The Dichotomy Between Film Music and Concert Music: Demonstrated By the Careers of Aaron Copland and Bernard Herrmann

Aaron Copland and Bernard Herrmann both began working in the film industry in 1939. Both were born in the United States, unlike many prominent composers working in Hollywood during the golden age, and both composed film scores and concert works. Copland composed mostly concert pieces while Herrmann composed mostly film scores. They worked in both the art music and popular music realms, yet they had to continually defend the validity of film music. Although this situation was not uncommon to composers working in Hollywood, this thesis focuses on the careers of Copland and Herrmann to demonstrate the dichotomy between film music and concert music. By contextualizing the careers of Copland and Herrmann within the broader culture of the United States during the early to mid-twentieth century, we can begin to understand how film music fits within music history. To fully understand this, we must rethink the rigid barrier placed between art music and popular music and the barrier between absolute music and pragmatic music, by realizing that these barriers were solidified at the turn of the twentieth century and were more or less foreign to people in the centuries preceding. In doing so, we might be able to understand how film music and art music influence each other, which could then inform how popular and pragmatic music have interacted with art music throughout history

“The World Can’t Tell You How You Are”: The Actors’ Studio, Inside the Actors Studio, and the Performance of Being

This thesis explores the shifting styles of self-presentation that are bound up with the Actors’ Studio’s promotional history. It argues that the self-presentational style inscribed by the promotional and pedagogical discourses of Method acting c. 1955 can be located within distinctly modem modes of capitalist production (cf. Ernest Sternberg’s Romantic and Modernist styles of self-presentation). It then explores ways in which a similar style of self-presentation seems to be perpetuated on the contemporary television show Inside the Actors Studio. After considering the additional inclusion of various “anti-Method” performance styles on ITAS, however, this thesis concludes that, although the discursive contours of Method self-presentation may seem to be intact, the program’s evocation of Romantic authenticity is wholly allegorical - a pastiche performed according to the logic of promotional culture

If I Had a Hammer: An Archeology of Tactical Media From the Hootenanny to the People\u27s Microphone

American folk music gatekeepers have been rightfully critiqued for positing problematic naturalizations of authenticity. Yet, there are underexplored thinkers and artists across the history of folk music whose relationship to media is more complicated. By drawing on the field of media archeology, this dissertation explores the various diagrams and models of communication that can be pulled from the long American folk revival. Media archeology as described by such thinkers as Jussi Parikka and Siegfried Zielinski is not a conventionally linear means of narrating media history; media archeology rather seeks to uncover forgotten and all-but-lost potentialities within our historical media ecologies. In this way, drawing also on the work of Friedrich Kittler, Marshall McLuhan, and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, I explore the subterranean but vivid discourse on technology offered by several key players in American folk music history. I begin by closely reading the work, writings, and eclectic projects of Alan Lomax and Pete Seeger. Lomax’s anthropological and folkloristic research was grounded in a myriad of both analogue and digital media; he pioneered the use of sound-recording technology in the field, used IBM mainframes to analyze musicological data in the sixties, and even experimented with personal computers and multimedia software in the eighties and nineties. I probe Lomax’s writings to find an anomalous and productive conception of the digital. Second, I look at Pete Seeger’s complicated relationship to McLuhan; despite his problems with the Torontonian superstar, Seeger’s own thought works towards a similarly medium-specific understanding of resistance. Chapter 3 considers Steve Jobs’s and Apple’s mobilization of Bob Dylan’s work and star image. Although Apple’s effacement of the machine has roots in Dylan’s own artistic lineage (via Romanticism), we can also find a post-humanist Dylan—one interested in noise, machines, and parasites. The final chapter explores through-lines between the “Hootenanny” parties held by Woody Guthrie and his friends in the early 1940s and more recent mobile, music-making iPhone apps, with a final stop at the Occupy movement’s “People’s Microphone.” These exploratory case studies bring to light a set of connections and convergences between digital history, folk music, and critical theory

