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This project explores Samuel Barber’s complete works for solo piano, including his early works published in 2010. The recording, captured on two CDs, represents the first complete collection of Barber’s published piano works and outlines Barber’s maturation from his teenage years to his full development as a world-renowned composer. The document includes a biographical sketch, an overview of his published solo piano works, and a performer’s guide. The performer’s guide examines technical and musical difficulties commonly found throughout his piano output, focusing on three aspects of Barber’s compositional appeal: lyricism, virtuosity, and eclecticism. The goal of this discussion is to aid the student in her exploration of Samuel Barber’s piano music. / School of Music

In this thesis, it is my intention to use Heideggerean phenomenology to build an account of two seemingly disparate areas of humour. Firstly, humour that arises out of a shift between ontological categories - specifically, between the ‘human’ and the ‘object,’ on one hand, and the ‘human’ and the ‘animal’ on the other; and, secondly, between objects and bodies failing. In doing so, I hope to elucidate the ‘hermeneutic condition’ of all humour, understood in Heidegger’s terms as the phenomenon of world. A hermeneutic condition is not to be thought of along the vein of a ‘necessary and sufficient condition’ of something being comical. There have been a number of attempts to try to pinpoint such a condition, with theories gravitating towards the ‘big three’ of incongruity, superiority and release. Personally, I am not convinced that there is such a condition - I think it more likely that certain types of humour share some traits, but there are no traits shared by all humour that can act as a marker that humour is afoot. Similarly, a hermeneutic condition should not be understood as a causal condition - I am not claiming that something is funny because of this condition. Rather, my suggestion is that the phenomenon of world is a necessary condition of humour’s intelligibility – we are the sort of creatures that can make and comprehend jokes because we are in-the-world, in Heidegger’s sense. I will suggest that it is only for Dasein that either getting the joke or failing to get the joke is a possibility, and this is precisely because only Dasein has this hermeneutic condition. Developing this claim necessitates the pursuit of a thoroughly worlded phenomenology, and to that end I want to suggest Heidegger’s work as an ideal foundation. Moreover, I will suggest that the humanlike objects and animals which amuse us are tacitly playing with this being-in-the-world, and the object and body failing has the potential to disclose this nature of this world to us. In this way, I hope to demonstrate that there is much to be gained from the phenomenological analysis of these two types of humour.

Bhānds are wandering comedians, widely dispersed in Pakistan and North India. While their art constitutes a persistent mode of performed practice in Pakistan, it is not given recognition by dominant culture. The thesis explores the caste, class, ethnic and literary biases that motivate this ostracism, and in turn how bhānds play with these status distinctions in performance. This interaction creates a dynamic mode, which is able to expose, negotiate and subvert hegemonic power structures, and, in so doing, continually adapts itself to changing socio-cultural contexts. Appreciation of these practices and their effects on the social norm has hitherto been lacking, precisely because of the cultural marginalisation which attempts to place the bhānd within a fixed definition of identity. In order to redress this imbalance, I explicate the bhānd’s aesthetics and socio-cultural mediation through multiple contemporary and historical manifestations. Contemporary reinventions range from stand-up comics in the nuptial rites, to carnivalesque comedians of the popular Punjabi theatre and socio-political commentators on satellite television. By extracting the bhānd from the prejudices of historiography, the thesis explores historical lineages between the bhānd and Sanskrit jesters and Sufi wise fools, arguing that this Indo-Muslim synchronism perpetuates the bhānd's presence in South Asia. This re-reading aims conceptually to release the bhānd from contemporary and historical constraints as a shape-shifting mode, which may be seen to continue generating innovative forms and practices for theatre and performance in Pakistan today.

