During its twenty-year lifespan, the Ballets Russes (1909 to 1929) was celebrated for bringing together illustrious artistic and cultural figures to collaborate on exotic productions based on Russian, Spanish, English and French themes. Notable by its absence from the Ballets Russes’ exotic interests is the culture and music of America, and this despite that during the 1920s Americans culture was a source of fascination and unease in the European cultural imagination. The Ballets Russes’ impresario, Serge Diaghilev, is recognized as holding the culture of the New World in disdain, yet nonetheless commissioned a “typically American” ballet score from Chicago composer John Alden Carpenter in 1923, which resulted in a score featuring a skyscraper-inspired machine aesthetic, and the inclusion of jazz and spirituals. Carpenter’s ballet was dropped by the Ballets Russes before production and was ultimately premiered as Skyscrapers: A Ballet of Modern American Life by the Metropolitan Opera Company on 19 February 1926. This thesis seeks to better understand Diaghilev’s perceived disdain for American culture, the reasons that caused him to avoid the inclusion of an American ballet in the Ballets Russes’ repertory, and his motives for commissioning a score from Carpenter. Drawing on archival documents from the Library of Congress, I construct a historical narrative of the commission and offer insight into the complex politics of patronage in the Ballets Russes. Furthermore, I position Skyscrapers as a product of cultural transfer, thus illustrating the manner in which Carpenter conceived of his ballet as an American work for an international audience. Finally, I examine the Metropolitan production of Skyscrapers and how it perpetuated racial stereotypes and participated in the debates about the mechanization of American life during the 1920s.

Piporgeln har länge varit det dominerande instrumentet i kyrkan. Digitalorgelns intåg är en förnyelse som främst tillkom på grund av ekonomiska och praktiska skäl. Digitalorgeln har gått från att vara undantag till norm. I denna uppsats ska jag undersöka hur denna strukturförändring påverkar en konserterande organist. Jag jämför förutsättningar i att framföra en konsert på en egen digitalorgel kontra en fast installerad piporgel. Detta undersöks dels genom en jämförelse mellan instrumenten, samt en konsert med en egenbyggd digitalorgel tillsammans med en stråkorkester. Under processens gång visar det sig att digitalorgeln fungerar som ett bra komplement på platser där en piporgel vore en omöjlighet, men den fungerar också som ett helt nytt instrument. / <p>Francis Poulenc - Orgelkonsert i g-moll</p><p>Kevin Lembke, orgel</p><p>Gunnar Julin, dirigent</p><p>KTH:s Akademiska Kapell</p>

The main purpose of this study will be to analyze the impressionistic style and techniques of Debussy, how the idiom came to be, and the influence of this particular idiom on two American composers. For thorough understanding, the poetic and artistic backgrounds of impressionism must be brought out; the biography of the man who originated the idiom, as well as his aesthetic theories, must be briefly covered. More objectively, from biographies and various other studies the techniques peculiarly impressionistic will be listed, and analysis will be made of several of the Debussy songs from various periods of his composition.

This essay examines the themes of paranoia and claustrophobia as elements of horror in John Campbell’s novella “Who Goes There?” (1938) and John Carpenter’s film-adaptation of said novella, called The Thing (1982). The novella and the film utilize the lack of trust and reliability in between the characters as elements of fear as well as supernatural elements in the form of a monster. This essay focuses on the different parts of the story running through both versions, mainly the setting, the characters and the monster, to show how the themes of paranoia and claustrophobia are used throughout these as elements of fear and horror. With the help of Sigmund Freud’s concept of the uncanny, as well as other sources, this essay argues that while the monster plays an important role throughout the story, the threats created by the paranoia and claustrophobia are equal to the monster itself.

The purpose of this study is to give some insight into the solo songs of John Alden Carpenter and show their position in the history of song composition in general.

In the present study, circular cylinders in the cross-flow or the motions of circular cylinders in a fluid at rest are especially of interest in fields, such as offshore and civil engineering or heat exchanger. For last two decades, the researches of the force caused by the fluid on the cylinder surface are mainly studied by the ways of experiment and numerical methods. A time-independent finite different method is developed to solve the two-dimensional fixed or transversely oscillating cylinder passing by a cross flow. The present study focuses on the cylinder under a cross flow with only two kinds of conditions, which are Re = 100, KC = 5 and Re=200, KC=4. The benchmark tests of the present numerical results are made and validated by the reported numerical simulation and experimental results, for instant, the flow visualization of the vorticity contours and the in-line force for a flow across a moving circular cylinder. The developed numerical method can easily apply on the analyses of interactions between viscous flow and motion cylinder. Besides, we also consider the oscillatory flow passes a circular cylinder connecting with a spring. The spring -linking cylinder is released in the beginning on the position of zero deflection of the spring and stares moving due to the influence of the in-line force acting on the cylinder. We can find that the spring-linking cylinder under a oscillating flow produces restoring force and drag force due to considering the influence of the spring and damping effect, the developed numerical method can easily apply on the analyses of interactions between viscous flow and oscillating cylinder.

