Alfred Schnittke’s quest for a universal musical language in the Penitential Psalms (1987–88)

This dissertation explores the genesis of Alfred Schnittke’s choral masterpiece, Penitential Psalms (1987–88), commissioned to celebrate the millennial anniversary of the Christianization of Russia (988–1988). Given the vast scope of this historical narrative, Schnittke decided that his composition must take into account a wide range of textual and musical developments. The analysis of the work proceeds along two complimentary axes: a discussion of the historical antecedents of the text, and a thorough examination of how Schnittke synthesized the musical elements associated with historical Russian Orthodox sacred music and Russian folkloric tradition with his own unique esthetic goals and personal compositional style to produce a blended, universal musical language

A Bridge Between the Past and the Present: The Musical Realization of an Ancient Poem, "Adam's Lament", in the Penitential Psalms by Alfred Schnittke

The article explore Adam’s Lament, the first movement of Alfred Schnittke’s choral masterpiece, Penitential Psalms (1987–88) , commissioned to celebrate the 1000th anniversary of the Christianization of Rus’ (988–1988). These poems represent a genre of ancient Russian, lyrical poetry commonly referred as penitential poems; they are not “Psalms” in the Biblical sense, but do draw upon imagery found in various biblical, liturgical sources, patristic writings and hymnody. The musical analysis of this movement proceeds along a discussion of the historical review of the origin of the text of Adam’s Lament and a close analysis of Schnittke’s reading and interpretation of this text. In this composition Schnittke synthesized the musical elements associated with historical Russian Orthodox sacred music with his unique personal compositional style. One of the compositional techniques that Schnittke uses for realization of the text is the system of musical structures or motives associated with specific textual concepts. The author has identified and cataloged these motifs. Adam’s Lament introduces the motifs that enroot into other musical transformations and figures, monograms, penetrate into and synthesize with other forms of the musical language in the other movements, and impel a musical development of the entire work. A synopsis of Schnittke’s procedures for implementation of the motives is a subject of the discussion

Semiflexible Chains under Tension

A functional integral formalism is used to derive the extension of a stiff chain subject to an external force. The force versus extension curves are calculated using a meanfield approach in which the hard constraint $u^2(s)=1$ is replaced by a global constraint $= 1$ where $u(s)$ is the tangent vector describing the chain and $s$ is the arc length. The theory ``quantitatively'' reproduces the experimental results for DNA that is subject to a constant force. We also treat the problems of a semiflexible chain in a nematic field. In the limit of weak nematic field strength our treatment reproduces the exact results for chain expansion parallel to the director. When the strength of nematic field is large, a situation in which there are two equivalent minima in the free energy, the intrinsically meanfield approach yields incorrect results for the dependence of the persistence length on the nematic field.Comment: 14 pages, 1 figure available upon request, submitted to J. Chem. Phy

Dynamic interpretation of geoid anomalies

The NASA Geodynamics program has as two of its missions precise determination of spatial variations in earth's geopotential (or geoid) and highly accurate monitoring of polar motion, including changes in the length of day (LOD). For the past several years, data sets provided by NASA, along with data and models from other areas of geophysic were used to place fundamental contraints on the large scale dynamics of earth and her sister planet Venus. The main approach was using fluid mechanical models of mantle flow to predict the long-wavelength variations in the geoid

La Salle University Women\u27s Basketball 1988-89

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The slav reception of Gregory of Nyssa’s works: an overview of early slavonic translations

Although a lot has been written about the "translatio" of Byzantine Christianity in the mediaeval Slavia orthodoxa, advancing a critical assessment of the Slav reception of the Greek Fathers remains a precarious undertaking. Although the mere listing of patristic texts in Slavonic translation obviously falls short of the demands of the subject, a notion of the corpus of translated texts is called for. The modest aim of the present article, which deals with the reception of Gregory of Nyssa among the orthodox Slavs, is first and foremost to establish the nature and range of the material reception of his writings by means of an overview of Old Slavonic translations of his works and of substantiated traces of influence of his writings on Slavonic texts, from the time of the Moravian mission (863) throughout the Slav Middle Ages