Commentary on Neumann's "Phenomena, Poiēsis, and Performance Profiling: Temporal-Textual Emphasis and Creative Analysis in Turandot at the Metropolitan Opera"

This commentary situates Neumann's research within the existing literature on musicological ontologies of the musical work as well as scholarship on the analysis of performance and recordings. The response focuses on the interdisciplinary strength of the author's method while offering a few caveats about the analytical tools used. Although Neumann ventures into an under-explored territory (i.e. the analysis of operatic voices), I urge the author not to isolate this analysis from other elements of performance, including both visual content and listening experienc

SAIC final technical report : summary and tables

This detailed report provides an update on the progress of research. Qualitative studies were carried out in Brazil and South Africa, investigating the spatial distribution of violence, poverty and inequality in order to better understand the structural context of social cohesion. The analysis yielded important new understandings: even when interventions significantly improve violence, they can at the same time have a negative effect on social cohesion. This in turn affects long term sustainability and ownership by communities. Analysis includes the relationship between inequality, poverty and homicide down to the municipal level, using the most recent homicide data

SAIC Final Technical Report : SurveyMonkey

The dimensions of social cohesion may be profoundly different in the global south. This Safe and Inclusive Cities (SAIC) policy brief reports on a survey of findings in Khayelitsha (South Africa). In South Africa the most basic legitimacy of state institutions is at stake. Participation may involve immediate defence of life; a sense of national or even local belonging remains intensely problematic, and social inequality is so pervasive that trust is deeply undermined. The research attempts to understand the way in which solidarity is imagined by social actors in terms of shared “webs of significance” or perceptions of “reality” that make social relationships possible

Loving thy neighbour in times of violence : social cohesion and collective efficacy in South Africa

The South African state has an understanding of civic solidarity that seeks a common good. Referred to in the literature as “social cohesion,” this is an idea that is said to be a preventative force against violence in communities. Researchers in this study however find that the community of Khayelitsha does not fit into this pre-defined definition. This study examines the ways that collective community order in the material conditions of Khayelitsha present an opposition force to the control of the State. Researchers argue that this can at times be supportive and communitarian and at other times exhibit severe violence

A call for comparative thinking: Crime, citizenship and security in the global South

This article argues for the importance of an international comparative perspective in terms of our analysis and response to violent crime. This is particularly important in the light of the fact that while an increasing number of countries in the global Southhave achieved formal democracy, they continue to be plagued by high levels of violent crime. In fact, transitions from authoritarian to democratic governance around the world, from Eastern Europe to Latin America and Africa, have been accompanied by escalating violent crime rates. In this context, we have much to learn from an international comparative approach in terms of understanding why democratic transitions are so often accompanied by increases in violence, what the impact of this violence is on the ability of these societies to deepen democracy, and what the most appropriate interventions are in relatively new and often resource poor democracies

The Moleleki execution : a radical problem of understanding.

This thesis explores one incident of violence known as the Moleleki execution in which eight ANC Youth League members and one adult ANC member were executed by members of a self defence unit (SDU) or informal defence structure operating in the shack settlement of Moleleki Extension 2 on the borders of Katlehong township on the East Rand. The executed ANCYL members were aged between 14 and 19. The execution took place in 1993 at the height of the politicised violence which swept across South Africa during the period of negotiated transition prior to the country’s first democratic election in 1994. Despite its extraordinary horror the Moleleki execution was not an isolated incident of atrocity. During the four years between the opening up of the South African political process in 1990 and the country’s first popular elections in 1994, profoundly transgressive violent political conflict claimed the lives of approximately 16 000 people. The primary concern of this thesis is not to investigate the Moleleki execution in order to reveal a single empirical “truth” but instead to explore the “radical problem of understanding” evoked by the execution. The thesis argues that the “radical problem of understanding” which the execution provoked was not a problem which could be empirically resolved but instead concerned the juridical conception of power within which the execution was understood. In this conception, violence remained an implacable exception to the “proper” functioning of “political” power. In the unpacking of the construction of “truth” about the execution, it becomes possible to “re-read” the execution and indeed the re-read the “political” in terms of a significantly different conception of power, which includes the biopolitical “the concrete ways in which power penetrates subjects’ very bodies and forms of life” (Foucault cited in Agamben, 1998, p. 5). This makes it possible to reinterpret the Moleleki execution in terms of the ambiguous articulation of biopolitical and juridico- political power at the boundaries of the juridico-political order – the “hidden nucleus” of sovereign power (Agamben, 1998, p. 6). Critically, the originary struggle for sovereignty in Moleleki, which led to the execution, was a struggle for sovereignty which, like other struggles during this period, would create the conditions of possibility for the post apartheid state by opening a space in which juridico-political order could have meaning. However, this articulation between juridico-political and biopolitical power was conflated under the normative juridical concept of sovereignty in the adjudication and interpretation of the actions of the Moleleki protagonists. Thus, instead of a juridical classification of the execution what was revealed was the ambiguity of the “political” as an uncertain point of articulation between biopolitical and juridico- political power, “life” and law in the realm of the exception at the boundaries of the juridico-political order. This thesis investigates these struggles of political conception over two historical junctures, the period in which the execution took place during South Africa’s negotiated transition and the post-apartheid period where the execution became the subject of significant efforts to inscribe its violence within the law within the context of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the courtroom where five SDU members were eventually sentenced to life terms of imprisonment for their involvement in the execution

