bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Madame Butterfly: The story
Authors: Groos Arthur
Published: August 2008

One of the tasks of opera scholarship, broadly defined as an interdisciplinary enterprise, should be to include within its purview areas of investigation that have received little attention in purely musicological research. While it is obvious that libretto studies might form one such focus, there is a broader area that should not be ignored. This is the historical and cultural situation of opera and its reception, a subject usually excluded in formalist analyses and studies of musical sources or performance practice, often with the implicit assumption that the ‘aesthetic world’ of opera is self-contained or has nothing to do with the ‘real world’. Even if one does not subscribe to contemporary theory's penchant for subsuming art and history into textuality, the interactions between opera and its cultural context are many-sided and complex, and deserve full scholarly attention.
Birtwistle's Gawain: An essay and a diary
Authors: Samuel Rhian
Published: August 2008

Harrison Birtwistle's musico-dramatic works all show a preoccupation with intricate formal design. Thus they fall firmly in the Modernist tradition, inherited on the one hand from the Second Viennese School (consider Webern's Piano Variations Op. 27 with its mirrors upon mirrors) and on the other from Stravinsky's later ballets (Birtwistle has acknowledged Agon as a major debt). But in works such as Punch and Judy, Yan Tan Tethera and The Mask of Orpheus, the self-conscious elevation of formal structure (sometimes to its extreme, ritual) distances us, even more than in neo-Classical Stravinsky, from any tendency to realism in the drama. In The Mask of Orpheus, Birtwistle's priorities are clear: he has said repeatedly that this opera is not about Orpheus; it is about writing a particular kind of work with a particular set of problems to solve. He could have just as easily chosen Faust for his libretto (and almost did). With Gawain, however, he seems to be moving in a new direction. Wagner's spirit (particularly as expressed in Parsifal) has entered the work; a new emphasis on drama in its naturalistic sense, and a new relationship between linear, narrative flow and closed forms has transported Gawain to new territory.
The domestication of opera
Authors: Emslie Barry
Published: August 2008

At the end of the last century opera started to shed elements of its many-sided and hybrid character. Of course there are numerous exceptions, but in general the genre becomes tighter, the expansive five-act form that triumphed at Paris in the middle of the nineteenth century is rejected and several elements, such as the ballet, dismissed as distractions. Musical structures, influenced – among other things – by Wagner's leitmotif system, become denser and even large scores exhibit an exceptional thematic homogeneity. Most striking, all those bandits, pirates, gods and gypsies make way for more conventional figures in mundane urban and rural settings. The fantastic is displaced by the domestic – or, if the old stage-figures survive, they do so, as I will suggest below, in an altered and diluted form that makes them proper subjects for ‘play’.
Pastoral and neoclassicism: A reinterpretation of Auden's and Stravinsky's Rake's Progress
Authors: Chew Geoffrey
Published: August 2008

It is a commonplace that the poetry best suited to an operatic libretto has fewer pretensions, and more transparency in the range of interpretations that can be placed upon it, than ‘literary’ poetry. Otherwise, it will scarcely bear the weight of the music, much less contribute to the great emotional climaxes that justify opera for many listeners in the first place. And some might mistrust a libretto that is too ‘literary’ or too complicated, for metaphysical and other subtleties are not easily projected across the footlights. No one was more acutely aware of this ‘unliterary’ relationship between words and music in opera than W. H. Auden. Writing in 1948, he stated: ‘Poetry is in its essence an act of reflection, of refusing to be content with the interjections of immediate emotion in order to understand the nature of what is felt. Since music is in essence immediate, it follows that the words of a song cannot be poetry.’
Berg's Lulu and theatre of the 1920s
Authors: Simms Bryan R.
Published: August 2008

As late as April 1928, it appeared unlikely that Berg would choose Frank Wedekind's Lulu plays as the basis of the new opera he was contemplating. By then he had narrowed his search for a libretto to Wedekind's plays and Gerhart Hauptmann's Und Pippa tanzt, and – contrary to the advice of friends such as Theodor Adorno – he was leaning towards Hauptmann. On 26 April he wrote to Arnold Schoenberg:

I'm thinking of my new work with the apprehension I feel before every new project. It will probably be Pippa, though Hauptmann's oppressive conditions (including 50% share of the royalties) don't make the work seem very advisable – from the ‘practical’ standpoint.
Not the marrying kind: Britten's Albert Herring
Authors: Hindley Clifford
Published: August 2008

At the climax of his account of a night of drunken adventure, Albert Herring, who has at last thrown off conventional restraints, suddenly breaks off: ‘a nightmare example of drunkenness, dirt, and worse…’. At which point the Glyndebourne production of a few years ago had Albert produce from his shirt an outsize pair of women's bloomers. The visual aid was presumably deemed necessary because the text does not make clear what inference we are to draw. The nature of Albert's desire is left open, and at least one early reviewer recognised that there might be a less conventional understanding of the superficially hilarious romp that Albert Herring presents. More recently, Philip Brett has trenchantly argued that the opera is a parable of the ‘coming out’ of a young gay man set against the oppression of small-town respectability, a view I believe to be in essence correct. There may, however, be room for a more detailed study of those elements in the text that enable us to affirm it with confidence.
Magnificence in motion: Stage musicians in Lully's ballets and operas
Authors: Harris-Warrick Rebecca
Published: August 2008

