St. Petersburg Court Chant and the Tradition of Eastern Slavic Church Singing

The present study examines the repertory of liturgical chant known as St. Petersburg Court Chant which emerged within the Imperial Court of St. Petersburg, Russia, and appeared in print in a number of revisions during the course of the 19th century, eventually to spread throughout the Russian Empire and even abroad. The study seeks answers to questions on the essence and composition of Court Chant, its history and liturgical background, and most importantly, its musical relationship to other repertories of Eastern Slavic chant. The research questions emerge from previous literary accounts of Court Chant (summarized in the Introduction), which have tended to be inaccurate and generally not based on critical research. The study is divided into eight main chapters. Chapter 1 provides a survey of the history of Eastern Slavic chant and the Imperial Court Chapel of St. Petersburg until 1917, with special emphasis on the history of singing traditional chant in polyphony, the status of the Court Chapel as a government authority, and its endeavours in publishing church music. Chapter 2 deals with the liturgical background of Eastern chant, the chant genres, and main repertories of Eastern Slavic chant. Chapter 3 concentrates on chant sources: it introduces the musical notations utilised, after which a typology of chant books is presented. The discussion continues with a survey of the sources of Court Chant and their content, the specimens selected for closer analysis, the comparative materials from other repertories, and ends with a commentary on some chant sources that have been excluded. The comparative sources include a specimen from around the beginning of the 12th century, a few manuscripts from the 17th century, and printed and manuscript chant books from the early 18th to early 20th century, covering the geographical area that delimits to the western Ukraine, Astrakhan, Nizhny Novgorod, and the Solovetsky Monastery. Chapter 4 presents the approach and methods used in the subsequent analytical comparisons. After a survey of the pitch organization of Eastern Slavic chant, the customary harmonization strategy of traditional chant polyphony is examined, according to which a method for meaningful analysis of the harmony is proposed. The method is based on the observation that the harmonic framework of chant polyphony derives from the standard pitch collection of monodic chant known as the Church Gamut, specific pitches of which form eight harmonic regions that behave like the usual tonalities of major and harmonic minor. Because of the considerable quantity of comparative chant forms, computer-assisted statistical methods are applied to the analysis of chant melodies. The primary chant forms and their respective comparative forms have been pre-processed into reduced chant prototypes and divided into redactions. The analyses are carried out by measuring the formal dissimilarities of the primary chant forms of the Court Chant repertory against each comparative form, and also by measuring the reciprocal dissimilarities of all chant versions in a redaction, the results of which are subjected to agglomerative hierarchical clustering in order to find out how the chant forms relate to each other. The dissimilarities are determined by applying a metric dissimilarity function that is based on the Levenshtein Distance. Chapter 5 provides the melodic and harmonic analyses of generic chants (chants used for multiple texts of different lengths), i.e., chants for stichera samoglasny and troparia, Chapter 6 of pseudo-generic chants (chants that are used for multiple texts but with certain restrictions), i.e., chants for heirmoi, prokeimena, and three other hymns, and Chapter 7 of non-generic chants, covering nine chants that in the Court repertory are not shared by multiple texts. The results are summarized and evaluated in Chapter 8. Accordingly, it can be established that, contrary to previous conceptions, melodically, Court Chant is in effect a full part of the wider Eastern Slavic chant tradition. Even if it is somewhat detached from the chant versions of the Synodal square-note chant books and the local tradition of Moscow, it is particularly close to chant forms of East Ukraine and some vernacular repertories from Russia. Respectively, the harmonization strategies of Court Chant do not show significant individuality in comparison with those of the available polyphonic comparative sources, the main difference being the part-writing, which generally conforms to western common practice standard, whereas the deviations from this tend to be more significant in other analysed repertories of polyphonic chant. Thus, insofar as the subsequent prevalence of Court Chant is not based on its forceful dissemination by authorities (as suggested in previous literature but for which little tangible evidence could be found in Chapter 1), in the present author’s interpretation, Court Chant attained its dominance principally because musically it was considered sufficiently traditional, and as a chant body supported by the government, was conveniently available in print in serviceable harmonizations.

