Jamaica: Macroeconomic Policy, Debt and the IMF

This paper looks at Jamaica’s recent history of indebtedness, its experience during the global economic downturn, and examines its current agreement with the International Monetary Fund (IMF). It finds that Jamaica’s economic and social progress has suffered considerably from the burden of an unsustainable debt; and that even after the debt restructuring of 2010, this burden remains unsustainable and very damaging. Pro-cyclical macroeconomic policies, implemented under the auspices of the IMF, have also damaged Jamaica’s recent and current economic prospects.jamaica, imf, debt, JDX,

“Unstuck in time”: Harry Partch's Bilocated Life

In a letter dated to 1960, Harry Partch describes living two lives simultaneously—one in modern America and another in ancient Greece. Furthermore, throughout his life, Partch exhibited striking dualities in both his music and personal life. Partch’s affinity for Greek themes and modalities in his music and musical theory is well known, but less known is his feeling of bilocation between Greek and modern life. Using writings by Vonnegut, Woolf, and Stephen Hawking, I examine methods of constructing history that support Partch’s temporal irregularity and, in so doing, foster new ways of understanding Partch and his music. With a particular focus on corporeality within his late work Revelation in the Courthouse Park, I explore how Partch leaned on his sense of bilocation to cope with his decidedly outsider status, how that in turn helped him deal with reality, and how biographers might tackle this most perplexing issue

PERFORMING THE PATRON: BETTY FREEMAN AND THE AVANT-GARDE

Little can be said about music during the last century without encountering the men and women who supported it financially. Pierre Bourdieu’s impression that the services rendered freely for the good of society reinforce a symbolic debt between giver and recipient complicates motivations behind patronage. Indeed, applying Bourdieu’s theory to altruism in general – here, patronage in particular – highlights what could be thought of as a performance of futility: both giver and receiver understand the tenacious terms yet agree nonetheless to act out the process of reaching equilibrium. In the case of iconic music patron Betty Freeman (1921– 2009), her support of the avant-garde seems, at times, to call into question on what side of this ‘performed futility’ she existed. This article considers ways in which Freeman’s work as patron of the musical avant-garde allowed her to perform her identity as a woman and mother among a community on the fringe

Calling out the nameless: CocoRosie's Posthuman sound world

“To engage with CocoRosie requires absolute suspension of disbe- lief,” writes The Guardian. This has as much to do with their music as their appearance, for sisterly duo CocoRosie have embraced what they call a “posthuman kind of style” rooted in the dissolution of gender. In an effort to imagine a world beyond human constructions of gender, CocoRosie creates a sound world that reflects this aesthetic of a genderless futurity. Following Donna Haraway’s notion of the posthuman occupying a “post-gender world” and Drew Daniel’s contention that “all sound is queer,” supposing sound can sound gendered or de-gendered centers the discussion of posthumanity around the production and reception of sound. This discussion of CocoRosie, then, offers music scholars a particularly apt discursive model for examining what a post-gender (and thus posthuman) sound world sounds like. CocoRosie’s strange music, I contend, carries a transformative impulse and in turn sounds the undoing of gender itself

The Music Room: Betty Freeman's Musical Soirées

For over ten years, Los Angeles arts patron Betty Freeman (1921–2009) welcomed composers, performers, scholars, patrons, and invited guests into her home for a series of monthly musicales that were known as ‘Salotto’. In this article, I analyse Freeman’s musicales within a sociological framework of gender and what Randall Collins calls ‘interaction rituals’. I contextualize these events, which took place in a space in her Beverly Hills home known as the Music Room, within a broader history of salon culture in Los Angeles in the twentieth century – a history that shaped the city’s relationship with the artistic avant-garde and made Los Angeles an important amplifier for many of the most important voices in contemporary Western art music of the last sixty years

Analysis of a Medical Center\u27s Cardiac Risk Screening Protocol Using Propensity Score Matching

Researchers at the University of Maryland Medical Center in Baltimore have developed a cardiac risk stratification protocol in the hopes of reducing the time-from arrival-to-first-operation for geriatric orthopedic patients. They collected observational data for two years prior to and following the October 2014 implementation of the new screening protocol. Therefore, advanced analytical techniques are required to isolate the treatment effect of the new screening protocol. Propensity score matching (PSM) is used to handle the observational data in order to reduce the bias attributable to the confounding covariates. In addition to PSM, various regression techniques are used to help the researchers determine if their treatment has been successful in reducing the number of cardiac complications experienced by the elderly patients during and post-surgery. Recommendations are then made to the hospital’s researchers