THE ART SONG OF SOUTH AMERICA: AN EXPLORATION THROUGH PERFORMANCE

The repertoire included in this dissertation was presented over the course of three recitals, The Songs of Argentina, The Songs of Brazil, Chile and Venezuela, and The Songs of Perú and Colombia. Each recital was supplemented by written program notes and English translations of the Spanish, Portuguese and Quechua texts. The selections presented in this study was chosen in an effort to pair the works of internationally renowned composers like Argentine composers Alberto Ginastera and Carlos Guastavino, and Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos, with those of lesser-known composers, including Venezuelan composer Juan Bautista Plaza, Peruvian composers Edgar Valcárcel, Theodoro Valcárcel, and Rosa Mercedes Ayarza de Morales, and Colombian composer Jaime Léon. Each composer represents a milestone in the development of art song composition in South America. All three recitals were recorded and are available on compact discs in the Digital Repository at the University of Maryland (DRUM). This dissertation was completed in May, 2011.

SELECTED CHARACTER PIECES OF FRÉDÉRIC CHOPIN (1810-1849), FRANZ LISZT (1811-1886) AND JOHANNES BRAHMS (1833-1897)

During the 19th century, Frédéric Chopin (1810-1849), Franz Liszt (1811- 1886), and Johannes Brahms (1833-1897) were among the most recognized composers of character pieces. Their compositions have been considered a significant milestone in piano literature. Frédéric Chopin (1810-1849) did not give descriptive titles to his character pieces. He grouped them into several genres such as Mazurkas, Polonaises. His Mazurkas and Polonaises are influenced by Polish dance music and inspired by the polish national idiom. Franz Liszt (1811-1886) was influenced in many ways by Chopin, and adopted Chopin’s lyricism, melodic style, and tempo rubato. However, Liszt frequently drew on non-musical subjects (e.g., art, literature) for inspiration. “Harmonies poétiques et religieuses” and “Années de pèlerinage” are especially representative of character pieces in which poetic and pictorial imagination are reflected. Johannes Brahms (1833-1897) was a conservative traditionalist, synthesizing Romantic expression and Classical tradition remarkably well. Like Chopin, Brahms avoided using programmatic titles for his works. The titles of Brahms’ short character pieces are often taken from traditional lyrical or dramatic genres such as ballade, rhapsody and scherzo. Because of his conservatism, Brahms was considered the main rival of Liszt in the Romantic Period. Brahms character pieces in his third period (e.g., Scherzo Op.4, Ballades of Op.10, and Rhapsodies of Op.79) are concise and focused. The form of Brahms’ character pieces is mostly simple ternary (ABA), and his style is introspective and lyrical. Through this recording project, I was able to get a better understanding of the styles of Chopin, Brahms and Liszt through their character pieces. This recording dissertation consists of two CDs recorded in the Dekelboum Concert Hall at the University of Maryland, College Park. These recordings are documented on compact disc recordings that are housed within the University of Maryland Library System.

Degenerate mixtures of rubidium and ytterbium for engineering open quantum systems

In the last two decades, experimental progress in controlling cold atoms and ions now allows us to manipulate fragile quantum systems with an unprecedented degree of precision. This has been made possible by the ability to isolate small ensembles of atoms and ions from noisy environments, creating truly closed quantum systems which decouple from dissipative channels. However in recent years, several proposals have considered the possibility of harnessing dissipation in open systems, not only to cool degenerate gases to currently unattainable temperatures, but also to engineer a variety of interesting many-body states. This thesis will describe progress made towards building a degenerate gas apparatus that will soon be capable of realizing these proposals. An ultracold gas of ytterbium atoms, trapped by a species-selective lattice will be immersed into a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) of rubidium atoms which will act as a bath. Here we describe the challenges encountered in making a degenerate mixture of rubidium and ytterbium atoms and present two experiments performed on the path to creating a controllable open quantum system. The first experiment will describe the measurement of a tune-out wavelength where the light shift of $\Rb{87}$ vanishes. This wavelength was used to create a species-selective trap for ytterbium atoms. Furthermore, the measurement of this wavelength allowed us to extract the dipole matrix element of the $5s \rightarrow 6p$ transition in $\Rb{87}$ with an extraordinary degree of precision. Our method to extract matrix elements has found use in atomic clocks where precise knowledge of transition strengths is necessary to account for minute blackbody radiation shifts. The second experiment will present the first realization of a degenerate Bose-Fermi mixture of rubidium and ytterbium atoms. Using a three-color optical dipole trap (ODT), we were able to create a highly-tunable, species-selective potential for rubidium and ytterbium atoms which allowed us to use $\Rb{87}$ to sympathetically cool $\Yb{171}$ to degeneracy with minimal loss. This mixture is the first milestone creating the lattice-bath system and will soon be used to implement novel cooling schemes and explore the rich physics of dissipation.

The Effect of Supportive Social Interaction Priming on Children's Prosocial Comforing Responses to Distressed Others

The ability to sensitively care for others’ wellbeing develops early in ontogeny and is an important developmental milestone for healthy social, emotional, and moral development. One facet of care for others, prosocial comforting, has been linked with important social outcomes such as peer acceptance and friendship quality, underscoring the importance of determining factors involved in the ability to comfort. Although social support has been linked with a number of important social outcomes, no study has directly examined whether felt social support can foster children’s positive behavior toward others. The purpose of the current investigation was to use an experimental priming paradigm to demonstrate that felt social support a) enhances children’s ability to respond prosocially to the distress of others and b) decreases children’s expressions of personal distress when faced with the distress of another person. Participants were 94 4-year-old children (M = 53.56 months, SD = 3.38 months; 52 girls). Children were randomly assigned to either view pictures of mothers and children in close, personal interactions (supportive social interaction condition), happy women and children in separate pictures, presented side-by-side (happy control condition), or pictures of colorful overlapping shapes (neutral control condition). Each set of 20 pictures was presented in the context of a categorization computer game that participants played 4 times throughout the course of the study. Immediately following the first three computer games, children were given the opportunity to comfort someone who was distressed; twice it was the adult experimenter working with the child, and once it was an unseen infant crying over a monitor that participants had been trained to use. Comforting behaviors and distress/arousal were coded in 10-second time segments and yielded a global comforting score and a distress proportion score for each task. Results indicated that priming condition had no effect on either prosocial comforting behavior or expressions of personal distress. I discuss these null findings in light of the available literatures on priming mental representations in children and on prosocial comforting, and suggest some future directions for continued investigation in both fields.