Above the Horizon, for orchestra

Above the Horizon is a two-movement composition for orchestra of roughly sixteen and a half minutes. The piece explores a variety of musical characteristics that have been important in my recent work, including the textural difference between active and static music. In this piece, I try to find various ways of superimposing these seemingly contrasting ideals. For example, a section of music that is not driven by pulse or harmonic change and is therefore static may be animated by active musical gestures such as tremolandi, trills or repetitions of single pitches. This technique helps to provide a constant sense of energy even within the slower, more reflective sections. Another important characteristic involves using timbre changes to transform single pitches and/or larger harmonic units. The orchestral medium, with its broad spectrum of colors, was a logical choice for this aesthetic consideration. The first movement, Cloud Formations, considers how the registral placement of pitch affects the resulting sound of similar harmonies, mainly through the opposition of open-spaced harmonies and cluster chords. The piece can be divided into three main formal sections, the first of which slowly unfolds the primary harmonic material, an openly spaced five-pitch chord that expands in a wedge-shaped motion. The second section shifts the focus to clusters, concentrating the pitch material into narrower but densely packed registral bands. The third section combines ideas from the previous two and leads to a forceful orchestral tutti before a short coda ends the movement. The second movement, Fireworks, consists of an energetic sound world that is motivated by the initial brass chords. The reiteration of these chords leads to the first of three main formal sections, where an underlying sixteenth note pulse that is irregularly accented provides a background for multiple layers of music. A contrasting second section lacks a regular pulse, is more chromatic and focuses on high and low registral extremes. The final section begins with a single trill-like figure before forceful repetitions of dense harmonies, rushing scalar gestures and repeated yet staggered pitch patterns provide the material for the end of the piece

Architecture, War and Genocide: Military Goals and the Development of SS Concentration Camp Architecture

World War II is a defining war for understanding modern history not only because of its place in 20th-century geopolitics but particularly because of the scale of warfare and new level of brutality. As is well known, central to the Nazi military campaign in the East were the ideological goals of state leaders to expand the land available for 'German' settlement and, concomitantly, to rid that land of those designated undesirable, above all the European Jews. The architectural remnants of the SS concentration camps have become emblematic for the experience of victims in this campaign as well as the extremes of Nazi policy. And yet in spite of their status as some of the most infamous construction in the modern period, relatively few architectural historians take up the concentration camps in their analysis of German architecture. Further, the minority of architectural historians who have analyzed the camps tend to focus on one site rather than the system as a whole and naturally concern themselves with the experience of the victims rather than the perpetrator's interests and view of architecture. Deborah Dwork and Robert Jan van Pelt's important work on Auschwitz is an exception to many of these trends. Still, in terms of the military campaigns going on in the East, even they tend to see Auschwitz as an ideological site that developed over time parallel to the military campaigns rather than as integral to them. In this account, the concentration camps and the waging of war produce simultaneous if related goals. This paper argues against the isolation of the concentration camps from the war by taking a broader view of the construction of SS concentration camps, analyzing their typological development and use of specific architectural and spatial traditions. In particular, it argues that the imperial goals of the war as emphasized in the political economic goals of the state are integral for helping to explain the scale and architectural choices made at Auschwitz and other concentration camps in the SS universe. In so doing, I look not only at the important parts of the camps that were sites of massive oppression but also at those sites built for the SS themselves, analyzing administrative and visual evidence concerning their own goals and their own construction. With this focus, the intersection of racist ideological goals and the military political economy of empire are manifest. Refocusing on the architecture of the concentration camps helps us to explain the implementation of warfare, its radicalization and its role in an imperial drive of unifying diverse ideological and political agendas.Conference co-organized by the Institute of Fine Arts; Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal; and Princeton University's School of Architecture

Built Environment at Auschwitz: Between Imperial Ambition and Genocide

Dr. Paul Jaskot, Art historian, DePaul University.https://digitalcommons.fairfield.edu/bennettcenter-posters/1315/thumbnail.jp

Analysis of selected features of application based on monolithic and microservice architecture

The article describes the performance of applications built in monolithic and microservice architectures. The base of research includes application supporting prescription management developed with the use of Spring Framework technology and implemented in the Docker Swarm test environment. The tested applications were subjected to various loads in the form of sending HTTP requests that simulated user behaviour. The research has proven that an application created based on microservices architecture offers better traffic handling in case of high load. Scaling a microservice application allows for greater gains in performance measured as quantity served client requests per unit of time than scaling a monolithic application under the same conditions scaling

A Criteria-Based Framework for Establishing System of Systems Governance

Orlando, FL: Proceedings of the 7th Annual International IEEE Systems Conference, pp. 491-496.Identified in text as U.S. Government work.AFOSR-MIPR-88-0010ARO-MIPR-137-8