Those fortunate enough to have seen the recent production of Jean-Baptiste Lully's Atys mounted by Les Arts Florissants will remember the sumptuously staged realm of sleep in Act III, during which costumed lute and recorder players appeared alongside the singers and dancers. Although conductor William Christie and director Jean-Marie Villégier made no attempt to reproduce the original seventeenth-century staging, they did adhere to Quinault's instructions for this scene to the extent of making musicians prominently visible. Atys is not exceptional in calling for stage musicians: Lully regularly included instrumentalists among the dramatis personae of his tragédies en musique, the genre on which he lavished most of his creative energies after 1672, and the practice is even more evident in the thirty or so ballets he composed for Louis XIV's court during the preceding two decades. The phenomenon of on-stage instrumentalists – much more extensive than the use of the banda in nineteenth-century Italian opera – has been studied only for the information it affords about the development of Lolly's orchestra or the iconography of French Baroque opera. This article is concerned rather with why instrumentalists appeared on stage at all, what they represented, how they functioned as characters, and the impact they had on the visual spectacle.
The opera queen: A voice from the closet
Authors: Robinson Paul
Published: August 2008

At one point in Paul Rudnick's play, Jeffrey, the title character, who claims to have slept with 5000 different men, speaks directly to the audience: ‘I know it's wrong to say that all gay men are obsessed with sex. Because that's not true. All human beings are obsessed with sex. All gay men are obsessed with opera.’
‘Adapted to the modern stage’: La clemenza di Tito in London
Authors: Senici Emanuele
Published: August 2008

Expressions such as ‘author’, ‘work’, ‘text’ and ‘repertory’ are used constantly in writings about Italian opera; they stand for concepts that seem uncontroversial and unproblematic. However, these terms acquired the value we currently grant them only through a long process, one inextricably linked to the century-long formation of an Italian ‘operatic repertory’ between about 1750 and 1850. At the beginning of this period, a select number of literary texts received new musical clothing each time they were revived; by its end, the text of a successful opera could not be set to music again, because music and text were indissolubly linked in the audience's perception. There were exceptions, of course, and the process of change was gradual and differed according to genre: in the late eighteenth century some drammi giocosi had European careers that lasted as long as thirty years, much longer than the most successful drammi per musica. What is more, although we can speak of a ‘repertory’. with reference to the whole of Europe or to Italy, if we narrow the focusto a single city we may have to move into the nineteenth century to amass a body of works sufficiently large to merit the term. However, the fact that this process lasted for a century, far fromdiminishing its importance, is in one sense proof of its relevance. for an understanding of Italian opera that fully embraces its cultural, social and political context, ‘facts’ will indeed last as long as a century.
Aspects of form in the Ottocento libretto
Authors: Balthazar Scott L.
Published: August 2008

In 1823, Alessandro Manzoni engaged a continuing debate over the merits of ‘Aristotelian’ unities of time and place with his Lettre à M. C*** sur l'unité de temps et de lieu dans la tragédie, a manifesto that synthesises and amplifies earlier polemics by Berchet, Pellico and Visconti. Dramatic expression, coherence and realism, Manzoni argued, are best served by giving priority to unity of action while ignoring the traditional restrictions of time and setting. Although discontinuities might occur between adjacent scenes, the focus on cause and effect and the exclusion of unrelated incidents would provide a coherence that had previously depended on physical and temporal proximity. Manzoni suggested that formal preconceptions be set aside and the action allowed to shape dramatic design. Characters could be introduced throughout a play rather than together in the first act, their motivations and goals allowed to evolve as the situation unfolds. These shifts would encourage writers to cultivate motifs other than love intrigues, which had traditionally held sway because they took little time to develop. In particular, historical plays could enact all important events instead of only the climax, and depict true causes and resolutions rather than ones invented to fit conventional constraints.
Why the first opera given in Paris wasn't Roman
Authors: Murata Margaret
Published: August 2008

Genealogies persist in the writing of histories, if not to suggest lineages then to delight or dismay us with the effects of accident and circumstance. The first generation of Italian operas were all court, that is private, entertainments, whether produced in Florence, Mantua, Rome or Turin. When this new form of entertainment first emigrated, it spoke Italian in foreign courts (except in Madrid), perhaps because it was so identified in its novelty with still novel Italian musical styles, with the dramaturgy of Italian spectacle and above all with the Italian way of singing. It travelled to the Habsburg imperial court early, in Prague, 1627. Like this performance, later occasional stagings in Vienna and Innsbruck remained in Italian and at first by Italians, though eventual progeny included scores by Gluck and Mozart. The court in Madrid, however, heard in 1627 a version of opera with a libretto by Lope de Vega, La selva sin amor; its score was by a theatrically inexperienced Tuscan lutenist, Filippo Piccinni. Madrid did not essay opera again until 1660. The court of Sigismund III in Warsaw heard Italian opera beginning in 1628, possibly with a Mantuan score. Opera made its way to Paris only in 1645, where, after acquiring a French text and French dancing and singing, it became one of the glories of the royal court. The cradle of opera, in all these cases, was the court, with all its resources in terms of money, an obligated audience and more than willing professionals, whether imported or local.
One halfstep at a time: Tonal transposition and ‘split association’ in Italian opera
Authors: Powers Harold
Published: August 2008

