Carl Nielsen's 'Folk-like' Songs and the 'Danish National Tone'

The notion of ‘Danishness’ remains a sensitive issue in Denmark, not only in reference to music, but also within the broader socio-political arena, in part because of the tensions caused by the influx of Middle-Eastern immigrants. The recent public debate, rash of publications on national identity, and creation of a Danish cultural canon are surely no coincidence. Against this backdrop, it is perhaps not surprising that Karen Vestergard and Ida-Marie Vorre’s 2006 study on Danishness in Nielsen’s folk-like songs sparked controversy, since the authors conclude that there is actually nothing inherently Danish about them, challenging the conventional wisdom that Nielsen’s folkelige songs express the ‘Danish national tone’. Yet even if one cannot verify Danish traits in these songs, it is possible to separate features of the European folk song tradition from Nielsen’s distinctive compositional practices. For example, whereas the songs’ folk-like character is mostly concentrated in the melody, their expressive quality derives largely from the harmonic language, an aspect not considered by Vestergaard and Vorre in their purely melodic analysis. Indeed, many songs manifest in miniature the shifting diatonicism that has been found to thwart expectation in Nielsen’s large-scale compositions. So even if these songs do not exhibit uniquely Danish traits, they do bear Nielsen’s stamp. This begs the question: if a country’s foremost composer has written songs that, for various extrinsic reasons, have become part of the collective folk heritage, cannot his stylistic characteristics, by extension, be considered nationalistic? Perhaps there was no Danish national tone before Nielsen, but over time, specifically through association with his music, these traits have come to represent Danishness, a perspective I argue in this article

Carl Nielsen Unmasked. Art and Popular Musical Styles in Maskarade

Although Carl Nielsen’s international reputation rests on his symphonies, in Denmark he is equally beloved for his songs. Over the course of his life, the former increased in complexity as the latter grew more folk-like, so that Nielsen developed into a Janus-faced composer, a master of both art and popular styles. These genres typically have been studied in isolation so that, though many scholars note that Nielsen’s music is full of contrast, few show that this depends on the opposition of two specific styles. Nor has a parallel been drawn between this musical tension and the conflicts Nielsen faced in his personal life, not the least of which was the insidious Law of Jante (“Thou shalt not believe thou art something”) that has plagued many a nationalist artist. Nowhere is Nielsen’s opposition of art and popular styles more effective than in Maskarade (1904-1906), arguably the Danes’s favorite among his compositions, in which the two styles represent conflicting dramatic themes and serve to distinguish between the characters. Ludvig Holberg’s eighteenth-century comedy provided Nielsen with a particularly apt and surprisingly current dramatic framework in which to play out the musical and personal tensions he experienced midway through his career. Nielsen’s opera is an interdependent literary-musical statement in which he underscored the dramatic themes and characterized the main roles with appropriate musical styles drawn from the entire range of his compositional personae. The masked ball’s utopian blurring of class distinctions is modeled musically in the symmetrical key scheme that fuses this musico-dramatic continuum

Prehabilitation for Shoulder Dysfunction in Breast Cancer

Objective: To evaluate prehabilitation exercises to improve shoulder pain and abduction range of motion (ROM) after breast cancer surgery; to evaluate methods of exercise teaching; to assess postsurgical seroma formation. Design: Pilot study Setting: Academic medical center Participants: 60 breast cancer patients were randomly assigned to either personal exercise instruction, group 1, n=36, or video only instruction, group 2, n=24. Interventions: Shoulder exercises were assigned to both groups 1 month prior to surgery at an outpatient visit. Group 1 received personal instruction on exercises, plus written exercise instruction, and a link to access an online video. Group 2 received only written exercise instruction and a link to access the online video. Main Outcome Measures: Exercise compliance, pain (via visual analog scale), shoulder abduction ROM (via goniometer), and presence or absence of seroma. Results or Clinical Course: 76% of study patients chose to exercise. There was no difference in exercise compliance between personal instruction versus video teaching. (75%, 24/32 in-person vs. 77%, 10/13 video only, OR=1.03). 66% of patients (20/30) lost greater than 10 degrees shoulder abduction ROM at 1 month post surgery. 29% of patients (9/31) had worse shoulder pain at one month post surgery than at baseline (24%, 6/25 exercisers, and 50%, 3/6 non-exercisers). 15% of patients (4/27) had worse shoulder pain at 3 months post surgery than at baseline (8%, 2/25 exercisers, and 100%, 2/2 non-exercisers). Prehabilitation exercise program inferred no additional risk of seroma formation (21%, 7/33 exercisers vs. 22%, 2/9 non-exercisers OR=.94). Conclusion: In-person teaching does not appear superior to video teaching for prehabilitation exercises in breast cancer. A high quality randomized controlled trial is necessary to assess efficacy of prehabilitation for improving post surgical outcomes. Prehabilitation exercises do not appear to increase risk of seroma formation in breast cancer surgery

Pulp, Vol. 3 No. 1

This is the third issue of Pulphttps://scholarworks.sfasu.edu/pulp/1002/thumbnail.jp

Present eternity : quests of temporality in the literary production of the "extrême contemporain" in France (The Writings of Dominique Fourcade and Emmanuel Hocquard)

The term \uab extr\ueame contemporain \ubb is an expression currently used by scholars to indicate the French literary production of the last 20 years. This term was used in a work of literature for the first time by the French poet Dominique Fourcade in 1986 (\uc9l\ue9gie L apostrophe E.C.) in reference to an epoch, but also to a new sense of experiencing time and space in the so-called \uab age of digital reproducibility \ubb. The aim of this paper is to consider how the change in temporal protocols due to the triumph of Big Optics (Paul Virilio) affects the sense of teleology (destiny) and the quest for experience in French contemporary poetry (in particular, in the genre of the elegy). Including both memory and anticipation, the \uab extr\ueame contemporain \ubb production seems to prefer the \u201ctime of now\u201d, Jetz-zeit in Benjamin\u2019s words, to past or testimony, and speaks to the present, whose responsibility is to give voice to a space where everything is simply allowed to happen

Genetic risk and a primary role for cell-mediated immune mechanisms in multiple sclerosis.