Making sense of the duality of social cohesion

This is the editorial for a speical edition of SACQ exploring the links between social cohesion and violence in South Africa

Is social cohesion relevant to a city in the global south? A case study of Khayelitsha township

The concept of social cohesion is increasingly being utilised in local and international policy discourse and scholarship. The idea of collective efficacy, defined as ‘social cohesion among neighbours combined with their willingness of intervene on behalf of the common good,’ has been posited as having an important protective effect against violence. This article investigates the relevance of international framings of social cohesion and collective efficacy, which have largely been conceptualised and tested in the global north, to the conditions of social life and violence prevention in a city in the global south. These circumstances are interrogated through an ethnographic study conducted in Khayelitsha township in the Western Cape, where a major internationally funded and conceptualised violence prevention intervention, Violence Prevention through Urban Upgrading (VPUU), has been implemented. The ethnographic material contests some of the key assumptions in international discourses on social cohesion and the manner in which social cohesion has been interpreted and effected in the violence prevention initiatives of VPUU.

The Accuracy of the Electrocardiogram during Exercise Stress Test Based on Heart Size

BACKGROUND: Multiple studies have shown that the exercise electrocardiogram (ECG) is less accurate for predicting ischemia, especially in women, and there is additional evidence to suggest that heart size may affect its diagnostic accuracy. HYPOTHESIS: The purpose of this investigation was to assess the diagnostic accuracy of the exercise ECG based on heart size. METHODS: We evaluated 1,011 consecutive patients who were referred for an exercise nuclear stress test. Patients were divided into two groups: small heart size defined as left ventricular end diastolic volume (LVEDV) <65 mL (Group A) and normal heart size defined as LVEDV ≥65 mL (Group B) and associations between ECG outcome (false positive vs. no false positive) and heart size (small vs. normal) were analyzed using the Chi square test for independence, with a Yates continuity correction. LVEDV calculations were performed via a computer-processing algorithm. SPECT myocardial perfusion imaging was used as the gold standard for the presence of coronary artery disease (CAD). RESULTS: Small heart size was found in 142 patients, 123 female and 19 male patients. There was a significant association between ECG outcome and heart size (χ(2) = 4.7, p = 0.03), where smaller hearts were associated with a significantly greater number of false positives. CONCLUSIONS: This study suggests a possible explanation for the poor diagnostic accuracy of exercise stress testing, especially in women, as the overwhelming majority of patients with small heart size were women

Large-Scale Structure, Performance and Brahms's Op. 119 No. 2

Research in musical performance studies has generated a healthy scepticism of the importance of large-scale structure to performance (in terms of both interpretation and perception): on the one hand, it might well be hardwired into notation, and on the other, prioritising it risks simply repeating outworn maxims that neglect the performer’s musical contributions. Recently, some scholars have begun to rethink the potential structural relevance of performance rather than necessarily determining structure on the basis of the musical score alone. In this article, I consolidate some of this thinking and draw out its implications for performers’ handling of large-scale structure; in doing so, I suggest that we should consider moving away from conventional large-scale score-based forms as structural certainties. I support this through a case study of Johannes Brahms’s Intermezzo in E minor, Op. 119 No. 2 in which I analyse recorded performances by Wilhelm Backhaus, Maria Yudina and Ilona Eibenschütz. I conclude by arguing that the inclusion and prioritisation of any particular musical material – whether the score, performance, or other – requires serious consideration and reflection in any analytical act