While scholarship on Walt Whitman has often dealt with "mysticism" as an important element of his writings and worldview, few critics have acknowledged the importance of Whitman's disciples in the development of the idea of secular comparative mysticism. While critics have often speculated about the religion Whitman attempted to inculcate, they have too often ignored the secularized spirituality that the poet's early readers developed in response to his poems. While critics have postulated that Whitman intended to revolutionize the consciousness of his readers, they have largely ignored the cases where this kind of response demonstrably occurred. "Hot Little Prophets" examines three of Walt Whitman's most enthusiastic early readers and disciples, Anne Gilchrist, Richard Maurice Bucke, and Edward Carpenter. This dissertation shows how these disciples responded to the unprecedented reader-engagement techniques employed in Whitman's Leaves of Grass, and how their readings of that book (and of Whitman himself) provided them with new models of identity, politics, and sexuality, new focuses of desire, and new ways in which to interpret their own lives and experiences. This historicized reader-response approach, informed by a contexualist understanding of mystical experience, provides an opportunity to study how meaning is created through the interaction of Whitman's poems and his readers' expectations, backgrounds, needs, and desires. It also shows how what has come to be called mystical experience occurs in a human context: how it is formed out of a complicated interaction of text and interpretation (sometimes misinterpretation), experience and desire, context and stimulus. The dissertation considers each disciple's education and upbringing, intellectual influences, habits of reading, and early religious attitudes as a foreground to the study of his or her initial reaction to Leaves of Grass. Separate chapters on the three figures investigate the crises of identity, vocation, faith, and sexuality that informed their reactions. Each chapter traces the development of the disciples' understanding of Whitman's poetry over a span of years, focusing especially on the complex role mystical experience played in their interpretation of Whitman and his works.

Sex in public: public performances of gay sex examines how (re)presentations of gay sex in the theater challenge, complicate, and interrogate the concepts of public and private in contemporary culture. Specifically, Sex In public argues that (re)presentations of gay sex in the public forum of the theater forces audiences to confront how the concepts of public and private circumscribe, influence, and control the lives and bodies and queer white men. Employing the queer theoretical works of Michael Warner (Publics and counterpublics and The trouble with normal), Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (Epistemology of the closet) and Michel Foucault (The history of sexuality volume I) Sex In public specifically considers how (re)presentations of white gay male sexuality and sexual activity are particularly effective sites of analysis when confronting hetero-normative hegemonic divisions of public and private. Through in-depth performance and textual analyses of Tim Miller's seminal queer solo performance piece My queer body and Peter Carpenter's dance theater piece Bareback into the sunset, Sex in public illustrates how sex and sexuality performed in public, which provoke both the participants and a witnessing audience to feel shame, can construct community and build coalitions across social identity categories. In Sex in public, I claim that gay male performance in the forum of the public space of the theater is a "space of circulation in which it is hoped that the poesis of scene making will be transformative, not replicative" (122) and which carries with it "the original hope of transforming not just policy but the space of public life itself" (124). / text

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This thesis argues that British scholars Havelock Ellis, John Addington Symonds, and Edward Carpenter viewed themselves as somewhat rebellious, attempting to reconstruct norms of sexuality, particularly those concerning homosexuality. To do so, they invoked the well‐established constructions of class, gender, and sex. Nevertheless, in spite of their attempts problematize these constructions, they simultaneously worked within and reinforced them. Ellis, Carpenter and Symonds desired to change widelyheld perceptions of homosexuality and while doing so, alter notions of class, gender, and sex. These scholars asserted that homosexual relationships could exist across the divides of the class‐system, helping to engender a greater cross‐class understanding. Yet at the same time, Ellis, Carpenter, and Symonds created a dichotomy of “true” and “degenerate” homosexuality that was determined along class lines. Furthermore, all three men claimed that homosexuals represented a possible third sex that transcended male/female bodies and masculine/feminine gender roles. However, while making such challenges, these men also fortified conventional gender and sex norms in their discourse of sexual difference.