears and welling emotions. Later, Shostakovich's purported memoir, "Testimony", stated: "I'll never believe that a man who understood nothing could feel the Fifth Symphony. Of course they understood, they understood what was happening around them and they understood what the Fifth was about."


title: Dmitri Shostakovich

text: The success put Shostakovich in good standing once again. Music critics and the authorities alike, including those who had earlier accused him of formalism, claimed that he had learned from his mistakes and become a true Soviet artist. In a newspaper article published under Shostakovich's name, the Fifth was characterized as "A Soviet artist's creative response to just criticism." The composer Dmitry Kabalevsky, who had been among those who disassociated themselves from Shostakovich when the "Pravda" article was published, praised the Fifth and congratulated Shostakovich for "not having given in to the seductive temptations of his previous 'erroneous' ways."


title: Dmitri Shostakovich

text: It was also at this time that Shostakovich composed the first of his string quartets. In September 1937, he began to teach composition at the Leningrad Conservatory, which provided some financial security.


title: Dmitri Shostakovich

text: In 1939, before Soviet forces attempted to invade Finland, the Party Secretary of Leningrad Andrei Zhdanov commissioned a celebratory piece from Shostakovich, the "Suite on Finnish Themes", to be performed as the marching bands of the Red Army paraded through Helsinki. The Winter War was a bitter experience for the Red Army, the parade never happened, and Shostakovich never laid claim to the authorship of this work. It was not performed until 2001. After the outbreak of war between the Soviet Union and Germany in 1941, Shostakovich initially remained in Leningrad. He tried to enlist in the military but was turned away because of his poor eyesight. To compensate, he became a volunteer for the Leningrad Conservatory's firefighter brigade and delivered a radio broadcast to the Soviet people. "" The photograph for which he posed was published in newspapers throughout the country.


title: Dmitri Shostakovich

text: Shostakovich's most famous wartime contribution was the Seventh Symphony. The composer wrote the first three movements in Leningrad while it was under siege; he completed the work in Kuybyshev (now Samara), where he and his family had been evacuated. According to a radio address he made on 17 September 1941, he continued work on the symphony in order to show his fellow citizens that everyone had a "soldier's duty" to ensure life went on. In another article written on 8 October, he wrote that the Seventh was a "symphony about our age, our people, our sacred war, and our victory." Shostakovich finished his Seventh Symphony on 27 December. The symphony was premiered by the Bolshoi Theatre Orchestra in Kuibyshev on 29 March and soon performed in London and the United States. It was subsequently performed in Leningrad while the city was still under siege. The city's remaining orchestra only had 14 musicians left, which led conductor Karl Eliasberg to reinforce it by recruiting anyone who could play an instrument.


title: Dmitri Shostakovich

text: The Shostakovich family moved to Moscow in spring 1943, by which time the Red Army was on the offensive. As a result, Soviet authorities and the international public were puzzled by the tragic tone of the Eighth Symphony, which in the Western press had briefly acquired the nickname "Stalingrad Symphony." The symphony was received tepidly in the Soviet Union and the West. Olin Downes expressed his disappointment in the piece, but Carlos Chávez, who had conducted the symphony's Mexican premiere, praised it highly.


title: Dmitri Shostakovich

text: Shostakovich had expressed as early as 1943 his intention to cap his wartime trilogy of symphonies with a grandiose Ninth. On 16 January 1945, he announced to his students that he had begun work on its first movement the day before. In April, his friend Isaac Glikman heard an extensive portion of the first movement, noting that it was "majestic in scale, in pathos, in its breathtaking motion". Shortly thereafter, Shostakovich ceased work on this version of the Ninth, which remained lost until musicologist Ol'ga Digonskaya rediscovered it in December 2003. Shostakovich began to compose his actual, unrelated Ninth Symphony in late July 1945; he completed it on 30 August. It was shorter and lighter in texture than its predecessors. Gavriil Popov wrote that it was "splendid in its joie de vivre, gaiety, brilliance, and pungency!" By 1946 it was the subject of official criticism. Israel Nestyev asked whether it was the right time for "a light and amusing interlude between Shostakovich's significant creations, a temporary rejection of great, serious problems for the sake of playful, filigree-trimmed trifles." The "New York World-Telegram" of 27 July 1946 was similarly dismissive: "The Russian composer should not have expressed his feelings about the defeat of Nazism in such a childish manner". Shostakovich continued to compose chamber music, notably his Second Piano Trio, dedicated to the memory of Sollertinsky, with a Jewish-inspired finale.


title: Dmitri Shostakovich

text: In 1948, Shostakovich, along with many other composers, was again denounced for formalism in the Zhdanov decree. Andrei Zhdanov, Chairman of the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR, accused the composers (including Sergei Prokofiev and Aram Khachaturian) of writing inappropriate and formalist music. This was part of an ongoing anti-formalism campaign intended to root out all Western compositional influence as well as any perceived "non-Russian" output. The conference resulted in the publication of the Central Committee's Decree "On V. Muradeli's opera "The Great Friendship"", which targeted all Soviet composers and demanded that they write only "proletarian" music, or music for the masses. The accused composers, including Shostakovich, were summoned to make public apologies in front of the committee. Most of Shostakovich's works were banned, and his family had privileges withdrawn. Yuri Lyubimov says that at this time "he waited for his arrest at night out on the landing by the lift, so that at least his family wouldn't be disturbed."


title: Dmitri Shostakovich

text: The decree's consequences for composers were harsh. Shostakovich was among those dismissed from the Conservatory altogether. For him, the loss of money was perhaps the heaviest blow. Others still in the Conservatory experienced an atmosphere thick with suspicion. No one wanted his work to be understood as formalist, so many resorted to accusing their colleagues of writing or performing anti-proletarian music.


title: Dmitri Shostakovich

text: During the next few years, Shostakovich composed three categories of work: film music to pay the rent, official works aimed at securing official rehabilitation, and serious works "for the desk drawer". The last included the Violin Concerto No. 1 and the song cycle "From Jewish Folk Poetry". The cycle was written at a time when the postwar anti-Semitic campaign was already under way, with widespread arrests, including that of Dobrushin and Yiditsky, the compilers of the book from which Shostakovich took his texts.


title: Dmitri Shostakovich

text: The restrictions on Shostakovich's music and living arrangements were eased in 1949, when Stalin decided that the Soviets needed to send artistic representatives to the Cultural and Scientific Congress for World Peace in New York City, and that Shostakovich should be among them. For Shostakovich, it was a humiliating experience, culminating in a New York press conference where he was expected to read a prepared speech. Nicolas Nabokov, who was present in the audience, witnessed Shostakovich starting to read "in a nervous and shaky voice" before he had to break off "and the speech was continued in English by a suave radio baritone". Fully aware that Shostakovich was not free to speak his mind, Nabokov publicly asked him whether he supported the then recent denunciation of Stravinsky's music in the Soviet Union. A great admirer of Stravinsky who had been influenced by his music, Shostakovich had no alternative but to answer in the affirmative. Nabokov did not hesitate to write that this demonstrated that Shostakovich was "not a free man, but an obedient tool of his government." Shostakovich never forgave Nabokov for this public humiliation. That same year, he was obliged to compose the cantata "Song of the Forests", which praised Stalin as the "great gardener".


title: Dmitri Shostakovich

text: Stalin's death in 1953 was the biggest step toward Shostakovich's rehabilitation as a creative artist, which was marked by his Tenth Symphony. It features a number of musical quotations and codes (notably the DSCH and Elmira motifs, Elmira Nazirova being a pianist and composer who had studied under Shostakovich in the year before his dismissal from the Moscow Conservatory), the meaning of which is still debated, while the savage second movement, according to "Testimony", is intended as a musical portrait of Stalin. The Tenth ranks alongside the Fifth and Seventh as one of Shostakovich's most popular works. 1953 also saw a stream of premieres of the "desk drawer" works.