In a recent number of19th-Century Music, Allan Atlas offered a complex analytical reading of Puccini'sMadama Butterfly, hinging on a pair of keys forming what he called ‘crossed tonal areas’. The tonality G flat major in the second-act trio ‘Io so che alle sue pene’ plays a crucial role in Atlas's reading, and he had to account for the fact that the trio was originally conceived a halfstep higher, in G major, and was so performed at the première in Milan. He asked:

can we assign a significant role to the Gbof the trio when it represents not Puccini's original – and presumably well-reasoned – intention, but what might be little more than a compositional accident necessitated by the practicalities of performance, and a specific one – Brescia, May 1904 – at that?

And in his footnote 13 to the foregoing, Atlas listed six studies discussing halfstep transpositions, three in Verdi and three more in Puccini.
Felice Romani, librettist by trade
Authors: Roccatagliati Alessandro
Published: August 2008

As anyone who has worked in the theatre will know, the journey from deciding to stage a work to its performance has two characteristics: the close interdependence of various artistic and organisational forces, and unpredictability. It should thus come as no surprise that a collection of documents concerning Felice Romani, a figure central to early nineteenth-century operatic life, presents an image both complex and constantly shifting; nor that in such sources the tasks of the librettist, even one of distinction, are always interwoven with those of other theatrical personalities: impresarios, singers and composers, administrators, executives, mediators, journalists, dancers, set-designers, craftsmen and factotums. This exploration of Romani and his trade seeks to describe these collaborations, while remaining sensitive to those fundamental aspects of nineteenth-century librettistic work that were their raison d'être. It will therefore be useful to proceed in two stages: first, to reflect on the nature and function of Romani's dramatic-poetic creations; then to provide synchronic sketches of his working relationships, dwelling on three of the most important – with theatrical institutions, with singers and with composers.
Meyerbeer'sIl crociato in Egitto: mélodrame, opera, orientalism
Authors: Everist Mark
Published: August 2008

Il crociato in Egittowas the last in a series of Italian operas written by Giacomo Meyerbeer between 1817 and 1824. Although hisEmma di ResburgoandMargherita d'Anjouhad been successful in Venice and Milan, it wasIl crociatothat put Meyerbeer in the first rank of internationally renowned composers of Italian opera. The work's contemporary popularity makes it an important element in the history of early nineteenth-century Italian opera, and the abundant source material that survives for the opera permits a reconstruction of its early history. Furthermore, the publication in facsimile of a copyist's score from the première at La Fenice and the recording of the work by Opera Rara have encouraged a modern revaluation.
Towards a psychopathology of opera
Authors: Tambling Jeremy
Published: August 2008

Roland Barthes discusses a postmodern condition in his last book,Camera Lucida: everything is signified and visible, and everything has the flatness of the photographic image; even death is rendered platitudinous, flat. If everything can be represented, nothing can be represented that would distinguish it from the mass of images already available; and if everything is for consumption in conditions of distraction, then difference disappears; we are left in a state Barthes calls ‘indifference’. Barthes then looks for thepunctum: any point of unrepresentability that will punctuate or pierce the smoothness of thestudium(art marked out by completeness, by total visibility). Thepunctum, by its wounding quality, would be a signifier pointing to something outside representation, outside thestudium, and inasmuch as opera in the condition of postmodernism is likely to be a saturated medium, absorbed by viewers and listeners in conditions of distraction, the question arises, whatpunctumcould it bear? There is, of course, nothing that could be isolated as such: it is, rather, that which by being outside representation appeals to what might be called–adapting Walter Benjamin's sense of photography as pointing to an ‘optical unconscious’ – an ‘aural unconscious’ just outside the text.
Reading and staging again
Authors: Treadwell James
Published: August 2008

