Formal jests:The sonata-form scherzo in Mendelssohn’s mature chamber music

One of the most striking aspects of Mendelssohn's scherzi is his unusual propensity for sonata form in this movement type. Yet in referencing sonata construction, the composer frequently appears to be playing against its norms, taking delight in confounding expectations in the movement's formal twists and turns, as if this ambiguous and ever-shifting relation were itself a crucial part of the aesthetic quality of the music. The present article examines the manipulations of form present in the sonata-orientated scherzi of Mendelssohn's mature chamber works from the period 1837–45: those of the String Quartets Op. 44 Nos 2 and 3 and the Piano Trios Op. 49 and Op. 66. In doing so, it makes several significant contributions to current debates about sonata form. First, while continuing the incursion of Formenlehre into the nineteenth century, it brings discussion of sonata form round to address a movement type – the scherzo – not normally considered in recent discussions. Second, the interaction between different formal types posited by these movements has numerous similarities with the dialogic approach foregrounded by James Hepokoski and Warren Darcy's sonata theory. The playful ambiguities suggested by Mendelssohn's scherzi seem particularly suited to a theory in which formal meaning is understood to arise from the productive tension between expectation and realisation, abstract generic norm and particular instantiation. Still, much of Mendelssohn's subtle manipulation of form occurs on the smaller-scale level of syntax, and one of this study's final implications concerns the interrelation between top-down, intentional models and bottom-up, generative approaches to form

A Revised Textual Tree Trace Notation for Prolog

This paper describes a ''textual tree trace'' (TTT) notation for representing the execution of Prolog programs. Compact, textual and non-linear, it provides detailed information about variable binding and execution history, and distinguishes several modes of goal failure. The revised form given here, yet to be empirically tested, is partly informed by Paul Mulholland's empirical comparisons of Prolog trace notations, in which an earlier version of the TTT notation was amongst those studied and criticised. The work presented here is an updated version of a previous workshop paper (Taylor, du Boulay, & Patel, 1994)

Astrometry with the Hubble Space Telescope: Trigonometric Parallaxes of Selected Hyads

We present absolute parallaxes and proper motions for seven members of the Hyades open cluster, pre-selected to lie in the core of the cluster. Our data come from archival astrometric data from FGS 3, and newer data for 3 Hyads from FGS 1R, both white-light interferometers on the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). We obtain member parallaxes from six individual Fine Guidance Sensor (FGS) fields and use the field containing van Altena 622 and van Altena 627 (= HIP 21138) as an example. Proper motions, spectral classifications and VJHK photometry of the stars comprising the astrometric refer- ence frames provide spectrophotometric estimates of reference star absolute parallaxes. Introducing these into our model as observations with error, we determine absolute parallaxes for each Hyad. The parallax of vA 627 is significantly improved by including a perturbation orbit for this previously known spectroscopic binary, now an astrometric binary. Compared to our original (1997) determina- tions, a combination of new data, updated calibration, and improved analysis lowered the individual parallax errors by an average factor of 4.5. Comparing parallaxes of the four stars contained in the Hipparcos catalog, we obtain an average factor of 11 times improvement with the HST . With these new results, we also have better agreement with Hipparcos for the four stars in common. These new parallaxes provide an average distance for these seven members, = 47.5 pc, for the core a \pm 1 - {\sigma} dispersion depth of 3.6 pc, and a minimum depth from individual components of 16.0 \pm 0.9 pc. Absolute magnitudes for each member are compared to established main sequences, with excellent agreement. We obtain a weighted average distance modulus for the core of the Hyades of m-M=3.376 \pm 0.01, a value close to the previous Hipparcos values, m-M=3.33\pm 0.02.Comment: 21 pages, 7 figures, Astronomical Journal, accepted 2011-3-

Mapping Rhode Island Cemeteries in Flood Risk Zones

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College