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Richard Wagner's published writings present various topoi to which he returned repeatedly. Often he adopts a historiographic approach in his arguments, and this feature suggested the present study concerning the composer's concepts of history. Wagner's historiographic approach is reflected in his discussions of the Greek influence on music. The contents of his personal libraries, first in Dresden and then in Zurich/Bayreuth, are also considered as further resources for the composer's study of history. Along with these sources, his autobiography, letters, and the extensive diary of his wife Cosima provide further substance for the present discussion. The shifts in Wagner's theories under the influence of Arthur Schopenhauer are also examined as is the composer's eventual realization that much of what he was attempting to do in his own works had already been foreshadowed in the early Italian humanist experiments that led to the birth of opera. Examples from his works, particularly Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, reveal his adoption of traits of various historical style periods in music history in his own compositions. Wagner's reverence for Palestrina and Bach are also highlighted. / text

Minimalist music has now become ubiquitous in film, found in everything from PBS advertisements to big-budget studio movies like A Beautiful Mind. This presents a number of questions: what kind of films use the technique, how does its deployment compare to the classical Hollywood score, and how does it function? This dissertation is intended to address these issues by examining what minimalism has come to mean in films that have become part of popular culture. I detail how the musical technique intersects with the model of the classical Hollywood film score, and, by exploring the film music of Steve Reich, Terry Riley, Philip Glass, Michael Nyman, and "nonminimalist" composers, give a history of minimalism's use on the score from its avant-garde origins in the 1960s to its commercial appropriations in the 1990s and 2000s. Utilizing Nicholas Cook's idea of "enabling similarity" from his book Analysing Musical Multimedia and Rebecca Leydon's minimalist tropes from her Music Theory Online article "Toward a Typology of Musical Tropes," I provide detailed analyses of ten films employing minimalist techniques (Koyaanisqatsi, The Terminator, A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, Solaris, Kundun, A Beautiful Mind, Proof, The Truman Show, Gattaca, and The Thin Blue Line), showing how musical meaning in these films is tied to minimalism's particular stylistic attributes. Through the repeated linkage of minimalism with the Other, the mathematical mind, and dystopia, these meanings have the possibility--like the socially-encoded meanings of the classical score--of becoming enculturated. / text

When I decided to produce an edition of Akhbar Siffin I discovered four manuscripts dealing with the historical accounts of the Battle of Siffin. The examination of these four manuscripts showed that they are not the same work; two of them are different copies of Akhbar Siffin. They are Ambrosiana H 129 and Borlin Q.U. 2040. The other two are different copies of the work of Abu Muhammad, Ahmad b. A`tham al-Kufi entitled Waq`at Siffin. They are Ankara, 'Saib 5418 and Mingana Collection, Islam, Arab 572. The next action was to compare the material of Akhbar Siffin with the material of Ibn A'tham's Waq`at Siffin. I concluded that Akhbar Siffin had more original material than Ibn A'tham's Waq'at Siffin and accordingly I decided to edit it. A study of the Ambrosiana Manuscript and the Berlin Manuscript of Akhbar Siffin indicated that the edition would best be based upon the Ambrosiana Manuscript because it has the fuller text and fewer mistakes and gaps than the Berlin Manuscript. The name of the author of Akhbar Siffin does not appear in either of the two manuscripts, and there is no assistance from any other source which may help in identifying him. The introduction of this edition consists of two parts; a bibliographical survey of the, works on the Battle of Siffin and analytical description of the material and the manusoripts of Akhbar Siffin.

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