Becoming Machinic Virtuosos: Guitar Hero, Rez, and Multitudinous Aesthetics

Media scholars Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greg de Peuter view digital play as a complex, conflicted site on the terrain of global capital; although seemingly “one-dimensional” diversions in many instances, video games also constitute a space where the virtual can be actualized and where radical subjectivities can be collaboratively improvised (2005; forthcoming). Drawing from Dyer-Witheford’s and de Peuter’s work, my paper explores a gaming trend that has not yet been critically examined – the incorporation by recent titles of musical performance. The wildly popular Guitar Hero and the lesser known but critically acclaimed Rez serve as examples of digital-musical play; my paper argues that both games offer virtual “lines of flight,” however humble. But in order to critically analyze these ludic-aesthetic works, I first attempt to synthesize and develop what I call “machinic virtuosity.” According to autonomist Marxist theorists Paolo Virno, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, the virtuoso (or “immaterial labourer”) is the paradigmatic worker of late capitalism (or “Empire”). As these thinkers argue, the qualitative shift to Empire’s mode of production is the moment when, theoretically, work becomes political. And yet, capital’s axiomatic of exchange remains as a sort of postmodern disciplinarian of virtuosity. A machinic virtuoso, then, to borrow a term from Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, might be one that aesthetically subverts or “de-territorializes” Empire’s capture of human creativity. With “machinic virtuosity” in mind I proceed to explicate Guitar Hero and Rez, two video games that explicitly engage with immaterial labour and performance under Empire. Guattari has pondered the possible sources of subversive art in late capitalism: “[Virtual machines] are not easily found at the usual marketplace for subjectivity and maybe even less at that for art; yet they haunt everything concerned with creation, the desire for becoming-other” (Chaosmosis 92). Can Guattari’s “virtual machines” be found at Wal-Mart? As I will show, they can

Rescuing Complementarity With Little Drama

The AMPS paradox challenges black hole complementarity by apparently constructing a way for an observer to bring information from the outside of the black hole into its interior if there is no drama at its horizon, making manifest a violation of monogamy of entanglement. We propose a new resolution to the paradox: this violation cannot be explicitly checked by an infalling observer in the finite proper time they have to live after crossing the horizon. Our resolution depends on a weak relaxation of the no-drama condition (we call it "little drama") which is the "complementarity dual" of scrambling of information on the stretched horizon. When translated to the description of the black hole interior, this implies that the fine-grained quantum information of infalling matter is rapidly diffused across the entire interior while classical observables and coarse-grained geometry remain unaffected. Under the assumption that information has diffused throughout the interior, we consider the difficulty of the information-theoretic task that an observer must perform after crossing the event horizon of a Schwarzschild black hole in order to verify a violation of monogamy of entanglement. We find that the time required to complete a necessary subroutine of this task, namely the decoding of Bell pairs from the interior and the late radiation, takes longer than the maximum amount of time that an observer can spend inside the black hole before hitting the singularity. Therefore, an infalling observer cannot observe monogamy violation before encountering the singularity.Comment: 26 pages, 3 figures - v2: added references, small tweaks - v3: corrected typos to reflect final published versio

Remote measurements of volcanic gases : applications of open-path Fourier transform infra-red spectroscopy (OP-FTIR) and Correlation spectroscopy (COSPEC)