title: Dmitri Shostakovich

text: During the 1940s and 1950s, Shostakovich had close relationships with two of his pupils, Galina Ustvolskaya and Elmira Nazirova. In the background to all this remained Shostakovich's first, open marriage to Nina Varzar until her death in 1954. He taught Ustvolskaya from 1939 to 1941 and then from 1947 to 1948. The nature of their relationship is far from clear: Mstislav Rostropovich described it as "tender". Ustvolskaya rejected a proposal of marriage from him after Nina's death. Shostakovich's daughter, Galina, recalled her father consulting her and Maxim about the possibility of Ustvolskaya becoming their stepmother. Ustvolskaya's friend Viktor Suslin said that she had been "deeply disappointed by [Shostakovich's] conspicuous silence" when her music faced criticism after her graduation from the Leningrad Conservatory. The relationship with Nazirova seems to have been one-sided, expressed largely in his letters to her, and can be dated to around 1953 to 1956. He married his second wife, Komsomol activist Margarita Kainova, in 1956; the couple proved ill-matched, and divorced five years later.


title: Dmitri Shostakovich

text: In 1954, Shostakovich wrote the Festive Overture, opus 96; it was used as the theme music for the 1980 Summer Olympics. (His '"Theme from the film "Pirogov", Opus 76a: Finale" was played as the cauldron was lit at the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens, Greece.)


title: Dmitri Shostakovich

text: In 1959, Shostakovich appeared on stage in Moscow at the end of a concert performance of his Fifth Symphony, congratulating Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic Orchestra for their performance (part of a concert tour of the Soviet Union). Later that year, Bernstein and the Philharmonic recorded the symphony in Boston for Columbia Records.


title: Dmitri Shostakovich

text: The year 1960 marked another turning point in Shostakovich's life: he joined the Communist Party. The government wanted to appoint him Chairman of the RSFSR Union of Composers, but to hold that position he was required to obtain Party membership. It was understood that Nikita Khrushchev, the First Secretary of the Communist Party from 1953 to 1964, was looking for support from the intelligentsia's leading ranks in an effort to create a better relationship with the Soviet Union's artists. This event has variously been interpreted as a show of commitment, a mark of cowardice, the result of political pressure, and his free decision. On the one hand, the apparat was less repressive than it had been before Stalin's death. On the other, his son recalled that the event reduced Shostakovich to tears, and that he later told his wife Irina that he had been blackmailed. Lev Lebedinsky has said that the composer was suicidal. In 1960, he was appointed Chairman of the RSFSR Union of Composers; from 1962 until his death, he also served as a delegate in the Supreme Soviet of the USSR. By joining the party, Shostakovich also committed himself to finally writing the homage to Lenin that he had promised before. His Twelfth Symphony, which portrays the Bolshevik Revolution and was completed in 1961, was dedicated to Lenin and called "The Year 1917".


title: Dmitri Shostakovich

text: Shostakovich's musical response to these personal crises was the Eighth String Quartet, composed in only three days. He subtitled the piece "To the victims of fascism and war", ostensibly in memory of the Dresden fire bombing that took place in 1945. Yet like the Tenth Symphony, the quartet incorporates quotations from several of his past works and his musical monogram. Shostakovich confessed to his friend Isaac Glikman, "I started thinking that if some day I die, nobody is likely to write a work in memory of me, so I had better write one myself." Several of Shostakovich's colleagues, including Natalya Vovsi-Mikhoels and the cellist Valentin Berlinsky, were also aware of the Eighth Quartet's biographical intent. Peter J. Rabinowitz has also pointed to covert references to Richard Strauss's "Metamorphosen" in it.


title: Dmitri Shostakovich

text: In 1962, Shostakovich married for the third time, to Irina Supinskaya. In a letter to Glikman, he wrote, "her only defect is that she is 27 years old. In all other respects she is splendid: clever, cheerful, straightforward and very likeable." According to Galina Vishnevskaya, who knew the Shostakoviches well, this marriage was a very happy one: "It was with her that Dmitri Dmitriyevich finally came to know domestic peace... Surely, she prolonged his life by several years." In November, he conducted publicly for the only time in his life, leading a couple of his own works in Gorky; otherwise he declined to conduct, citing nerves and ill health.


title: Dmitri Shostakovich

text: That year saw Shostakovich again turn to the subject of anti-Semitism in his Thirteenth Symphony (subtitled "Babi Yar"). The symphony sets a number of poems by Yevgeny Yevtushenko, the first of which commemorates a massacre of Ukrainian Jews during the Second World War. Opinions are divided as to how great a risk this was: the poem had been published in Soviet media and was not banned, but it remained controversial. After the symphony's premiere, Yevtushenko was forced to add a stanza to his poem that said that Russians and Ukrainians had died alongside the Jews at Babi Yar.


title: Dmitri Shostakovich

text: In 1965, Shostakovich raised his voice in defence of poet Joseph Brodsky, who was sentenced to five years of exile and hard labor. Shostakovich co-signed protests with Yevtushenko, fellow Soviet artists Kornei Chukovsky, Anna Akhmatova, Samuil Marshak, and the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. After the protests, the sentence was commuted, and Brodsky returned to Leningrad.


title: Dmitri Shostakovich

text: In 1964, Shostakovich composed the music for the Russian film "Hamlet", which was favorably reviewed by "The New York Times": "But the lack of this aural stimulation—of Shakespeare's eloquent words—is recompensed in some measure by a splendid and stirring musical score by Dmitri Shostakovich. This has great dignity and depth, and at times an appropriate wildness or becoming levity".


title: Dmitri Shostakovich

text: In later life, Shostakovich suffered from chronic ill health, but he resisted giving up cigarettes and vodka. Beginning in 1958, he suffered from a debilitating condition that particularly affected his right hand, eventually forcing him to give up piano playing; in 1965, it was diagnosed as poliomyelitis. He also suffered heart attacks in 1966 and 1971, as well as several falls in which he broke both his legs; in 1967, he wrote in a letter: "Target achieved so far: 75% (right leg broken, left leg broken, right hand defective). All I need to do now is wreck the left hand and then 100% of my extremities will be out of order."


title: Dmitri Shostakovich

text: A preoccupation with his own mortality permeates Shostakovich's later works, such as the later quartets and the Fourteenth Symphony of 1969 (a song cycle based on a number of poems on the theme of death). This piece also finds Shostakovich at his most extreme with musical language, with 12-tone themes and dense polyphony throughout. He dedicated the Fourteenth to his close friend Benjamin Britten, who conducted its Western premiere at the 1970 Aldeburgh Festival. The Fifteenth Symphony of 1971 is, by contrast, melodic and retrospective in nature, quoting Wagner, Rossini and the composer's own Fourth Symphony.


title: Dmitri Shostakovich

text: Shostakovich died of heart failure on 9 August 1975 at the Central Clinical Hospital in Moscow. A civic funeral was held; he was interred in Novodevichy Cemetery, Moscow. Even before his death, he had been recognized with the naming of the Shostakovich Peninsula on Alexander Island, Antarctica. Despite suffering from Motor Neurone Disease (or ALS) from as early as the 1960s, Shostakovich insisted upon writing all his own correspondence and music himself, even when his right hand was virtually unusable.


title: Dmitri Shostakovich

text: Shostakovich himself left behind several recordings of his own piano works; other noted interpreters of his music include Mstislav Rostropovich, Tatiana Nikolayeva, Maria Yudina, David Oistrakh, and members of the Beethoven Quartet.


title: Dmitri Shostakovich

text: Shostakovich's musical influence on later composers outside the former Soviet Union has been relatively slight, although Alfred Schnittke took up his eclecticism and his contrasts between the dynamic and the static, and some of André Previn's music shows clear links to Shostakovich's style of orchestration. His influence can also be seen in some Nordic composers, such as Lars-Erik Larsson. Many of his Russian contemporaries, and his pupils at the Leningrad Conservatory were strongly influenced by his style (including German Okunev, Sergei Slonimsky, and Boris Tishchenko, whose Fifth Symphony of 1978 is dedicated to Shostakovich's memory). Shostakovich's conservative idiom has grown increasingly popular with audiences both within and outside Russia, as the avant-garde has declined in influence and debate about his political views has developed.


