Thesis (M. Div.)--Emmanuel School of Religion, 2005. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 63-65).

Alexander Scriabin (1872-1915) stands as one of the most unconventional twentieth-century Russian composers, particularly with respect to his piano works. The overwhelming majority of Scriabin's compositions—sixty-seven of his seventy-four published works—were written for solo piano. His etudes from 1905 forward are revolutionary, especially compared with his earlier Chopinesque style. Among Scriabin’s twenty-six etudes, his Op.49, No. 1 (1905), Op.56, No. 4 (1908) and the last three etudes of Op.65 (1912) date from his last period of composition. In the Op.49 etude, Scriabin started to abandon traditional tonality. He omitted the key signature altogether in the Op.56 etude. The final three etudes of Op.65 feature constant dissonances on ninths, sevenths and fifths. Alexander Scriabin’s last five etudes represent the culmination of his compositional development and innovations at the piano. Several factors coalesce in these etudes, including unusual harmony, bichords, non-tonal hierarchy, and structural symmetry. Most of these factors derive in some fashion from Scriabin’s increasing reliance upon the so-called “mystic chord” in his late works. This study will illustrate how Scriabin explored new sonorous and aesthetic ideas in his late etudes by means of these innovations.

The Alexander Wallace Spanier cohomology theory associates with an arbitrary topological space an abelian group. In this paper, an arbitrary topological space is associated with an R-module. The construction of the R-module is similar to the Alexander Wallace Spanier construction of the abelian group.

No description available.

Diss. Univ. Erlangen-Nürnberg, 2007.

Many musicians are forced to scale down or even abandon their profession due to injuries caused by playing and practicing their instruments for long hours in unnatural body positions; also, the competition and the high standard expected of performers in the industry causes anxiety and tension in their lives. Increasingly, music schools, conservatories and colleges attempt to cater for these problems by including classes in the Alexander Technique. But young learners can also fall prey to these problems. Performance anxiety is potentially a threat to any musician’s career and can be experienced at all levels of expertise. In the light of this the following research question was tested: Is it possible to substantially reduce performance anxiety (stage fright) in instrumental playing by implementing Alexander Technique principles? The study included a group of twelve school-going children who had been identified as being prone to performance anxiety. They were divided into two groups of six each, one being the experimental group and the other the control group. The experimental group consisted of six flute students who were exposed to selected Alexander Technique principles in their lessons, while the control group consisted of six flute students that were taught by different teachers, who provided no exposure. Both groups were tested at the beginning of the research, before they played an examination, to ascertain the level of performance anxiety they experienced. Eighteen months later, after the experimental group had been exposed to Alexander principles, both groups played another examination and were then tested again to ascertain whether or not the experimental group’s levels of anxiety had been significantly reduced, compared to the control group. The control groups’ second testing was very similar to their first testing and performance anxiety was still a big drawback to their musical performance. Not only was performance anxiety markedly reduced in the experimental group, but their self-esteem and self-confidence were increased as well. As a result it was deduced that young learners can benefit tremendously from learning and applying Alexander Technique principles to the playing of a musical instrument. Copyright / Dissertation (MMus)--University of Pretoria, 2009. / Music / unrestricted

