Alternative Neo-Riemannian Approaches to Carl Nielsen

On the basis of songs or songlike themes from three periods of Nielsen’s career I try to show how Nielsen’s harmonic progressions become simpler while displaying a more refined complexity. I do this on the basis of the theories of the Danish scholar/composers Jorgen Jersild and Jan Maegaard which are, in various degrees, based on Riemannian analysis. The two Danes thus represent an alternative neo-Riemannian approach to harmonic analysis. This approach was developed from 1970 to 1989, the very same years in which Erno Lendvai, David Lewin, Deborah Stein and Harald Krebs wrote their respective groundbreaking works. Even though Jersild’s and Maegaard’s theories were developed independently of these writers, their content communicates with the content of their theories. And even though a theory of foreground harmonic progressions like Jersild’s is seemingly as opposed as possible to a Schenkerian middleground-based harmonic approach, they do actually, in some regards, have something in common, just as in other regards they supplement each other perfectly. I try, through the analyses of Nielsen’s music plus a few other examples (Schumann, Liszt and Wolf), to show how the theories of these above mentioned many writers and others, may be integrated into the two Danish theories. In discussing analytical theories the text is especially conversant with two recent books on Nielsen, Anne-Marie Reynolds’ The Voice of Carl Nielsen (2010) and Daniel Grimley’s Carl Nielsen and the Idea of Modernism (2011), as the two main analyses refer to analyses in Reynolds and Grimley respectively

Population ageing, public debt and sustainable fiscal policy

Due to rising life expectancy and declining fertility, the world’s population is ageing rapidly. Not only does the number of elderly relative to the number of working-age people increase, so does the proportion of the very old in the general population of the aged. In consequence, government spending on pensions, health care and other services provided for the aged is increasing and has been projected to rise on an even larger scale after the turn of the century. How can the old-age social expenditures be accommodated into a sustainable path for the general government budget?2 In most European countries, public outlays allocated to the elderly are financed on a pay-as-you-go (PAYG) basis, i.e. benefits paid to retired people are directly financed by contemporaneous taxes levied on workers. In periods with dramatic swings in the age structure, the tax rate is likely to swing as well. For example, when the population is ageing, the ratio of the number of persons of drawing age to that of those of contributing age increases, and PAYG financing implies an increase in the transfers from young to old. Does that cause generational conflicts, and will the PAYG scheme eventually be undermined?

Power variation & stochastic volatility: a review and some new results

In this paper we review some recent work on limit results on realised power variation, that is sums of powers of absolute increments of various semimartingales. A special case of this analysis is realised variance and its probability limit, quadratic variation. Such quantities often appear in financial econometrics in the analysis of volatility. The paper also provides some new results and discusses open issues.Bipower; Mixed Gaussian limit; Power variation; Quadratic variation; Realised variance; Realised volatility; Stochastic volatility.

Reviews

Reviews:THORLEIF SjØVOLD ( ed.): Jntroduksjonen av jordbruk i Norden. Oslo Marek Zvelebil: From Forager to Farmer in the Boreal Zone. BAR International Ser. 115. Oxford 1981 (by Peter Rowley-Conwy) Ester Boserup: Population and Technological Change. Chicago 1981 (by Svend Nielsen

Limit theorems for bipower variation in financial econometrics

In this paper we provide an asymptotic analysis of generalised bipower measures of the variation of price processes in financial economics. These measures encompass the usual quadratic variation, power variation and bipower variations which have been highlighted in recent years in financial econometrics. The analysis is carried out under some rather general Brownian semimartingale assumptions, which allow for standard leverage effects