title: Dmitri Shostakovich

text: Shostakovich's works are broadly tonal but with elements of atonality and chromaticism. In some of his later works (e.g., the Twelfth Quartet), he made use of tone rows. His output is dominated by his cycles of symphonies and string quartets, each totaling 15. The symphonies are distributed fairly evenly throughout his career, while the quartets are concentrated towards the latter part. Among the most popular are the Fifth and Seventh Symphonies and the Eighth and Fifteenth Quartets. Other works include the operas "Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk", "The Nose" and the unfinished "The Gamblers", based on the comedy by Gogol; six concertos (two each for piano, violin and cello); two piano trios; and a large quantity of film music.


title: Dmitri Shostakovich

text: Shostakovich's music shows the influence of many of the composers he most admired: Bach in his fugues and passacaglias; Beethoven in the late quartets; Mahler in the symphonies; and Berg in his use of musical codes and quotations. Among Russian composers, he particularly admired Modest Mussorgsky, whose operas "Boris Godunov" and "Khovanshchina" he reorchestrated; Mussorgsky's influence is most prominent in the wintry scenes of "Lady Macbeth" and the Eleventh Symphony, as well as in satirical works such as "Rayok". Prokofiev's influence is most apparent in the earlier piano works, such as the first sonata and first concerto. The influence of Russian church and folk music is evident in his works for unaccompanied choir of the 1950s.


title: Dmitri Shostakovich

text: Shostakovich's relationship with Stravinsky was profoundly ambivalent; as he wrote to Glikman, "Stravinsky the composer I worship. Stravinsky the thinker I despise." He was particularly enamoured of the "Symphony of Psalms", presenting a copy of his own piano version of it to Stravinsky when the latter visited the USSR in 1962. (The meeting of the two composers was not very successful; observers commented on Shostakovich's extreme nervousness and Stravinsky's "cruelty" to him.)


title: Dmitri Shostakovich

text: Many commentators have noted the disjunction between the experimental works before the 1936 denunciation and the more conservative ones that followed; the composer told Flora Litvinova, "without 'Party guidance' ... I would have displayed more brilliance, used more sarcasm, I could have revealed my ideas openly instead of having to resort to camouflage." Articles Shostakovich published in 1934 and 1935 cited Berg, Schoenberg, Krenek, Hindemith, "and especially Stravinsky" among his influences. Key works of the earlier period are the First Symphony, which combined the academicism of the conservatory with his progressive inclinations; "The Nose" ("The most uncompromisingly modernist of all his stage-works"); "Lady Macbeth", which precipitated the denunciation; and the Fourth Symphony, described in Grove's Dictionary as "a colossal synthesis of Shostakovich's musical development to date". The Fourth was also the first piece in which Mahler's influence came to the fore, prefiguring the route Shostakovich took to secure his rehabilitation, while he himself admitted that the preceding two were his least successful.


title: Dmitri Shostakovich

text: After 1936, Shostakovich's music became more conservative. During this time he also composed more chamber music. While his chamber works were largely tonal, the late chamber works, which Grove's Dictionary calls a "world of purgatorial numbness", included tone rows, although he treated these thematically rather than serially. Vocal works are also a prominent feature of his late output.


title: Dmitri Shostakovich

text: In the 1940s, Shostakovich began to show an interest in Jewish themes. He was intrigued by Jewish music's "ability to build a jolly melody on sad intonations". Examples of works that included Jewish themes are the Fourth String Quartet (1949), the First Violin Concerto (1948), and the "Four Monologues on Pushkin Poems" (1952), as well as the Piano Trio in E minor (1944). He was further inspired to write with Jewish themes when he examined Moisei Beregovski's 1944 thesis on Jewish folk music.


title: Dmitri Shostakovich

text: In 1948, Shostakovich acquired a book of Jewish folk songs, from which he composed the song cycle "From Jewish Folk Poetry". He initially wrote eight songs meant to represent the hardships of being Jewish in the Soviet Union. To disguise this, he added three more meant to demonstrate the great life Jews had under the Soviet regime. Despite his efforts to hide the real meaning in the work, the Union of Composers refused to approve his music in 1949 under the pressure of the anti-Semitism that gripped the country. "From Jewish Folk Poetry" could not be performed until after Stalin's death in March 1953, along with all the other works that were forbidden.


title: Dmitri Shostakovich

text: Throughout his compositions, Shostakovich demonstrated a controlled use of musical quotation. This stylistic choice had been common among earlier composers, but Shostakovich developed it into a defining characteristic of his music. Rather than quoting other composers, Shostakovich preferred to quote himself. Musicologists such as Sofia Moshevich, Ian McDonald, and Stephen Harris have connected his works through their quotations.


title: Dmitri Shostakovich

text: One example is the main theme of Katerina's aria, "Seryozha, khoroshiy moy", from the fourth act of "Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District". The aria's beauty comes as a breath of fresh air in the intense, overbearing tone of the scene, in which Katerina visits her lover Sergei in prison. The theme is made tragic when Sergei betrays her and finds a new lover upon blaming Katerina for his incarceration.


title: Dmitri Shostakovich

text: More than 25 years later, Shostakovich quoted this theme in his Eighth String Quartet. In the midst of this quartet's oppressive and somber themes, the cello introduces the Seryozha theme "in the 'bright' key of F-sharp major" about three minutes into the fourth movement. This theme emerges once again in his Fourteenth String Quartet. As in the Eighth Quartet, the cello introduces the theme, which here serves as a dedication to the cellist of the Beethoven String Quartet, Sergei Shirinsky.


title: Dmitri Shostakovich

text: In 2004, the musicologist Olga Digonskaya discovered a trove of Shostakovich manuscripts at the Glinka State Central Museum of Musical Culture in Moscow. In a cardboard file were some "300 pages of musical sketches, pieces and scores" in Shostakovich's hand. A composer friend bribed Shostakovich's housemaid to regularly deliver the contents of Shostakovich's office waste bin to him, instead of taking it to the garbage. Some of those cast-offs eventually found their way into the Glinka. ... The Glinka archive "contained a huge number of pieces and compositions which were completely unknown or could be traced quite indirectly," Digonskaya said.


title: Dmitri Shostakovich

text: Among these were Shostakovich's piano and vocal sketches for a prologue to an opera, "Orango" (1932). They were orchestrated by the British composer Gerard McBurney and premiered in December 2011 by the Los Angeles Philharmonic conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen.


title: Dmitri Shostakovich

text: According to McBurney, opinion is divided on whether Shostakovich's music is "of visionary power and originality, as some maintain, or, as others think, derivative, trashy, empty and second-hand". William Walton, his British contemporary, described him as "the greatest composer of the 20th century". Musicologist David Fanning concludes in Grove's Dictionary that "Amid the conflicting pressures of official requirements, the mass suffering of his fellow countrymen, and his personal ideals of humanitarian and public service, he succeeded in forging a musical language of colossal emotional power."


title: Dmitri Shostakovich

text: Some modern composers have been critical. Pierre Boulez dismissed Shostakovich's music as "the second, or even third pressing of Mahler". The Romanian composer and Webern disciple Philip Gershkovich called Shostakovich "a hack in a trance". A related complaint is that Shostakovich's style is vulgar and strident: Stravinsky wrote of "Lady Macbeth": "brutally hammering ... and monotonous". English composer and musicologist Robin Holloway described his music as "battleship-grey in melody and harmony, factory-functional in structure; in content all rhetoric and coercion".


title: Dmitri Shostakovich

text: In the 1980s, the Finnish conductor and composer Esa-Pekka Salonen was critical of Shostakovich and refused to conduct his music. For instance, he said in 1987:


title: Dmitri Shostakovich

text: Salonen has since performed and recorded several of Shostakovich's works, including leading the world premiere of "Orango", but has dismissed the Fifth Symphony as "overrated", adding that he was "very suspicious of heroic things in general".


title: Dmitri Shostakovich

text: Shostakovich borrows extensively from the material and styles both of earlier composers and of popular music; the vulgarity of "low" music is a notable influence on this "greatest of eclectics". McBurney traces this to the avant-garde artistic circles of the early Soviet period in which Shostakovich moved early in his career, and argues that these borrowings were a deliberate technique to allow him to create "patterns of contrast, repetition, exaggeration" that gave his music large-scale structure.


