"Thought-Tormented Music": Joyce and the Music of the Irish Revival

"In this special issue's opening essay, Martin Dowling devotes almost half of "'Thought-Tormented Music': Joyce and the Music of the Irish Revival" to what he calls "the situation of music in the Irish literary revival." He focuses chiefly on 1904, which was both an intensely productive period for the revival movement and a year chock-full of crucial events and decisions for Joyce. Drawing on the works of Pierre Bourdieu and Jaques Lacan, Dowling explores the revivalists' efforts to "de-anglicize" Irish music, to remove foreign influences that distorted the "pure tradition of Irish song," and to achieve an improbable harmony between the music favoured by the disappearing Anglo-Irish aristocracy and the Irish-speaking peasantry. Inevitably, disputes occurred over what constituted "authentic" Irish music. Factions quarrelled over whether pristine Irish music existed in the Atlantic seaboard or more inland; whether "authentic" songs were sung with or without instrumental accompaniment; and whether the piano, rather than the traditional harp, was a legitimate instrument of accompaniment. Having delineated the historical and theoretical context, Dowling offers a richly detailed analysis of Joyce's story "A Mother." He reveals how almost every element in the story--from the Eire Abu Society to the Antient Concert Rooms, from the conflict between Mrs. Kearney and Hoppy Holohan to the plight of Kathleen Kearney--is charged with meaning by the subtextual conflicts of the revivalists' agenda. Dowling explains also the "authenticity" in Joyce's depiction of vocal performances of "The Lass of Aughrim" in "The Dead" and "The Croppy Boy" in "Sirens," which he calls two "true gems" of authentic Irish music." --Introduction by Charles Rossman and Alan W. Friedman, Guest Editors, pp. 409-410

“Shotgun” cloning of skin peptide precursors from skin secretion-derived cDNA libraries of the Fujian large-headed frog, Limnonectes fujianensis

Amphibian skin secretions are rich sources of biologically-active peptides and several studies involving molecular cloning of their biosynthetic precursors have revealed that many exhibit highly-conserved domain architectures with an associated high degree of primary structural conservation of the signal peptides. This conservation of primary structure is reflected at the level of nucleotide sequence — a finding that has permitted our group to design primers to these sites facilitating “shotgun” cloning using cDNA libraries from uninvestigated species. Here we describe the results of such an approach using a skin secretion-derived cDNA library from the Fujian large-headed frog, Limnonectes fujianensis, a completely unstudied species. In over 50 clones studied by this approach, 12 were found to encode peptides of different primary structure. Representatives of 5 different families of antimicrobial peptides derived from the skins of ranid frogs were found and these were brevinin-1 (n = 3), the ranatuerin-2 (n = 3), esculentin-2 (n = 1), temporin (n = 1) and chensinin (n = 1). Three clones encoded peptides that were novel with no homologues present in contemporary on-line databases. These included two related 16-mer peptides, named peptides SC-16a and b, and an unrelated 24-mer, named peptide AG-24. Preliminary biological characterisation of SC-16a has demonstrated an antimicrobial activity against Gram-negative bacteria with a minimal inhibitory concentration of 35 µM with no observable haemolysis up to 200 µM. This finding may suggest that this peptide represents a novel class of antimicrobial with little effect on eukaryotic membranes.

Construction of cDNA libraries from trifluoroacetic acid-solvated amphibian skin secretions: molecular cloning of multiple bombinin-like peptide precursor transcripts from a library of yellow-bellied toad (Bombina variegata) secretion

Amphibian skin secretions are renowned as complex mixtures of bioactive peptides many of which are analogues of endogenous regulatory peptides. While skin secretions can be obtained non-invasively for peptidome analysis, parallel studies on the granular gland transcriptome required specimen sacrifice. The aim of the present study was to analyse archived skin secretions to determine the robustness of bioactive peptide precursor-encoding polyadenylated mRNAs in an attempt to extract maximum molecular information from rare samples. A range of solvated skin secretion samples were examined after lyophilisation for their potential to generate viable and comprehensive cDNA libraries based upon polyadenylated mRNA capture and amplification/cloning using appropriate commercial kits. Here we present unequivocal data that the granular gland transcriptome persists in a PCR amenable format even after storage for as long as 12 years in 0.1%(v/v) aqueous trifluoroacetic acid (TFA). We used a pooled skin secretion sample (2 ml) from the yellow-bellied toad, Bombina variegata (n = 14), containing the equivalent of 5 mg/ml of lyophilised skin secretion, that had been used in part for peptide isolation purposes in 1998 and had been stored at - 20 °C since that time. In the first cloning experiment, 12 different bombinin-like peptide precursor cDNAs were cloned encoding 17 different bombinins, the majority of which were novel. Subsequently, bombesin and bradykinin-related peptide precursor transcripts have been cloned successfully. These data illustrate the unexpected stability/longevity of the transcriptome in these secretions — a finding with implications for both this field of research and for the wider field of molecular biology.

Spatial Perception and Cognition in Multichannel Audio for Electroacoustic Music

Listeners experience electroacoustic music as full of significance and meaning, and they experience spatiality as one of the factors contributing to its meaningfulness. If we want to understand spatiality in electroacoustic music, we must understand how the listener’s mental processes give rise to the experience of meaning. In electroacoustic music as in everyday life, these mental processes unite the peripheral auditory system with human spatial cognition. In the discussion that follows we consider a range of the listener’s mental processes relating space and meaning from the perceptual attributes of spatial imagery to the spatial reference frames for places and navigation. When considering multichannel loudspeaker systems in particular, an important part of the discussion is focused on the distinctive and idiomatic ways in which this particular mode of sound production contributes to and situates meaning. These idiosyncrasies include the phenomenon of image dispersion, the important consequences of the precedence effect and the influence of source characteristics on spatial imagery. These are discussed in close relation to the practicalities of artistic practice and to the potential for artistic meaning experienced by the listener.

Meaning in Electroacoustic Music and the Everyday Mind

The key question posed here is how listeners experience meaning when listening to electroacoustic music, especially how they experience it as art. This question is addressed by connecting electroacoustic listening with the ways that the mind constructs meaning in everyday life. Initially, the topic of the everyday mind provides a framework for discussing cognitive schemas, mental spaces, the Event schema and auditory gist. Then, specific idioms of electroacoustic music are examined that give rise to artistic meaning. These include the creative binding of circumstances with events and the conceptual blending that creates metaphorical meaning. Finally, the listener's experience of long-term events is discussed is relation to the location event-structure metaphor.

Juxtaposition and Non-Motion: Varese Bridges Modernism and Electroacoustic Music

Edgard Vare` se’s Poe` me e´ lectronique can be viewed as a bridge between early twentieth-century modernism and electroacoustic music. This connection to early modernism is most clearly seen in its use of musical juxtaposition, a favoured technique of early modernist composers, especially those active in Paris. Juxtaposition and non-motion are considered here, particularly in relationship to Smalley’s exposition of spectromorphology (Smalley 1986), which in its preoccupation with motion omits any significant consideration of non-motion. Juxtaposition and non-motion have an important history within twentieth-century music, and as an early classic of electroacoustic music, Poe` me e´ lectronique is a particularly striking example of a composition that is rich in juxtapositions similar to those found in passages of early modernist music. Examining Poe` me e´ lectronique through the lens of juxtaposition and non-motion reveals how the organisation of its juxtaposed sounds encourages the experience of sound structure suspended time.

Fairground Music; Augustine Sleeping Before He Can Talk; Telegraph; Cathedral

Four poems.