Improvisation in Vocal Contrapuntal Pedagogy: An Appraisal of Italian Theoretical Treatises of the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries

The extemporaneous application of pre-assimilated compositional paradigms into musical performance retained a central position in the training of Medieval and Renaissance musicians, specifically within the context of Western polyphonic practice. Recent scholarship has shown the significance of memorization in the oral transmission of plainchant and early polyphony. Attention has been particularly directed to aspects of orality and literacy in relation to “composition” (the term here applies to both written and oral), and, at the same time, studies correlated to fifteenth and sixteenth century contrapuntal theory, have mainly focused on the works of single theorists. The information we possess regarding improvised vocal counterpoint rests almost entirely on theoretical treatises, which in spite of their simplistic nature, provide us with a relevant, even though partial, account of the subject. Through a close scrutiny of various unexamined theoretical sources, this investigation attempts to present a thorough historiographical account of the phenomenon. What emerges is the persistence of a long-standing didactic tradition and performance practice of improvised vocal counterpoint well trough the early Baroque era. As it will be shown, Italian treatises of this period, in addition to presenting more or less standardized contrapuntal rules, often provided students (in most cases amateurs) and singers with supplementary practical examples of basic interval progressions, cadential patterns and graphic illustrations, which were conceived as a mnemonic gamut of formulas to be incorporated into contrapuntal practice

Aspetto dei popolamenti vegetali bentonici della laguna di Porto Pozzo (Sardegna)

A floristic and vegetational study of Porto Pozzo lagoon have been done. The analisys of six transects allowed a general description of the main vegetal associations, besides, in 17 stations known area samples have been collected. The results show the perfect condition of preservation of this lagoon and the peculiarity of his flora is witnessed for 19 new-species pointed out for the sardinian flora and for the presence of three zones characterized by aegagropilae forms

Matching Bounds: How Choice of Matching AlgorithmImpacts Treatment Effects Estimates and What to Do about It

Different matches on the same data may produce different treatment effect estimates, even when they achieve similar balance or minimize the same loss function. We discuss reasons and consequences of this problem. We present evidence of this problem by replicating ten papers that use matching. We introduce Matching Bounds: a finite-sample, non-stochastic method that allows analysts to know whether a matched sample that produces different results with the same levels of balance and overall match quality could be obtained from their data. We apply Matching Bounds to a replication of a matching study of the effects of foreign aid on civil conflict and find that results could change based on the matched sample chosen

Augmented Modality Exclusivity Norms for Concrete and Abstract Italian Property Words

How perceptual information is encoded into language and conceptual knowledge is a debated topic in cognitive (neuro)science. We present modality norms for 643 Italian adjectives, which referred to one of the five perceptual modalities or were abstract. Overall, words were rated as mostly connected to the visual modality and least connected to the olfactory and gustatory modality. We found that words associated to visual and auditory experience were more unimodal compared to words associated to other sensory modalities. A principal components analysis highlighted a strong coupling between gustatory and olfactory information in word meaning, and the tendency of words referring to tactile experience to also include information from the visual dimension. Abstract words were found to encode only marginal perceptual information, mostly from visual and auditory experience. The modality norms were augmented with corpus-based (e.g., Zipf Frequency, Orthographic Levenshtein Distance 20) and ratings-based psycholinguistic variables (Age of Acquisition, Familiarity, Contextual Availability). Split-half correlations performed for each experimental variable and comparisons with similar databases confirmed that our norms are highly reliable. This database thus provides a new important tool for investigating the interplay between language, perception and cognition

I rapporti con l’Islam italiano: dalle proposte d’intesa al Patto nazionale

SOMMARIO: 1. Breve premessa - 2. L’ininterrotto dialogo tra il Governo e le comunità islamiche italiane - 3. Il “Patto di condivisione” della Città di Torino e il “Patto nazionale per un Islam italiano” - 4. L’Italia e le misure di contrasto al terrorismo - 5. Conclusione.The relationship with Italian Islam: from the proposals of ‘Intesa’ to the ‘Patto nazionaleABSTRACT: According to statistics, Muslims living in Italy are currently just over 1.6 million. However, despite this significant presence of Muslims on the national territory, the vast world of Islamic associations has not yet managed to sign an Intesa, an agreement that religious minorities can establish to regulate their relations with the Italian state. The reasons why Islam does not have an agreement are mainly two: the absence of an authoritative subject, representative of Italian Islam, able to act as an interlocutor with state institutions and the incompatibility between Islamic cultural values and those of a secular state. Nevertheless, covering all the stages of dialogue between the Italian government and the Islamic associations from the nineties until the conclusion of the Patto nazionale (2017), this work aims to show that the condition of legal vacuum depends on unfounded prejudices towards Islamic culture and on the lack of political will to come to terms with Islam