title: Dmitri Shostakovich

text: Shostakovich was in many ways an obsessive man: according to his daughter he was "obsessed with cleanliness". He synchronised the clocks in his apartment and regularly sent himself cards to test how well the postal service was working. Elizabeth Wilson's "Shostakovich: A Life Remembered" indexes 26 references to his nervousness. Mikhail Druskin remembers that even as a young man the composer was "fragile and nervously agile". Yuri Lyubimov comments, "The fact that he was more vulnerable and receptive than other people was no doubt an important feature of his genius." In later life, Krzysztof Meyer recalled, "his face was a bag of tics and grimaces."


title: Dmitri Shostakovich

text: In Shostakovich's lighter moods, sport was one of his main recreations, although he preferred spectating or umpiring to participating (he was a qualified football referee). His favorite football club was Zenit Leningrad (now Zenit Saint Petersburg), which he would watch regularly. He also enjoyed card games, particularly patience.


title: Dmitri Shostakovich

text: Shostakovich was fond of satirical writers such as Gogol, Chekhov and Mikhail Zoshchenko. Zoshchenko's influence in particular is evident in his letters, which include wry parodies of Soviet officialese. Zoshchenko noted the contradictions in the composer's character: "he is ... frail, fragile, withdrawn, an infinitely direct, pure child ... [but also] hard, acid, extremely intelligent, strong perhaps, despotic and not altogether good-natured (although cerebrally good-natured)."


title: Dmitri Shostakovich

text: Shostakovich was diffident by nature: Flora Litvinova has said he was "completely incapable of saying 'No' to anybody." This meant he was easily persuaded to sign official statements, including a denunciation of Andrei Sakharov in 1973. His widow later told "Helsingin Sanomat" that his name was included without his permission. But he was willing to try to help constituents in his capacities as chairman of the Composers' Union and Deputy to the Supreme Soviet. Oleg Prokofiev said, "he tried to help so many people that ... less and less attention was paid to his pleas." When asked if he believed in God, Shostakovich said "No, and I am very sorry about it."


title: Dmitri Shostakovich

text: Shostakovich's response to official criticism and whether he used music as a kind of covert dissidence is a matter of dispute. He outwardly conformed to government policies and positions, reading speeches and putting his name to articles expressing the government line. But it is evident he disliked many aspects of the regime, as confirmed by his family, his letters to Isaac Glikman, and the satirical cantata "Rayok", which ridiculed the "anti-formalist" campaign and was kept hidden until after his death. He was a close friend of Marshal of the Soviet Union Mikhail Tukhachevsky, who was executed in 1937 during the Great Purge.


title: Dmitri Shostakovich

text: It is also uncertain to what extent Shostakovich expressed his opposition to the state in his music. The revisionist view was put forth by Solomon Volkov in the 1979 book "Testimony", which claimed to be Shostakovich's memoirs dictated to Volkov. The book alleged that many of the composer's works contained coded anti-government messages, placing Shostakovich in a tradition of Russian artists outwitting censorship that goes back at least to Alexander Pushkin. He incorporated many quotations and motifs in his work, most notably his musical signature DSCH. His longtime musical collaborator Yevgeny Mravinsky said, "Shostakovich very often explained his intentions with very specific images and connotations."


title: Dmitri Shostakovich

text: The revisionist perspective has subsequently been supported by his children, Maxim and Galina, although Maxim said in 1981 that Volkov's book was not his father's work. Volkov has further argued, both in "Testimony" and in "Shostakovich and Stalin", that Shostakovich adopted the role of the "yurodivy" or holy fool in his relations with the government. Other prominent revisionists are Ian MacDonald, whose book "The New Shostakovich" put forward further revisionist interpretations of his music, and Elizabeth Wilson, whose "Shostakovich: A Life Remembered" provides testimony from many of the composer's acquaintances.


title: Dmitri Shostakovich

text: Musicians and scholars including Laurel Fay and Richard Taruskin contested the authenticity and debate the significance of "Testimony", alleging that Volkov compiled it from a combination of recycled articles, gossip, and possibly some information directly from the composer. Fay documents these allegations in her 2002 article 'Volkov's "Testimony" reconsidered', showing that the only pages of the original "Testimony" manuscript that Shostakovich had signed and verified are word-for-word reproductions of earlier interviews he gave, none of which are controversial. Against this, Allan B. Ho and Dmitry Feofanov have pointed out that at least two of the signed pages contain controversial material: for instance, "on the first page of chapter 3, where [Shostakovich] notes that the plaque that reads 'In this house lived [Vsevolod] Meyerhold' should also say 'And in this house his wife was brutally murdered'."


title: Dmitri Shostakovich

text: In May 1958, during a visit to Paris, Shostakovich recorded his two piano concertos with André Cluytens, as well as some short piano works. These were issued on LP by EMI and later reissued on CD. Shostakovich recorded the two concertos in stereo in Moscow for Melodiya. Shostakovich also played the piano solos in recordings of the Cello Sonata, Op. 40 with cellist Daniil Shafran and also with Mstislav Rostropovich; the Violin Sonata, Op. 134, in a private recording made with violinist David Oistrakh; and the Piano Trio, Op. 67 with violinist David Oistrakh and cellist Miloš Sádlo. There is also a short newsreel of Shostakovich as soloist in a 1930s concert performance of the closing moments of his first piano concerto. A color film of Shostakovich supervising the Soviet revival of "The Nose" in 1974 was also made.


title: Dmitri Shostakovich

text: In 1962, he was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Scoring of a Musical Picture for "Khovanshchina" (1959).


title: Bismuth

text: Bismuth is a chemical element with the symbol Bi and atomic number 83. It is a post-transition metal and one of the pnictogens, with chemical properties resembling its lighter group 15 siblings arsenic and antimony. Elemental bismuth occurs naturally, and its sulfide and oxide forms are important commercial ores. The free element is 86% as dense as lead. It is a brittle metal with a silvery-white color when freshly produced. Surface oxidation generally gives samples of the metal a somewhat rosy cast. Further oxidation under heat can give bismuth a vividly iridescent appearance due to thin-film interference. Bismuth is both the most diamagnetic element and one of the least thermally conductive metals known.


title: Bismuth

text: Bismuth was long considered the element with the highest atomic mass whose nuclei do not spontaneously decay. However, in 2003 it was discovered to be extremely weakly radioactive. The metal's only primordial isotope, bismuth-209, experiences alpha decay at such a minute rate that its half-life is more than a billion times the estimated age of the universe. For all but the most exotic of uses bismuth may be considered stable because of its tremendously long half-life.


title: Bismuth

text: Bismuth metal has been known since ancient times. Before modern analytical methods bismuth's metallurgical similarities to lead and tin often led it to be confused with those metals. The etymology of "bismuth" is uncertain. The name may come from mid-sixteenth century New Latin translations of the German words or , meaning 'white mass', which were rendered as or .


title: Bismuth

text: Bismuth compounds account for about half the global production of bismuth. They are used in cosmetics; pigments; and a few pharmaceuticals, notably bismuth subsalicylate, used to treat diarrhea. Bismuth's unusual propensity to expand as it solidifies is responsible for some of its uses, as in the casting of printing type. Bismuth has unusually low toxicity for a heavy metal. As the toxicity of lead and the cost of its environmental remediation became more apparent during the 20th century, suitable bismuth alloys have gained popularity as replacements for lead. Presently, around a third of global bismuth production is dedicated to needs formerly met by lead.


title: Bismuth

text: Bismuth metal has been known since ancient times and it was one of the first 10 metals to have been discovered. The name "bismuth" dates to around 1665 and is of uncertain etymology. The name possibly comes from obsolete German ', ', ' (early 16th century), perhaps related to Old High German ' ("white"). The New Latin ' (coined by Georgius Agricola, who Latinized many German mining and technical words) is from the German ', itself perhaps from "", meaning "white mass".


title: Bismuth

text: The element was confused in early times with tin and lead because of its resemblance to those elements. Because bismuth has been known since ancient times, no one person is credited with its discovery. Agricola (1546) states that bismuth is a distinct metal in a family of metals including tin and lead. This was based on observation of the metals and their physical properties.


title: Bismuth

text: Miners in the age of alchemy also gave bismuth the name "," or "silver being made" in the sense of silver still in the process of being formed within the Earth.


title: Bismuth

text: Bismuth was also known to the Incas and used (along with the usual copper and tin) in a special bronze alloy for knives.