Multiple sclerosis is a common disease of the central nervous system in which the interplay between inflammatory and neurodegenerative processes typically results in intermittent neurological disturbance followed by progressive accumulation of disability. Epidemiological studies have shown that genetic factors are primarily responsible for the substantially increased frequency of the disease seen in the relatives of affected individuals, and systematic attempts to identify linkage in multiplex families have confirmed that variation within the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) exerts the greatest individual effect on risk. Modestly powered genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have enabled more than 20 additional risk loci to be identified and have shown that multiple variants exerting modest individual effects have a key role in disease susceptibility. Most of the genetic architecture underlying susceptibility to the disease remains to be defined and is anticipated to require the analysis of sample sizes that are beyond the numbers currently available to individual research groups. In a collaborative GWAS involving 9,772 cases of European descent collected by 23 research groups working in 15 different countries, we have replicated almost all of the previously suggested associations and identified at least a further 29 novel susceptibility loci. Within the MHC we have refined the identity of the HLA-DRB1 risk alleles and confirmed that variation in the HLA-A gene underlies the independent protective effect attributable to the class I region. Immunologically relevant genes are significantly overrepresented among those mapping close to the identified loci and particularly implicate T-helper-cell differentiation in the pathogenesis of multiple sclerosis

Changes in Early Cortical Visual Processing Predict Enhanced Reactivity in Deaf Individuals

Individuals with profound deafness rely critically on vision to interact with their environment. Improvement of visual performance as a consequence of auditory deprivation is assumed to result from cross-modal changes occurring in late stages of visual processing. Here we measured reaction times and event-related potentials (ERPs) in profoundly deaf adults and hearing controls during a speeded visual detection task, to assess to what extent the enhanced reactivity of deaf individuals could reflect plastic changes in the early cortical processing of the stimulus. We found that deaf subjects were faster than hearing controls at detecting the visual targets, regardless of their location in the visual field (peripheral or peri-foveal). This behavioural facilitation was associated with ERP changes starting from the first detectable response in the striate cortex (C1 component) at about 80 ms after stimulus onset, and in the P1 complex (100–150 ms). In addition, we found that P1 peak amplitudes predicted the response times in deaf subjects, whereas in hearing individuals visual reactivity and ERP amplitudes correlated only at later stages of processing. These findings show that long-term auditory deprivation can profoundly alter visual processing from the earliest cortical stages. Furthermore, our results provide the first evidence of a co-variation between modified brain activity (cortical plasticity) and behavioural enhancement in this sensory-deprived population

Pan-cancer Alterations of the MYC Oncogene and Its Proximal Network across the Cancer Genome Atlas

Although theMYConcogene has been implicated incancer, a systematic assessment of alterations ofMYC, related transcription factors, and co-regulatoryproteins, forming the proximal MYC network (PMN),across human cancers is lacking. Using computa-tional approaches, we define genomic and proteo-mic features associated with MYC and the PMNacross the 33 cancers of The Cancer Genome Atlas.Pan-cancer, 28% of all samples had at least one ofthe MYC paralogs amplified. In contrast, the MYCantagonists MGA and MNT were the most frequentlymutated or deleted members, proposing a roleas tumor suppressors.MYCalterations were mutu-ally exclusive withPIK3CA,PTEN,APC,orBRAFalterations, suggesting that MYC is a distinct onco-genic driver. Expression analysis revealed MYC-associated pathways in tumor subtypes, such asimmune response and growth factor signaling; chro-matin, translation, and DNA replication/repair wereconserved pan-cancer. This analysis reveals insightsinto MYC biology and is a reference for biomarkersand therapeutics for cancers with alterations ofMYC or the PMN

Pan-Cancer Analysis of lncRNA Regulation Supports Their Targeting of Cancer Genes in Each Tumor Context

Long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs) are commonly dys-regulated in tumors, but only a handful are known toplay pathophysiological roles in cancer. We inferredlncRNAs that dysregulate cancer pathways, onco-genes, and tumor suppressors (cancer genes) bymodeling their effects on the activity of transcriptionfactors, RNA-binding proteins, and microRNAs in5,185 TCGA tumors and 1,019 ENCODE assays.Our predictions included hundreds of candidateonco- and tumor-suppressor lncRNAs (cancerlncRNAs) whose somatic alterations account for thedysregulation of dozens of cancer genes and path-ways in each of 14 tumor contexts. To demonstrateproof of concept, we showed that perturbations tar-geting OIP5-AS1 (an inferred tumor suppressor) andTUG1 and WT1-AS (inferred onco-lncRNAs) dysre-gulated cancer genes and altered proliferation ofbreast and gynecologic cancer cells. Our analysis in-dicates that, although most lncRNAs are dysregu-lated in a tumor-specific manner, some, includingOIP5-AS1, TUG1, NEAT1, MEG3, and TSIX, synergis-tically dysregulate cancer pathways in multiple tumorcontexts