In a recent issue of this journal, David J. Levin proposed an approach to evaluating the work of directors and producers of opera. The idea that one might be able to theorise the difference between good and bad stagings is appealing, not least because many of us would like to feel able to raise the standard of debate on this subject. Most public discussions of opera productions (or at least of those productions that generate public discussion) can be predicted in advance, more or less verbatim; the persistence of the arguments used on all sides is in itself enough to suggest that little progress is being made. On the other hand, it is not easy to see how academic debate contributes. Theatre is where operas enter public discourse. Performance might seem like a decisive act of interpretation – choices have to be made about how to present the given work – but, paradoxically, it also marks the point at which opera escapes the attentions of the academy in favour of a constituency which is (presumably) less grounded in theory and less committed to consciously interpretative acts. With understandable reservations, Levin suggests the use of commercially available videos to analyse details of a staging, but details of this sort are not likely to contribute significantly to a theatre audience's experience of how a production works and what it has to say. Videotape permits us the mastery of freeze-frame enquiry, and at the same time confines us within the flattened perspective chosen at each moment by the camera's eye. Both its advantages and its drawbacks are incommensurate with theatre, where (especially in opera, with its simultaneous but distinct modes) the stream of information is diverse and continuous, and our eye moves in relative freedom, never capturing the totality of the stage. One might draw an analogous distinction between academic criticism, which works by isolating certain elements of the ‘text’ or its contexts and subjecting them to intense scrutiny, and the more holistic act of sitting in the opera-house watching a ‘work’ unfold. The pause button creates a sequence of discrete images submitted to the critic's intellectual play. In the theatre, a staging is more likely to achieve its effects through what we might call its ‘feel’, its general character and stance. When Peter Sellars setCosì fan tuttein a diner, the air of incongruous modernity – conveyed through costume, set, the characters' ways of behaving–must have determined the audience's sense of his interpretation far more powerfully than (for example) the fact that he had Ferrando and Gugliemo sing ‘Secondate, aurette amiche’ in their own characters rather than their assumed ones.
Proust and music: The anxiety of competence
Authors: Newark Cormac , Wassenaar Ingrid
Published: August 2008

Propped up in his bed, for all the world the quintessential fin-de-siècle invalid, Marcel Proust listened to the perplexing sound of music far away. He heard it from beyond the walls of his room, through a connecting tube: the famous théâtrophone, a permanent subscription telephone line that could connect Proust's apartment in the boulevard Haussmann to a number of Parisian theatres, opera houses and concert halls. The operatic scenes that succeeded in penetrating those walls were not scenes at all: they were disembodied voices, issuing instructions for the visual imagination. Those moments that progressed further — onto the pages of A la recherche du temps perdu — were of course even less corporeal: both invisible and soundless. In the passage from opera house to author to novel, who can say how much was lost? All that remains are words, hundreds of thousands of them, pouring noiselessly into a space where the music has sunk without trace; the fevered patient added reams more supplementary material (inflations, substitutions, emendations) as fast as the opera came in through the wall, papering — soundproofing — the room with words.
Re-gendering the Libertine; or, the Taming of the Rake: Lucy Vestris as Don Giovanni on the early nineteenth-century London stage
Authors: Cowgill Rachel
Published: August 2008

When Luigi Bassi entered the stage of the Prague National Theatre in 1787 to create the title role of Mozart and Da Ponte's Don Giovanni, he could have drawn inspiration from a rich tradition of theatrical, pantomimic and marionette representations of the legendary Don Juan, to which this new opera was the latest contribution. Previous incarnations had been shaped by the likes of Tirso de Molina, Molière, Shadwell, Purcell and Gluck; yet it is Mozart and Da Ponte's version that has for us become the definitive: the Don as paradox; an uncomfortable blend of the despicable and the admirable, hero and anti-hero. Lecher, rapist, liar, cheat, murderer, he is the brutal epitome of macho striving for power and domination, yet clothed with a seductive panache, conviction and bravado — the reckless-heroic libertine phallocrat who would rather face the fires of eternal damnation than curb his appetites.
Structure and expression in the scènes of Rameau's Hippolyte et Aricie
Authors: Rosow Lois
Published: August 2008

The libretto for a tragèdie en musique might be regarded as a tabula rasa. Whereas an Italian dramma per musica generally differentiates between recitative poetry and aria poetry — versi sciolti on the one hand, strophic versi misurati on the other — its French counterpart contains page after page of supple vers libres, which lend themselves to a great variety of musical shapes. Indeed, apart from a few highly conventional gestures, one cannot necessarily tell simply by looking at the libretto how a tragédie en musique will have been set. The point might be illustrated by an example, a pair of invocations sung by Phèdre in Jean-Philippe Rameau's Hippolyte et Aricie (1733); one of them is a single quatrain, and the other consists of eight lines divided by their rhyme scheme into two quatrains. The columns at the left show the length of the vers (with + indicating feminine rhyme) and the rhyme scheme:
Grieving in the mirrors of Verdi's Willow Song: Desdemona, Barbara and a ‘feeble, strange voice’
Authors: Toliver Brooks
Published: August 2008

When ‘la mesta’ (the sad one) intones ‘Salce!’ from the lonely heath within the Willow Song, she creates a situation at once compelling and artificial — a song within a song within an opera:
Naturalism and supernaturalism in Alfred Bruneau' Le Rêve
Authors: Huebner Steven
Published: August 2008