title: Bismuth

text: Beginning with Johann Heinrich Pott in 1738, Carl Wilhelm Scheele, and Torbern Olof Bergman, the distinctness of lead and bismuth became clear, and Claude François Geoffroy demonstrated in 1753 that this metal is distinct from lead and tin.


title: Bismuth

text: Bismuth is a brittle metal with a dark, silver-pink hue, often with an iridescent oxide tarnish showing many colors from yellow to blue. The spiral, stair-stepped structure of bismuth crystals is the result of a higher growth rate around the outside edges than on the inside edges. The variations in the thickness of the oxide layer that forms on the surface of the crystal cause different wavelengths of light to interfere upon reflection, thus displaying a rainbow of colors. When burned in oxygen, bismuth burns with a blue flame and its oxide forms yellow fumes. Its toxicity is much lower than that of its neighbors in the periodic table, such as lead and antimony.


title: Bismuth

text: No other metal is verified to be more naturally diamagnetic than bismuth. (Superdiamagnetism is a different physical phenomenon.) Of any metal, it has one of the lowest values of thermal conductivity (after manganese, and maybe neptunium and plutonium) and the highest Hall coefficient. It has a high electrical resistivity. When deposited in sufficiently thin layers on a substrate, bismuth is a semiconductor, despite being a post-transition metal. Elemental bismuth is denser in the liquid phase than the solid, a characteristic it shares with germanium, silicon, gallium, and water. Bismuth expands 3.32% on solidification; therefore, it was long a component of low-melting typesetting alloys, where it compensated for the contraction of the other alloying components to form almost isostatic bismuth-lead eutectic alloys.


title: Bismuth

text: Though virtually unseen in nature, high-purity bismuth can form distinctive, colorful hopper crystals. It is relatively nontoxic and has a low melting point just above 271 °C, so crystals may be grown using a household stove, although the resulting crystals will tend to be of lower quality than lab-grown crystals.


title: Bismuth

text: At ambient conditions, bismuth shares the same layered structure as the metallic forms of arsenic and antimony, crystallizing in the rhombohedral lattice (Pearson symbol hR6, space group Rm No. 166) of the trigonal crystal system. When compressed at room temperature, this Bi-I structure changes first to the monoclinic Bi-II at 2.55 GPa, then to the tetragonal Bi-III at 2.7 GPa, and finally to the body-centered cubic Bi-V at 7.7 GPa. The corresponding transitions can be monitored via changes in electrical conductivity; they are rather reproducible and abrupt and are therefore used for calibration of high-pressure equipment.


title: Bismuth

text: Bismuth is stable to both dry and moist air at ordinary temperatures. When red-hot, it reacts with water to make bismuth(III) oxide.


title: Bismuth

text: It reacts with fluorine to make bismuth(V) fluoride at 500 °C or bismuth(III) fluoride at lower temperatures (typically from Bi melts); with other halogens it yields only bismuth(III) halides. The trihalides are corrosive and easily react with moisture, forming oxyhalides with the formula BiOX.


title: Bismuth

text: It reacts with nitric acid to make bismuth(III) nitrate (which decomposes into nitrogen dioxide when heated).


title: Bismuth

text: The only primordial isotope of bismuth, bismuth-209, was traditionally regarded as the heaviest stable isotope, but it had long been suspected to be unstable on theoretical grounds. This was finally demonstrated in 2003, when researchers at the "Institut d'Astrophysique Spatiale" in Orsay, France, measured the alpha emission half-life of to be (3 Bq/Mg), over a billion times longer than the current estimated age of the universe. Owing to its extraordinarily long half-life, for all presently known medical and industrial applications, bismuth can be treated as if it is stable and nonradioactive. The radioactivity is of academic interest because bismuth is one of a few elements whose radioactivity was suspected and theoretically predicted before being detected in the laboratory. Bismuth has the longest known alpha decay half-life, although tellurium-128 has a double beta decay half-life of over . Bismuth's extremely long half-life means that less than approximately one-billionth of the bismuth present at the formation of the planet Earth would have decayed into thallium since then.


title: Bismuth

text: Several isotopes of bismuth with short half-lives occur within the radioactive disintegration chains of actinium, radium, and thorium, and more have been synthesized experimentally. Bismuth-213 is also found on the decay chain of neptunium-237 and uranium-233.


title: Bismuth

text: Commercially, the radioactive isotope bismuth-213 can be produced by bombarding radium with bremsstrahlung photons from a linear particle accelerator. In 1997, an antibody conjugate with bismuth-213, which has a 45-minute half-life and decays with the emission of an alpha particle, was used to treat patients with leukemia. This isotope has also been tried in cancer treatment, for example, in the targeted alpha therapy (TAT) program.


title: Bismuth

text: Bismuth forms trivalent and pentavalent compounds, the trivalent ones being more common. Many of its chemical properties are similar to those of arsenic and antimony, although they are less toxic than derivatives of those lighter elements.


title: Bismuth

text: At elevated temperatures, the vapors of the metal combine rapidly with oxygen, forming the yellow trioxide, . When molten, at temperatures above 710 °C, this oxide corrodes any metal oxide and even platinum. On reaction with a base, it forms two series of oxyanions: , which is polymeric and forms linear chains, and . The anion in is a cubic octameric anion, , whereas the anion in is tetrameric.


title: Bismuth

text: The dark red bismuth(V) oxide, , is unstable, liberating gas upon heating. The compound NaBiO is a strong oxidising agent.


title: Bismuth

text: Bismuth sulfide, , occurs naturally in bismuth ores. It is also produced by the combination of molten bismuth and sulfur.


title: Bismuth

text: Bismuth oxychloride (BiOCl, see figure at right) and bismuth oxynitrate (BiONO) stoichiometrically appear as simple anionic salts of the bismuthyl(III) cation (BiO) which commonly occurs in aqueous bismuth compounds. However, in the case of BiOCl, the salt crystal forms in a structure of alternating plates of Bi, O, and Cl atoms, with each oxygen coordinating with four bismuth atoms in the adjacent plane. This mineral compound is used as a pigment and cosmetic (see below).


title: Bismuth

text: Unlike the lighter pnictogens nitrogen, phosphorus, and arsenic, but similar to antimony, bismuth does not form a stable hydride. Bismuth hydride, bismuthine (), is an endothermic compound that spontaneously decomposes at room temperature. It is stable only below −60 °C. Bismuthides are intermetallic compounds between bismuth and other metals.


title: Bismuth

text: In 2014 researchers discovered that sodium bismuthide can exist as a form of matter called a “three-dimensional topological Dirac semi-metal” (3DTDS) that possess 3D Dirac fermions in bulk. It is a natural, three-dimensional counterpart to graphene with similar electron mobility and velocity. Graphene and topological insulators (such as those in 3DTDS) are both crystalline materials that are electrically insulating inside but conducting on the surface, allowing them to function as transistors and other electronic devices. While sodium bismuthide () is too unstable to be used in devices without packaging, it can demonstrate potential applications of 3DTDS systems, which offer distinct efficiency and fabrication advantages over planar graphene in semiconductor and spintronics applications.


title: Bismuth

text: The halides of bismuth in low oxidation states have been shown to adopt unusual structures. What was originally thought to be bismuth(I) chloride, BiCl, turns out to be a complex compound consisting of Bi cations and BiCl and BiCl anions. The Bi cation has a distorted tricapped trigonal prismatic molecular geometry and is also found in , which is prepared by reducing a mixture of hafnium(IV) chloride and bismuth chloride with elemental bismuth, having the structure . Other polyatomic bismuth cations are also known, such as Bi, found in . Bismuth also forms a low-valence bromide with the same structure as "BiCl". There is a "true" monoiodide, BiI, which contains chains of units. BiI decomposes upon heating to the triiodide, , and elemental bismuth. A monobromide of the same structure also exists.


title: Bismuth

text: In oxidation state +3, bismuth forms trihalides with all of the halogens: , , , and . All of these except are hydrolyzed by water.


title: Bismuth

text: The oxidation state +5 is less frequently encountered. One such compound is , a powerful oxidizing and fluorinating agent. It is also a strong fluoride acceptor, reacting with xenon tetrafluoride to form the cation:


title: Bismuth

text: In aqueous solution, the Bi ion is solvated to form the aqua ion in strongly acidic conditions. At pH > 0 polynuclear species exist, the most important of which is believed to be the octahedral complex [].


