Lutheranism, Anti-Judaism, And Bach\u27s St. John Passion: With An Annotated Literal Translation Of The Libretto

Bach\u27s St. John Passion is surely one of the monuments of Western music, yet performances have become inevitably controversial. In large part, this is the result of the combination of powerful, highly emotional music coupled with a text that includes passages from a gospel marked by vehement anti-Judaic sentiments. What did this masterpiece mean in Bach\u27s day, and what does it mean today? Although the bibliographies on Bach and on Judaism have grown enormously since World War II, there has been very little work on the relationships between these two areas. This is hardly surprising writers focusing on issues of anti-Semitism often lack musical training and are, in any event, interested in more pressing social and political issues. Bach scholars, on the other hand, have mostly concentrated on narrowly defined musical topics. And strangely, almost no scholarly attention has been given to the relationships between Lutheranism and Judaism as they affect the St. John Passion. Through a reappraisal of Bach\u27s work and its contexts, Michael Marissen confronts Bach and Judaism directly, providing interpretive commentary that could serve as a basis for more informed and sensitive discussions of this troubling work. Consisting of a long interpretive essay, followed by an annotated literal translation of the libretto, a guide to recorded examples, and a detailed bibliography, this concise text provides the reader with the tools to assess the work on its own terms and in the appropriate contexts. The discussion centers first on the principal messages of the St. John Passion: Jesus\u27 identity, his work, and how this affects the lives of his followers. Marissen goes on to suggest that fostering hostility toward Jews is not the subject or purpose of Bach\u27s setting. For those who would reduce Bach\u27s powerful work to its artistry, and for those listeners who find Bach\u27s music deeply meaningful but may not have considered its attendant religious and cultural issues, as well as for those who assume the work essentially teaches con

CompareMS2 2.0: An Improved Software for Comparing Tandem Mass Spectrometry Datasets

It has long been known that biological species can be identified from mass spectrometry data alone. Ten years ago, we described a method and software tool, compareMS2, for calculating a distance between sets of tandem mass spectra, as routinely collected in proteomics. This method has seen use in species identification and mixture characterization in food and feed products, as well as other applications. Here, we present the first major update of this software, including a new metric, a graphical user interface and additional functionality. The data have been deposited to ProteomeXchange with dataset identifier PXD034932.publishedVersio

Translation initiation and its deregulation during tumorigenesis

Regulation of protein synthesis at the level of translation initiation is fundamentally important for the control of cell proliferation under normal physiological conditions. Conversely, misregulation of protein synthesis is emerging as a major contributory factor in cancer development. Most bulk protein synthesis is initiated via recognition of the mRNA 5′ cap and subsequent recognition of the initiator AUG codon by a directional scanning mechanism. However, several key regulators of tumour development are translated by a cap-independent pathway. Here we review eukaryotic translation initiation, its regulation and the ways in which this regulation can break down during tumorigenesis