Michael Christoforidis, Manuel de Falla and Visions of Spanish Music London/ New York, Routledge, 2018.

No abstract available

Reconstructing zarzuela performance practices ca. 1900: wax cylinder and gramophone disc recordings of Gigantes y cabezudos

This article makes an initial contribution to the largely unexplored field of historical performance practice in zarzuela by examining the earliest surviving recordings of Manuel Fernández Caballero’s Gigantes y cabezudos (1898). One of the greatest successes of the género chico subgenre of zarzuela during the early years of commercial phonography in Spain, it is also the zarzuela of which the most recordings made before 1905 have survived: nineteen, made on wax cylinders by local gabinetes fonográficos and on disc by Gramophone. Both the thriving género chico culture and its singing practices, as well as the technological, commercial, and cultural aspects of the early recording industry in Spain, are discussed to consider how recordings related to live performance in this particular context, what the value is of these recordings as documents of performance practice, and what questions they open up for further study of performance practice in zarzuela

Outreach, entertainment, innovation: Exiled Spanish composers and European radio

This essay takes as its starting point the involvement of exiled Spanish composers Salvador Bacarisse and Roberto Gerhard with the public radio broadcasters of the countries to which they were exiled. It examines the music (both incidental and autonomous) they composed and arranged, as well as features on music they wrote, presented or contributed to. In doing so, it articulates a critique of the dominant historiographical narratives that understand Spanish twentieth-century music as a continuous, monolithic advance toward a single ideal of modernity. Such narratives were first introduced by Federico Sopeña and Tomás Marco under Francoism, yet they continue to be influential in the present day. I examine how the music for radio of Bacarisse and Gerhard forces us to consider key components of these narratives, such as the understanding of exile as either assimilation or resistance to the host culture, the role of artistic collaboration in the careers of many exiles, and the dichotomy of commercialism and absolute music

Alliteration and consonance in Aquitanian versus: putting the body back into singing

The use of alliteration and consonance (the repetition of consonant sounds in close proximity) in Aquitanian monophonic repertoires has been noticed in existing scholarship; scholars including Andreas Haug, Jeremy Llewellyn, and Mary Channen Caldwell ascribe various structural and mnemonic functions to it. In this article, I re-examine the presence of alliteration and consonance in Aquitanian versus and trope repertoires by focusing on the kinds of bodily engagement that they demand from singers and on how such engagements might have contributed to matters of musical structure, narrativity and relationship between text and music – all areas in which Aquitanian repertoires innovated greatly. Indeed, the repetitions of consonant sounds in close proximity would have likely demanded singers to engage their speech organs (lips, tongues, jaws, palate and abdominal support) in ways rather different from what we tend to find in the everyday repertoire that monks would have sung in Aquitanian monasteries. My discussion draws upon a range of medieval understandings of the body: from the widespread absence of bodily and organic matters in medieval singing treatises, to communal understandings of the body which would have likely resonated with monastic communities. The aim is not necessarily to reconstruct the performance practice of this repertoire, but rather to prompt a re-examination of it through its sonic and bodily aspects, gaining new understandings on the relationship between music in this repertoire and on their contextualization in a world where ideas about music, music-making and the body were changing

Travelling phonographs in fin de siècle Spain: recording technologies and national regeneration in Ruperto Chapí’s El fonógrafo ambulante

Through analysis of the zarzuela El fonógrafo ambulante (1899; music by Ruperto Chapí, libretto by Juan González), this article discusses how the arrival of recording technologies in Spain (1877–1900) was influenced by and in turn influenced discourses concerning modernity, regional difference and interregional mobility. With recent critical accounts of the early history of recording technologies having emerged mostly from the study of technologically advanced countries, this article is also a reminder of the role of cultural context: the study of the arrival of the phonograph in Spain indeed reveals how early users of recording technologies related their experiences to broader discourses of modernity and identity that had often been taken for granted elsewhere. Intended to entertain large contingents of people across a variety of social classes, El fonógrafo ambulante portrayed an aspect of late nineteenth-century life in Spain that its audiences would have been familiar with, that is, the travelling phonographs paraded through Spanish cities, towns and villages during the 1890s. The work also embodies views on sound-recording technologies which would have resonated with its audience – in accordance with zarzuela’s defense of an integrative, progressively industrialized, urban, somewhat relaxed in terms of social mores, yet still ideologically conservative Spain. In fact, whereas the arrival of a phonograph in an Andalusian village at the beginning of the zarzuela is initially presented as a potential danger to social practices, reservations are quickly overcome when it becomes clear that mobile recording technologies can make the Spanish pueblo thrive by encouraging mutual understanding between Spanish regions and ensuring the preservation of gender roles. However, El fonógrafo ambulante shies away from defending transformative uses of phonography that other, more regeneracionista sectors of the population anticipated; in doing so, it ultimately presents a sceptical view of modernity as the path to national regeneration