title: Bismuth

text: In the Earth's crust, bismuth is about twice as abundant as gold. The most important ores of bismuth are bismuthinite and bismite. Native bismuth is known from Australia, Bolivia, and China.


title: Bismuth

text: The difference between mining and refining production reflects bismuth's status as a byproduct of extraction of other metals such as lead, copper, tin, molybdenum and tungsten. World bismuth production from refineries is a more complete and reliable statistic.


title: Bismuth

text: Bismuth travels in crude lead bullion (which can contain up to 10% bismuth) through several stages of refining, until it is removed by the Kroll-Betterton process which separates the impurities as slag, or the electrolytic Betts process. Bismuth will behave similarly with another of its major metals, copper. The raw bismuth metal from both processes contains still considerable amounts of other metals, foremost lead. By reacting the molten mixture with chlorine gas the metals are converted to their chlorides while bismuth remains unchanged. Impurities can also be removed by various other methods for example with fluxes and treatments yielding high-purity bismuth metal (over 99% Bi).


title: Bismuth

text: The price for pure bismuth metal has been relatively stable through most of the 20th century, except for a spike in the 1970s. Bismuth has always been produced mainly as a byproduct of lead refining, and thus the price usually reflected the cost of recovery and the balance between production and demand.


title: Bismuth

text: Prior to World War II, demand for bismuth was small and mainly pharmaceutical — bismuth compounds were used to treat such conditions as digestive disorders, sexually transmitted diseases and burns. Minor amounts of bismuth metal were consumed in fusible alloys for fire sprinkler systems and fuse wire. During World War II bismuth was considered a strategic material, used for solders, fusible alloys, medications and atomic research. To stabilize the market, the producers set the price at $1.25 per pound ($2.75 /kg) during the war and at $2.25 per pound ($4.96 /kg) from 1950 until 1964.


title: Bismuth

text: In the early 1970s, the price rose rapidly as a result of increasing demand for bismuth as a metallurgical additive to aluminium, iron and steel. This was followed by a decline owing to increased world production, stabilized consumption, and the recessions of 1980 and 1981–1982. In 1984, the price began to climb as consumption increased worldwide, especially in the United States and Japan. In the early 1990s, research began on the evaluation of bismuth as a nontoxic replacement for lead in ceramic glazes, fishing sinkers, food-processing equipment, free-machining brasses for plumbing applications, lubricating greases, and shot for waterfowl hunting. Growth in these areas remained slow during the middle 1990s, in spite of the backing of lead replacement by the United States federal government, but intensified around 2005. This resulted in a rapid and continuing increase in price.


title: Bismuth

text: Most bismuth is produced as a byproduct of other metal-extraction processes including the smelting of lead, and also of tungsten and copper. Its sustainability is dependent on increased recycling, which is problematic.


title: Bismuth

text: It was once believed that bismuth could be practically recycled from the soldered joints in electronic equipment. Recent efficiencies in solder application in electronics mean there is substantially less solder deposited, and thus less to recycle. While recovering the silver from silver-bearing solder may remain economic, recovering bismuth is substantially less so.


title: Bismuth

text: Next in recycling feasibility would be sizeable catalysts with a fair bismuth content, such as bismuth phosphomolybdate. Bismuth used in galvanizing, and as a free-machining metallurgical additive.


title: Bismuth

text: Bismuth in uses where it is dispersed most widely include certain stomach medicines (bismuth subsalicylate), paints (bismuth vanadate), pearlescent cosmetics (bismuth oxychloride), and bismuth-containing bullets. Recycling bismuth from these uses is impractical.


title: Bismuth

text: Bismuth has few commercial applications, and those applications that use it generally require small quantities relative to other raw materials. In the United States, for example, 733 tonnes of bismuth were consumed in 2016, of which 70% went into chemicals (including pharmaceuticals, pigments, and cosmetics) and 11% into bismuth alloys.


title: Bismuth

text: Some manufacturers use bismuth as a substitute in equipment for potable water systems such as valves to meet "lead-free" mandates in the U.S. (began in 2014). This is a fairly large application since it covers all residential and commercial building construction.


title: Bismuth

text: In the early 1990s, researchers began to evaluate bismuth as a nontoxic replacement for lead in various applications.


title: Bismuth

text: Bismuth is an ingredient in some pharmaceuticals, although the use of some of these substances is declining.


title: Bismuth

text: Bismuth oxychloride (BiOCl) is sometimes used in cosmetics, as a pigment in paint for eye shadows, hair sprays and nail polishes. This compound is found as the mineral bismoclite and in crystal form contains layers of atoms (see figure above) that refract light chromatically, resulting in an iridescent appearance similar to nacre of pearl. It was used as a cosmetic in ancient Egypt and in many places since. "Bismuth white" (also "Spanish white") can refer to either bismuth oxychloride or bismuth oxynitrate (BiONO), when used as a white pigment. Bismuth vanadate is used as a light-stable non-reactive paint pigment (particularly for artists' paints), often as a replacement for the more toxic cadmium sulfide yellow and orange-yellow pigments. The most common variety in artists' paints is a lemon yellow, visually indistinguishable from its cadmium-containing alternative.


title: Bismuth

text: Bismuth is used in metal alloys with other metals such as iron. These alloys are used in automatic sprinkler systems for fires. It forms the largest part (50%) of Rose's metal, a fusible alloy, which also contains 25–28% lead and 22–25% tin. It was also used to make bismuth bronze which was used in the Bronze Age, having been found in Inca knives at Machu Picchu.


title: Bismuth

text: The density difference between lead (11.32 g/cm) and bismuth (9.78 g/cm) is small enough that for many ballistics and weighting applications, bismuth can substitute for lead. For example, it can replace lead as a dense material in fishing sinkers. It has been used as a replacement for lead in shot, bullets and less-lethal riot gun ammunition. The Netherlands, Denmark, England, Wales, the United States, and many other countries now prohibit the use of lead shot for the hunting of wetland birds, as many birds are prone to lead poisoning owing to mistaken ingestion of lead (instead of small stones and grit) to aid digestion, or even prohibit the use of lead for all hunting, such as in the Netherlands. Bismuth-tin alloy shot is one alternative that provides similar ballistic performance to lead. (Another less expensive but also more poorly performing alternative is "steel" shot, which is actually soft iron.) Bismuth's lack of malleability does, however, make it unsuitable for use in expanding hunting bullets.


title: Bismuth

text: Bismuth, as a dense element of high atomic weight, is used in bismuth-impregnated latex shields to shield from X-ray in medical examinations, such as CTs, mostly as it is considered non-toxic.


title: Bismuth

text: The European Union's Restriction of Hazardous Substances Directive (RoHS) for reduction of lead has broadened bismuth's use in electronics as a component of low-melting point solders, as a replacement for traditional tin-lead solders. Its low toxicity will be especially important for solders to be used in food processing equipment and copper water pipes, although it can also be used in other applications including those in the automobile industry, in the European Union, for example.


title: Bismuth

text: Bismuth has been evaluated as a replacement for lead in free-machining brasses for plumbing applications, although it does not equal the performance of leaded steels.


title: Bismuth

text: Many bismuth alloys have low melting points and are found in specialty applications such as solders. Many automatic sprinklers, electric fuses, and safety devices in fire detection and suppression systems contain the eutectic In19.1-Cd5.3-Pb22.6-Sn8.3-Bi44.7 alloy that melts at This is a convenient temperature since it is unlikely to be exceeded in normal living conditions. Low-melting alloys, such as Bi-Cd-Pb-Sn alloy which melts at 70 °C, are also used in automotive and aviation industries. Before deforming a thin-walled metal part, it is filled with a melt or covered with a thin layer of the alloy to reduce the chance of breaking. Then the alloy is removed by submerging the part in boiling water.


