bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Impact of maternal probiotic-supplemented dietary counselling on pregnancy outcome and prenatal and postnatal growth: a double-blind, placebo-controlled study
Authors: Luoto Raakel , Laitinen Kirsi , Nermes Merja , Isolauri Erika
Published: February 2010

The perinatal nutritional environment impacts upon the health and well-being of mother and child also in the long term. The aim of the present study was to determine the safety and efficacy of perinatal probiotic-supplemented dietary counselling by evaluating pregnancy outcome and fetal and infant growth during the 24 months' follow-up. Altogether, 256 women were randomised at their first trimester of pregnancy into a control and a dietary intervention group. The intervention group received intensive dietary counselling provided by a nutritionist and were further randomised, double-blind to receive probiotics (Lactobacillus rhamnosusGG andBifidobacterium lactisBb12; diet/probiotics) or placebo (diet/placebo). Firstly, probiotic intervention reduced the frequency of gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM); 13 % (diet/probiotics)v.36 % (diet/placebo) and 34 % (control);P = 0·003. Secondly, the safety of this approach was attested by normal duration of pregnancies with no adverse events in mothers or children. No significant differences in prenatal or postnatal growth rates among the study groups were detected. Thirdly, distinctive effects of the two interventions were detected; probiotic intervention reduced the risk of GDM and dietary intervention diminished the risk of larger birth size in affected cases;P = 0·035 for birth weight andP = 0·028 for birth length. The results of the present study show that probiotic-supplemented perinatal dietary counselling could be a safe and cost-effective tool in addressing the metabolic epidemic. In view of the fact that birth size is a risk marker for later obesity, the present results are of significance for public health in demonstrating that this risk is modifiable.
Analysis of developmental genetic effects from embryo, cytoplasm and maternal plant for oleic and linoleic acid contents of rapeseed
Authors: VARIATH M. T. , WU J. , ZHANG L. , SHI C.
Published: February 2010

The genetic effects, including genetic main effects and genotype×environment (G×E) interaction effects, for oleic acid content (OAC) and linoleic acid content (LAC) at five different developmental times/stages were studied using unconditional and conditional genetic models for seed quantitative traits in diploid plants. The unconditional analysis results revealed that both OAC and LAC were simultaneously controlled by diploid embryo nuclear genes, cytoplasmic genes and diploid maternal plant nuclear genes and their G×E interaction effects. Effects on the embryo and cytoplasm were found to be more important for OAC at different developmental times while maternal effects, in combination with cytoplasmic effects, were more important for LAC at most development times. The conditional analysis revealed that the net effect from expression of maternal genes was more important for both traits at most developmental stages. The total narrow-sense heritability was high for both OAC and LAC, with general heritabilities being more visible for OAC and G×E interaction heritability being more important for LAC at most development times. The predicted genetic effects indicated that while most parents (with the exception of Youcai 601, Zhongyou 821 and Eyouchangjia) could be used for improving OAC of offspring, Double 20-4 was the most appropriate for improving LAC due to its better stability and positive values across environments at most development times.
Interactions between steady and oscillatory convection in mushy layers
Authors: GUBA PETER , WORSTER M. GRAE
Published: February 2010

We study nonlinear, two-dimensional convection in a mushy layer during solidification of a binary mixture. We consider a particular limit in which the onset of oscillatory convection just precedes the onset of steady overturning convection, at a prescribed aspect ratio of convection patterns. This asymptotic limit allows us to determine nonlinear solutions analytically. The results provide a complete description of the stability of and transitions between steady and oscillatory convection as functions of the Rayleigh number and the compositional ratio. Of particular focus are the effects of the basic-state asymmetries and non-uniformity in the permeability of the mushy layer, which give rise to abrupt (hysteretic) transitions in the system. We find that the transition between travelling and standing waves, as well as that between standing waves and steady convection, can be hysteretic. The relevance of our theoretical predictions to recent experiments on directionally solidifying mushy layers is also discussed.
A numerical study of global frequency selection in the time-mean wake of a circular cylinder
Authors: LEONTINI J. S. , THOMPSON M. C. , HOURIGAN K.
Published: February 2010

A series of direct numerical simulations, both in two- and three-dimensions, of the flow past a circular cylinder for Reynolds numbers Re ≤ 600 has been conducted. From these simulations, the time-mean (and, for the three-dimensional simulations, the spanwise spatial-mean) flow has been calculated. A global linear stability analysis has been conducted on these mean flows, showing that the mean cylinder wake for Re ≤ 600 is marginally stable and the eigenfrequency of the leading global mode closely predicts the eventual saturated vortex shedding frequency. A local stability analysis has also been conducted. For this, a series of streamwise velocity profiles has been extracted from the mean wake and the stability of these profiles has been analysed using the Rayleigh stability equation. The real and imaginary instability frequencies gained from these profiles have then been used to find the global frequency selected by the flow using a saddle-point criterion. The results confirm the success of the saddle-point criterion when the mean flow is quasi-parallel in the vicinity of the saddle point; however, the limitations of the method when the mean flow exhibits higher curvature are also elucidated.
Nonlinear modulation of ion-acoustic waves in two-electron-temperature plasmas
Authors: ESFANDYARI-KALEJAHI A. , KOURAKIS I. , AKBARI-MOGHANJOUGHI M.
Published: February 2010

