The early-twentieth-century culture in western art music of idolizing the composer as the autonomous creative genius has been challenged by recent developments across musicology and creativity research literature. The composer’s music is now regarded as the product of a collaborative network, influenced by all who come into contact with it—first and foremost the performer. Yet, the nature of the performer’s creative impact on the compositional process remains under-explored. This thesis is centred on a qualitative artistic research project, designed to identify and critically evaluate the prospective extent and scope of creative performer agency; it aims to ascertain how a typical lack of familiarity with the instrument may affect the composer’s creative practice, and to reveal key factors that shape the nature and the consequences of composer-performer interaction and collaboration. It proceeds by commissioning new works for guitar from a range of composers for different performers, and by documenting and analysing the processes of collaboration that result. This research agenda challenges the perception of distinct creative roles that remains resilient in present-day cultural understandings and discourse. The findings are intended to broaden understanding of contemporary collaborative practices in the compositional process for the guitar and generalize to the guitar repertoire of the long twentieth century, during which the majority of substantial works were composed in collaboration. The thesis also contributes to a developing and generalizable framework of practice-led research literature that analyses music-making by recognizing the multiple loci and their interactions that underpin all aspects of the creative processes. Chapter 1 discusses the establishment of the creative hegemony of the composer and its opposing currents across disciplines from the late romantic period to the late twentieth century. Chapter 2 comprises an indicative chronology of select collaborations in the long twentieth-century guitar repertoire and an overview of relevant practice-led research projects in performance studies. Ethnographic methodologies are reviewed in Chapter 3 and the fieldwork commissions are analysed in Chapters 4 and 5. Finally, Chapter 6 comprises an evaluation of the performer’s creative agency and its significance when placed in broader frameworks of contemporary guitar practices, contemporary composition across instrumentations, generalizing to historical guitar collaboration and its implications for creativity research.

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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of North Texas, Aug., 2007. / Title from title page display. Includes bibliographical references.

<p>This dissertation examines Charles Darwin’s major texts together with literary works by turn-of the-century American women writers—Nella Larsen, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Kate Chopin—in order to trace how evolutionary theory shaped transatlantic cultural ideas of race, particularly black identity, and gender. I focus on the concept of “descent” as the overarching theme organizing categories of the human in evolutionary terms. My perspective and methods—examining race and gender from a black feminist perspective that draws on biopolitics theory, as well as using close reading, affect theory, and attention to narrative in my textual analysis—comprise my argument’s framework. By bringing these perspectives and methods together in my attention to the interplay between Darwinian discourse and American literature, I shed new light on the turn-of-the-century transatlantic exchange between science and culture. Throughout this dissertation, I argue that descent constitutes a central concept and point of tension in evolutionary theory’s inscription of life’s development. I also show how themes of human-animal kinship, the Western binary of rationality and materiality, and reproduction and maternity circulated within this discourse. I contribute to scholarly work relating evolutionist discourse to literature by focusing on American literature: in the context of turn-of-the-century American anxieties about racial and gender hierarchies, the evolutionist paradigm’s configurations of human difference were especially consequential. Moreover, Larsen, Gilman, and Chopin offer responses that reveal this hierarchy’s varied effects on racialized and gendered bodies. I thus demonstrate the significance of examining Darwinian discourse alongside American literature by women writers, an association in need of deeper scholarly attention, especially from a feminist, theoretical perspective. </p><p>This dissertation begins with my application of literary analysis and close reading to Darwin’s major texts in order to uncover how they formed a suggestive foundation for late nineteenth- to early twentieth-century ideologies of race and gender. I use this analysis as the background for my investigation of Larsen’s, Gilman’s, and Chopin’s literary texts. In Chapter 1, I conduct a close reading of Darwin’s articulation of natural selection in <i>The Origin of Species</i>and focus on how Darwin’s syntactical and narrative structure imply evolution as an agential force aimed at linear progress. In Chapter 2, I analyze Darwin’s articulation of the development of race and gender differences in <i>The Descent of Man</i>, as well as Thomas Henry Huxley’s <i>Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature</i>, and argue that Darwin’s and Huxley’s accounts suggest how anxiety over animal-human kinship was alleviated through structuring nonwhite races and women as less developed and hence inferior. In Chapter 3, I argue that Larsen’s novel <i>Quicksand </i>interrogates and complicates aesthetic primitivism and biopolitical racism and sexism, both rooted in evolutionist discourses. Finally, in Chapter 4, I focus on Gilman’s utopian novel <i>Herland</i>and select short stories by Chopin. While Gilman unambiguously advocates for a desexualized white matriarchy, Chopin’s stories waver between support for, and critique of, racial hierarchy. Reading these authors together against the backdrop of white masculine evolutionist theory reveals how this theory roots women as materially bound reproducers of racial hierarchy.</p>

This thesis deals with the measurement of physical quantities in building using decentralized system for data collecting. The system consists of Raspberry Pi as a master device of the system. There are three branches connected to this master device. Each branch consists of up to 32 modules for data-concentration from sensors of physical quantities. The Raspberry Pi has implemented web interface for displaying measured values and system administration.

