bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Invitation or Challenge?
Authors: Fluck Alan
Published: February 2010

By the best musical standards the average school concert programme makes dismal reading. The School Orchestra will play the usual Haydn Minuets and Handel Gavottes, with perhaps an imitation Pomp and Circumstance March thrown in. The School Choir will sing some folk songs, as well as some pieces by Bach, Mozart and Schubert; there is nothing to complain of here, but what about the dreary group of so-called modern songs at the end of the programme? No doubt a song or two by Vaughan Williams and Arthur Benjamin will be found, but otherwise the usual things are there: Fairies in the Glen and Flowers in the Spring: and to finish with, the highly moral one with plenty of uplift; there are dozens that fit in here, so there is no need to mention titles. But where is the music of our real modern composers? By modern composers I don't mean the school music masters, church organists, or “educational” composers who at this minute doubtless are turning out another uplifting song for massed unison voices, but the real composers, those who are sometimes in evidence on the Third Programme and at the Cheltenham Festival. It appears that our real composers are not very interested in writing music for our school children to sing and play. True, some have shown the way: Bartók, Kodály, Copland, Vaughan Williams, Britten have all made considerable and worthwhile contributions to this particular field. But where are the rest? The great majority of them are not “Ivory Tower” artists, and yet even in the concert programmes of those schools which are musically enterprising their names seldom if ever appear.
Key Characteristics
Authors: Keller Hans
Published: February 2010

The subject indicated by my title is probably the obscurest in the whole of musicography. I say “musicography,” not “music,” because musically it is not, in my submission, obscure at all; it is merely complex. But musicians do not tend to write, and musicographers do not tend to hear.
The Aesthetic Hypothesis and “The Rape of Lucretia”
Authors: Squire W. H. Haddon
Published: February 2010

Every music student knows that both oratorio and opera were developments of the early form of drama; indeed opera of a kind existed long before the Christian era and is as old as the drama itself. In England oratorio may be said to be the successor of the medieval Mystery play, and opera that of the Morality.
London Festival of the International Society for Contemporary Music
Authors: Boys Henry
Published: February 2010

A distinguished musician, having glanced through the programme of the twentieth Festival of the International Society for Contemporary Music held in London this July, asked “Why in a festival of modern music is there so little modern music?”—thus alluding to the large proportion of works by long-established composers.
New Music in London
Authors: Mason Colin , Chapman Ernest
Published: February 2010

Rarely can one safely say from a purely aural knowledge of a single performance that any new work is a masterpiece. But at last such an opportunity has come with the Zorian's performance of Tippett's third Quartet. Beside it, many fine quartets of this century are dwarfed, and Bartók's alone seem of comparable stature. There is indeed a strong resemblance to Bartók's fifth Quartet. In both works the composers are most accessible, yet most individual; both achieve amazing textural clarity in combination with exquisite new sonorities; lastly, both quartets have five movements, alternately fast and slow, of approximately corresponding character. There is in each work a profound first movement, a jaunty high-speed, folkish third, (Tippett's containing bagpipe effects similar to those in certain movements of Bartók marked Cornemuse) and a puzzling fifth, problematical because it presents no problems, which makes us unsure how to interpret it. Not that these two movements have anything else in common except that they are fine music. Bartók's is a wry sneer at the eighteenth-century rondo, Tippett's a gentle epilogue, but just as the sneer is out of place and puzzling in the one very serious quartet, so is the ingenuousness of the epilogue in the other.
Film Music
Authors: Irving Ernest
Published: February 2010

I Have just read a very amusing little book which was issued in pocket size to the American troops during the war. It is written by Oscar Levant and carries the attractive title A Smattering of Ignorance. The author throws a powerful spotlight into American film-music and analyses its disclosures in a style sometimes cynical, sometimes ingenuous, but always exhibiting the delightful and disarming American quality of self-criticism.
Manuel de Falla
Authors: Blom Eric
Published: February 2010

The death last November of Manuel de Falla in the Argentine did not remove a figure who had been lately in the minds of musicians and music-lovers. Rather did it bring his picture back to their memories—the almost forgotten picture of a small, dried-up little man looking like some fanatical monk ready to go to the torture for an ideal, right or wrong. Almost forgotten: the man who twenty years ago was in the foreground as the most eminent living Spanish composer had long receded into a baffling obscurity. If he was mentioned at all, there were hints of some mystery or other. Some said his reason had gone, others that he had become a religious recluse, and some concluded from these rumours that there was some truth in both because these things may be interdependent.
Some Notes on Performance
Authors: Stein Erwin
Published: February 2010