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In this thesis, we established a cellular CDMA reverse channel model, which incorporates a time-invariant discrete multipath Nakagami-fading channel in a multiple-cell system. The effects of intra and inter-cell interference, perfect power control, lognormal shadowing and RAKE receiver with varying number of taps are investigated. For performance improvement forward error correction and smart antenna techniques are incorporated into the model. Expressions for probability of bit error are developed under a range of operating conditions and the model is tested using Monte Carlo Simulation. / Turkish Army author

The purpose of the present study was to investigate the relationship between drive level, defined in terms of scores on the Taylor Manifest Anxiety Scale, and performance in a complex paired-associate learning task, in which an attempt was made to control the number and strength of the competing responses.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 27-33). / The premise of this research is that the creation of a disordered space will have a positive effect on the stimulation of a physical response to spoken language. In a disordered space, vocal delivery is foregrounded as physical activity and has a re-patterning effect on the vocal landscapes of young actors. A disordered space co-opts elements from the vocal art forms of the popular phenomenon of the Spoken Word Movement. Disordered spaces act as an intervention on the traditional notions of western theatre voice practice. Chapter 1: The term 'disordered spaces' is explored as an imaginative mental space, feeding off the energetic impulses created by anti-establishment notions of chaos and anarchy. The language based forms of the Spoken Word Movement invite new responses to stimuli that force a repatterning of vocal responses in the actor, with an emphasis on the visceral quality of speech. Chapter 2: I outline in further detail the specific vocal elements of the Spoken Word Movement that contribute to the creation of disordered spaces. The four main strands that influence this movement are Rap Music, Dub Poetry, Slam Poetry and Freestyle. Rhythmic qualities of dialect are examined as a means of re-patterning responses to text. There is an exploration of the paralinguistic elements of speech through the concept of beat-boxing. The status of the individual performer is reconsidered in terms of the ownership of material that occurs within the movement. Chapter 3: Vocal landscapes are analysed as a socio-linguistic reality that is affected by changes in dialect. The dialect of the Spoken Word Movement is classified as non-standard dialect, which is slang based. It is concluded that it is the flexibility of a young actor's vocal landscape that leads to the success of the co-option of vocal elements from the Spoken Word Movement. I propose ways of using this material as inspiration for an intervention on the traditional notions of western theatre voice.

This paper investigates different ways of writing as creative invention for the writer/director/deviser. Three forms of writing are examined: the playwright as author of the dramatic text, the devising group as author of the dramatic and/or performance text, and the director as author of the mise en scene. In the first chapter the playwright as author is examined in relation to a historical view of the dramatic text. My own background as a playwright is treated in the context of the challenge to the written text experienced by contemporary playwrights as visual and physical elements of performance gain increasing importance. In the second chapter the devising group is addressed as author of the dramatic and/or performance text. Potential benefits of improvisation and devising are explored, as well as drawbacks of the devising process when compared to the process of writing a dramatic text as a playwright. In chapter three the director is scrutinised as the author of the mise en scene. The director's choice of a sign system and different methods of writing the performance text are weighed in view of their efficacy in creating a performance code that is readable by an audience. In the conclusion the three types of writing are evaluated, and the benefits and challenges of devising the dramatic and/or performance text are weighed; the devising process is regarded as an augmentation of a traditional writing process.

In this paper I endeavor to chart the trajectory through my Practice as Research process into, and later development of, what eventually became a performance and literary work entitled Jesus Thesis and Other Critical Fabulations. The paper details in the first part, Modes of Disidentification, the practices of three black, interdisciplinary artists: Todd Gray, Sethembile Msezane and Athi-Patra Ruga operating at different intersections of black identity and how their practices exemplify different possibilities for disidentification in creative practice. Using the framework of queer cultural theorist José Esteban Muñoz' Disidentifications (1984) as a theoretical base, I endeavor to explore the different techniques that these artists use in response, retaliation and, possibly, congruence to the politics of representation . In order to elucidate and experiment with these techniques I employ a Practice as 1 Research methodology that I unpack in the second half of the paper, Biomythography, critical fabulation and disidentification in Practice. In Biomythography, critical fabulation and disidentification in practice I engage the performance works I created during my masters in Theatre and Performance, namely Jesus Thesis and Other Critical Fabulations and icarus descent and illustrate how the theory of disidentification can be performed utilizing the techniques of biomythography (Lorde, 1982) and critical fabulation (Hartman, 2008) that gesture towards a complication of rigid identity theory. Underpinning this research is the desire to explore artistic techniques that complicate rigid, categorical identity theory and practices in the hope that these techniques can serve towards alternatives to and liberation from the social, categorical identity model inherited in Southern Africa through the colonial systems of identity based categorization.