Marcel Prawy, born in Vienna, graduated in law. In 1936, the couple Kiepura/Eggerth engaged him as private assistant. Two years later Jan Kiepura helped him to emigrate to New York. In 1943, after his employment ended, Prawy joined the US Army. Finally he returned as an elite soldier to Vienna and began his pioneering work for ‘Broadway Musicals’. In 1955, he was appointed dramaturge at the ‘Wiener Volksoper’. One year later in February, Kiss Me, Kate was performed in two Austrian theatres. The Viennese version was produced by Prawy himself and staged by Heinz Rosen. In Graz André Diehl directed the orchestration by conductor Rudolf Bibl on the basis of a piano score. Prawy relied on a mixture of Austrian theatre luminaries and American actors. In the Volksoper 183 performances took place – Graz had only 16. The reviews for the Viennese premiere reaffirmed the cheers. The criticism of the Graz production did not receive the same attention as Prawy’s production did.

Presenting and applying an ideal developmental model for the classical existential hero, or main character, provides a functional paradigm for discrimination between essentialist and existential texts. In particular it allows for degrees of fine existential differentiation amongst the hero's acts of any literary work. The paradigm does so by making it possible clearly to discern and describe the "recuperation" that a reader must do to render an "impaired" text intelligible. The paradigm covers four phases of transformational activity by the hero, more or less successfully negotiated, depending on the given work under analysis; vacillation/bad faith; crisis/arrest; abrogation/nothingness; and nihilation/project choice. Only one of the three novels so analyzed, Camus' The Stranger, contains a hero, Meursault, who is able to engage this paradigm successfully. The other two novels, not generally associated with existentialism, Heller's Something Happened and Chopin's The Awakening, reveal important and explicable variations of the model, but neither finally gives an exemplary authentic hero. The value of this paradigm is the way it functions as a dynamic heuristics, as a template, to isolate and render meaningful the dimensions of the career of each main character of these works as an "existential murderer." After an introduction of the paradigm, the thesis analyzes the tragic suicide of Mrs. Edna Pontellier, the comic infanticide of Bob Slocum, and the tragicomic homicide of Meursault.

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This dissertation presents an interdisciplinary investigation into the construction of gender-transgressive supernatural voices in Gothic media, drawing on works in queer and feminist theory, voice studies, and performance studies. Spanning two centuries and case studies including Gian Carlo Menotti’s The Medium, art and popular song including Franz Schubert’s “Erlkönig” and Kate Bush’s “Leave It Open,” literary works by Charles Brockden Brown and Vernon Lee, and the Spiritualist séances of Louisa Ann Meurig Morris and Jesse Shepard, I argue that these gender-transgressive voices offer a striking alternative theorization of the “disembodied voice” that, in direct contrast to techno-determinist narratives, is created in performance through unsettling the voice-body-gender relationship. I locate the origins of the connection between gender-transgressive and supernatural or disembodied voices in the early nineteenth century, where rapidly changing ideas about of gender and the body collided with a parallel retheorization of voice as both an important locus for understanding social difference and a site of identity formation. The Gothic became an important mode to explore and destabilize the relationship between voice, body, and gender, particularly for voices that did not conform to increasingly rigid gender expectations; high male and low female voices are consistently used to mark alterity in Gothic media across genres, as are other queer-coded vocal acts. This context sets the stage for what I term performed disembodiment; moments in which a voice is understood as being disembodied, despite the visible presence of the vocalizer. My work argues that some forms disembodiment can be produced not by making a performer’s body absent, but precisely through marking the body’s presence and setting the performing body at odds with the voice through gender-transgressive techniques. One of the primary methods of effecting this performed disembodiment is through “cross-gender vocalization,” wherein pitch, timbre, and articulation are manipulated resulting in, for example, female bodies that appear to produce “male” voices. My dissertation thus argues that “disembodiment” can be produced not only via technologies but through contextual strategies of performance, involving both performers and audiences in the creation of the disembodied voice

This bachelor thesis engages in a quest to understand the concepts of necessity and grace in Simone Weils thinking. The question in play, in which many more questions lie hidden, reads as follows: How does Weil understand the operations of grace in relation to the ”blind necessity” of the natural world, and what are the philosophical implications of this concept of grace? What are, for instance, given her understanding of the world as God’s creation, the metaphysical grounds for a basic human activitiy such as thinking or reflexion? A reading of Simone Weils works on necessity, grace, affliction and attention is contrasted with her thoughts on science, method and truth. The concept of necessity is compared to the one of Spinoza, especially on the subject of how the good or the just relates to the true and the necessary: it shows there are interesting similarities and illuminating differences between the two philosophers’ lines of thought. Here, the concept of attention becomes central to the image: the idea of a cultivated mode of reception of the world and of the Other. Attention is analogously understood as a method of prayer and a cultivated ethical attitude towards other human beings – and an ideal scientific state of mind. In the final chapter of the analytic part of the composition, Weils concept of grace is investigated in regard to concepts of thinking and understanding. Here, Leibniz idea of the divine world and the divine mind plays a concise but important role on the matter of a tentative metaphysical grounding of thinking as such – how this can be thought and how it reflects and deepens Simone Weils metaphysics, especially her understanding of the highest states of insight into the nature of the world as partly a work of divine grace. In the last chapter Walter Benjamins vision of the coming philosophy as a consolidation between Immanuel Kants transcendental philosophy and religious experience – and religious thought – show the way for further investigation into the field, a field that the thesis has outlined at the same time as it has attempted to answer some specific questions that seems to be the most urgent ones.