The composition of volcanic gas plumes depends largely on the chemistry of the degassing magma, the depth of volatile exsolution, and the level of volcanic activity. The ratios between the most common volcanic gases: CO2, H2O, SO2, HCl and HF, as measured at the surface, can be used to provide information on the evolution of the magma body. My research on volcanic gases has centred on the use of open-path Fourier transform IR spectroscopy (Op_FTIR) and correlation spectroscopy (COSPEC). I have also used data collected using other direct and remote-sensing techniques. Remote-sensing techniques rely on the characteristic IR or UV absorbances of natural and/or artificial radiation by different gases. The longer range of these techniques enables the analysis of gases in inaccessible plumes; thus reducing the need for operators to enter hazardous areas. As the instruments do not interact with the analysed gases there is no contamination, condensation or secondary reactions. However, the instruments tend to be heavy, expensive, and complex. Environmental factors can complicate analyses; clouds can dissolve and remove analyte rapidly, and variations in wind speed can result in gas fluxes having high errors. It is also much more difficult to analyse specific gas sources remotely as mixing of gases from different sources can occur. Direct-sampling techniques rely on gases being trapped, dissolved or adsorbed before being analysed by traditional methods, e. g. wet-chemistry, colourimetry, and gas chromatography. The capture of gases is best achieved as close to the source as possible, thus increasing the risk to the operator, and may only be possible during periods of low activity. The physical interaction of gases with instrument and collection vessels can lead to contamination and initiation of secondary reactions. Direct-sampling techniques are labour intensive and thus are capable of only generating a relatively small amount of data compared to the more automated remote-sensing techniques. The suitability of an individual technique therefore depends greatly on: the type of gas to be measured; the location of vent or fumamle; the level of volcanic activity; and the environment in which data are collected. I used OP-FTIR on La Fossa di Vulcano to measure the SO2: HCL mass ratios of gases emitted from the rim and central crater fumaroles, -4.3 - 6.1 and 0.9 - 2.6 respectively. I attributed the higher crater rim gas ratios to the interaction of the gases with shallow hydrothermal reservoirs, causing scrubbing of the more soluble HCl- At Mt. Etna, my OP-FTIR analysis of gases emitted from the central craters showed that, in 1994, SO2: HCl mass ratios were ~4.9 - 5.8. These values lie between those reported for eruptive degassing, >10, and background degassing, 2 fluxes for the 1991 - 1993 Etna eruption showed that variations were generally synchronous; small scale differences relating to the drainage of degassed magma from beneath the summit craters into the eruptive fissure. I also conducted OP-FTIR and COSPEC analyses on Montserrat in June 1996 to show the gas plume to be relatively SO2 poor, with SO2: HCl mass ratios of 4 in volcanic plumes to be made. I have also used HF-SiF4 ratios to estimate gas equilibrium temperatures at La Fossa and Mt. Etna to be ~200°C and ~250 - 290°C respectively. I have also investigated the structural evolution of the Masaya Volcanic Complex. The visible complex has formed over ~1000 years; with average rates of effusion of -0.2 x 106 m3/y, much lower than those required to provide the estimated volume of caldera infill, -2 x 106 m3/y. Historic activity has centred on the twin massifs of Volcán Masaya and Volcán Santiago and is dominated by pit-crater collapses. I propose that the degassing episodes, which occur with no increase in eruptive activity, are related to the convective overturn of magma beneath the craters

The Case of the Missing Gates: Complexity of Jackiw-Teitelboim Gravity

The Jackiw-Teitelboim (JT) model arises from the dimensional reduction of charged black holes. Motivated by the holographic complexity conjecture, we calculate the late-time rate of change of action of a Wheeler-DeWitt patch in the JT theory. Surprisingly, the rate vanishes. This is puzzling because it contradicts both holographic expectations for the rate of complexification and also action calculations for charged black holes. We trace the discrepancy to an improper treatment of boundary terms when naively doing the dimensional reduction. Once the boundary term is corrected, we find exact agreement with expectations. We comment on the general lessons that this might hold for holographic complexity and beyond.Comment: 31 pages, 5 figure

Impact of in-house specialty pharmacy on access to novel androgen axis inhibitors in men with advanced prostate cancer

Introduction: Novel androgen axis inhibitors are standard of care treatments in advanced prostate cancer. The billed amounts for these medications are often very high, which may create significant financial toxicity for patients and lead to delays in treatment. Our institution implemented an in-house specialty pharmacy in 2014, that provides these medications and evaluates copay assistance options for all patients. We evaluated the program’s impact on out of pocket cost (OOP) and turnaround time (TAT). Methods: We reviewed available internal specialty pharmacy records to identify prescriptions for abiraterone or enzalutamide filled between 1/1/17 and 12/31/18. Payments were stratified by primary payment (amount reimbursed by the patient’s prescription plan based on the benefit’s design) and copayment assistance. Turnaround times (TAT) in business days were stratified by prescriptions requiring intervention (prior authorization, copayment assistance, or insufficient inventory) and clean prescriptions (those requiring no intervention). Results: One thousand four hundred seventeen prescriptions for 175 unique patients requiring abiraterone (n=869, 61.3%) or enzalutamide (n=548, 38.7%) were filled through the institution’s specialty pharmacy. The average amount paid by primary payer was $9,492.96 for a 30 day supply (range:$3,382.48-$12,939.84). Average quoted copay was$577.53 (range $3.08-$10,560.39). 64% of patients received copayment assistance. Average OOP cost per prescription after co-pay assistance was $100.83 (range$0-$8556.64). Three patients declined treatment due to cost (1.7% of overall). Average TAT was 2.98 days for clean prescriptions and 3.36 days for prescriptions needing intervention (p=0.055). Discussion: OOP cost varied significantly based on plan design and copayment assistance eligibility. The majority of patients received copayment assistance, which markedly reduced OOP cost. Cost rarely precluded access to treatment. TAT was not significantly prolonged for prescriptions requiring intervention. Further studies to determine impact of pharmacy type on access to specialty medications are indicated