title: Bismuth

text: Bismuth is used to make free-machining steels and free-machining aluminium alloys for precision machining properties. It has similar effect to lead and improves the chip breaking during machining. The shrinking on solidification in lead and the expansion of bismuth compensate each other and therefore lead and bismuth are often used in similar quantities. Similarly, alloys containing comparable parts of bismuth and lead exhibit a very small change (on the order 0.01%) upon melting, solidification or aging. Such alloys are used in high-precision casting, e.g. in dentistry, to create models and molds. Bismuth is also used as an alloying agent in production of malleable irons and as a thermocouple material.


title: Bismuth

text: Bismuth is also used in aluminium-silicon cast alloys in order to refine silicon morphology. However, it indicated a poisoning effect on modification of strontium. Some bismuth alloys, such as Bi35-Pb37-Sn25, are combined with non-sticking materials such as mica, glass and enamels because they easily wet them allowing to make joints to other parts. Addition of bismuth to caesium enhances the quantum yield of caesium cathodes. Sintering of bismuth and manganese powders at 300 °C produces a permanent magnet and magnetostrictive material, which is used in ultrasonic generators and receivers working in the 10–100 kHz range and in magnetic and holographic memory devices.


title: Bismuth

text: Scientific literature indicates that some of the compounds of bismuth are less toxic to humans via ingestion than other heavy metals (lead, arsenic, antimony, etc.) presumably due to the comparatively low solubility of bismuth salts. Its biological half-life for whole-body retention is reported to be 5 days but it can remain in the kidney for years in people treated with bismuth compounds.


title: Bismuth

text: Bismuth poisoning can occur and has according to some reports been common in relatively recent times. As with lead, bismuth poisoning can result in the formation of a black deposit on the gingiva, known as a bismuth line. Poisoning may be treated with dimercaprol; however, evidence for benefit is unclear.


title: Bismuth

text: Bismuth's environmental impacts are not well known; it may be less likely to bioaccumulate than some other heavy metals, and this is an area of active research.


The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: Learning, Teaching, Assessment, abbreviated in English as CEFR or CEF or CEFRL, is a guideline used to describe achievements of learners of foreign languages across Europe and, increasingly, in other countries. The CEFR is also intended to make it easier for educational institutions and employers to evaluate the language qualifications of candidates for education admission or employment. Its main aim is to provide a method of learning, teaching, and assessing that applies to all languages in Europe.


title: Common European Framework of Reference for Languages

text: It was put together by the Council of Europe as the main part of the project "Language Learning for European Citizenship" between 1989 and 1996. In November 2001, a European Union Council Resolution recommended using the CEFR to set up systems of validation of language ability. The six reference levels (A1, A2, B1, B2, C1, C2) are becoming widely accepted as the European standard for grading an individual's language proficiency.


text: An intergovernmental symposium in 1991 titled "Transparency and Coherence in Language Learning in Europe: Objectives, Evaluation, Certification" held by the Swiss Federal Authorities in the Swiss municipality of Rüschlikon found the need for a common European framework for languages to improve the recognition of language qualifications and help teachers co-operate. A project followed to develop language-level classifications for certification to be recognised across Europe.


text: As a result of the symposium, the Swiss National Science Foundation set up a project to develop levels of proficiency, to lead on to the creation of a "European Language Portfolio"certification in language ability which can be used across Europe.


text: A preliminary version of the Manual for Relating Language Examinations to the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) was published in 2003. This draft version was piloted in a number of projects, which included linking a single test to the CEFR, linking suites of exams at different levels and national studies by exam boards and research institutes. Practitioners and academics shared their experiences at a colloquium in Cambridge in 2007 and the pilot case studies and findings were published in Studies in Language Testing (SiLT). The findings from the pilot projects then informed the Manual revision project from 2008 to 2009.


text: The CEFR divides general competences in "knowledge", "skills", and "existential competence" with particular communicative competences in "linguistic competence", "sociolinguistic competence" and "pragmatic competence". This division does not exactly match previously well-known notions of "communicative competence", but correspondences among them can be made.


text: The CEFR has three principal dimensions: language activities, the domains in which the language activities occur, and the competencies on which a person draws when they engage in them.


text: The CEFR distinguishes four kinds of language activities: reception (listening and reading), production (spoken and written), interaction (spoken and written) and mediation (translating and interpreting).


text: General and particular communicative competencies are developed by producing or receiving texts in various contexts under various conditions and constraints. These contexts correspond to various sectors of social life that the CEFR calls domains. Four broad domains are distinguished: educational, occupational, public and personal. These largely correspond to register.


text: A language user can develop various degrees of competence in each of these domains and to help describe them, the CEFR has provided a set of six "Common Reference Levels" (A1, A2, B1, B2, C1, C2).


text: The Common European Framework divides learners into three broad divisions that can each be further divided into two levels; for each level, it describes what a learner is supposed to be able to do in reading, listening, speaking and writing. The following table indicates these levels. A more thorough description of each level, with criteria for listening, reading, speaking and writing, is available on the Internet.


text: These descriptors can apply to any of the languages spoken in Europe and there are translations in many languages.


text: Educational bodies for various languages have offered estimates for the amount of study needed to reach levels in the relevant language.


text: Multiple organisations have been created to serve as an umbrella for language schools and certification businesses that claim compatibility with the CEFR. For example, the European Association for Language Testing and Assessment (EALTA) is an initiative funded by the European Community to promote the CEFR and best practices in delivering professional language training. The Association of Language Testers in Europe (ALTE) is a consortium of academic organisations that aims at standardising assessment methods. Eaquals (Evaluation and Accreditation of Quality in Language Services) is an international association of institutions and organisations involved in language education, active throughout Europe and following the CEFR.


text: In France, the Ministry for Education has created a government-mandated certificate called CLES, which formalises the use of the CEFR in language teaching programmes in French higher education institutions.


text: In Germany, Telc, a non-profit agency, is the federal government's exclusive partner for language tests taken at the end of the integration courses for migrants, following the CEFR standards.


text: Studies have addressed correspondence with the ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines and the United States ILR scale.


text: In a panel discussion at the Osaka University of Foreign Studies, one of the coauthors of the CEFR, Brian North, stated that a "sensible hypothesis" would be for C2 to correspond to "Distinguished," C1 to "Superior," B2 to "Advanced-mid" and B1 to "Intermediate-high" in the ACTFL system.


text: This agrees with a table published by the American University Center of Provence giving the following correspondences:


text: However, a comparison between the ILR self-assessment grids (reading, speaking, listening ) and the CEFR assessment grid could suggest a different equivalence:


text: A study by Buck, Papageorgiou and Platzek addresses the correspondence between the difficulty of test items under the CEFR and ILR standards. The most common ILR levels for items of given CEFR difficulty were as follows:


text: Canada increasingly uses the CEFR in a few domains. CEFR-compatible exams such as the DELF/DALF (French) and the DELE (Spanish) are administered. Universities increasingly structure their courses around the CEFR levels. Larry Vandergrift of the University of Ottawa has proposed Canadian adoption of the CEFR in his report "Proposal for a Common Framework of Reference for Languages for Canada" published by Heritage Canada. This report contains a comparison of the CEFR to other standards in use in Canada and proposes an equivalence table.


text: The resulting correspondence between the ILR and ACTFL scales disagrees with the generally accepted one. The ACTFL standards were developed so that Novice, Intermediate, Advanced and Superior would correspond to 0/0+, 1/1+, 2/2+ and 3/3+, respectively on the ILR scale. Also, the ILR and NB OPS scales do not correspond despite the fact that the latter was modelled on the former.


text: A more recent document by Macdonald and Vandergrift estimates the following correspondences (for oral ability) between the Public Service Commission levels and the CEFR levels:


text: Language schools may also propose their own equivalence tables. For example, the Vancouver English Centre provides a comprehensive equivalence table between the various forms of the TOEFL test, the Cambridge exam, the VEC level system, and the CEFR.


text: Language schools and certificate bodies evaluate their own equivalences against the framework. Differences of estimation have been found to exist, for example, with the same level on the PTE A, TOEFL, and IELTS, and is a cause of debate between test producers.


text: The CEFR, initially developed to ease human mobility and economic growth within the highly multilingual European Union, has since influenced and been borrowed by various other areas.


text: In Japan, the adoption of CEFR has been encouraged by academics, institutional actors (MEXT), politicians and business associations, but also by learners themselves. Adoption in Malaysia has also been documented. In Vietnam, adoption of the CEFR has been connected to recent changes in English language policy, efforts to reform higher education, orientation toward economic opportunities and a tendency for administrators to look outwards for domestic solutions.