It is odd to see the wrongdoer honourably acquitted while his victim is condemned, yet these are often the respective lots of performer and composer. Who has not sometimes looked forward to the playing of a rarely-heard work which he happens to love, only to be disappointed in the event by an inadequate performance? What he well knew to be a beautiful piece of music was exhibited as a mere conglomeration of sounds with little meaning, or none. Imagine the feelings of a composer as he listens to such a performance of his work! No wonder the blame is put on him whose music one is supposed to have heard. And the performer is often praised for his courage in an allegedly lost cause.… That it was lost because the performer did not really know what he was playing is seldom conjectured.
Opera in London
Authors:   The Earl of Harewood
Published: February 2010

During the three months, September ist to December ist, London has had the opportunity of seeing twenty-three different operas, given by five organisations—Sadlers Wells, the resident Co vent Garden Company, the New London Opera Company, the Vienna State Opera, and the English Opera Group. These twenty-three works have been made up as follows; four by Puccini: three each by Mozart and Britten: two by Verdi and Richard Strauss: and one each by Beethoven, Rossini, Donizetti, Smetana, Gounod, Bizet, Rimsky-Korsakov, Leoncavallo and Mascagni; that is to say, three written in the eighteenth century, twelve in the nineteenth, and eight in the twentieth. There is a certain amount of inevitable duplication amongst the five organisations concerned, and the considerable variation in production and performance is probably best seen by looking at the repertory of each company separately.
Bruno Walter's Autobiography
Authors: Franckenstein George
Published: February 2010

The profound spirituality, the serenity, the noble maturity, and the wonderful freshness of Bruno Walter at the age of seventy-one, and of his art, have greatly impressed his innumerable admirers who had recently the privilege and happiness of seeing and hearing him conduct after an interval of many years. What is the source from which this magic power springs?
American Orchestras
Authors: Burkat Leonard
Published: February 2010

The virtuoso orchestra and its virtuoso conductor are the most popular musicians in America today. They are the successors of the violin recitalist who toured the country playing to audiences of adoring women; to the coloratura soprano who was a thousand times more admired for the sounds she could make than for the relevance of the sounds to the music (such as it was) on her programme. They are the musical equivalent of the ballerina from whose slipper champagne is sipped, of the radio crooner with his following of swooning adolescent females, of the movie star who collects fans.
The Third Symphony of Aaron Copland
Authors: Berger Arthur V.
Published: February 2010

Aaron Copland's Third Symphony, completed in 1946 after some two years of concentrated labour, comes at the end of more than a decade during which his orchestral efforts were either in response to commissions in the field of ballet (Billy the Kid, Rodeo and Appalachian Spring) or cinema (Our Town), contrived to underline spoken text (Lincoln Portrait) or transmit impressions of travel (El Salón México, Danzón Cubano) or otherwise restricted by exterior factors (e.g., Second Hurricane and Outdoor Overture, intended for performance by school children). The degree to which he maintained his integrity and the quality and self-subsistence of his music through all these pièces d'occasion is quite astonishing. But it is, all the same, highly gratifying, and in the realm of the most notable musical occurrences, that he has finally found the leisure (through a commission from the Koussevitsky Foundation) to write a full-length symphony (some forty minutes in duration), a work that has not, either in seriousness or dimension, been obliged to compromise in the slightest with an impresario or any other demands of an occasion or dramatic situation.
Giselle—1950: Three Interpretations
Authors: Austin R. J.
Published: February 2010

During the past year London ballet-goers have had an opportunity of studying interpretations in the title role of Giselle by the three most accomplished ballerinas of our time. This seems, in retrospect, to be the outstanding feature in a memorable year at the ballet, and the one most pleasant to recall.
The Operas of Darius Milhaud
Authors: Rostand Claude
Published: February 2010

The list of Darius Milhaud's operas, leaving aside Les Saintes Maries de la Mer (a six-hundred-page score composed at the age of fifteen and subsequently burnt) consists of sixteen works, ranging from La Brebis Egarée (1910) to Bolivar (1943).

It is difficult—and probably useless—to try and make an a priori synthesis of this output, whose essential features stand out naturally from a panoramic glance even as rapid as this one. Indeed, Milhaud has never created in systematic fashion; his researches into the general domain of musical aesthetics and language have in no way been guided by preconceived ideas, and in particular he has never composed music for the stage (which is one of the most important aspects of his work) except as a result of chance meetings, either with poets or dramatists, or with poetical or dramatic themes and texts.
A “Gay Myth”—The Story of “Die Liebe der Danae”
Authors: Tenschert Roland
Published: February 2010

