Trombone glissando: a case study in continuity and change in brass instrument performance idioms

The glissando is one of the key idiomatic features of the slide trombone. It appears to have originated in the improvisatory practices of circus and itinerant theater groups in the mid-19th c. There is no evidence of it being notated in art music until late in the 19th c.; even in the early 20th c., glissando markings in scores (the notation varies) needed an explanatory note about how the effect was to be achieved. The article traces the history of trombone glissando and suggests that its introduction into the idiom of the instrument was hampered by ideological controversy about its origins and its implementation by early jazz performers in New Orleans. Valve trombones were better known to these players than the slide instrument, so when they were acquired by those players who exploited the 'tailgate' style, they naturally emphasized the effect that the slide instrument seemed to encourage. The ideological conflict arose as the maturing conservatoire tradition set out orthodoxies based on the most refined stylistic models of virtuosity and taste drawn from art music. The point of friction appears to have been partly racial and class-based, and partly focused on an interpretation of glissando that placed it as a crude corruption of portamento, which was encouraged in the didactic literature as an emblem of refinement

Victorian Bands and their Dissemination in the Colonies

From the late 1840s, amateur brass bands and professional military bands became widespread in Europe and America due to the sudden availability of low-priced valve instruments. Band music also became an important feature of colonial life. Towards the end of the century, the indigenous populations of colonized countries started playing brass instruments, often with the encouragement or teaching of colonizers. The resulting cultural assimilation in Asia, Africa, and the Pacific is discussed

Maintaining alignment in management education : the potential for drift in assessment

The paper explores the issues involved in maintaining operational alignment between curriculum aims, teaching and the assessment of student learning. Whilst various conceptual frameworks can help to shape learning outcomes that reflect a constructivist approach across an aligned scheme of education there are, nonetheless, opportunities for misalignment to occur with the potential to significantly dilute the aims of the curriculum. A particular focus of the paper is the use of verbs to articulate learning outcomes and how these follow through into assessment mechanisms. The paper argues that drift is likely to occur in all forms of education, although empirical evidence is usually difficult to access due to the confidential nature of assessment processes. In order to illustrate the conjectured concerns, a case study drawing on the published syllabi, examinations and marking schemes from the examinations of a professional accounting body is presented. Keywords: assessment; constructive alignment; learning objectives; marking processe

Cornetti e tromboni in the high Renaissance and Baroque

Review of the following recordings: Giovanni Gabrieli: Sacred symphonies (Hyperion cda67957); Giovanni Gabrieli: Sacrae symphoniae (Accent acc24282); Venise sur Garonne (Flora flo3314); Giovanni Battista Fontana, Giovanni Gabrieli: Sonate & canzone (Accent acc24250); L’Arte dei Piffari: Cornetts and sackbuts in early Baroque Italy (Pan Classics pc10332); Trombone grande: Music for bass sackbut around 1600 (Accent acc24263)

Public Military Music and the Promotion of Patriotism in the British Provinces, c. 1780-c. 1850

The role and importance of military musicians changed and intensified in the late eighteenth century through two important processes. The first was the culture of display that took root in both the home-based army and units in the colonies. The second was the result of successive militia acts which effectively ensured that military units with bands would be systematically placed in every corner of the British Isles. It became evident that music as a component of military display served an important diplomatic purpose. Music performed in public spaces was heard by a population deeply sceptical of the army and with an essentially local sense of identity. The experience of the sight and sound of military music raised entirely new perceptions of nation and of the state as a benign power. Two important and related themes emerge here. The first is the historical process that led, almost accidentally, to a realization that music as part of military display had potential to influence populations across the country and in the colonies. The second, more challenging, theme concerns the nature of the evidence for this idea and how it is to be treated. It is an idea that is totally convincing if the experience of hearing and seeing military spectacle by the mass of the people can be shown to have had impact. What is the evidence of listening to music by those people at whom it was targeted, how robust is it and what can be made of it

The Impact of the Safe and Successful Youth Initiative (SSYI) on City-Level Youth Crime Victimization Rates

Background: The physical, emotional, and financial costs resulting from youth violence are well documented. Purpose: This article summarizes the results of a quasi-experimental evaluation study to test a youth violence intervention program in eleven cities in Massachusetts. Setting: In 2011, Massachusetts initiated the Safe and Successful Youth Initiative (SSYI), which provides a comprehensive public health approach for young men believed to be at “proven risk” for being involved with firearms. Intervention: The SSYI program components include: (1) Specific identification of young men, ages 14-24, at highest risk for being involved in firearms violence; (2) Use of street outreach workers to find these young men, assess their needs, and act as brokers for services; (3) The provision of a continuum of comprehensive services including education, employment, and intensive supervision. Eleven cities with the highest count of violent offenses reported to the police in 2010 were selected for SSYI funding in 2011 and began implementing the program. Research Design:  Short-interrupted time series design with a comparison group. The observed and predicted trends in monthly violent victimization rates for the 11 SSYI cities were compared to the next 23 cities (as they ranked in reported violent crime in 2010). Data Collection and Analysis: Using police incident data, researchers examined SSYI's impact on monthly city level violent crime, aggravated assault and homicide rates for persons ages 14-24. Findings: Results indicated that SSYI had a statistically significant and positive impact on reducing the number of victims of violent crimes, aggravated assaults, and homicides per month that were reported to the police.  A city with SSYI has approximately 60 fewer victims of violence each year, ages 14-24, per 100,000 citizens over the post-intervention period. Keywords: quasi-experiment; interrupted time series; crime prevention; violence; Massachusett

Assessment in higher education : the potential for a community of practice to improve inter-marker reliability

