7 research outputs found
Marie Collier: a life
Get PDFThe Australian soprano Marie Collier (1927-1971) is generally remembered for two things: for her performance of the title role in Puccini’s Tosca, especially when she replaced the controversial singer Maria Callas at late notice in 1965; and her tragic death in a fall from a window at the age of forty-four. The focus on Tosca, and the mythology that has grown around the manner of her death, have obscured Collier’s considerable achievements. She sang traditional repertoire with great success in the major opera houses of Europe, North and South America and Australia, and became celebrated for her pioneering performances of twentieth-century works now regularly performed alongside the traditional canon. Collier’s experiences reveal much about post-World War II Australian identity and cultural values, about the ways in which the making of opera changed throughout the world in the 1950s and 1960s, and how women negotiated their changing status and prospects through that period. She exercised her profession in an era when the opera industry became globalised, creating and controlling an image of herself as the ‘housewife-diva’, maintaining her identity as an Australian artist on the international scene, and developing a successful career at the highest level of her artform while creating a fulfilling home life. This study considers the circumstances and mythology of Marie Collier’s death, but more importantly shows her as a woman of the mid-twentieth century navigating the professional and personal spheres to achieve her vision of a life that included art, work and family
Implementation aspects of a BDD package supporting general decision diagrams
Get PDFGeneral decision diagram is a loose term for a superset of different types of decision diagrams - we are interested in joining BDDs, FDDs, and different types of suppressed DDs, e.g. ZBDDs. I will present: The current state of our BDD package Biddy (functionalities and details about the original implementation aspects). Our ideas for efficient implementation of ZBDDs (which could be used for all types of suppressed DDs).New type od decision diagrams called ZFDD (somehow symmetric to ZBDD). A rough draft about the implementation of a package supporting general decision diagrams