Richard Strauss first thought of composing a musical setting for the Danae myth in the Spring of 1920. The work was finished on 28th June, 1940, at Alt Garmisch and will be produced this August as the Salzburg Festival. The composer, in a letter to Hugo von Hofmannsthal dated 27th June, 1919, expressed his desire to have a subject for a light opera after the style of the Lucian dialogues between gods and hetaerae. Some seven months later the poet produced a sketch for a light, three-act operetta type of work in the Lucian spirit. On 23rd April the libretto went to Strauss. Hofmannsthal took the opportunity of explaining that what he was after was a development from the style of Der Rosenkavalier and of Ariadne and his arrangement of Molière's Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme. For this there would be needed the kind of light, witty music that Strauss alone, at that particular period of his life, was capable of supplying. This early classical myth which, in the Lucian sense, was to be thought of as a “milesian fairy tale,” flippantly treated, should be as French as possible in manner but without sacrificing the essentially German core and the concealed symbolism and metaphysics that went with it. The poet was already concerning himself, too, with questions of costumes and scenery. He envisaged something in the classical style of the Viennese designers, or even better, in Poiret's.
Criticism: A State Of Emergency
Authors: Mitchell Donald
Published: February 2010

My second quotation, that superbly cutting account of a husband, occurs in The Awkward Age. The imagery might, under only a little pressure, be made to serve as a description of the present-day music critic, an odd accessory to the world of music who is only rarely (like the fire extinguisher) of practical use:—a bucket on a peg, indeed, and all too often an empty one.
Strict Serial Technique in Classical Music
Authors: Keller Hans
Published: February 2010

Vaughan Williams' inspired attacks on musical history in The Making of Music (London, 1955) have come in for some heavy censure. “There is no physical reason,” he writes, “why an 18th-century composer should not have written the whole of Strawinsky and Schoenberg, provided that he had the pen and paper.” “Only the same reason,” Martin Cooper comments, “that prevents a monkey with a typewriter producing Hamlet.”
Music in Brazil
Authors: Savill Roy
Published: February 2010

Through its creative wealth and technical importance, Brazilian music has assumed a prominent position in the context of contemporary composition. This blossoming, which is tied to such personalities as Villa-Lobos, Camargo Guarniere or Francisco Mignone, is related to the natural resources of the environment and stems from the inter-action of a whole gamut of values.
An Unknown Leningrad Museum
Authors: Seaman Gerald
Published: February 2010

In a far corner of St. Isaac's Square in Leningrad, overshadowed by the gold-domed cupola of the city's most famous cathedral, stands the Institute of Cinema, Theatre and Music. Few foreign visitors to Leningrad realize that on the first floor of that building is contained one of the largest collection of folk instruments in the world, a collection which, though primarily devoted to the Soviet Union, nevertheless contains instruments from Western Europe, China, India and Japan.
Meeting with Anton Webern (Pages from a Diary)
Authors: Dallapiccola Luigi
Published: February 2010

Alfred Schlee's long and interesting letter, sent from Vienna on the 8th of this month, ends with the words: ‘Unfortunately I also have some extremely sad news for you. Webern has died in a tragic accident, just when his works are at last about to establish themselves firmly among us.’

Prague, 5 September 1935

(I.S.C.M. Festival)

This evening Heinrich Jalowetz directed the world première of Anton Webern's Concerto op.24, a composition of unbelievable brevity (scarcely six minutes of music) and truly extraordinary concentration. Every decorative element is eliminated. Nine instruments are used: three wind, three brass and two strings plus piano.
Sense and Sound: Gerhard's Fourth Symphony
Authors: MacDonald Calum
Published: February 2010

The publication and recording of one of the principal works of Gerhard's last years is a double event of major importance. Although Gerhard wrote so many notable works in the final decade of his life that one hesitates to call the Fourth Symphony the greatest of them, it is wholly representative of a composer who is coming to be recognized as one of the foremost of our time. If full recognition has not yet been accorded him, it may be because of the superficial but widespread assumption that the works of his last period are largely demonstrations of brilliant textural invention whose structural raison d'être can be felt only ‘intuitively’ (and thus, of course, needn't be explained). We are asked to take even the audible structure (or as some commentators seem to imply, the lack of it) on trust.
The Music of Taverner
Authors: Arnold Stephen
Published: February 2010

The newcomer to Peter Maxwell Davies's music may well be bewildered by a Stravinskian profusion of widely differing styles. Stravinsky's stylistic progress was at one time misunderstood and severely criticized; but as audiences grew increasingly familiar with the whole of his musical output, the consistency of his musical concerns became obvious. Perhaps because of the more sympathetic view of Stravinsky's music, Davies has been better understood in this respect, even though over the seventeen years or so of his acknowledged output, the disparities of style are at least as great as they were with Stravinsky.
Revolution and Evolution in Art
Authors: Bartók Béla
Published: February 2010

The word ‘revolution’ is often misused in connection with contemporary music. Every composer who writes some kind of new music is called a revolutionary musician by many people. Let us now examine the exact meaning of revolution. According to dictionaries, the term denotes reversal of conditions, fundamental change. In other words, it is a destruction of all that existed before and a beginning anew, a start from nothing.
The Symphonies of Roger Sessions
Authors: Imbrie Andrew
Published: February 2010