‘If forced to choose, I would prefer Monsieur Zola widi wings than Monsieur Zola on all fours.’ So groused Anatole France about the apparent new turn in Emile Zola's great Rougon-Macquart cycle taken by die publication of Le Rêve in 1888. Because the gritty surface of La Bête humaine (1890) followed closely upon the delicate folds of Le Rêve, France's critical quandary was soon resolved. Yet ever since the publication of Le Rêve even critics much more congenial to Zola than France have remarked upon the unusual place in die Rougon-Macquart of this tale about a virginal heroine set adrift in the small provincial town of Beaumont.
Fishing regulations, individual discount rate, and fisherman behaviour in a developing country fishery
Authors: AKPALU WISDOM
Published: August 2008

Studies of compliance with fishing regulations have been based on fishery crimes where the offender faces a one-period decision problem of maximizing an expected utility. Moreover, the returns from the crimes are uncertain because the offender may lose them if caught. This paper extends these models by considering a fishery crime that generates a flow of returns until the offender is caught and then punished. Consequently, it incorporates into the existing model the influence of dynamic deterrence in which the discount rate affects violation levels. The predictions of the model are tested on data from an artisanal fishery in Ghana.
Folate and vitamin B12status of women of reproductive age living in Hanoi City and Hai Duong Province of Vietnam
Authors: Hien Vu Thi Thu , Lam Nguyen Thi , Khan Nguyen Cong , Dung Nguyen Tri , Skeaff C Murray , Venn Bernard J , Walmsley Trevor , George Peter M , McLean Judy , Brown Matthew R , Green Timothy J
Published: August 2008

Objectives

To assess the folate and vitamin B12status of a group of Vietnamese women of reproductive age and to estimate the rate of neural tube defects (NTD) based on red blood cell (RBC) folate concentrations.

Design and subjects

A representative sample of non-pregnant women (15–49 years) living in Hanoi City (n244) and Hai Duong Province (n245).

Measures

RBC folate, plasma vitamin B12and plasma holo-transcobalamin (holoTC), a sensitive indicator of vitamin B12status.

Results

Mean (95 % CI) concentrations of RBC folate, plasma B12and plasma holoTC were 856 (837, 876) nmol/l, 494 (475, 513) pmol/l and 78 (74, 82) pmol/l, respectively. Only 3 % and 4 % of women had plasma B12and holoTC concentrations indicative of deficiency. No woman had an RBC folate concentration indicative of deficiency (<317 nmol/l). Only 47 % of women had an RBC folate concentration ≥905 nmol/l. Accordingly, we predict the NTD rate in these regions of Vietnam to be 14·7 (14·2, 15·1) per 10 000 pregnancies.

Conclusion

There was no evidence of folate and vitamin B12deficiency among this population of Vietnamese women. However, suboptimal folate status may be placing three out of five women at increased risk of NTD. Reductions in NTD rates are still possible and women would benefit from additional folic acid during the periconceptional period from either supplements or fortified foods.
Use of a questionnaire to assess vitamin D status in young adults
Authors: Bolek-Berquist Jilaine , Elliott Mary E , Gangnon Ronald E , Gemar Dessa , Engelke Jean , Lawrence Susan J , Hansen Karen E
Published: August 2008

Objective

We hypothesized that young adults would commonly have vitamin D deficiency and that a questionnaire could help identify subjects with the condition.

Design

Between January and May 2004, we administered a questionnaire to a convenience sample of young adults. We measured each participant’s serum level of 25-hydroxyvitamin D (25(OH)D) using a chemiluminescent assay and defined deficiency as serum 25(OH)D < 16 ng/ml.

Setting and subjects

We recruited young adults living in Madison, Wisconsin without pre-existing conditions affecting vitamin D and/or Ca metabolism.

Results

One hundred and eighty-four adults (mean age 24 years, 53 % women, 90 % Caucasian) participated in the study. Nearly three in four adults (71 %) had 25(OH)D level <30 ng/ml and 26 % were vitamin D-deficient. In multivariate analysis, persons reporting a suntan (OR = 0·24, 95 % CI 0·09, 0·63, P = 0·004), tanning booth use (OR = 0·09, 95 % CI 0·02, 0·43, P = 0·002) and daily ingestion of two or more servings of milk (OR = 0·21, 95 % CI 0·09, 0·48, P < 0·001) were less likely to be deficient. These three questions provided a sensitivity and specificity of 79 % and 78 %, respectively, for the presence of deficiency.

Conclusions

The questionnaire is moderately useful to identify young adults likely to be vitamin D-deficient. Additional revisions of the questionnaire may improve its ability to predict vitamin D deficiency.
Dietary intake and nutritional adequacy prior to conception and during pregnancy: a follow-up study in the north of Portugal
Authors: Pinto Elisabete , Barros Henrique , Santos Silva Isabel dos
Published: August 2008

Objective

To assess maternal diet and nutritional adequacy prior to conception and during pregnancy.

Design

Follow-up of a cohort of pregnant women with collection of questionnaire data throughout pregnancy and after delivery.

Setting

Antenatal clinics at two public hospitals in Porto, Portugal.

