Anna Magdalena as Bach's Copyist

Among the wives of eighteenth-century composers, no one is perhaps more favourably and affectionately described than Bach's second wife, Anna Magdalena (1701-1760). She has been commonly pictured as her husband's trusted assistant, copying his works in handwriting which closely resembled her husband's beautiful calligraphy. No one appreciates her contributions more than today's musicologists, for her copies are usually 'neat and accurate', and are often among the most important primary sources when Bach's autographs do not survive. Occasionally, however, it is difficult to accommodate this patronising view of her role and its significance. It is well known, for instance, that her copy of Bach's Cello Suites (BWV 1007-1012) contains an unusually large number of inaccuracies and copying errors. One must ask how many of these blunders should be ascribed to her. How would a 'neat and accurate' copyist produce such an error-ridden manuscript if she had made it from a fair copy? In this paper, I shall first discuss Anna's copies of Bach's works, and see if any particular patterns or tendencies in her copying activities emerge when these are placed in this broader chronological context. In an attempt to evaluate her performance as a copyist, I shall look at typical situations in which she worked, while at the same time seeking to discover what additional values her copies may bring to our studies of Bach's life and works.

'What say you to [this] book? Is it yours?'::Oral and Collaborative Narrative Trajectories in the Mediated Writings of Anna Trapnel

This article argues that, when a printed page is initially orally generated and then transcribed, either at the time or on a subsequent occasion by a listener or an interlocutor, there are important critical implications for the “I” of the account. It takes as a case study Anna Trapnel's first published works. Appearing within a few weeks of each other in 1654, The Cry of a Stone and Strange and Wonderful News are both mediated texts, large parts of which depend on the agency of a relater. The article begins by examining the textual traces of the relater, arguing for the centrality of his role and other agencies in the shaping of the works which bear Trapnel's name. Situating itself in relation to a current orientation in feminist autobiographical theory that places emphasis on the external requirement to narrate one's life, rather than on the spontaneous production of autobiography by an inner self, the article emphasizes notions of coaxing, witnessing and intersubjectivity to point up an appreciation of women's life writing as a species of cultural production in which various historical actors—male and female—participate. This dialogic process, which persists into the afterlife of transcription, owes part of its genesis to the political vagaries of 1654 and precipitates two contrasting—but equally “authentic”—versions of Trapnel's life and self. Mapping this movement, discussion concentrates on the ways in which a critical confrontation with women's oral narrative is as much an activity of disentangling as it is of reconstructing, an activity which is revealing of the extent to which a spectrum of social and cultural networks participates in and facilitates the female writing act.

Contemporary Radio Art and Spatial Politics: The Critical Radio Utopias of Anna Friz

The article explores the work of the Canadian sound artist Anna Friz over the last decade. Her work deals explicitly with issues of technology and the relative absence of women's voices on radio. Exploring her work as a composer, installation artist, instrumentalist, performance artist and storyteller, and contextualising these practices within feminist critiques and radio conventions, the article explores Friz's ‘self-reflexive radio’. Ideas of ‘supermodernity’, ‘displacement’ and ‘critical utopia’ are deployed to discuss specific pieces of Friz's work in relation to identity and space. The article argues that Friz reconfigures the radio as a site of resistance to dominant constructions of contemporary globalised space and cultures, the politics of informational capitalism and the uneven flows that these cultures and politics engender.

Common variants at the MHC locus and at chromosome 16q24.1 predispose to Barrett's esophagus

Barrett's esophagus is an increasingly common disease that is strongly associated with reflux of stomach acid and usually a hiatus hernia, and it strongly predisposes to esophageal adenocarcinoma (EAC), a tumor with a very poor prognosis. We report the first genome-wide association study on Barrett's esophagus, comprising 1,852 UK cases and 5,172 UK controls in the discovery stage and 5,986 cases and 12,825 controls in the replication stage. Variants at two loci were associated with disease risk: chromosome 6p21, rs9257809 (P(combined) = 4.09 × 10(-9); odds ratio (OR) = 1.21, 95% confidence interval (CI) =1.13-1.28), within the major histocompatibility complex locus, and chromosome 16q24, rs9936833 (P(combined) = 2.74 × 10(-10); OR = 1.14, 95% CI = 1.10-1.19), for which the closest protein-coding gene is FOXF1, which is implicated in esophageal development and structure. We found evidence that many common variants of small effect contribute to genetic susceptibility to Barrett's esophagus and that SNP alleles predisposing to obesity also increase risk for Barrett's esophagus.

Polymorphisms near TBX5 and GDF7 are associated with increased risk for Barrett's esophagus

BACKGROUND & AIMS: Barrett's esophagus (BE) increases the risk of esophageal adenocarcinoma (EAC). We found the risk to be BE has been associated with single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) on chromosome 6p21 (within the HLA region) and on 16q23, where the closest protein-coding gene is FOXF1. Subsequently, the Barrett's and Esophageal Adenocarcinoma Consortium (BEACON) identified risk loci for BE and esophageal adenocarcinoma near CRTC1 and BARX1, and within 100 kb of FOXP1. We aimed to identify further SNPs that increased BE risk and to validate previously reported associations.