Recently a composer was told by a knowledgeable critic that no one writes symphonies any more, to which he replied: ‘Yes, I know; so I call mine something else.’ Roger Sessions has not done this. His eight symphonies, which span the years from 1927 to the present, are worthy of the name, and give undeniable evidence that reports of the genre's demise have been premature. In originality and scope of expression, and in the mastery with which large-scale symphonic thinking is reconciled with a post-tonal idiom, the cycle that begins with the Second Symphony (1946) deserves to be counted among the outstanding musical achievements of the past 25 years.
Gespräche Mit Brecht und Dürrenmatt
Authors: von Einem Gottfried
Published: February 2010

Im Sommer 1948—oder war's 49?—wohnte Brecht in Salzburg bei mir. Ich hatte die Absicht, mit ihm zusammen eine Oper zu machen. Er erzählte mir einen Stoff, den ich vergessen habe. Oder vielmehr, ich vermische ihn in meiner Erinnerung mit der “Dreigroschenoper”, der er sehr ähnlich war. Ubrig blieb nichts als der Titel: “Von den Freuden und Leiden der gröβeren und kleineren Seeräuber”.
The Compositional Process
Authors: Denisov Edison
Published: February 2010

In analyzing any composition, we retrace certain moments in the creative process. It is wholly unimportant whether the work arose through the conscious application of some compositional principle, or purely intuitively (in which case we presume that the author himself ‘didn't notice’ it). If we can observe an underlying principle, it has an objective reality, and we are therefore fully justified in investigating it and regarding it as part of the compositional process. The deeper we penetrate the musical fabric of a work, the more subtle and profound are the principles we uncover. By its nature, genuine analysis seems almost a reconstruction of the original process of composition. It is true that we are often unable to establish the order in which various principles arose in the composer's mind; but this, in the long run, is not really essential.
Riding the Thermals—Howard Skempton's Piano Music
Authors: Hill Peter
Published: February 2010

Howard skempton is a deeply serious composer, but his art is modest and makes no self-conscious effort to impress. Precisely because it is so natural the music seems to tell us a lot about the private person behind the notes. The music's dimensions are equally modest. Most of the piano pieces last little more than a minute or two, and they are ideal for domestic music-making, playing for one's own pleasure or to a friend.

Skempton was born in 1947. He studied composition privately with Cornelius Cardew with whom, together with Michael Parsons, he helped to found the Scratch Orchestra in 1969. Since 1974 he has composed vocal, accordion, and percussion pieces for the many concerts he has given with Michael Parsons. His largest work to date has been Chorales which was given its first performance in 1982 by the Merseyside Youth Orchestra.
Berthold Goldschmidt: Orchestral Music
Authors: Matthews Colin
Published: February 2010

With his major work, the opera Beatrice Cenci, unperformed apart from extracts, his other opera Der gewaltige Hahnrei not revived professionally since its highly successful première more than 50 years ago, the Second Quartet having to wait 17 years for its première, the remarkably original Kästner settings of 1931 still awaiting a performance, it is clear that it is not only Berthold Goldschmidt's orchestral works that have been ‘undeservedly neglected’.

But of these orchestral works only one can in any sense be said to have entered the repertoire, and that, ironically, is one of Goldschmidt's very earliest works—the Comedy of Errors Overture of 1925. It is his only orchestral score in print. The three concertos—the Cello Concerto (1953), Clarinet Concerto (1954), and Violin Concerto (1951–5)—received a fair number of performances during the 1950'5 (not all of them under Goldschmidt's baton), but have virtually disappeared, along with the inventive Sinfonietta of 1945. Perhaps the least deserving of the obscurity into which they have temporarily fallen are the Ciaconna Sinfonica (1936) and the Mediterranean Songs (1958)—both of them works of real power and substance, and immediately approachable.
The Music of Edison Denisov
Authors: Bradshaw Susan
Published: February 2010

At a time when scarcely any Soviet composer of the post-war generation had been heard of, let alone heard, in this country, it was quite a coup for the 1967 Brighton Festival to have been able to present a performance of Sun of the Incas by Edison Denisov—and this only three years after the work was composed. Rough and ready as the Brighton performance undoubtedly was (with poorly cued parts and too little rehearsal time), it was readily apparent to performers and audience alike that this was no safe, middle-of-the-road music, but the work of a forward-looking composer with a voice of his own as distinctive as that of any of his western contemporaries. The same audience would certainly have been astonished to know that Denisov—like other now distinguished Soviet composers of the same generation—had been totally cut off from the literature of non-Russian 20th-century music in its entirety until the late 1950's: not a hint of any of the historic musical events of our time had been allowed to reach them—not even of the developments in pre-1914 Vienna. In Denisov's case it is still more surprising to learn that his own early environment had denied him the experience of music of any kind.
Fauré's Performance Practice
Authors: Jones J. Barrie
Published: February 2010

