Creating Art Song in the South Slav Territories (1900-1930s): Femininity, Nation and Performance

In this thesis I explore a double life of art song as a work of art and a symbol of newly emerging Yugoslav identity in the South Slav territories during the first three decades of the twentieth century. I examine this repertory as performance, through activities of two leading sopranos, Maja Strozzi-Pečić (1882-1962) and Ivanka Milojević (1881-1975). They collaborated with composers Petar Konjović (1883-1970) and Miloje Milojević (1884-1946), respectively, to create the repertory and establish its concert tradition. Aiding this was Bela Pečić (1873-1938), Strozzi-Pečić’s husband-accompanist. By analysing the repertory’s creation in the context of nation-building in Yugoslavia I identify the two sopranos as ‘patriots’ - bearers of national identity. I argue they legitimized this body of work as ‘national’ high art in performance. Key performative factors in this process were gender, high vocal technique and language, and in the case of Strozzi-Pečić the star factor. As ideal female types, they harmonized and synthesized different traditions, ethnicities, religions and languages through the power of their voices. The two sopranos’ contrasting vocal practices: that of an opera star and an exclusively chamber singer, engendered two distinctive bodies of repertories. They shaped the composers’ vocal lines and influenced their choice of topics and traditional musical elements, resulting in Konjović’s penchant for sevdalinka tradition and Milojević’s focus on mother-figure characters. I adopt the form of lecture recital as part of original practice tradition to retell the story of the repertory’s creation as a story of two women as authors. Rather than recreating their vocal practices, I draw on the power they had as creators to give a new reading of this repertory. I restore the unifying vision that infused this music and highlight its message for today’s audiences: the empowerment of a performer through national song for post-national aspirations

(Post)utopian Vineland: Ideological Conflicts in the 1960s and the 1980s

This paper delineates a revolutionary period in postmodern America: the sixties from the vantage point of the eighties as presented in Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland. It brings controversial aspects of U.S. history and culture into view: the blacklist period in the 1950s, the rise of counterculture and the hippie movement, and the politics of the eighties. With their arrival, each new generation pushes aside the old and implements their own ideologies, which gives this space (Vineland and the U.S. in general) utopian and post-utopian characteristics at the same time. It is a crossroads which generation after generation has inhabited, with layers of history that overlap, underlying the ideological battles between woge and humans, Indians and the whites, the Left and the Right, hippies and the Nixon administration, various marginal groups (mostly reminders of the hippy generation) and the Reaganite politics

Revealing the interface structure and bonding mechanism of coupling agent treated WPC

© 2018 by the authors. This paper presents the interfacial optimisation of wood plastic composites (WPC) based on recycled wood flour and polyethylene by employing maleated and silane coupling agents. The effect of the incorporation of the coupling agents on the variation of chemical structure of the composites were investigated by Attenuated total reflectance-Fourier Transform Infrared spectroscopy (ATR-FTIR) and Solid state 13 C Nuclear Magnetic Resonance spectroscopy (NMR) analyses. The results revealed the chemical reactions that occurred between the coupling agents and raw materials, which thus contributed to the enhancement of compatibility and interfacial adhesion between the constituents of WPC. NMR results also indicated that there existed the transformation of crystalline cellulose to an amorphous state during the coupling agent treatments, reflecting the inferior resonance of crystalline carbohydrates. Fluorescence Microscope (FM) and Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) analyses showed the improvements of wood particle dispersion and wettability, compatibility of the constituents, and resin penetration, and impregnation of the composites after the coupling agent treatments. The optimised interface of the composites was attributed to interdiffusion, electrostatic adhesion, chemical reactions, and mechanical interlocking bonding mechanisms

Molar-mass distribution of urea-formaldehyde resins of different degrees of polymerisation by MALDI-TOF mass spectrometry

This paper describes some results obtained in an investigation of urea-formaldehyde (UF) resins of different degrees of polymerisation by matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionisation time-of-flight (MALDI-TOF) mass spectrometry (MS). MALDI-TOF MS proved to be an appropriate technique for analyzing these types of polymers, bearing in mind that the results of the analysis correspond with previous physical and chemical measurements. This technique enables a relatively swift determination of the degree of polymerrisation through the monitoring of key changes in the structure of a polymer. Thus, in the analysis of UF resins, it may be possible to monitor a decrease in the intensity of the monohydroxymethyl urea (MMU) signal, which corresponds to an increase of the mass spectra values in the mass range of higher homologues, above 1000 g mol(-1). A noticeable difference concerns the signal intensities in the higher mass ranges (up to 1400 g mol(-1)), which corresponds to more branched and longer homologues of the polymers. Especially, a significantly more intensive signal of MMU was registered. The average molecular weight (MW) of the examined samples was between 936 and 1324 g mol(-1), with a maximal deviation of 20 %, depending on the ratios of the reactants

Star persona and national identity in the age of the empire: The role of Maja Strozzi-Pecic in Petar Konjovic’s opus

This study explores the collaboration between the soprano Maja Strozzi-Pečić and the composer Petar Konjović. It sheds light on the relations between the star and the musical work, as well as the notions of gender and genre, reinstating the performer to the centre of the historical stage within the epoch and the genre of music not usually associated with stardom. It examines the star as both the product and the producer, and as an embodiment of a national identity, highlighting the star’s agency in the creation of her own persona and the co-authoring of the works that she performed

“Cinematic” Gravity’s Rainbow: Indiscernibility of the Actual and the Virtual

Acknowledging that all media interpenetrate without any one being privileged as original, this paper focuses on the influence and omnipresence of screen technologies, cinematography in particular, asserting its capacities to act as a dominant technological and cultural force, which surveys and controls the economy, affects human consciousness, and implements its own ideologically tainted reality. More specifically, the analysis demonstrates the impact of cinematography within Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, emphasizing intermedial reflexivity from screen to paper, its unfolding and animation, representations and mutations, but also the notion that virtuality dominates actuality (Virilio, The Vision 63), or, in Deleuze’s terms, the two coalesce within the crystal-image, for the real and the imaginary, the actual and the virtual, although distinct, are indiscernible (Deleuze, Cinema 2 68-69). The study is grounded in Paul Virilio’s theoretical framework and his criticism of the colonization of the real by the virtual, and in Gilles Deleuze’s account on cinematic taxonomy and how cinematography partakes in the emergence of a new notion of reality and history. By appropriating, repurposing, and reshaping the techniques, forms, and contents of cinematography, and at the same time being critical of its effects, Pynchon uses paper surface for transition of his ideas, validating the repercussions of intermediation as a cultural force and unveiling literature’s performativity, its ability to shelter/entertain the “cinematic,” which in turn revolutionizes and animates fiction