METHODS: We performed a genome-wide association study (GWAS) to identify variants associated with BE and further analyzed promising variants identified by BEACON by genotyping 10,158 patients with BE and 21,062 controls.

RESULTS: We identified 2 SNPs not previously associated with BE: rs3072 (2p24.1; odds ratio [OR] = 1.14; 95% CI: 1.09-1.18; P = 1.8 × 10(-11)) and rs2701108 (12q24.21; OR = 0.90; 95% CI: 0.86-0.93; P = 7.5 × 10(-9)). The closest protein-coding genes were respectively GDF7 (rs3072), which encodes a ligand in the bone morphogenetic protein pathway, and TBX5 (rs2701108), which encodes a transcription factor that regulates esophageal and cardiac development. Our data also supported in BE cases 3 risk SNPs identified by BEACON (rs2687201, rs11789015, and rs10423674). Meta-analysis of all data identified another SNP associated with BE and esophageal adenocarcinoma: rs3784262, within ALDH1A2 (OR = 0.90; 95% CI: 0.87-0.93; P = 3.72 × 10(-9)).

CONCLUSIONS: We identified 2 loci associated with risk of BE and provided data to support a further locus. The genes we found to be associated with risk for BE encode transcription factors involved in thoracic, diaphragmatic, and esophageal development or proteins involved in the inflammatory response.

Factors influencing success of clinical genome sequencing across a broad spectrum of disorders

To assess factors influencing the success of whole-genome sequencing for mainstream clinical diagnosis, we sequenced 217 individuals from 156 independent cases or families across a broad spectrum of disorders in whom previous screening had identified no pathogenic variants. We quantified the number of candidate variants identified using different strategies for variant calling, filtering, annotation and prioritization. We found that jointly calling variants across samples, filtering against both local and external databases, deploying multiple annotation tools and using familial transmission above biological plausibility contributed to accuracy. Overall, we identified disease-causing variants in 21% of cases, with the proportion increasing to 34% (23/68) for mendelian disorders and 57% (8/14) in family trios. We also discovered 32 potentially clinically actionable variants in 18 genes unrelated to the referral disorder, although only 4 were ultimately considered reportable. Our results demonstrate the value of genome sequencing for routine clinical diagnosis but also highlight many outstanding challenges.

In the Shadows of the Old Town: Thomas Anna and 19th-century Glasgow

In 1858, a volume entitled Midnight Scenes and Social Photographs – being sketches of life in the streets, wynds and dens of the city of Glasgow was published under the pseudonym of ‘Shadow’ by Alexander Brown, a Glaswegian flâneur and reformer. Its frontispiece is an etching which depicts a theatre-like proscenium arch whose curtains have been withdrawn to reveal to the audience all the poverty, destitution and disorder that one was likely to find after dark in the insalubrious quarters of the city. At the extreme left-hand side, partly obscured by the curtain a silhouetted figure stands behind an unwieldy camera perched on a tripod. Distinctly unaffected by the mêlée, an arm is calmly raised and a finger precisely arched in the moment before the shutter is clicked and the scene committed to record. The volume, however, relies exclusively on textual descriptions to evoke the underside of the city and contains no photographs at all. Instead, the use of the word photograph in the title can be understood as a metaphor for detached scientific objectivity, a quality much celebrated by nineteenth-century reformers and investigators of social ills. As it happened, a decade after Shadow disappeared into the labyrinthine back-lands of Old Town Glasgow, he was followed there by a real photographer. In 1868, Thomas Annan was commissioned by the City Improvements Trust to take photographs of the Old Town in its last moments of existence before it was pulled down under a series of legislative acts. But perhaps paradoxically, given Shadow’s faith in the analytical properties of photography, Annan’s work seems to refute much of the material contained in Midnight Scenes and other similar tracts. Instead of the dens, shebeens, labyrinths and rowdy crowds described by Shadow, Annan’s depictions of the Old Town convey a static, calm environment, one which is often sparsely inhabited by a curious but apparently orderly population.

Taking account of the sensational tendencies of many reformists’ texts, this paper investigates the discrepancies between the two representations, focussing in particular on the constraints which operated on Annan during his commission. It argues that Annan’s compositions – which became very influential on other 19th century photographers of everyday life such as John Thomson or Jacob Riis – far from being dispassionate analytical works, emerged as a result of a matrix of factors which included: photographic and artistic precedents; Annan’s own predilections as a photographer; technological limitations; the nature of the commission from the City Improvements Trust and political climate in which it was given; the medieval urban fabric in which he had to operate; and, perhaps, most importantly, the identity of the Old Towns inhabitants themselves.