Nowadays, personal interpretations in performance may in some quarters be unfashionable, in some instances undesirable, but to some degree they are inevitable. In many cases, such interpretations can be revealing, in that they throw previously unsuspected light onto the music; despite their apparently unusual approach, they are quickly accepted and join the ranks of the authoritative. (One thinks, for example, of early performances by Maurizio Pollini of Schoenberg's piano music, where an Italian style of performance is brought to bear upon a German style of composition in a wholly convincing manner.) Stravinsky's deep-freeze interpretations, where the performer follows the instructions on the packet, delineate only one approach to the subject.
The Plum'd Serpent: Antonio Borgese and Roger Sessions's ‘Montezuma”
Authors: Olmstead Andrea
Published: February 2010

The Spanish Conquest of Mexico provides stirring drama for an epic opera on an American subject It has been set by some 30 composers; the earliest is Graun's Montezuma (1755), and the best-known Spontini's Fernand Cortez, ou la Conquête de Mexique (1809). Antonio Borgese, a Sicilian who ‘fell in love with the English language’, retold the epic story to music by Roger Sessions.

How did such an unlikely alliance—a Sicilian poet, an American composer, and Mexican history—come about? Sessions first met Antonio Borgese in 1934 in his home town of Hadley, Massachusetts, when Borgese was teaching at Smith College. In 1935 Borgese made a trip to Mexico, where he was overwhelmed by the early history of that country; on his return, he proposed collaborating on an opera on the subject, although he had never written a libretto. Sessions knew nothing of Mexico's history, but did possess a first edition of Prescott's Conquest of Mexico given to his grandfather, possibly by Prescott himself. Sessions read the Prescott and Bernal Diaz's account, and he too became enthralled. Borgese wisely advised against Sessions's proposed title, Tenochtitlan, arguing, ‘The opera is written for titans; we don't need a title for titans, too’. Instead, he suggested the title Montezuma.
Robert Simpson's ‘New Way’
Authors: Pike Lionel
Published: February 2010

The Recently Issued Recording of Simpson's Eighth String Quartet has given us an opportunity to examine a change in that composer's approach to large-scale form. He himself mentioned this ‘new way’—without using such a Beethovenian expression—in a BBC Radio 3 discussion with Michael Oliver, on 6 November 1982:

In earlier times I was interested in large-scale tonality, large areas of tonality: but now I'm trying to find what intervals themselves can generate, using the resonances inherent in simple intervals like the fifth, the fourth or the third. I try to generate something from that by feeling it in a novel way, by approaching the interval of a fifth as if I had never heard it before, and trying to find what can happen—or by using intervals against each other. Take two intervals, the second and the fifth; then you have a combination of intervals and you can use them in different ways against each other.
York Höller's ‘The Master and Margarita’: A German Opera
Authors: Stenzl Jürg
Published: February 2010

1 ‘Literaturoper’: Literary Opera and the ‘problem of opera’

Right up to the end of the 19th century, an opera libretto was conceived differently from a stage play. This was because, from the outset, the libretto was thought out and constructed with a view to being set to music and sung. The librettist, whether he was writing in Italian or French, had to respect the conventions of this particular literary genre, conventions that were derived from a specific type of musical drama comprised of an alternation between recitatives (action) and arias or ensembles (tableaux). The use of specific lines and rhymes made the libretto into a ‘pre-composition’, and gave the composer an architectural plan to follow.
Dušan Martinček: An Introduction to His Music
Authors: Babcock David
Published: February 2010

There is a certain type of composer, a type characteristic of the culture of our century, with its unprecedented complexities and contradictions. This is the slow and painstaking composer, who eschews all self–repetition, producing a limited number of works. Each one of these works, however, will be a work of real weight and significance. Henri Dutilleux comes to mind as an example of this type; György Kurtág is another. It can be said that these composers, like Varèse, Webern, Spinner, and Ruggles before them, have given us, in terms of substance, a great deal of music. And so has the Slovak composer Dušan Martinček.
Minds, brains, and programs
Authors: Searle John R.
Published: February 2010

This article can be viewed as an attempt to explore the consequences of two propositions. (1) Intentionality in human beings (and animals) is a product of causal features of the brain. I assume this is an empirical fact about the actual causal relations between mental processes and brains. It says simply that certain brain processes are sufficient for intentionality. (2) Instantiating a computer program is never by itself a sufficient condition of intentionality. The main argument of this paper is directed at establishing this claim. The form of the argument is to show how a human agent could instantiate the program and still not have the relevant intentionality. These two propositions have the following consequences: (3) The explanation of how the brain produces intentionality cannot be that it does it by instantiating a computer program. This is a strict logical consequence of 1 and 2. (4) Any mechanism capable of producing intentionality must have causal powers equal to those of the brain. This is meant to be a trivial consequence of 1. (5) Any attempt literally to create intentionality artificially (strong AI) could not succeed just by designing programs but would have to duplicate the causal powers of the human brain. This follows from 2 and 4.

“Could a machine think?” On the argument advanced here only a machine could think, and only very special kinds of machines, namely brains and machines with internal causal powers equivalent to those of brains. And that is why strong AI has little to tell us about thinking, since it is not about machines but about programs, and no program by itself is sufficient for thinking.
Peer-review practices of psychological journals: The fate of published articles, submitted again
Authors: Peters Douglas P. , Ceci Stephen J.
Published: February 2010

A growing interest in and concern about the adequacy and fairness of modern peer-review practices in publication and funding are apparent across a wide range of scientific disciplines. Although questions about reliability, accountability, reviewer bias, and competence have been raised, there has been very little direct research on these variables.

The present investigation was an attempt to study the peer-review process directly, in the natural setting of actual journal referee evaluations of submitted manuscripts. As test materials we selected 12 already published research articles by investigators from prestigious and highly productive American psychology departments, one article from each of 12 highly regarded and widely read American psychology journals with high rejection rates (80%) and nonblind refereeing practices.

With fictitious names and institutions substituted for the original ones (e.g., Tri-Valley Center for Human Potential), the altered manuscripts were formally resubmitted to the journals that had originally refereed and published them 18 to 32 months earlier. Of the sample of 38 editors and reviewers, only three (8%) detected the resubmissions. This result allowed nine of the 12 articles to continue through the review process to receive an actual evaluation: eight of the nine were rejected. Sixteen of the 18 referees (89%) recommended against publication and the editors concurred. The grounds for rejection were in many cases described as “serious methodological flaws.” A number of possible interpretations of these data are reviewed and evaluated.
Précis of Knowledge and the Flow of Information
Authors: Dretske Fred I.
Published: February 2010

A theory of information is developed in which the informational content of a signal (structure, event) can be specified. This content is expressed by a sentence describing the condition at a source on which the properties of a signal depend in some lawful way. Information, as so defined, though perfectly objective, has the kind of semantic property (intentionality) that seems to be needed for an analysis of cognition. Perceptual knowledge is an information-dependent internal state with a content corresponding to the information producing it. This picture of knowledge captures most of what makes knowledge an important cpistcmological notion. It also avoids many of the problems infecting traditional justificational accounts of knowledge (knowledge as [justified, true belief’). Our information pickup systems are characterized in terms of the way they encode incoming information (perception) for further cognitive processing. Our perceptual experience is distinguished from our perceptual beliefs by the different way sensory information is encoded in these internal structures. Our ropositional attitudes – those (unlike knowledge) having a content that can be either true or false (e.g., belief) – are described in terms of the way internal (presumably neural) structures acquire during learning a certain information-carrying role. The content of these structures (whether true or false) is identified with the kind of information they were developed to carry
Human inbreeding avoidance: Culture in nature
Authors: van den Berghe Pierre L.
Published: February 2010

Much clinical and ethnographic evidence suggests that humans, like many other organisms, are selected to avoid close inbreeding because of the fitness costs of inbreeding depression. The proximate mechanism of human inbreeding avoidance seems to be precultural, and to involve the interaction of genetic predispositions and environmental conditions. As first suggested by E. Westermarck, and supported by evidence from Israeli kibbutzim, Chinese sim-pua marriage, and much convergent ethnographic and clinical evidence, humans negatively imprint on intimate associates during a critical period of early childhood (between ages 2 and 6).

There is also much evidence that, like other social animals, humans do not seek to maximize outbreeding, but rather to maintain an optimal balance between outbreeding and inbreeding.Closeinbreeding reduces fitness through inbreeding depression, butsomeinbreeding brings the benefits of nepotism. For simple, stateless, horticultural societies, the optimal balance seems to be achieved by a combination of precultural inbreeding avoidance of relatives with anr≤·25 and cultural rules of preferential marriage with kin withr≥·25. Adjustment of the coefficient of inbreeding to other ecological settings seems to be largely cultural. An interactive model of “culture in nature” is presented, in which culture is seen as coevolving with genes to produce the maxiniization of individual inclusive fitness.
The codes of man and beasts
Authors: Premack David
Published: February 2010