The amplitude modulation of ion-acoustic waves is investigated in a plasma consisting of adiabatic warm ions, and two different populations of thermal electrons at different temperatures. The fluid equations are reduced to nonlinear Schrödinger equation by employing a multi-scale perturbation technique. A linear stability analysis for the wave packet amplitude reveals that long wavelengths are always stable, while modulational instability sets in for shorter wavelengths. It is shown that increasing the value of the hot-to-cold electron temperature ratio (μ), for a given value of the hot-to-cold electron density ratio (ν), favors instability. The role of the ion temperature is also discussed. In the limiting case ν = 0 (or ν → ∞), which correspond(s) to an ordinary (single) electron-ion plasma, the results of previous works are recovered.
‘Fill Full the Mouth of Famine’: Voluntary Action in Famine Relief in India 1896–1901
Authors: BREWIS GEORGINA
Published: February 2010

This paper considers non-governmental famine relief in India during 1896–1898 and 1899–1901. It details the efforts of a broad spectrum of middle-class Indians, Christian missionaries, British non-officials and off-duty civil servants who were drawn into voluntary service on semi-official committees which were responsible for distributing record sums raised through international appeals. It also explores the extension of relief work by independent agencies in the 1890s. The paper considers evolving British attitudes to indigenous relief methods and the sometimes fraught relations between government and voluntary agencies. It suggests that voluntary famine relief activities during the 1890s mark a transition from traditional religious philanthropy to organised social service. Voluntary relief at this time differed from earlier responses to famine hunger because it was marked by fundraising, co-operation with other agencies and the personal service of volunteers. In conclusion, it is shown that participation in relief in the 1890s inspired a new generation of educated Indians to channel their nationalism into practical social service after 1900.
Molecular detection ofBabesiaspp. and other haemoparasitic infections of cattle in Maputo Province, Mozambique
Authors: MARTINS TIAGO M. , NEVES LUÍS , PEDRO OLÍVIA C. , FAFETINE JOSÉ M. , DO ROSÁRIO VIRGÍLIO E. , DOMINGOS ANA
Published: February 2010

Molecular detection ofBabesiaspecies in apparently healthy cattle within an endemic region was carried out in order to determine the prevalence of carriers and the geographical distribution ofBabesia bigeminaandBabesia bovisin Maputo Province, Mozambique. Samples from 477 animals at 5 localities were analysed using 2 techniques, the semi-nested hot-start PCR and the reverse line blot (RLB) assay. With the semi-nested hot-start PCR, detection ofB. bigeminaranged between 30% and 89%, and ofB. bovisbetween 27% and 83%. The RLB assay was comparatively less sensitive in this study and detection ofB. bovisranged from 0% to 17%, andB. bigeminawas not detected at all by this technique. Analysis of new sequences of the 18S rRNA gene revealed that the currentB. bigeminaRLB probe is not specific for the identification of isolates in Mozambique. The RLB assay, however, resulted in the detection of 8 other haemoparasite species belonging to the generaBabesia,Theileria,AnaplasmaandEhrlichia. 18S rRNA gene sequences from theTheileriaspp. were identified, and a phylogenic tree constructed with these sequences yielded a heterogeneousT. mutans-like group. In conclusion, infection withB. bigeminaandB. bovisis endemic in Maputo Province, but rates of transmission vary. Furthermore, mixed infections with the haemoparasites responsible for several tick-borne diseases in cattle are common in Mozambique.
Pathways for the influx of molecules into cercariae of Schistosoma mansoni during skin penetration
Authors: THORNHILL J. A. , McVEIGH P. , JURBERG A. D. , KUSEL J. R.
Published: February 2010

It has been observed that fluorescent membrane-impermeant molecules can enter the cercariae as they penetrate mouse skin. The hypothesis to be tested was that such molecules, which included Lucifer Yellow and a variety of fluorescent dextrans, entered the parasite through the nephridiopore and excretory tubules as well as through the surface membrane. FITC-labelled poly-L-lysine (molecular weight 10 kDa), added at 4°C during syringe transformation, was found to enter the nephridiopore and labelled the excretory bladder and sometimes the excretory tubules. This finding indicates that macromolecules (10 kDa) can enter the nephridiopore. It was found that linoleic acid (a normal constituent of skin) greatly stimulated uptake of Lucifer Yellow and dextrans into the excretory/subtegumental region of 2-h-old schistosomula. This correlated with an increased uptake of membrane-impermeant propidium iodide at 37°C. Since increased uptake of propidium iodide occurs when membranes become permeable, the surface membrane could also be a pathway of transport of the membrane-impermeant molecules into the schistosomulum.
Experimental infection of two South American reservoirs with four distinct strains ofTrypanosoma cruzi
Authors: ROELLIG DAWN M. , McMILLAN KATHERINE , ELLIS ANGELA E. , VANDEBERG JOHN L. , CHAMPAGNE DONALD E. , YABSLEY MICHAEL J.
Published: February 2010