Tactile-Proprioceptive Robotic Grasping

Robotic grasping has been studied increasingly for a few decades. While progress has been made in this field, robotic hands are still nowhere near the capability of human hands. However, in the past few years, the increase in computational power and the availability of commercial tactile sensors have made it easier to develop techniques that exploit the feedback from the hand itself, the sense of touch. The focus of this thesis lies in the use of this sense. The work described in this thesis focuses on robotic grasping from two different viewpoints: robotic systems and data-driven grasping. The robotic systems viewpoint describes a complete architecture for the act of grasping and, to a lesser extent, more general manipulation. Two central claims that the architecture was designed for are hardware independence and the use of sensors during grasping. These properties enables the use of multiple different robotic platforms within the architecture. Secondly, new data-driven methods are proposed that can be incorporated into the grasping process. The first of these methods is a novel way of learning grasp stability from the tactile and haptic feedback of the hand instead of analytically solving the stability from a set of known contacts between the hand and the object. By learning from the data directly, there is no need to know the properties of the hand, such as kinematics, enabling the method to be utilized with complex hands. The second novel method, probabilistic grasping, combines the fields of tactile exploration and grasp planning. By employing well-known statistical methods and pre-existing knowledge of an object, object properties, such as pose, can be inferred with related uncertainty. This uncertainty is utilized by a grasp planning process which plans for stable grasps under the inferred uncertainty.

The house that the Court built. The retained powers case law of the European Court of Justice and the constitutional structure of the Union

Euroopan unionin perustamissopimusten katsotaan muodostavan EU:n valtiosäännön, jonka rajat ovat kuitenkin perustamissopimusten määräysten väljän muotoilun sekä Euroopan unionin tuomioistuimen tulkintakäytännön valossa epätarkat. Etenkin kysymys unionin ja sen jäsenvaltioiden välisestä toimivallanjaosta on EU-oikeudellisen tutkimuksen klassikoita. Tarkastelen pro gradu -tutkielmassani unionin valtiosääntörakennetta ja unionioikeuden kokonaisvaikutusta jäsenvaltioiden toimivaltojen käyttöön erityisesti EU-tuomioistuimen ratkaisukäytännössään kehittämän niin kutsutun retained powers -doktriinin valossa. Kyseisen opin mukaan EU-oikeus asettaa vaatimuksia jäsenvaltioiden toimivaltojen käytölle myös niillä aloilla, joilla sääntelytoimivalta on jäänyt jäsenvaltioille eikä sitä ole jaettu unionin kanssa. Aiheen teoreettisen tarkastelun pohjalta analysoin Euroopaun unionin tuomioistuimen ratkaisukäytäntöä erityisesti yhtä säilytetyn toimivallan alaa, koulutusta, koskevissa tapauksissa pyrkien havaitsemaan typologioita tuomioistuimen ratkaisutoiminnassa. Tutkimus noudattaa EU-valtiosääntöoikeuden metodologiaa. Keskeisenä lähdemateriaalina on siten käytetty unionituomioistuimen ratkaisukäytäntöä, joka heijastaa perustamissopimuksia tarkemmin unionin valtiosääntörakennetta. Oikeuskäytännön analyysi ja tulkinta on suoritettu peilaten sitä vasten unionin kehitystä markkinaorientoituneesta organisaatiosta yleismaailmalliseksi poliittiseksi unioniksi. Tutkielmani loppupäätelmä on, että jäsenvaltiot ovat tietyissä rajoissa hyväksyneet unionituomioistuimen kehittämän doktriinin, ja unionituomioistuin on siten saanut aikaan tosiasiallisen muutoksen EU:n valtiosääntörakenteessa. Retained powers -doktriini on omiaan syventämään eurooppalaista integraatiota ja nostaa kysymyksiä toimivallanjaon merkityksestä unionioikeudessa, perustamissopimusten kyvystä heijastaa unionin valtiosääntörakennetta sekä unionituomioistuimen toiminnan poliittisesta luonteesta.