In this dissertation, I formulate and solve four philosophical puzzles on Aristotle's conception of pleasures and pains by using the Aristotelian dialectical method. The first puzzle concerns the nature of pleasure. In the Nicomachean Ethics book VII, Aristotle describes pleasure as an unimpeded activity of our natural state. In book X, however, he states that pleasure is something that supervenes on activity. I reconcile these two descriptions of pleasure by drawing on Aristotle's scientific works and his works in ethics. By offering this holistic view, I argue that pleasure is a passion or a way of being affected unimpededly. The second puzzle concerns the nature of pain. I develop a perceptual model to understand Aristotle's conception of pain. I also propose a mirroring method to understand pain by utilizing Aristotle's theory of contrariety. I argue that (1) like pleasure, pain is a passion; but (2) unlike pleasure, pain is a way of being affected impededly. Aristotle observed that there are two seemingly conflicting ways of thinking about the nature and significance of pain. On the one hand, perhaps all kinds of pain are evil and must be categorically avoided. On the other hand, perhaps some pains are intrinsically good and necessary in a virtuous life. In the third puzzle, I explore these apparently competing conceptions of pain. I argue that the solution to the puzzle is to affirm the common intuition that all pains are intrinsically bad, but at the same time to reject the claim that pain must always be avoided at all costs. Finally, I formulate a puzzle that comes from the work of Alexander of Aphrodisias, who entertains two opposing ethical intuitions concerning pain. The first intuition is that not all pains are bad, while the second intuition is that all pains are intrinsically bad. To solve the puzzle, I argue that pains are good insofar as they are a type of alienation. Furthermore, using Aristotle's theory of contrariety, I argue that even though all pains are intrinsically bad, it is not the case that all pleasures are good.

This thesis develops some general calculational techniques for finding the orders of knots in the topological concordance group C . The techniques currently available in the literature are either too theoretical, applying to only a small number of knots, or are designed to only deal with a specific knot. The thesis builds on the results of Herald, Kirk and Livingston [HKL10] and Tamulis [Tam02] to give a series of criteria, using twisted Alexander polynomials, for determining whether a knot is of infinite order in C. There are two immediate applications of these theorems. The first is to give the structure of the subgroups of the concordance group C and the algebraic concordance group G generated by the prime knots of 9 or fewer crossings. This should be of practical value to the knot-theoretic community, but more importantly it provides interesting examples of phenomena both in the algebraic and geometric concordance groups. The second application is to find the concordance orders of all prime knots with up to 12 crossings. At the time of writing of this thesis, there are 325 such knots listed as having unknown concordance order. The thesis includes the computation of the orders of all except two of these. In addition to using twisted Alexander polynomials to determine the concordance order of a knot, a theorem of Cochran, Orr and Teichner [COT03] is applied to prove that the n-twisted doubles of the unknot are not slice for n ≠ 0,2. This technique involves analysing the `second-order' invariants of a knot; that is, slice invariants (in this case, signatures) of a set of metabolising curves on a Seifert surface for the knot. The thesis extends the result to provide a set of criteria for the n-twisted double of a general knot K to be slice; that is, of order 0 in C. The structure of the knot concordance group continues to remain a mystery, but the thesis provides a new angle for attacking problems in this field and it provides new evidence for long-standing conjectures.

Songs of the Wind is a five-movement composition for reader, chamber choir, and chamber orchestra. The work is approximately twenty-five minutes in duration. The title describes the programmatic nature of the piece, which depicts an animistic ritual invoking the wind as a deity. The texts are drawn from translations of American Indian poetry as well as original poems by the American Indian scholar Hartley Alexander.

The life of Pope Alexander VI has been the object of controversy for centuries. He has often been portrayed in terms of moral extremes. Those historians who have been critical of his methods and motives have depicted the Borgia pope as evil incarnate. For them, Alexander VI was the ultimate symbol of papal corruption. Those historians sympathetic with the church have claimed that Alexander was a slandered and misunderstood figure. In reality, Alexander VI could most accurately be described as temporal prince so typical of the Renaissance. In many respects, he was no better or worse than any other pontiff of his age. Of all the so-called secular popes, Alexander VI has been singled out as a figure of exceptional immorality and corruptibility. Unlike some orthodox Roman catholic authors determined to completely whitewash the pontificate Alexander VI and the Renaissance papacy, my aim is to engage in an impartial critique of the existing evidence. We will see that Alexander VI was a typical pope of the Renaissance, obsessed with temporal concerns, sometimes at the expense of his duties as head of the Roman catholic Church. He was also a man completely devoted to the advancement of his family, making sure that every member of the House of Borgia was achieved the highest level of power and influence. In spite of the justified charges of nepotism, many historians have repeated many of the false tales regarding Alexander's personal character. These will be shown to based on little more than unsubstantiated rumor and innuendo.