Creative Collaborations: The Songs/Poems of Canadian Artists Leslie Uyeda and Lorna Crozier

Composer Leslie Uyeda and poet Lorna Crozier inspire, create, and collaborate in real time. Uyeda and Crozier have an exceptional creative collaboration as they have collaborated on 9 song cycles in the past 12 years and the subject matter of much of their art can be seen as cultural reflections and critiques. This is evident in the song cycle The First Woman which speaks of the silencing of women’s voices through the tales of Lilith and Eve in the garden of Eden and the rape of Dinah, Jacob\u27s daughter. To successfully collaborate on 9 song cycles is a feat in itself, but to also create art that embraces challenging emotions and topics concerning current gender issues is remarkable. Through a singular case study analysis consisting of in-depth interviews and musical score analysis, this monograph aims to not only provide a performance guide to two Uyeda and Crozier creations, White Cat Blues and The First Woman, but to also uncover what makes their creative collaboration process so unique and special. Within the performance guide, the poetry is examined discovering theme, tone, structure, language devices, and imagery. The music is analyzed focusing on structure, style, basic harmony, and the relationship between the text and music, highlighting specific areas of word painting. The performance guide concludes with an examination of the vocal technical challenges presented to the singer, with possible solutions. Accompanying the performance guide are recordings of four Uyeda and Crozier art song collaborations. To date, the researcher has not identified any contemporary research studies of creative collaboration in solo Canadian vocal work. The information about Uyeda and Crozier in combination with the performance guide to the White Cat Blues and The First Woman serve as a great resource for teachers, singers, and pianists

The political party system and democratic crisis in Bolivia

Using Kenneth Roberts’ (2002) party-society linkages framework, this study examined the reasons for the decline of the political party system in Bolivia after 2000. The political party system that emerged in 1985 was connected to society primarily through clientelist-based linkages. The economic and political model adopted after the transition to democracy severely debilitated the party system’s capacity to forge linkages with society beyond clientelism. Using interviews, survey data, and primary and secondary documents, the study demonstrated that prolonged economic recession and social change revealed the weaknesses of the linkages connecting the political party system with Bolivian society. It concluded that the party system in Bolivia went into decline because it could not adapt to the country’s changing social landscape after 2000. The highly limited nature of clientelist-based linkages in Bolivia suggests that they were ill-suited to withstand economic recession and social crisis