Subjects

Two hundred and forty-nine pregnant women who reported a gestational age below 13 weeks at the time they attended their first antenatal visit.

Results

Intakes of energy and macronutrients were within recommended levels for most women. Pregnancy was accompanied by increases in the dietary intake of vitamins A and E, riboflavin, folate, Ca and Mg, but declines in the intake of alcohol and caffeine. The micronutrients with higher inadequacy prevalences prior to pregnancy were vitamin E (83 %), folate (58 %) and Mg (19 %). These three micronutrients, together with Fe, were also those with the highest inadequacy prevalences during pregnancy (91 %, 88 %, 73 % and 21 %, respectively, for folate, Fe, vitamin E and Mg). Ninety-seven per cent of the women reported taking supplements of folic acid during the first trimester, but the median gestational age at initiation was 6·5 (interquartile range 5, 9) weeks. Self-reported prevalences of Fe and Mg supplementation were high, and increased throughout pregnancy.

Conclusion

The study identified low dietary intakes of vitamin E, folate and Mg both in the preconceptional period and during pregnancy, and low intake of Fe during pregnancy only. The low dietary intake of folate and the late initiation of supplementation indicate that current national guidelines are unlikely to be effective in preventing neural tube defects.
Tradition and change
Authors: Lohof Eric
Published: August 2008

This article is based on the results of a project on social change in the Early and Middle Bronze Age in the north-eastern Netherlands, which ended in 1991. Although the project originally focused on the possible development of social stratification, here, the emphasis will be on the relationship between burial ritual and social change in general. Before embarking on the main argument, it should be understood that the link between burial ritual and social change by no means implies the view that burial ritual reflects all social changes which take place within a society, nor that the changes observed in the burial ritual are essential to an understanding of the society concerned. The burial ritual offers us no more than an opportunity to study past social changes. The resulting interpretations should be supported and tested by other expressions of material culture, such as those concerning economy and settlement patterns.
Thoughts on death and gender
Authors: Sørensen Marie Louise Stig
Published: August 2008

Lohof's paper provides a good opportunity for reflecting upon current theoretical approaches to burial rituals and death in the archaeological past. The paper contains many constructive ideas, and its general social perspective means that the interpretations are of relevance for many regions of north-western Europe. It is particularly noteworthy how this kind of approach can bring out details rather than merging them into general trends. Through such attention the mortuary practices of the period appear as far more fluctuating and varied than usually appreciated; a characteristic that lends support to the idea of mortuary contexts constituting a discursive practice rather than a simple reflection of society. It makes one wonder about the potential variability behind the uniform ‘stories’ created for so many areas for this period. As an example, the ‘coming and going’ of cremation during this time is an important observation, that should be emphasised and more fully integrated in our explanations of the use of cremation in the Late Bronze Age.
Performances of the living
Authors: Thomas Julian
Published: August 2008

Eric Lohof's study of funerary practices in the later Neolithic and Bronze Age of the north-eastern Netherlands provides a welcome reassessment of this material. Its broad scope and its grounding in a theoretical consideration of mortuary ritual are to be applauded. Any criticisms which I have to raise here should therefore be seen as caveats to a more general agreement with its objectives and conclusions.
Archaeology, Folklore and the Ideational Dimension of Space
Authors: Roymans Nico
Published: August 2008

I wish to thank Barbara Bender, Aron Gurevich and Ton Lemaire for reviewing my contribution and for making critical comments on the ideas put forward in it. I should like to take this opportunity to comment briefly on the main points in their reviews.
Blowing the Whistle Again
Authors: Rensink Eelco
Published: August 2008

First of all, I would like to thank F. Audouze, C. Gamble and T. Murray for their written reactions to my article. I see their commentaries as both interesting and informative and the remarks put forward by them as being relevant to regional upper palaeolithic research in general. The value of their comments is not, in my opinion, limited only to researchers of the northern Magdalenian. With this in mind, I hope that the current discussion is seen as a positive development also by palaeolithic archaeologists working in other areas using other databases. Although each of the commentaries vary greatly in content, they all share an important common theme: the value of ethnographic generalizations remains uncertain even for the later phases of the Palaeolithic. That I subscribe to this point of view should surprise nobody who has read my article. It is important that we, in Gamble's words, ‘become our own ethnographers of the Magdalenian’, without doing damage to the heuristic value of models such as those postulated by Binford.
A response to my critics
Authors: Thomas Julian
Published: August 2008

It is a rare treat to have a distinguished group of colleagues give up their time to read and comment upon one's work. They deserve my thanks for their kindness, but also for their more trenchant criticisms. As Susanne Küchler notes, Time, culture and identity is a very personal project, and I view these commentaries as an unexpected addition to the learning process which the book represents. They have raised questions which will stimulate my work for a good while to come, but for reasons of space I must be brief here. I will reply to each in turn, although in no particular order.
Built heritage and the politics of (re) presentation
Authors: Odermatt Peter
Published: August 2008