Trypanosoma cruzi(Tc), the causative agent of Chagas disease, is a diverse species with 2 primary genotypes, TcI and TcII, with TcII further subdivided into 5 subtypes (IIa–e). This study evaluated infection dynamics of 4 genetically and geographically diverseT. cruzistrains in 2 South American reservoirs, degus (Octodon degus) and grey short-tailed opossums (Monodelphis domestica). Based on prior suggestions of a genotype-host association, we hypothesized that degus (placental) would more readily become infected with TcII strains while short-tailed opossums (marsupial) would be a more competent reservoir for a TcI strain. Individuals (n=3) of each species were intraperitoneally inoculated withT. cruzitrypomastigotes of TcIIa [North America (NA)-raccoon (Procyon lotor) origin], TcI [NA-Virginia opossum (Didelphis virginiana)], TcIIb [South America (SA)-human], TcIIe (SA-Triatoma infestans), or both TcI and TcIIa. Parasitaemias in experimentally infected degus peaked earlier (7–14 days post-inoculation (p.i.)) compared with short-tailed opossums (21–84 days p.i.). Additionally, peak parasitaemias were higher in degus; however, the duration of detectable parasitaemias for all strains, except TcIIa, was greater in short-tailed opossums. Infections established in both host species with all genotypes, except for TcIIa, which did not establish a detectable infection in short-tailed opossums. These results indicate that both South American reservoirs support infections with these isolates from North and South America; however, infection dynamics differed with host and parasite strain.
Copulation enhances resistance against an entomopathogenic fungus in the mealworm beetle Tenebrio molitor
Authors: VALTONEN TERHI M. , VIITANIEMI HEIDI , RANTALA MARKUS J.
Published: February 2010

Ecological immunology is based upon the notion that activation and use of the immune system is costly and should thus be traded off against other energy-demanding aspects of life history. Most of the studies on insects that have examined the possibility that mating results in trade-offs with immunity have shown that mating has immunosuppressive effects. The connection between mating and immunity has traditionally been investigated using indirect measures of immunity. However, studies that have assessed the effects of mating on the resistance against real pathogens have had conflicting results. A previous study on Tenebrio molitor showed that copulation decreases phenoloxidase activity in the haemolymph, and concluded that copulation corrupts immunity in this species. In the present study we tested whether mating also affects the ability of T. molitor to resist the entomopathogenic fungus, Beauveria bassiana. Interestingly, we found that mating enhanced resistance against the fungal infection and that the effect was stronger on males than females. Furthermore, we found that male beetles were overall more susceptible to the fungal infection than were females, indicating an immunological sex difference in immunity. Our study highlights the importance of the use of real pathogens and parasites in immuno-ecological studies.
Influence of the pseudophyllidean cestode Schistocephalus solidus on oocyte development in the threespine stickleback Gasterosteus aculeatus
Authors: HEINS D. C. , BROWN-PETERSON N. J.
Published: February 2010

The objective of this study was to investigate the means by which Schistocephalus solidus might reduce annual fecundity in female threespine stickleback fish (Gasterosteus aculeatus) through processes of oocyte development. Histological examinations of specimens from one lake in Alaska in 2000 and 2001 were used to analyse the effects of S. solidus on recruitment of primary growth oocytes into vitellogenesis, atresia of vitellogenic oocytes, and the interspawning interval. The ratio of primary growth to late secondary growth (late vitellogenic) oocytes was significantly greater (P<0·01) among infected fish than uninfected ones in early-season samples from 2000 and 2001, revealing a decrease in recruitment of oocytes from primary growth into vitellogenic oocytes among infected females. The difference was marginally non-significant (P=0·087) in a mid-season sample from 2001 due to reductions in the entire pool of vitellogenic (early and late secondary growth) oocytes recruited prior to the spawning season in this determinate-fecundity species. Atresia among all vitellogenic oocytes was low and did not differ between infected and uninfected females. Histological estimations of the interspawning interval using post-ovulatory follicles showed no significant differences between infected and uninfected fish, suggesting that the number of spawnings in stickleback females each spawning season is unaffected by S. solidus infection. Thus, annual fecundity appears to be reduced only through recruitment of oocytes into vitellogenesis.
Looking again at Shostakovich 4
Authors: Ottaway Hugh
Published: February 2010

When this article was first mooted, Shostakovich was alive and working—on a Sixteenth Symphony. Quite apart from one's personal feelings about the man, the death of such an artist is bound to affect one's relationship with his work. At its simplest, this is the end of the line, the closing of the frontier; the knowledge that the old will not again be ‘modified’ by the new. For the first time, there is the possibility of seeing the work as a whole. However, so far as I am aware, the principal way in which the new situation has a bearing on this article is entirely non-productive: I find myself wondering in a rather different way how much we shall ever know of the discussions and heart-searching that preceded the withdrawal of the Fourth Symphony and the composition of the Fifth. Did Shostakovich leave any diaries, or a personal memoir, or …? But my intentions are strictly factual; as factual, that is, as critical scrutiny can make them.
Reclaiming Roslavets: The Troubled Life of a Russian Modernist
Authors: Ferenc Anna
Published: February 2010

