La concertina portugaise est un accordéon diatonique principalement fabriqué en Italie de manière industrielle. Depuis le Revival dans l’Alto-Minho portugais, cet instrument est devenu incontournable dans toute l’interprétation de la culture locale. Daté des début des années 1990, le Revival a vu la culture régionale se développer en partie avec l’aide de la concertina qui a su s’adapter, évoluer et influencer le répertoire local. La question centrale de cette recherche est de comprendre comment un instrument aussi répandu que l’accordéon diatonique a pu s’imposer dans une culture locale et singulière comme celle de l’Alto-Minho. Ce travail de recherche déploie une étude minutieuse du processus organologique qui a permis à l’accordéon diatonique de devenir une concertina portugaise, ainsi que l’analyse du répertoire joué par ce dernier en incluant les modes de jeux, les notions d’esthétiques des genres, les caractéristiques propres aux interprétations, aux performances et à leurs lieux d’exécutions. Il apparaît que tout le processus d'accordage qui semble aujourd'hui stabilisé est unique dans sa conception et que toutes les modifications visuelles à travers des symboles fortement identitaires sont profondément enracinées dans l’image de l’instrument. La concertina est devenue au long des années un atout culturel majeur pour la région de l'Alto-Minho. Au début adaptable, aujourd'hui adaptée, elle est passée du statut d'instrument autrefois « pratique » à « caractéristique » aujourd'hui. / Since the Revival in the Portuguese Alto-Minho, Portuguese concertina became inescapable in any interpretation of the local culture. Dated from the early 1990s, the Revival period has seen the development of the local culture with the help of the concertina which was able to adapt, evolve and affect the local repertory. The central question of this research is to understand how such an usual instrument like the diatonic accordion was able to compose with a local and singular culture such as the one from Alto Minho. This research study adresses organological question of the careful process which allowed the diatonic accordion to become a Portuguese concertina. It examines and analyses the repertoire performed by the concertina including the questions of playing techniques, aesthetics, genres, the unique characteristics of interpretations, performances in relation to their conditions and places. It appears that all the tuning process, which seems stabilized today, as well as the unique design and all its visual changes through strong symbols of identity are deeply rooted in the instrument's image. The concertina has become over the years a major cultural asset for the region of Alto-Minho. At start adaptable, now adapted, it increased instrument status from “practical” to “characteristic” today.

The main objektive of the submitted thesis is a new artistic conception of the literary work entitled ?The Happy Prince? written by an Irish writer Oscar Wilde.The theoretical part focuses on the author's life, the kontent and currency of the selected topic, as well as on the employment of simile topics in the pedagogice practice. The thesis also introduces the existing illustrative interpretation of the aforesaid publication and revers to the works of several well ? known artists which inspired the author.The practical part defines the working procedure, creation of designs, application of graphic arts methods and creation of the concertina book.

La Primavera: Concertino for English Horn and Chamber Orchestra is a work in a traditional chamber orchestra instrumentation: single woodwinds (flute, oboe, clarinet, and bassoon), two French horns, trumpet, timpani and strings. A through-composed work of 14 minutes in duration, the Concertino is conceptually based on the idea that spring is not the first of the seasons, but rather the last. As a result, all of its motivic materials are organically linked to one another, and function as paired forces that struggle for supremacy. The introduction of the third motive functions as a motivic synthesis, since it contains intrinsic elements of previous motives. There are several important compositions based on the topic of the seasons among them we find: Vivaldi's Concerto Grosso Le Quatro Staggione, Haydn's oratorio The Seasons, and Piazzola's chamber work Las Estaciones. While researching this topic, the conceptual dilemma of spring as the last season was considered. This became a turning point in the compositional process strong enough to consider the spring as a singular topic of interest. The analysis of this work through Derrida's Deconstruction theory first came to me while reading Rose Rosengerd Subotnick's Deconstructive Variations: Music and Reason in Western Society. The Linguistic approach, was inspired in part by Leonard Bernstein's lecture “The Unanswered Question,” and Jean J. Nattiez's Music and Discourse: Toward a Semiology of Music.

Snakes are one of the world’s most versatile organisms, at ease slithering through rubble or climbing vertical tree trunks. Their adaptations for conquering complex terrain thus serve naturally as inspirations for search and rescue robotics. In a combined experimental and theoretical investigation, we elucidate the propulsion mechanisms of snakes on both hard and granular substrates. The focus of this study is on physics of snake interactions with its environment. Snakes use one of several modes of locomotion, such as slithering on flat surfaces, sidewinding on sand, or accordion-like concertina and worm-like rectilinear motion to traverse crevices. We present a series of experiments and supporting mathematical models demonstrating how snakes optimize their speed and efficiency by adjusting their frictional properties as a function of position and time. Particular attention is paid to a novel paradigm in locomotion, a snake’s active control of its scales, which enables it to modify its frictional interactions with the ground. We use this discovery to build bio-inspired limbless robots that have improved sensitivity to the current state of the art: Scalybot has individually controlled sets of belly scales enabling it to climb slopes of 55 degrees. These findings will result in developing new functional materials and control algorithms that will guide roboticists as they endeavor towards building more effective all-terrain search and rescue robots.

This thesis deals with an author's book. The thesis describes sorts of artistically made books and a development of the author's book. It has also the intention to present several Czech and foreign authors whose creation is related to the author's book. The author researches, which artists work with a topic of water and nature in their author's books. She is concerned with various types of visual expression of water in wide area of fine art in 20th and 21st century. The author also dealt with the topic of water in her own author's book called Otava. Illustrations show specific features of this river and also the general features of water. Apart from that, the author points out the life of people and animals around the river. A didactic project is made up of tasks, which should lead pupils to look at water in an artistic, social and environmental context.