6,896 research outputs found
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“When a woman speaks the truth about her body”: Ethel Smyth, Virginia Woolf, and the challenges of lesbian auto/biography
As professionals who encountered first-hand the invidious barriers within patriarchal society that hindered career women, Ethel Smyth and Virginia Woolf both used their published writings to pursue lifelong crusades against the under-representation of females in their respective disciplines. This article compares the different strategies by which the two artists strove to tell the truth about their experiences as women, and considers the corresponding implications for Smyth’s musical output. While the egotistical Smyth candidly recounted stories relating to herself, Woolf excised overt authorial presence from her texts, instead invoking fictitious, protean narrators to reflect the collective unconsciousness of Womanhood. Woolf’s encouragement and criticism of Smyth’s literary endeavours are examined in the context of her biographical theories and feminist critiques, and of the lesbian proclivities of both women. Their published writings and personal documents suggest that Smyth actively appealed to the very autobiographical strategies that Woolf persistently counselled her to subvert, in order to compete with the (heterosexual) patriarchy on equal terms. She apparently held this option to be the only available one through which to insinuate herself within the canonical traditions specific to music, as distinct from those of literature
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Report on Work from October 2011 to August 2012 as University Learning Development Associate for Assessment and Feedback
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Biography and the New Musicology
Traditional musicology has long resisted biographical interpretations in favor of formalistic approaches. While the so-called “New Musicology” has more recently redressed this imbalance by encouraging the contextualization of music, including critical studies that take account of issues of biography in relation to musical works, the ideologies of musical biography themselves have remained largely unexplored. In consequence, the modern discipline may have unwittingly absorbed wholesale many of the tendencies that accumulated within the genre in the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The many fascinating scholarly studies of musical biography to have recently appeared offer little assistance in this respect, for they primarily scrutinize the assumptions that historically underpinned the genre without giving due consideration to their lingering existence within current musicology. This essay surveys of some of the most fascinating biographical readings that have appeared in recent years in order to demonstrate that debates such as those over Schubert’s sexuality and Shostakovich’s relationship with the Soviet regime, as well as various other hermeneutical studies conducted in relation to aspects of composers’ lives, have a wider grounding within musical biography’s historical preoccupations than has hitherto been recognized. I show the continuing presence in modern musicology of the phenomenon by which attempts to redress a past biographical misconception merely re-inscribe a new one in place of the old, and argue that the current climate of epistemic inclusivity is such that consideration of the extent to which a given study may be a reflection of its author is now more important than ever. By way of conclusion, I advocate the future cultivation of a more self-reflexive approach in biographical scholarship within musicology, one that knowingly takes into account the relationship between different composer biographies rather than merely focusing on that of a single figure in isolation
Development of a flight-qualified whole-body dosimeter system Final report
Whole-body dosimeter system for monitoring radiation exposure to crew during space mission
Multifrequency Aperture-Synthesizing Microwave Radiometer System (MFASMR). Volume 2: Appendix
A number of topics supporting the systems analysis of a multifrequency aperture-synthesizing microwave radiometer system are discussed. Fellgett's (multiple) advantage, interferometer mapping behavior, mapping geometry, image processing programs, and sampling errors are among the topics discussed. A FORTRAN program code is given
Multifrequency Aperture-Synthesizing Microwave Radiometer System (MFASMR). Volume 1
Background material and a systems analysis of a multifrequency aperture - synthesizing microwave radiometer system is presented. It was found that the system does not exhibit high performance because much of the available thermal power is not used in the construction of the image and because the image that can be formed has a resolution of only ten lines. An analysis of image reconstruction is given. The system is compared with conventional aperture synthesis systems
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Mythological Motifs in the Biographical Accounts of Haydn’s Later Life
While Mozart biography has been widely theorized, that of his greatest contemporary has received much less critical attention, even though their trajectories are completely different: Haydn’s long, stable, and relatively uneventful life contrasts strikingly with Mozart’s exceptional rate of development from prodigious childhood to premature death. Drawing on primary literature including the reminiscences of Griesinger (1809), Dies (1810), and Carpani (1812) and the landmark biography by Pohl and Botstiber (1875-82, 1927), as well as scholarship by Vernon Gotwals, H. C. Robbins Landon, and Matthew Head, this chapter investigates three of the most fascinating stories that have emerged in life-writing on Haydn’s later life: his visit of 1795 to the monument erected in his honour by Count Harrach at Rohrau; the celebrated performance of The Creation in March 1808; and the episode of Haydn’s death the following year. The themes that flourished in their retellings over the decades – including the rising social status of the artist, Haydn’s eleventh-hour rapprochement with Beethoven, and notions of The Creation as harbinger of the composer’s death (for which obvious analogies may be drawn with Mozart’s Requiem) – reveal much about the means by which Haydn’s biographers sought to state the case for their subject’s inclusion within musical canon. Consideration of various mythological motifs (to borrow Ernst Kris and Otto Kurz’s term) that emerged in life-writing on Haydn yields a fuller understanding of the origins, at the advent of mature musical biography, of certain important tropes subsequently elaborated and perpetuated in the course of the nineteenth century
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