In August 1992, theAmericanmultinational Coca Cola launched a n ew advertising campaign inItaly. The advertisement used, showed theGreekParthenon. The commercial artist had replaced the temple's original fluted baseless columns with columns resembling the world's most famous bottle. Whereas it took the Greeks almost 180 years to launch a protest against the theft of the sculptures of the Parthenon by Lord Elgin, their reaction was now of another order. The tasteless representation infuriated the national archaeological authorities. As these were preparing to sue, Coca Cola offered its excuses to the Greek government.
Appropriation and Preservation (Built) heritage as a common good
Authors: Annis M. Beatrice
Published: August 2008

In his paper Peter Odermatt takes the local inhabitants and their right to (re)presentation and appropriation of the monumental heritage under protection against the hegemonistic pretension of the Authority – scientific, institutional, economical – that they are solely entitled to this right. The author rightly argues that, in the appropriation of cultural heritage, the Authority does not hold any greater rights than those who live in the vicinity of monuments or those who come from abroad to visit them. The examples he outlines are derived from a Sardinian context and illustrate how the ‘colonial’ pretensions of the heritage industry alienate the local residents from their monumental past and, as a consequence, how indifference led into oblivion.
Marketing the Past
Authors: Löfgren Orvar
Published: August 2008

In 1992 a public quarrel started at the opening of the new Stone Age Museum in Swedish Lapland. Were the early local inhabitants from 5000 years ago to be called Swedes or Sami (Lapps)? A couple of years later the newly excavated Viking trading post Birka was presented as an example of an early multi-ethnic Swedish community, with a message of peaceful coexistence among Swedes and immigrants. Modern concepts like ‘identity’ or ‘multi-ethnic society’ do not travel very well through history, but any historical reconstruction will be characterized by projecting contemporary ideas, hopes or anxieties back into the past.
Heritage Lines
Authors: Fowler Peter
Published: August 2008

I respond to Odermatts's request for an open dialogue with a personal contribution. Heritage as theory can be abstruse as well as too abstract so I am fired on my first-person trajectory by the interest he generates in writing, albeit impersonally and in proper academic mode, about something which has been experienced as well as studied. In any case, if anything at all has come out of some 10–15 years of seriously-labelled heritage studies, it is surely that views on the topic are bound to be subjective. Odermatt uses, for example, the word ‘theft’ in his first paragraph whereas Lord Elgin actually bought the Parthenon sculptures. It becomes almost improper, then, not to use the personal pronoun in a field characterized by its many different shades of grey.
The South Netherlands project
Authors: Roymans Nico
Published: August 2008

This article discusses the development of the research strategy of the South Netherlands project conducted by the Instituut voor Pre- en Protohistorische Archeologie (IPP) of the University of Amsterdam. Its general objective is the study of long-term transformations in landscape and culture between ca 1000 B.C. and 1200 A.D. in the flat sandy region of the southern Netherlands and the adjacent part of northern Belgium. This area of ca 100 by 140 km is roughly bordered by the rivers Meuse, Demer and Scheldt (= MDS-region; see figure 1). The project has a history which started in the early 1970s. It evolved out of the ‘Kempenproject’ of the IPP and the Archeologisch Instituut van de Vrije Universiteit (AIVU) at Amsterdam. At present it is a major research programme of the IPP, with each year several large excavations dispersed over the region, but with a concentration in the south-eastern half of the province of North-Brabant (figure 1).
Interactions of theory, methodology and practice
Authors: Bintliff John
Published: August 2008

The development of regional projects over the last generation has been heavily influenced by changing theoretical agendas. Landscape archaeology had been a growing force since the 1920s, but after the highpoint of the ‘palaeoeconomy movement’ in the 1970s its ecological wing has been unjustly neglected over this period. The New Archaeology of the 60s and 70s injected a fascination with geographical, statistical and sampling approaches that is unlikely to disappear as an essential aspect for the analysis of settlement history. Post-processualism in the 80s and 90s has encouraged renewed interest in what has been termed the ‘culturalist’ perspective – the ways in which people's perceptions of landscape influence their behaviour across it. But it always needs repeating that this derivative movement of post-modernism is only one of several sets of approaches that has emerged since New Archaeology, so I prefer the term post-structuralist for all these ideas of the 80s and 90s: other packages that I have found exciting to read about and try to apply in archaeology include world systems/core periphery theory, the approaches of the French Annales school, and the rapidly-expanding chaos and complexity theory. My current reading of the theoretical scene sees a strong movement away from the rather tedious battle of the ‘isms’ and towards a new eclecticism – this is very much in tune with the current general intellectual trend in the West towards neo-pragmatism. Not to be forgotten finally is the greater involvement of academic regional projects with public archaeology and heritage management, areas of professional archaeology that have probably become the dominant ones over this same time-period. Indeed some regional projects, including my own in Boeotia, Central Greece, see the creation of a regional heritage centre as the logical outcome of what began as an academic research project.
Inhabiting modern landscape
Authors: Cosgrove Denis
Published: August 2008