The design, delivery and assessment of a complete educational scheme, such as a degree programme or a professional qualification course, is a complex matter. Maintaining alignment between the stated aims of the curriculum and the scoring of student achievement is an overarching concern. The potential for drift across individual aspects of an educational scheme (teaching, learning and assessment), together with emerging criticism in extant literature of the reliability of marking processes, suggests that, in practice, maintaining alignment might be more difficult than had previously been assumed. In this paper, the concept of a Community of Practice (CoP) is employed as an analytical lens through which the notion of a markers’ standardisation meeting that focuses on maintaining alignment between the curriculum, the marking scheme and the scoring of student scripts can be critically examined. Given that the aims and subject content of management learning are both multidimensional and contextual, such meetings have the potential to develop a shared approach to the elaboration and application of the marking scheme. A further role of the CoP is in the calibration of markers to accommodate further variations in student responses as they arise in the actual marking process. In this respect, the CoP has both descriptive and prescriptive potential in terms of aiding the development of markers of professional accounting examinations and also, we suggest, within accounting education more generally

Drought Management Concepts: Lessons of the 1976-1977 U.S. Drought

Three approaches to drought management are developed as generalized mathematical models. Each model is then applied to particular locations in Utah using the hydrologic/economic data from the 1976-77 drought. The modeling approaches include: (1) A multiple regression approach is used to quantify the changes in water use achieved by three common municipal sector rationing policies: (a) restrictions on time of outdoor use, (b) price increases, and (c) mandatory quantity restrictions (2) A model was presented for determing the optimal long term price schedule for rationing a stochastically variable water supply during summer peak demand season among groups of municipal water users which have different demands. (3) The third model analyzed various management policies in terms of their impact on net benefits to the agricultural and municipal sectors. The model is capable of modifying policies monthly, based upon the chaning hydrologic situation. It can vary constraints in a manner that simulates an institutional environment ranging from total freedom of price changes and water exchanges between sectors to those constraints existing during the 76-77 drought. Conclusions include: 1) Mandatory water use regulations are much more effective than price increases in reducing water use (at least in a short term drought). 2) A theoretical analysis of demand and supply functions showed that Salt Lake City\u27s pricing polity (about $0.25/1000 gallons) is very close to optimal. 3) The third model showed that very substantial losses in consumer surplus in Slat Lake County during the drought were caused by variuos institutional restrictions

Investigation of a chemically regenerative redox cathode polymer electrolyte fuel cell using a phosphomolybdovanadate polyoxoanion catholyte

Chemically regenerative redox cathode (CRRC) polymer electrolyte fuel cells (PEFCs), where the direct reduction of oxygen is replaced by an in-direct mechanism occurring outside of the cell, are attractive to study as they offer a solution to the cost and durability problems faced by conventional PEFCs. This study reports the first detailed characterization of a high performance complete CRRC PEFC system, where catholyte is circulated between the cathode side of the cell and an air-liquid oxidation reactor called the “regenerator”. The catholyte is an aqueous solution of phosphomolybdovanadate polyoxoanion and is assessed in terms of its performance within both a small single cell and corresponding regenerator over a range of redox states. Two methods for determining regeneration rate are proposed and explored. Expressing the regeneration rate as a “chemical” current is suggested as a useful means of measuring re-oxidation rate with respect to the cell. The analysis highlights the present limitations to the technology and provides an indication of the maximum power density achievable, which is highly competitive with conventional PEFC systems

The continuous performance test (rCPT) for mice: a novel operant touchscreen test of attentional function.

RATIONALE: Continuous performance tests (CPTs) are widely used to assess attentional processes in a variety of disorders including Alzheimer's disease and schizophrenia. Common human CPTs require discrimination of sequentially presented, visually patterned 'target' and 'non-target' stimuli at a single location. OBJECTIVES: The aims of this study were to evaluate the performance of three popular mouse strains on a novel rodent touchscreen test (rCPT) designed to be analogous to common human CPT variants and to investigate the effects of donepezil, a cholinesterase inhibitor and putative cognitive enhancer. METHODS: C57BL/6J, DBA/2J and CD1 mice (n = 15-16/strain) were trained to baseline performance using four rCPT training stages. Then, probe tests assessed the effects of parameter changes on task performance: stimulus size, duration, contrast, probability, inter-trial interval or inclusion of flanker distractors. rCPT performance was also evaluated following acute administration of donepezil (0-3 mg/kg, i.p.). RESULTS: C57BL/6J and DBA/2J mice showed similar acquisition rates and final baseline performance following rCPT training. On probe tests, rCPT performance of both strains was sensitive to alteration of visual and/or attentional demands (stimulus size, duration, contrast, rate, flanker distraction). Relative to C57BL/6J, DBA/2J mice exhibited (1) decreasing sensitivity (d') across the 45-min session, (2) reduced performance on probes where the appearance of stimuli or adjacent areas were changed (size, contrast, flanking distractors) and (3) larger dose- and stimulus duration-dependent changes in performance following donepezil administration. In contrast, CD1 mice failed to acquire rCPT (stage 3) and pairwise visual discrimination tasks. CONCLUSIONS: rCPT is a potentially useful translational tool for assessing attention in mice and for detecting the effects of nootropic drugs.Funding for this research was provided by Professor Mark Johnson, Imperial College London. CHK received funding from the Korean Health Technology R&D Project, Ministry of Health & Welfare, Republic of Korea (HI11C1183). MHE, SRON, TWR, LMS, TJB and ACM received funding from the Innovative Medicine Initiative Joint Undertaking under grant agreement no 115008 of which resources are composed of EFPIA in-kind contribution and financial contribution from the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013). LMS and TJB were funded by Medical Research Council/Wellcome Trust grant 089703/Z/09/Z.This is the final version of the article. It first appeared from Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00213-015-4081-