text: Noriyuki (2009) observes the "mechanical" reuse of the European framework and concepts by Japanese teachers of mostly Western languages, missing the recontextualisation part: the need to adapt the conceptual vocabulary to the local language and to adapt the framework to the local public, its language and practices.


text: Around 2005, the Osaka University of Foreign Studies developed a CEFR-inspired project for its 25 foreign languages, with a transparent and common evaluation approach. While major languages had long had well-defined tools for the Japanese public, able to guide teachers in teaching and performing assessments in a methodic way, this project pushed the adoption of similar practices to smaller languages, as requested by students.


text: In late 2006–2010, the Keio University led the ambitious CEFR-inspired Action Oriented Plurilingual Language Learning Project to favour multi-campus and inter-language cooperation in creating teaching materials and assessment systems from child to university levels. Since 2015, the "Research on Plurilinguistic and Pluricultural Skill Development in Integrated Foreign Language Education" has followed up.


text: The framework was translated into Chinese in 2008. In 2011, French sinologist Joël Bellassen suggests the CEFR together with its metalanguage could and should be adapted to distant languages such as Chinese, with the necessity to adapt and extend it with relevant concepts proper to the new language and its learners. Various efforts on adaptation to Chinese have been made.


text: In Japan, East-Asian languages teaching are largely ignored due to the Japanese society being mainly oriented toward Western languages teaching, missing a valuable opportunity for Japanese to directly reach neighbouring countries and for smaller languages to solidify their languages' teaching.


text: The CEFR methodology has been extended to describe and evaluate the proficiency of users of programming languages, when the programming activity is considered as a language activity.


title: Intersectionality

text: Intersectionality is an analytical framework for understanding how aspects of a person's social and political identities combine to create different modes of discrimination and privilege. Intersectionality identifies multiple factors of advantage and disadvantage. Examples of these factors include gender, caste, sex, race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, religion, disability, weight, and physical appearance. These intersecting and overlapping social identities may be both empowering and oppressing.


title: Intersectionality

text: Intersectionality broadens the scope of the first and second waves of feminism, which largely focused on the experiences of women who were white, middle-class and cisgender, to include the different experiences of women of color, poor women, immigrant women, and other groups. Intersectional feminism aims to separate itself from white feminism by acknowledging women's differing experiences and identities.


title: Intersectionality

text: The term "intersectionality" was coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989. Intersectionality is a qualitative analytic framework developed in the late 20th century that identifies how interlocking systems of power affect those who are most marginalized in society. Activists use the framework to promote social and political egalitarianism. Intersectionality opposes analytical systems that treat each axis of oppression in isolation. In this framework, for instance, discrimination against black women cannot be explained as a simple combination of misogyny and racism, but as something more complicated. Intersectionality engages in similar themes as triple oppression, which is the oppression associated with being a poor or immigrant woman of color. Intersectional analysis aligns very closely with anarcha-feminist power analysis frameworks.


title: Intersectionality

text: Criticism includes the framework's tendency to reduce individuals to specific demographic factors, and its use as an ideological tool against other feminist theories. Critics have characterized the framework as ambiguous and lacking defined goals. As it is based in standpoint theory, critics say the focus on subjective experiences can lead to contradictions and the inability to identify common causes of oppression.


title: Intersectionality

text: The concept of intersectionality was introduced to the field of legal studies by black feminist scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, who used the term in a pair of essays published in 1989 and 1991. While the theory primarily began as an exploration of the oppression of black women within society and the ways in which they experience intersecting layers of different forms of oppression, the analysis has expanded to include many more aspects of social identity. Identities most commonly referenced in fourth-wave feminism include race, gender, sex, sexuality, class, ability, nationality, citizenship, religion, and body type. The term was not adopted widely by feminists until the 2000s and has only grown since that time.


title: Intersectionality

text: Intersectionality originated in critical race studies and entails the interconnection of gender and race (Nash 2008). Intersectionality demonstrates a multifaced connection between race, gender, and other systems that work together to oppress while allowing privilege. Intersectionality is relative because it displays how race, gender, and other components operate as one to shape the experiences of others. Crenshaw used intersectionality to denote how race, class, gender, and other systems combine to shape the experiences of many by making room for privilege. Crenshaw used intersectionality to display the disadvantages caused by intersecting systems creating structural, political, and representational aspects of violence against minorities in the workplace and society. Crenshaw explained the dynamics that using gender, race, and other forms of power in politics and academics plays a big role in intersectionality.


title: Intersectionality

text: In "DeGraffenreid v. General Motors" (1976), Emma DeGraffenreid and four other black female auto workers alleged compound employment discrimination against black women as a result of General Motors' seniority-based system of layoffs. The courts weighed the allegations of race and gender discrimination separately, finding that the employment of African-American male factory workers disproved racial discrimination, and the employment of white female office workers disproved gender discrimination. The court declined to consider compound discrimination, and dismissed the case. Crenshaw argued that in cases such as this, the courts have tended to ignore black women's unique experiences by treating them as women or black.


title: Intersectionality

text: The ideas behind intersectional feminism existed long before the term was coined. For example, Sojourner Truth exemplifies intersectionality in her 1851 "Ain't I a Woman?" speech, in which she spoke from her racialized position as a former slave to critique essentialist notions of femininity. Similarly, in her 1892 essay "The Colored Woman's Office", Anna Julia Cooper identifies black women as the most important actors in social change movements because of their experience with multiple facets of oppression. Patricia Hill Collins has located the origins of intersectionality among black feminists, Chicana and other Latina feminists, indigenous feminists and Asian American feminists between the 1960s and 1980s. Collins has noted the existence of intellectuals at other times and in other places who discussed similar ideas about the interaction of different forms of inequality, such as Stuart Hall and the cultural studies movement, Nira Yuval-Davis, Anna Julia Cooper and Ida B. Wells. She noted that, as second-wave feminism receded in the 1980s, feminists of color such as Audre Lorde, Gloria E. Anzaldúa and Angela Davis entered academic environments and brought their perspectives to their scholarship. During this decade, many of the ideas that would together be labeled as intersectionality coalesced in U.S. academia under the banner of "race, class and gender studies".


title: Intersectionality

text: As articulated by author bell hooks, the emergence of intersectionality "challenged the notion that 'gender' was the primary factor determining a woman's fate". The historical exclusion of black women from the feminist movement in the United States resulted in many black 19th- and 20th-century feminists, such as Anna Julia Cooper, challenging their historical exclusion. This disputed the ideas of earlier feminist movements, which were primarily led by white middle-class women, suggesting that women were a homogeneous category who shared the same life experiences. However, once established that the forms of oppression experienced by white middle-class women were different from those experienced by black, poor, or disabled women, feminists began seeking ways to understand how gender, race, and class combine to "determine the female destiny".


title: Intersectionality

text: The concept of intersectionality is intended to illuminate dynamics that have often been overlooked by feminist theory and movements. Racial inequality was a factor that was largely ignored by first-wave feminism, which was primarily concerned with gaining political equality between white men and white women. Early women's rights movements often exclusively pertained to the membership, concerns, and struggles of white women. Second-wave feminism worked to dismantle sexism relating to the perceived domestic purpose of women. While feminists during this time achieved success in the United States through the Equal Pay Act of 1963, Title IX, and "Roe v. Wade", they largely alienated black women from platforms in the mainstream movement. However, third-wave feminism—which emerged shortly after the term "intersectionality" was coined in the late 1980s—noted the lack of attention to race, class, sexual orientation, and gender identity in early feminist movements, and tried to provide a channel to address political and social disparities. Intersectionality recognizes these issues which were ignored by early social justice movements. Many recent academics, such as Leslie McCall, have argued that the introduction of the intersectionality theory was vital to sociology and that before the development of the theory, there was little research that specifically addressed the experiences of people who are subjected to multiple forms of oppression within society. An example of this idea was championed by Iris Marion Young, arguing that differences must be acknowledged in order to find unifying social justice issues that create coalitions that aid in changing society for the better. More specifically, this relates to the ideals of the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW).