Distant Light: Songs on Texts by Richard Boada

Distant Light: Songs on Texts by Richard Boada is a collection of songs for baritone voice, piano, alto saxophone, and percussion (vibraphone and marimba). The texts do not present a continuous narrative, but they share common themes. Most are set in the rural South and deal with the conflict between nature and industrial development. This piece functions as a cohesive whole, but each song could be performed separately and would be effective out of the context of the entire work. Distant Light is made up of eight songs and is approximately 23 minutes in duration.

CHASING THE SINGERS: THE TRANSITION OF LONG-SONG (URTYN DUU) IN POST-SOCIALIST MONGOLIA

Long-song (Urtyn duu) is a prominent Mongolian traditional folk song genre that survived throughout the socialist period (1921-1990) and throughout the political transformation of Mongolia from socialism to democratic capitalism after the Soviet Union was dismantled and terminated its aid to Mongolia in 1990. This dissertation, based on research conducted from 2006 to 2010, presents and investigates the traces of singers' stories and memories of their lives, songs, and singing, through the lens of the discourse on change and continuity in, and as, folk tradition. During the socialist period, this genre was first considered backward, and was then subtly transformed into an urban national style, with the formation of a boundary between professionalism and amateurism among long-song singers and with selective performance of certain songs and styles. This boundary was associated with politics and ideology and might be thought to have ended when the society entered its post-socialist period. However, the long-song genre continued to play a political role, with different kinds of political meaning one the one hand and only slight musical modification on the other. It was now used to present a more nostalgic and authentic new Mongolian identity in the post-socialist free market. Through my investigation, I argue that the historical transition of Mongolia encompassed not merely political or economic shifts, but also a deeper transformation that resulted in new cultural forms. Long-song provides a good case study of the complicated process of this cultural change.

FOLK ELEMENTS IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY HUNGARIAN MUSIC

At the beginning of the twentieth century, composers Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály collected thousands of folksongs from the rural regions of Hungary. In an effort to preserve a part of their culture that they feared would be lost, they not only transcribed and catalogued these folksongs, but also incorporated the folk traditions they encountered into their own compositional style. This dissertation deals with violin music written by Bartók, Kodály and their Hungarian contemporaries that have in common the use of rhythms, modes, melodies, figurations and playing techniques sourced in folk traditions. The use of the Hungarian folk idiom in classical music was not exclusive to the twentieth century. From the late eighteenth century until the first decades of the twentieth century, composers utilized aspects of a popular eighteenth-century form of Hungarian folk music called verbunkos. What makes the use of folk music unique in the twentieth century is that, thanks to the work of Bartók and Kodály, composers found inspiration in the more authentic “peasant music.” Unlike the popular, urban verbunkos music, peasant music was the product of the more secluded village-music tradition, largely untouched by the influences of city life. In addition to stimulating a new focus on peasant music, Bartók and Kodály fully assimilated the folk idiom into their compositional toolkits, creating a new style of folk-inspired art music that influenced a generation of Hungarian composers. The new style included characteristic elements of both peasant music and the verbunkos tradition, such as ancient modes and scales, accompanimental and melodic rhythmic patterns, ornamentation, and phrase structures sourced in folk song. To demonstrate the implementation of the folk idiom by twentieth-century Hungarian composers, three recital programs were given at the University of Maryland that included works by Béla Bartók, Sándor Veress, Leo Weiner, Zoltán Kodály, Ernő Dohnányi, Zoltán Székely and György Kurtág. The works can be divided into two main categories: settings or transcriptions of folk material (e.g. Bartók’s Hungarian Folksongs) and compositions using classical forms that include the Hungarian folk idiom (e.g. Bartók’s Contrasts). Recital collaborators include Li-Tan Hsu, Evelyn Elsing, Elizabeth Brown, Shelby Sender and Samantha Angelo.