Songs of the Victorians

Songs of the Victorians, Joanna Swafford (ed.), 2013–2020. http://www.songsofthevictorians.com/index.html

Amateur recording on the phonograph in fin-de-siècle Barcelona: practices, repertoires and performers in the Regordosa-Turull wax cylinder collection

The Regordosa-Turull wax cylinder collection, held at the Biblioteca de Catalunya, Barcelona, is unique among early recording collections. It contains 358 cylinders recorded by the textile industrialist Ruperto Regordosa, mostly at his Barcelona home, featuring prominent Spanish and non-Spanish singers of opera and zarzuela, as well as the composer Isaac Albéniz. This article aims to establish the significance of the collection for the study both of the amateur recording culture that existed alongside commercial phonograph recordings and of performance practices in opera and zarzuela. By examining the broader characteristics of the collection and textual sources from the period, and by closely analysing some of the cylinders, this article explores how Regordosa adopted (and in some cases adapted) certain generic conventions employed in commercial recordings of the time, and what the implications of this are when considering these early recordings as documents of performance practice

Canagliflozin and renal outcomes in type 2 diabetes and nephropathy

BACKGROUND Type 2 diabetes mellitus is the leading cause of kidney failure worldwide, but few effective long-term treatments are available. In cardiovascular trials of inhibitors of sodium–glucose cotransporter 2 (SGLT2), exploratory results have suggested that such drugs may improve renal outcomes in patients with type 2 diabetes. METHODS In this double-blind, randomized trial, we assigned patients with type 2 diabetes and albuminuric chronic kidney disease to receive canagliflozin, an oral SGLT2 inhibitor, at a dose of 100 mg daily or placebo. All the patients had an estimated glomerular filtration rate (GFR) of 30 to <90 ml per minute per 1.73 m2 of body-surface area and albuminuria (ratio of albumin [mg] to creatinine [g], >300 to 5000) and were treated with renin–angiotensin system blockade. The primary outcome was a composite of end-stage kidney disease (dialysis, transplantation, or a sustained estimated GFR of <15 ml per minute per 1.73 m2), a doubling of the serum creatinine level, or death from renal or cardiovascular causes. Prespecified secondary outcomes were tested hierarchically. RESULTS The trial was stopped early after a planned interim analysis on the recommendation of the data and safety monitoring committee. At that time, 4401 patients had undergone randomization, with a median follow-up of 2.62 years. The relative risk of the primary outcome was 30% lower in the canagliflozin group than in the placebo group, with event rates of 43.2 and 61.2 per 1000 patient-years, respectively (hazard ratio, 0.70; 95% confidence interval [CI], 0.59 to 0.82; P=0.00001). The relative risk of the renal-specific composite of end-stage kidney disease, a doubling of the creatinine level, or death from renal causes was lower by 34% (hazard ratio, 0.66; 95% CI, 0.53 to 0.81; P<0.001), and the relative risk of end-stage kidney disease was lower by 32% (hazard ratio, 0.68; 95% CI, 0.54 to 0.86; P=0.002). The canagliflozin group also had a lower risk of cardiovascular death, myocardial infarction, or stroke (hazard ratio, 0.80; 95% CI, 0.67 to 0.95; P=0.01) and hospitalization for heart failure (hazard ratio, 0.61; 95% CI, 0.47 to 0.80; P<0.001). There were no significant differences in rates of amputation or fracture. CONCLUSIONS In patients with type 2 diabetes and kidney disease, the risk of kidney failure and cardiovascular events was lower in the canagliflozin group than in the placebo group at a median follow-up of 2.62 years

AI is a viable alternative to high throughput screening: a 318-target study

: High throughput screening (HTS) is routinely used to identify bioactive small molecules. This requires physical compounds, which limits coverage of accessible chemical space. Computational approaches combined with vast on-demand chemical libraries can access far greater chemical space, provided that the predictive accuracy is sufficient to identify useful molecules. Through the largest and most diverse virtual HTS campaign reported to date, comprising 318 individual projects, we demonstrate that our AtomNet® convolutional neural network successfully finds novel hits across every major therapeutic area and protein class. We address historical limitations of computational screening by demonstrating success for target proteins without known binders, high-quality X-ray crystal structures, or manual cherry-picking of compounds. We show that the molecules selected by the AtomNet® model are novel drug-like scaffolds rather than minor modifications to known bioactive compounds. Our empirical results suggest that computational methods can substantially replace HTS as the first step of small-molecule drug discovery

I. Contreras Zubillaga, « Tant que les révolutions ressemblent à cela ». L’avant- garde musicale espagnole sous Franco, 2020

No abstract available