It is evident by now that swift political changes have had an impact on music scholarship in Russia. A radical shift from rejection to appreciation of the music of Russian early 20th-century modernists was announced on the pages of Sovetskaia Muzyka in January, 1991, where the following admission appeared: ‘By silencing the activities of the musicians of the Russian avantgarde for a prolonged period of time, we have in essence artificially narrowed the complex panorama of our music history.’ In the case of Nikolai Andreevich Roslavets, the process of historical revision has included recent publication and re-publication by Muzyka of some of his piano and chamber music. At a time when paper shortage is critical in Russia, such an effort demonstrates a sincere commitment to acknowledging his work. Certainly, another welcome result of this new attitude has been access, though apparently still limited, to the Roslavets archives in Moscow. The valuable information contained therein provides biographical details which finally allow for a substantiated and more definitive statement on the life of this composer who figured so prominently among the Russian modernists.
Shostakovich and the Ustvolskaya Connexion: a textual investigation
Authors: Blois Louis
Published: February 2010

In the atlas of Soviet music, many roads lead to and from Shostakovich. A New York Continuum conceit last year drew attention to an intriguing and little known thematic connexion between Shostakovich and his fellow composer Galina Ustvolskaya (born 1919). The works of this composer shared the program with those of Ruth Crawford Seeger and Grazyna Bacewicz under the banner ‘Three Women Pioneers.’ Each was among the first women in their country to have forged an original and distinguished body of work from the resources of 20th-century music.
The Music of Andrzej Panufnik
Authors: Walsh Stephen
Published: February 2010

A good deal has been said recently, in these and other pages, about the wealth of good music now being written under conditions of at least relative artistic enlightenment in the countries of the Eastern European bloc. Nobody, I imagine, will suggest that we should pay any less attention than we do to that welcome phenomenon. But at the same time it would be a pity if we were to forget that Western Europe still harbours a number of composers who fled from the East during the years when music was still not free to take its own course there, and when there was no immediate reason to suppose that the situation would soon improve. Of these, only the Hungarian Ligeti, who lives in Vienna, has been taken up internationally. The Pole Andrzej Panufhik, a comparable figure who happens however to live in London, is at present hardly recognized as a composer of even national importance.
Webern's Sketches (I)
Authors: Smalley Roger
Published: February 2010

In tempo 91 I wrote an article on the recently discovered and published sketches of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring. Since that time an equally handsome volume of sketches by Anton Webern has appeared. Studying the sketchbooks of a great composer is perhaps the closest we can ever come to experiencing the act of creation. It is still—inevitably—a second-hand experience, but one which enables us to follow the process of creation with more immediacy than does the analysis of an already completed score. If we analyze a finished work we can learn a great deal about the structure of that work in particular, and about compositional techniques in general. As composition progresses, the musical ideas with which the composer started out begin to develop according to their own inner logic. Eventually the composer is no longer in the position of dictating events but of attempting to discover and follow the logical development which the music itself dictates to him.
Developments and Dangers: The Training of Young Composers
Authors: Duchen Jessica
Published: February 2010

As the 1980s draw to their close, contemporary music is becoming more eclectic than ever before. In the tremendous range of idioms, from symphonies to synthesizers via many ‘isms’ and ‘neos’, composers of the younger generation have a baffling choice of directions for their preferred moves. Ideologies have altered considerably during the past two decades; the demands of technology have left some institutions unable to keep up with the progress of electronic music in others; now the early musical experience of children in schools is changing too, with the introduction of GCSE placing emphasis on creativity and composition. But amongst the changes some aspects of a composer's training remain unaltered. There is a general sense that composers are ‘born and not made’, although they can be helped – or hindered – by their teachers. As Professor Alexander Goehr remarked: ‘I can teach anybody to compose so long as they are not a composer’. The mechanics of composing, such as formal structure or writing counterpoint, can be taught; the source of inspiration is as inexplicable as ever. The young composer remains something of a rebel figure, with a need for a particular means of self-expression that can be shaped but not dictated to. The rudiments of harmony and counterpoint, form and orchestration, can all be explained and absorbed by the student. But for a gifted composer in training, the essential search remains for the individual voice which must be found through independent choices, under the careful guidance of a good teacher.
Serocki's ‘Spatial Sonoristics’
Authors: Davies Lyn
Published: February 2010

In polish music since 1945 we can certainly see the political, linguistic, literary and religious interests of most Polish composers as part of a larger picture—a re-emergence which has generated many new techniques that are of world-wide significance. One of the main players on this stage was Kazmierz Serocki (1922–1981) who left a large body of work which commands our respect and admiration. Serocki's work as a composer, like that of Lutoslawski and Baird, underwent many subtle and interesting changes that reflect the course of musical composition in Poland since 1945, marked by a movement we could describe as ‘toward spatial sonoristics’.
Elisabeth Lutyens (1906–1983)
Authors: Elias Brian
Published: February 2010

Elisabeth lutyens has left a vacuum which will not be easily filled. Her single minded and highly idealistic devotion to her art gives us all a standard to which to aspire, and although her ideals sometimes made her embittered with the musical world, her accurate observation and criticism of changing values made her a latter-day prophet who did not always cry wolf. And yet, as we all know, she was by no means a reactionary.
Spinner, ‘Die Reihe’, and Thematicism. Notes towards a thirteenth question
Authors: Drew David
Published: February 2010

1. Not repudiated; but shelved for better times or lost in worse. The question, however, was imprecise; and it allowed Spinner's many-enveloped reply to escape from the period between 1936 and 1941 (the year of the op. 2 string quartet).

2. Snapshots of opp. 1–28 have always shown the same immaculate flower-beds; row upon row. Such views seldom invite questions concerning the uprooted groundsel and convolvulus. Although closer inspection reveals that many of the works with opus numbers are still unpublished and unperformed, even that discovery may not prompt urgent questions about the development of a composer whose published works are all, to varying extents, rooted in Webernian precept. For instance, one might assume from a glance at the published scores of opp. 3–4 that the unpublished opp. 1–2 could safely be taken for granted (and that the 1941 revision of op. 1 brought it ‘in line’ with the rest). One would be wrong.
Returns and Departures: recent Maxwell Davies
Authors: Pruslin Stephen
Published: February 2010

It is interesting to consider Maxwell Davies's three ‘Taverner’ fantasias in relation to the three Leonora overtures of Beethoven. Of course, it is extremely easy to challenge this analogy: the Leonoras were written to be performed with Fidelio, whereas the ‘Taverner’ fantasias were never intended for operatic use. Furthermore, the symphonic proportions, particularly of Leonoras 2 and 3, were completely at variance with Beethoven's need for concision, and led him to reject them in favour of the Fidelio overture, whereas Maxwell Davies has explicitly stated that he felt there were ideas within Taverner which positively demanded further symphonic comment.
Webern's Sketches (II)
Authors: Smalley Roger
Published: February 2010

The most extensive selection of plates in the volume (13 in all) is devoted to this work. It was originally conceived as a Concerto for Violin, Clarinet, Horn, Piano and String Orchestra and, like the Concerto op. 24, was inspired by (and presumably during) Webern's walking tours in the Carinthian Alps. This is made clear by his verbal outline of the work (top of plate 12) which reads as follows:—
Holst and India (I) ‘Maya’ to ‘Sita’
Authors: Head Raymond
Published: February 2010

Everyone Knows that several of Gustav Holst's early works are concerned with subject-matter derived from Indian mythology. The most significant, though by no means the only, examples are the operas Sita and Savitri, the cantata The Cloud Messenger, and the various settings of Hymns from the Rig Veda. His knowledge and use of that subject-matter, however, has received little critical appraisal. Conventional formulations such as that in John Vinton's Dictionary of 20th Century Music (‘his studies of Sanskrit … introduced him to Eastern thought’), themselves derived from Imogen Holst's biography of her father, have been allowed to stand unscrutinized. There has, in particular, been little or no discussion of the relationship between Holst's sources, compositional style, and creative achievement in these works – which constitute, after all, his first really personal contribution to European music. Yet these are vitally important considerations if the music of Holst's ‘Indian’ period is to be rescued from the picturesque. Just as important as the literary and philosophical aspects is the cultural context; a discussion of that will help to explain why Holst should have been looking towards India in the first place.
Steve Reich and Debussy: Some Connexions
Authors: Morris Patrick
Published: February 2010

Debussy's Works offer numerous examples of what, with historical hindsight, could be called systemic thinking. Texture is built up from repetitions of various elements—melodic scraps, trills, runs, figures—in such a way that the traditional view of Debussy as a primarily harmonic composer has to be temporarily abandoned. The combinations that these repetitions produce have a connexion with the innovative harmonic practices for which Debussy is famous; but this should not blind us to the fact that the underlying thought is often, in the good sense of the word, repetitious—see Examples 1 and 2, for instance.
A Viennese Exponent of Understatement: Personal reflections on Friedrich Cerha
Authors: Ligeti György
Published: February 2010

I First Met Friedrich Cerha and his wife Traude in December 1956. After a concert given by the International Society for Contemporary Music—at that time still considered a small group of conspirators—in a remote room at the Musikakademie, my mentor Hanns Jelinek took me to the Gmoa-Keller on the Heumarkt to introduce me to the leaders of Vienna's musical avant-garde.
Ernst Krenek At 87
Authors: Dickinson Peter
Published: February 2010

Ernst Krenek is the subject of the first chapter of John Rockwell's stimulating survey All American Music, but this is no compliment to the composer. He is described as ‘one of the last of a line of European immigrants who enriched our music but also suppressed the nascent evolution of a truly American culture’. This seems rough justice from a country which has been nurtured on generations of imported cultures, fed into a developing and eventually unique main stream, but one can see Rockwell's point about the enormous prestige of serialism. Forty years after his emigration, it is possible to wonder whether even Stravinsky, via Craft, was adversely affected by the powerful establishment fashions of his American context. And Copland? It is becoming commonplace now, especially in architecture, to regard some of the manifestations of modernism as, quite simply, a mistake.
New Music in Austria Since 1945
Authors: Cerha Gertraud
Published: February 2010

Vienna, they say, is synonymous with music. Worldwide public opinion, responding to the New Year's Day Concert and the Vienna Boys’ Choir, confirms it.

Confronted by the multifarious political and economic scandals of recent times, the Austrian Minister for Education and the Arts has declared that our art and culture is the only ‘export’ to have survived intact. But as far as 20th-century music is concerned, its ‘export’ has received little official encouragement. Apart from a 1972 ballet production by Aurel Miloss with music by Schoenberg, and a performance of Gottfried von Einem's Kabale und Liebe at the 1977 Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, our National Opera has presented no contemporary work outside Austria since 1945, nor any work by the Second Viennese School. Nor does any contemporary Austrian music appear on the touring schedules of the Vienna Philharmonic, as it used to (on a modest scale) in the 1950's; and works of the Schoenberg school are only played when conductors like Abbado, Zubin Mehta, or Christoph von Dohnanyi insist.
The Symphonies of Malcolm Arnold: Eclecticism and the Symphonic Conception
Authors: Stasiak Christopher
Published: February 2010

Paradoxes Abound in Arnold's music, and while in most instances they need not be understood in order to appreciate the music (for it is, as Hugo Cole has suggested, ‘so clear, so self-sufficient, so much to be enjoyed for its own sake’), in terms of the Symphony the idea deserves further consideration. The basic paradox is this: that the composer's particularily prolific form of eclecticism is at odds with the conceptual and technical demands of symphonic form. In his well-considered definition of the Symphony, Robert Simpson states that it is a ‘profoundly inclusive’ form, one in which all the diverse elements of music are brought together to make an organic and dynamic whole. It is active in all possible ways; ‘no evasions are tolerable in the attempt to achieve the highest state or organization of which music is capable’. Eclecticism, then, would appear first to present problems of technical integration, and second to give an overly diffuse aural result.
Domino Roberto Carwor, Canonico de Scona…
Authors: Reid-Baxter James
Published: February 2010

(In recognition that 1987 sees the 500th anniversary of the birth of Robert Carver (1487–c. 1566), generally considered the greatest Scottish composer of the Renaissance, we append a poem by a founder-member of the modern-day Carver Choir of Aberdeen. Dr. Reid-Baxter has written in Carver's own tongue, the aureate Scots of the late Middle Ages. After due consideration, we have forborne to provide translation or glossary, since enough of TEMPO'S readers should be acquainted with such major figures of British literature as Robert Henryson, William Ounbar, and Gavin Douglas.)
‘A London Symphony’ and ‘Tono-Bungay’
Authors: Arblaster Anthony
Published: February 2010

SHORTLY BEFORE HIS DEATH in 1958 Vaughan Williams told Michael Kennedy, who was already committed to writing the composer's ‘musical biography’, that the coda or Epilogue to the final movement of his A London Symphony had a link with the end of H.G. Wells's novel Tono-Bungay, in which London is evoked as the book's narrator and central character passes down the Thames through the city to the open sea. ‘For actual coda see end of Wells's Tono Bungay’ was the composer's laconic advice. Kennedy then quotes two short passages from the final chapter of Tono-Bungay, and these have since become a standard point of reference for other writers on the symphony. They have appeared in record sleeve and programme notes, and in other places, such as Hugh Ottaway's BBC Music Guide to the Vaughan Williams Symphonies. The most frequently quoted passage is the following:

Light after light goes down. England and the Kingdom, Britain and the Empire, the old prides and the old devotions, glide abeam, astern, sink down upon the horizon, pass—pass. The river passes—London passes, England passes…
An Autobiolographical Sketch
Authors: Morton Lawrence
Published: February 2010

I was born on July 1904 in Duluth, Minnesota, and have often wondered if the chill of my native climate generated my preference for the ‘coolth’ of Classicism in the arts to the excessive warmth of Romanticism. During my freshman year in high school my family moved to Minneapolis where summer heat and humidity reinforced my dislike of climatic-musical ‘Fahrenheight’. But years later I learned to detest Midwestern winters as heartily as Czerny exercises, and not until I moved to California in 1939 did I achieve thermal composure and, with it, musical equanimity to the point where I am happy with both Mozart and Brahms.
The Identity of Leopold Spinner
Authors: Busch Regina
Published: February 2010

SPINNER only ever asked friends and, so far as we know, musicians he knew personally to further the cause of his music; at most he would accept the good offices of those acquaintances he trusted. His own initiatives consisted solely of submitting or sending out scores he thought had possibilities. Any sort of propaganda or publicity was alien to him. The object and basis of any negotiations was his music: it should speak for itself, it should be performed and, presumably, published for its own sake. He considered it sufficiently convincing not to require his powers of persuasion. Again, when it came to performances, he displayed an attitude characteristic of the composers and performers of the Schoenberg School: comparable instances are recorded of Schoenberg, Webern, Kolisch, and Stcuermann, and to some extent Berg. He willingly supported serious efforts on behalf of his music; on the other hand he refused to make the customary concessions to the music industry or to the conditions necessary for performances nowadays. He would not employ kindly euphemisms, and was loth to forgo the realization of the differentiations in interpretation vital to his music. He was never simply grateful just to be performed. All this with good reason: the approach to new music, including that of the Second Viennese School, is still made difficult or blocked by inadequately rehearsed, misleading, incomprehensible or merely boring performances. Spinner's music cannot be fully grasped at first hearing or playing, and looking at the notes leads to nothing—save the observation that some of them look ‘like Webern’. Unfortunately hardly any of Spinner's works have gone beyond the first performance, and as for the scores, all they got was a cursory glance.
Imogen Holst's Music, 1962–84
Authors: Tinker Christopher
Published: February 2010

Few Musicians know of Imogen Hoist's work as a composer. She entered the R.C.M. in 1926, won an open scholarship for composition in 1927, the Cobbett Prize of 1928 with a Phantasy String Quartet, and an Octavia travelling scholarship in 1929. She was in league with the rising number of women musicians in London at the time, composing for the Anne Macnaghten Quartet, Victoria Reid and Sylvia Spencer among others; her works were performed and broadcast along with those of Lutyens and Maconchy. She was also developing her career as a pianist, undertaking much accompaniment work. Neuritis put an end to this, and, as she remained unmarried, she needed to find work to support herself financially. She joined the staff of the English Folk Dance and Song Society and began work as a school music teacher. An enormous quantity of arrangements ensued, most of which were published. As a result, her output became best known in the field of folk song arrangement, either for educational purposes or for the EFDSS. During the 1930's the only compositions she undertook were little pieces to help in her teaching. Her list of compositions did grow substantially in the following decade (during which she founded and directed the music department at Dartington), but the quantity and quality of them remained little recognized.
The Score: An open letter to Sir William Glock on the occasion of his 80th birthday
Authors: Drew David
Published: February 2010

ItWas, DearWilliam, distinctly chastening the other day to discover your signature inside a precious score which had been living and sleeping in the shadow of my piano for many years—so many, indeed, that I could have sworn it actually belonged to me. Since you arc one of those rare spirits for whom the lending of books and scores is inseparable from the delights of possessing them, you probably don't need my sorry example to remind you of how easily an au revoir can become an adieu. But now that the wanderer is safely back on your shelves, the frivolous thought that this is another sense in which I'll be wishing you many happy returns has been replaced by a more serious one; for as soon as I begin to ask myself how much else that I like to call my own—and I don't of course mean mere ‘belongings’—is in fact owed to you, there emerges an immeasurably greater question whose bearing on every one of us will surely be illuminated by the celebrations of your splendid birthday. The question is this: how much have we tended to take for granted, and how much have we forgotten or never investigated, about the nature and extent of your manifold contributions to musical life and understanding within and beyond this small island?
Conversations in Leningrad, 1988
Authors: Polin Claire
Published: February 2010

Certainly it was the year to visit the USSR, as one rubbed shoulders with pre-Summit reporters awaiting Reagan/Gorbachev, and pilgrims celebrating the millennium of Christianity in Russia. Wandering up the Nevsky Prospekt, you saw musicians hurrying with instrument cases in hand; and whichever way you crossed the Neva or the canals, the babel of language sounded like a session at the United Nations. As Tikhon Khrennikov (still Chairman of the Composers Union 40 years after its notorious 1948 Congress) pointed out in his welcoming address at the opening concert, the Festival's purpose was ‘for building spiritual bridges between nations using music as the unique and indispensable means of communication’. Stylistic restrictions were withdrawn so that listeners would get an unusually broad idea of the ‘many-sided panorama of modern musical art’. Thus, not only ‘serious’ music but also pop, jazz, folk, and traditional musics were performed. Having attended the previous two Festivals, it was very interesting to observe the progressive attitude of the Third. Not only was there more of everything, but more variety: not only symphonic, chamber, and choral music events, but also organ recitals, modern violin music, opera, children's theatre, a song evening, and even one for light music. Not only did the best Soviet conductors and performers participate, but also the New York Philharmonic, the BBC Welsh Symphony Orchestra, jazz groups of the USSR and elsewhere, and the British avant-garde vocal group ‘Electric Phoenix’. Although the concerts were heavily weighted with Soviet works, still almost 40 countries were represented (from Cuba to Mongolia) with works by more than 150 living composers.
Ligeti's Chamber Concerto – Summation or Turning Point?
Authors: Searby Michael
Published: February 2010

György Ligeti's music of the 1970s shows a distinct change of direction in its main preoccupation. Up to the middle 1970s his dominant concern was with textural elements, note-cluster development and the use of strict canons to create ‘Mikropolyphonie’. Mikropolyphonie is usually generated by a canonic development where each entry uses the same pitch array but also has a unique rhythmic shape and is therefore unlike-a normal canon (Example 1, below, is a good illustration). Melody, non-cluster harmony, and rhythmic clarity were not usually significant features. However the opera Le Grande Macabre (1974–77) shows a clear, unambiguous change of approach and a greater eclecticism; as Ligeti states: ‘In Le Grande Macabre there is less of the static, slowly, gradually evolving music. I felt I had worn these types out’.
Unpublished Bouleziana at the Paul Sacher Foundation
Authors: Edwards Allen
Published: February 2010

Though in existence for less than a decade, Basle's Paul Sacher Foundation has already achieved an importance as a repository for the music of the 20th century comparable only to the importance of New York's Museum of Modern Art as a storehouse for representative masterpieces of this century's visual arts.
The Contemporary Problem
Authors: Keller Hans
Published: February 2010

“Perhaps musically not bringing much new,” Ove Nordwall says about György Ligeti's Continuum for harpsichord solo—in a sensitive piece about the composer's output in the last issue of Tempo. I'm not so sure, though. It always depends on what we mean by new, of course, and our emotions are expert question-beggers: as soon as they like something it has something new, but when they dislike it they aren't slow to find its models.
Dialectics in Peter Maxwell Davies
Authors: Chanan Michael
Published: February 2010

One of the persistent features of Peter Maxwell Davies's music has been the use of musical material borrowed from medieval and renaissance sources. His interest in the music of this period has not of course been in its abstract musical forms, which represent aesthetic ideals now unattainable, but in themes of faith and belief which it can be used to symbolise for us. Like Adrian Leverkiihn, the composer-hero of Thomas Mann's Dr. Faustus, Davies is concerned with the dilemma that in a godless world, to create God after one's own image is to call up the devil.
Serial Procedures in the Ricercar II of Stravinsky's “Cantata”
Authors: Mason Colin
Published: February 2010

The Ricercar II, for solo tenor, in Stravinsky's Cantata contains what is perhaps the most vividly and thrillingly audible transposition in any serial work, by any composer, when at the last line of the penultimate verse (‘And rose again on the third day’) Stravinsky for the first time in the song lifts the series by a semitone, so that the singer on the final word touches for the first and only time a high F sharp (Ex.1).
Stravinsky and the Muses
Authors: Read Herbert
Published: February 2010

The interrelation of the arts is a fruitful subject for discussion, but leads only to pedantry if the intention is only to make distinctions. It is more interesting to trace the similarities, perhaps even to find an all-embracing identity, but that task demands an unusual range of sensibility. The senses are dependent on separate organs of sensation, so that a sensitive eye is not necessarily housed in the same body as a sensitive ear. The musician may be colour-blind, the painter tone-deaf, and there may even exist some law of compensation in the nervous system, so that the hypertrophy of one sense involves the atrophy of another. Men of universal sensibility are rare, but they do exist and Stravinsky is one of them.
On Co-Conducting Stockhausen's ‘Gruppen’
Authors: Mar Norman Del
Published: February 2010

I had long heard of this extraordinary work as one of the most startling productions of the avant-garde school of serial composers and was therefore greatly interested when my friend Alexander Gibson invited me to join him, together with John Carewe, in presenting it at one of his Musica Viva concerts at the St. Andrew's Hall in Glasgow.
Dallapiccola's Last Orchestral Piece
Authors: Petrobelli Pierluigi
Published: February 2010

After the completion of Preghieie—which had its first performance at the University of California, Berkeley, on 10 November 1962 during a festival of nine concerts entirely devoted to his music—Dallapiccola returned to and completed the score of Three questions with two answers, commissioned early in 1960 by the New Haven Symphony Orchestra. This request for an orchestral piece coincided with the beginning of work on the score of Ulisse, and the composer thought fit to utilize in the new piece the musical material he was going to exploit fully in the opera. It was, therefore, a sort of test, on a smaller instrumental scale, of the material which was to become the supporting and unifying element in Dallapiccola's magnum opus. Three questions with two answers was performed only once during his life, on 5 February 1963 in New Haven. Dallapiccola never thought it appropriate to publish what turned out to be his last orchestral piece; the score is now available (Milan: Edizioni Suvini Zerboni, n. 8155), and had its European première in London on 9 June 1977, performed by the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Zóltan Pésko.
‘The Mime of Mick, Nick and the Maggies’
Authors: Buller John
Published: February 2010

The Mime of Mick, Nick and the Maggies—on Part II of Finnegans Wake by James Joyce—lasts about an hour. It is for soprano, tenor and baritone, seven female voices and six male, with an instrumental group of 13 players: flutes, oboes, clarinet (doubling contrabass clarinet), bassoons, 2 horns, trumpet, 2 trombones, percussion, keyboards, cello and bass. There is also a ‘Manager’—either ‘live’ or on tape. The text selected is from a comparatively self-contained section of Finnegans Wake, separately published by Joyce as a fragment under this name in 1934 but now just the first section of Part 11, sometimes referred to as the Children's Night Games. It fuses children's games with life/sexual games, describing humiliation and extreme loneliness and the realizing creative power of building from these with the mythologies of the fall, of parenthood and of the family, with jealousy and incest, closing with the almost central Joycean prayer: ‘Loud, heap miseries upon us yet entwine our arts with laughters low’. In it, the two sons of HCE, Shem and Shaun, now as children called Glugg and Chuff, are outside their father's pub in the evening with their sister Issy and her seven girl friends (though they sometimes disturbingly multiply into a lunar monthly 28). The game is Angels and Devils and Glugg is the devil, Chuff Saint Michael, whilst the girl/angels or harpy/maggies think of a colour—but twist it to the colour of their knickers. Heliotrope is the rather unlikely colour and three times Glugg is allowed to advance and try three guesses.