Exposing the chimpanzee to language training appears to enhance the animal's ability to perform some kinds of tasks but not others. The abilities that are enhanced involve abstract judgment, as in analogical reasoning, matching proportions of physically unlike exemplars, and completing incomplete (external) representations of action. The abilities that do not improve concern the location of items in space and the inferences one might make in attempting to obtain them. Representing items in space and making inferences about them could be done with an imaginal code, but representing relations and judging the relations between them, as in analogies, requires a more abstract code. Language training cannot instill such an abstract code, but for species that have the code to start with, it may enhance the animal's ability to use it.
Brain organization for language from the perspective of electrical stimulation mapping
Authors: Ojemann George A.
Published: February 2010

A model for the organization of language in the adult humans brain is derived from electrical stimulation mapping of several language-related functions: naming, reading, short-term verbal memory, mimicry of orofacial movements, and phoneme identification during neurosurgical operations under local anesthesia. A common peri-Sylvian cortex for motor and language functions is identified in the language dominant hemisphere, including sites common to sequencing of movements and identification of phonemes that may represent an anatomic substrate for the “motor theory of speech perception.” This is surrounded by sites related to short-term verbal memory, with sites specialized for such language functions as naming or syntax at the interface between these motor and memory areas. Language functions are discretely and differentially localized in association cortex, including some differential localization of the same function, naming, in multiple languages. There is substantial individual variability in the exact location of sites related to a particular function, a variability which can be partly related to the patient's sex and overall language ability and which may depend on prior brain injury and, perhaps subtly, on prior experience. A common “specific alerting response” mechanism for motor and language functions is identified in the lateral thalamus of the language–dominant hemisphere, a mechanism that may select the cortical areas appropriate for a particular language function.
Rational belief
Authors: Kyburg Henry E.
Published: February 2010

There is a tension between normative and descriptive elements in the theory of rational belief. This tension has been reflected in work in psychology and decision theory as well as in philosophy. Canons of rationality should be tailored to what is humanly feasible. But rationality has normative content as well as descriptive content.

A number of issues related to both deductive and inductive logic can be raised. Are there full beliefs – statements that are categorically accepted? Should statements be accepted when they become overwhelmingly probable? What is the structure imposed on these beliefs by rationality? Are they consistent? Are they deductively closed? What parameters, if any, does rational acceptance depend on? How can accepted statements come to be rejected on new evidence

Should degrees of belief satisfy the probability calculus? Does conformity to the probability calculus exhaust the rational constraints that can be imposed on partial beliefs? With the acquisition of new evidence, should beliefs change in accord with Bayes' theorem? Are decisions made in accord with the principle of maximizing expected utility? Should they be?

A systematic set of answers to these questions is developed on the basis of a probabilistic rule of acceptance and a conception of interval-valued logical probability according to which probabilities are based onknownfrequencies. This leads to limited deductive closure, a demand for only limited consistency, and the rejection of Bayes' theorem as universally applicable to changes of belief. It also becomes possible, given new evidence, to reject previously accepted statements.
An analysis of psychotherapy versus placebo studies
Authors: Prioleau Leslie , Murdock Martha , Brody Nathan
Published: February 2010

Smith, Glass, and Miller (1980) have reported a meta-analysis of over 500 studies comparing some form of psychological therapy with a control condition. They report that when averaged over all dependent measures of outcome, psychological therapy is. 85 standard deviations better than the control treatment. We examined the subset of studies included in the Smith et al. metaanalysis that contained a psychotherapy and a placebo treatment. The median of the mean effect sizes for these 32 studies was. 15. There was a nonsignificant inverse relationship between mean outcome and the following: sample size, duration of therapy, use of measures of outcome other than undisguised self-report, measurement of outcome at follow-up, and use of real patients rather than subjects solicited for the purposes of participation in a research study. A qualitative analysis of the studies in terms of the type of patient involved indicates that those using psychiatric outpatients had essentially zero effect sizes and that none using psychiatric inpaticnts provide convincing evidence for psychotherapeutic effectiveness. The onty studies clearly demonstrating significant effects of psychotherapy were the ones that did not use real patients. For the most part, these studies involved small samples of subjects and brief treatments, occasionally described in quasibeliavioristic language. It was concluded that for real patients there is no evidence that the benefits of psychotherapy are greater than those of placebo treatment.
Précis of The Modularity of Mind
Authors: Fodor Jerry A.
Published: February 2010