Archaeology, anthropology, human geography: three disciplines born out of a nineteenth-century imperative among Europeans to apply a coherent model of understanding (Wissen-schaft) to varied forms of social life within a differentiated physical world; three disciplines stretched between the epistemology and methods of the natural sciences (Naturwissenschaften) which promised certainty, and the hermeneutic reflexivity and critical doubt of the Humanities (Geisteswissenschaften) which promised self-knowledge. Each of these disciplines is today in crisis, and for the same reason. Europe as the place of authoritative knowledge, of civilization, has been decentred upon a post-colonial globe; the white, bourgeois European male has been dethroned as the sovereign subject of a universal and progressive history. Thus, the enlightened intellectual project represented by archaeology, anthropology and human geography, whose findings were unconsciously designed to secure the essentially ideological claims of liberal Europeans, are obliged to renegotiate their most fundamental assumptions and concepts (Gregory, 1993). The linguistic turn in the social sciences and humanities which has so ruthlessly exposed the context-bound nature of their scientific claims — what Ton Lemaire refers to as a critical awareness of their inescapable cultural and historical mediation — forces a recognition that their central conceptual terms, such as ‘culture’, ‘nature’, ‘society’, and ‘landscape’, are far from being neutral scientific objects, open to disinterested examination through the objective and authoritative eye of scholarship. They are intellectual constructions which need to be understood in their emergence and evolution across quite specific histories. Ton Lemaire seeks to sketch something of the history of landscape as such a socially and historically mediated idea: as a mode of representing relations between land and human life, which has played a decisive role in the development of archaeology as a formal discipline. On the foundation of this history he develops a critique of the social and environmental characteristics and consequences of modernity, and seeks to relocate archaeological study within a reformed project of sensitive contemporary ‘dwelling’ on earth.
Ambiguous landscape(s)
Authors: Lemaire Ton
Published: August 2008

I wish to thank Augustin Berque, Denis Cosgrove, and Tim Ingold for their critical and stimulating comments on my article. I shall discuss the main arguments in their reactions in the order I received their paper respectively. To begin with, I agree with Cosgrove that the relation between landscape and modernity is ‘more complex and ambiguous’ than in my summary and I agree further with him, quoting Rose (1993), that the viewing subject in its distanced and proprietorial relationship with the environment is mostly a male subject. At least since Merchant's Death of nature (1980) we are aware of the gendered nature of the modern scientific approach of nature. But although it is true that there are ‘several histories of nature’ and that many details may be put forward to complete my view, I nevertheless contend that the main lines in my short history of ‘the invention of the landscape’ are basically right.
GIS: a useful research technique, not an end in itself
Authors: Stoddart Simon
Published: August 2008

Milco Wansleeben provides a useful review of some of the current problems of GIS, and I find much agreement with his comments. As he states most effectively, GIS provides the ability to execute repetitive routes rapidly. When practised well, it will not save time but allow the more thorough interrogation of the data within the same time.
On the natural history of the peasant landscape
Authors: Bazelmans Jos , Kolen Jan , H.T Waterbolk
Published: August 2008

Harm Tjalling Waterbolk (1924) is regarded, together with Pieter J.R. Modderman (1919) and Willem Glasbergen (1923–1979), as the direct inheritor of the founder of Dutch archaeology Albert Egges van Giffen (1884–1973). From the middle of the 1950s, after Van Giffen's retirement, thistroikashaped the rapidly growing academic archaeology in the Netherlands. Until well into the 1970s and 1980s they occupied the most prominent chairs at the universities of Groningen, Leiden and Amsterdam. One look at Waterbolk's impressive list of publications (almost exclusively articles) tells us that for half a century he has been an authoritative participant in developments in Dutch archaeology. He has been involved, directly or indirectly, in the modernization of excavation practices, in changes in the organization of academic education and research, in the introduction of new methods and techniques and in shifts in theory and interpretation. He has made a valuable contribution to the development of large-scale settlement research, to the shaping of the Dutch legal foundation of university education (the study of prehistory in theAcademisch Statuut), to the expansion of palynological research and the C14 method, and to the conceptualization of long-term continuity in the spatial organization of historical communities. His work is interesting because of the blending of a scientific interest in the history of the cultural landscape and a committed and critical involvement with the protection of such. Enough reasons to interview him ten years after his retirement. We meet Waterbolk in Meppel, a small town in south-west Drenthe, on one of the few hot days in the summer of 1996. It has been agreed that we will first pay a short visit to his birthplace in Havelte and to Van Giffen's grave in Diever. Before long it becomes clear that during the tour a web of named places and paths is gradually unfolding, each with its own historical tale and associated with personal memories. The afternoon is spent in the area between Balloo and Rolde, 5 kilometres east of Assen, the capital of the province of Drenthe. This area, which has an un-Dutch concentration of still existing and visible megalithic tombs, burial mounds, Celtic fields, and prehistoric roads, has recently become the subject of Waterbolk's interest (Waterbolk 1994a, and in press b).