CANCIONES ARGENTINAS (SONGS OFARGENTINA): A RECORDING PROJECT

This Dissertation Project comprises recordings of Argentine art songs. The discs are approximately 40-60 minutes in length and consist of songs from the traditional art-song repertoire for voice and piano. This project is particularly appropriate because of the very limited number of recordings of Argentine songs, which are notable both not only for their high quality but for their accessibility of performance for voice teachers, students, and professional singers alike. Art songs in the Spanish language are a welcome resource, and the poetry included in this project is of an outstanding quality. Some of the poets set to music are Gabriela Mistral (a poet laureate of Chile and the first Latin American woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature), Pablo Neruda (also a Nobel laureate), Luis Cernuda, and Leon Benar6s. The lyrics of some songs are based on traditional sources, and the melodies and rhythms of all are representative of South American-indigenous and European­ immigrant cultures. The composers represented here will be familiar to some listeners but more than likely unfamiliar to most. Yet Alberto Ginastera (1916-1983) is considered to be the greatest of all Argentine composers. Alberto Williams (1862-1952) is known as the father of the Nationalist School of composition in Argentina, and Carlos Lopez Buchardo (1881-1963) is a most influential composer and pedagogue after whom the national Conservatory of Music in Buenos Aries is named. Two composers who remain relatively unknown outside of South America, Abraham Jurafsky (1906- 1993) and Julio Perceval (1903-1963) are also represented in this project. A complete compact disc is devoted to the works of Carlos Guastavino. Known as the "Argentine Schubert", Guastavino has over 250 songs to his credit. Chiefly a composer for piano and voice, his recent death (October 2000) makes a recording of his works especially appropriate. This project also includes a written component, a supportive dissertation briefly describing the history of the Argentine art song and the lives and influences of the composers and poets represented in the studio recordings. The CD recordings are held in the Michelle Smith Performing Arts Library at the University of Maryland.

The Daedalus system: A tool for the Italian investigating magistrate

Daedalus is a computer tool, developed by an Italian magistrate - Carmelo Asaro - and integrated in his own daily routine as an investigating magistrate conducting inquiries, then as a prosecutor if and when the case investigated goes to court. This tool has recently been adopted by magistrates in judiciary offices throughout Italy, spawning moreover other related projects. First, this paper describes a sample session with daedalus. Next, an overview of an array of judicial tools leads to positioning daedalus in the context of the spectrum.

Trade credit linkages along the supply chain: evidence for the Italian textile sector

We examine the trade credit linkages among firms within a supply chain to reckon the effect of such linkages on the propagation of liquidity shocks from downstream to upstream firms. We choose a sample appropriate for this task, consisting of a large data set of Italian firms from the textile industry, a well known example of a comprehensive manufacturing cluster featuring a large number of small and specialized firms at each level of the supply chain. The results of the analysis indicate that the level of trade credit that firms provide to their suppliers is positively related to the level of trade credit granted to their clients: when the level of trade credit granted to clients divided by sales goes up by 1, the level of trade credit provided to suppliers divided by cost-of goods-sold goes up by an amount that varies between 0,22 and 0,52. Since all firms along the chain are linked by trade credit relationships, an increase in the level of trade credit granted by wholesalers generates a liquidity cascade throughout the chain. We designate the overall increase in the level of trade credit among all firms in the chain as a result of a unitary impulse in the level of trade credit granted by wholesalers as the multiplier effect of trade credit for the industry chain. We estimate such multiplier to vary between 1.28 and 2.04. We also investigate the effect of final demand on the level of trade credit sourced by firms at various levels of the chain and, in particular, whether such effect is amplified for firms further up in the chain as a result of liquidity propagation via trade credit linkages. We uncover evidence of such amplification when the links of liquidity transmission along the chain are individually modeled and estimated. An unitary increase in wholesalers’ sales is found to produce an effect on trade payables among firms at the top of the chain (i.e., Preparers and Spinners) that is more than twice as big as the corresponding effect among firms at the bottom of the chain (i.e., Wholesalers).

Philosophy and Politics in the 20th in Argentina. Readings of Italian Idealism

The transition from a positivist matrix to an idealistic one in Argentinean academic philosophy can be read as a result of a gradual and problematic pollution. It was, also, heavily traversed by considerations that exceeded the theoretical aspects. Based on the willingness to explore this transit, the article pays attention to one of the episodes of this contamination: how the Revista de Filosofía reads Croce and Gentile’s philosophy. Observing there some possibility of dialogue between positivist assumptions, with which the journal takes a position, and the idealism the article analyze how this dialogue and its limits were given from a political consideration. If the idealism was condemned, it is centrally owed to its performance during the first years of the government of Mussolini. If, meanwhile, it was some to rescue of that philosophy, it was that it contributed to think the revolutionary change.