The Modularity of Mind proposes an alternative to the “New Look” or “interaetionist” view of cognitive architecture that has dominated several decades of cognitive science. Whereas interactionism stresses the continuity of perceptual and cognitive processes, modularity theory argues for their distinctness. It is argued, in particular, that the apparent plausibility of New Look theorizing derives from the failure to distinguish between the (correct) claim that perceptual processes are inferential and the (dubious) claim that they are unencapsidated, that is, that they are arbitrarily sensitive to the organism's beliefs and desires. In fact, according to modularity theory, perceptual processes are computationally isolated from much of the background knowledge to which cognitive processes have access. The postulation of autonomous, domain-specific psychological mechanisms underlying perceptual integration connects modularity theory with the tradition of faculty psychology, in particular, with the work of Franz Joseph Call. Some of these historical affinities, and some of the relations between faculty psychology and Cartesianism, are discussed in the book.
Pain and behavior
Authors: Rachlin Howard
Published: February 2010

There seem to be two kinds of pain: fundamental “sensory” pain, the intensity of which is a direct function of the intensity of various pain stimuli, and “psychological” pain, the intensity of which is highly modifiable by such factors as hypnotism, placebos, and the sociocultural setting in which the stimulus occurs.

Physiological, cognitive, and behavioral theories of pain each have their own view of the nature of the two kinds of pain. According to physiological theory and cognitive theory, “psychological” pain and “sensory” pain are both internal processes, with the former influencing the latter as central processes influence peripheral processes. According to behavioral theory, “sensory” pain is a reflex (a respondent) while “psychological” pain is an instrumental act (an operant). Behavioral theory claims that neither kind of pain is an internal process — that both are overt behaviors.

Although both physiological theory and cognitive theory agree with common sense that pain is internal, they disagree with commonsense intuitions at other points. They are no better at explaining the subjective experience of pain than is behavioral theory. They have not generated treatments for pain that are superior to those generated by behavioral theory. There is no basis for the frequent claim by antibehaviorist philosophers and psychologists that behaviorism, because it cannot explain pain, is less capable of explaining mental phenomena than physiology or cognition.
The organization of human postural movements: A formal basis and experimental synthesis
Authors: Nashner Lewis M. , McCollum Gin
Published: February 2010

A scheme for understanding the organization of human postural movements is developed in the format of a position paper. The structural characteristics of the body and the geometry of muscular actions are incorporated into a three-dimensional graphical representation of human movement mechanics in the sagittal plane. A series of neural organizational hypotheses limit a theoretically infinite number of combinations of muscle contractions and associated movement trajectories for performing postural corrections: (1) Controls are organized to use the minimum number of muscles; (2) frequently performed movements are organized to require a minimum of neural decision-making.

These hypotheses lead to the prediction that postural movements are composed of muscle contractile strategies derived from a limited set of distinct contractile patterns. The imposition of two mechanical constraints related to the configuration of support and to requirements for body stability with respect to gravity predict the conditions under which individual movement strategies will be deployed.

A complementary organizational scheme for the senses is developed. We show that organization of postural movements into combinations of distinct strategies simplifies the interpretation of sensory inputs. The fine-tuning of movement strategies can be accomplished by breaking down the complex array of feedback information into a series of scalar quantities related to the parameters of the movement strategies. For example, the magnitude, aim, and curvature of the movement trajectory generated by an individual strategy can be adjusted independently.

The second half of the report compares theoretical predictions with a series of actual experimental observations on normal subjects and patients with known sensory and motor disorders. Actual postural movements conform to theoretical predictions about the composition of individual movement strategies and the conditions under which each strategy is used. Observations on patients suggest how breakdowns in individual steps within the logical process of organization can lead to specific movement abnormalities.

Discussion focuses on the areas needing further experimentation and on the implications of the proposed organizational scheme. We conclude that although our organizational scheme is not new in demonstrating the need for simplifying the neural control of movement, it is perhaps original in imposing discrete logical control upon a continuous mechanical system. The attraction of the scheme is that it provides a framework compatible with both mechanical and physiological information and amenable to experimental testing.
Four frames suffice: A provisional model of vision and space
Authors: Feldman Jerome A.
Published: February 2010

This paper presents a general computational treatment of how mammals are able to deal with visual objects and environments. The model tries to cover the entire range from behavior and phenomenological experience to detailed neural encodings in crude but computationally plausible reductive steps. The problems addressed include perceptual constancies, eye movements and the stable visual world, object descriptions, perceptual generalizations, and the representation of extrapersonal space.

The entire development is based on an action-oriented notion of perception. The observer is assumed to be continuously sampling the ambient light for information of current value. The central problem of vision is taken to be categorizing and locating objects in the environment. The critical step in this process is the linking of visual information to symbolic object descriptions; this is calledindexing, from the analogy of identifying a book from index terms. The system must also identifysituationsand use this knowledge to guide movement and other actions in the environment. The treatment focuses on the different representations of information used in the visual system.

The four representational frames capture information in the following forms: retinotopic, head-based, symbolic, and allocentric. The functional roles of the four frames, the communication among them, and their suggested neurophysiological realization constitute the core of the paper. The model is perforce crude, but appears to be consistent with all relevant findings.