Sicong Ma\u27s Amei Suite & Gaoshan Suite : historical background and performer\u27s guide

Before the Spanish, the Dutch, the Japanese, and the Chinese Mainlanders occupied Taiwan, Austronesians are believed to have been the island’s first immigrants. They are acknowledged as the Aboriginal Taiwanese. Since these people do not have a written language, music, especially singing, became an important means of communication and education for the Aborigines, whose culture is today considered one of the most historically valuable cultures in Taiwan. Sicong Ma (1912-1987) is a major composer who also played an important political role in China. After escaping from China during the Culture Revolution in 1967, Ma was protected by the United States government and settled in the Unites States until he died, He traveled to Taiwan several times as an invited guest of the government, where he gave recitals and conducted symphony orchestras on the island. During his trips to Taiwan, Ma had a chance to attend performances of aboriginal music; this document will explore the influence of this tribal music on his Amei Suite (1973) and Gaoshan Suite (1973), composed after his return to the US. This document will comprise four chapters. The first chapter will explore Sicong Ma’s biographical information and his compositional style, and will also emphasize the connection between Ma and Taiwan. The second chapter will be an introduction to the music of the Taiwanese Aborigines. It will review the musical style of the different tribes, and the use of their instruments, such as double nose flutes, jaw harps, and mouthbows. Chapter three will provide an historical perspective on both of the Ma works under consideration. In cases where it is not possible to consult the original score, the author will concentrate on the musical characters in Ma’s version. The fourth chapter will comprise a performer’s guide. The author will analyze the two suites and give suggestions for interpretation. The goal of this document is to promote the culture of the author’s home country. Moreover, the author hopes that this document will inspire more musicians to analyze and perform works that draw on the folkloric and indigenous idioms of their own countries

Modeling and Analysis of Scholar Mobility on Scientific Landscape

Scientific literature till date can be thought of as a partially revealed landscape, where scholars continue to unveil hidden knowledge by exploring novel research topics. How do scholars explore the scientific landscape , i.e., choose research topics to work on? We propose an agent-based model of topic mobility behavior where scholars migrate across research topics on the space of science following different strategies, seeking different utilities. We use this model to study whether strategies widely used in current scientific community can provide a balance between individual scientific success and the efficiency and diversity of the whole academic society. Through extensive simulations, we provide insights into the roles of different strategies, such as choosing topics according to research potential or the popularity. Our model provides a conceptual framework and a computational approach to analyze scholars' behavior and its impact on scientific production. We also discuss how such an agent-based modeling approach can be integrated with big real-world scholarly data.Comment: To appear in BigScholar, WWW 201

Optical transitions between Landau levels: AA-stacked bilayer graphene

The low-frequency optical excitations of AA-stacked bilayer graphene are investigated by the tight-binding model. Two groups of asymmetric LLs lead to two kinds of absorption peaks resulting from only intragroup excitations. Each absorption peak obeys a single selection rule similar to that of monolayer graphene. The excitation channel of each peak is changed as the field strength approaches a critical strength. This alteration of the excitation channel is strongly related to the setting of the Fermi level. The peculiar optical properties can be attributed to the characteristics of the LL wave functions of the two LL groups. A detailed comparison of optical properties between AA-stacked and AB-stacked bilayer graphenes is also offered. The compared results demonstrate that the optical properties are strongly dominated by the stacking symmetry. Furthermore, the presented results may be used to discriminate AABG from MG, which can be hardly done by STM