Music Hall: Regulations and Behaviour in a British Cultural Institution

The music hall in late nineteenth-century Britain offers an example of a cultural institution in which legal measures, in-house regulations, and unscripted codes of behaviour all come into play. At times, the performers or audience were under coercion to act in a certain way, but at other times constraints on behaviour were more indirect, because the music hall created common understanding of what was acceptable or respectable. There is, however, a further complication to consider: sometimes insider notions of what is normative or appropriate come into conflict with outsider concerns about music-hall behaviour. These various pressures are examined in the context of rowdiness, drunkenness, obscenity, and prostitution, and conflicts that result when internal institutional notions of what is normative or appropriate come into conflict with external social anxieties

Cosmopolitan musicology

This chapter briefly retraces the path that led to the arguments in the development of social justice and a democratic culture. It sets out with a commitment to multiculturalism and cultural relativism, and so an early research in Orientalism, in the sense in which Said and postcolonial theorists used that term. Cosmopolitanism has returned to the agenda in the context of debates about globalization. Beck and Edgar Grande argue not for the 'world citizenship' model of cosmopolitanism; instead, they call for the goodwill felt towards one's own country to be extended to other countries. The global and the local are not the oppositional entities they once were, and a reworked concept of cosmopolitanism could aid in their analysis. Cosmopolitanism has a relationship to diasporic experience: a Diaspora can make great efforts to retain cultural traditions, but can also assimilate other cultural knowledge and practices. The chapter outlines a future direction for musicology

German operetta in the West End and on Broadway

Anyone studying the reception of German operettas in Britain and America is bound to recognise that the productions in the West End and on Broadway of Franz Lehár’s The Merry Widow mark a new phase. Before The Merry Widow, the last German operetta to hold the stage successfully in both London and New York had been Carl Zeller’s Der Vogelhändler. It became The Tyrolean at the Casino Theatre, New York, in October 1891, and The Bird-seller at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, London, four years later. Wiener Blut, an operetta of 1899 based on arrangements of the music of Johann Strauss Jr, was produced on Broadway as Vienna Life in early 1901, but had no outing in London. The stage works of Paul Lincke, credited as the founder of Berlin operetta, took time to travel. His ensemble song ‘Glühwürmchen’ from Lysistrata was familiar as an orchestral piece in London, but his operetta Frau Luna, popular in Germany, was not produced in London until 1911, and not produced at all in New York. The gaze of theatre managers at the fin de siècle was fixed firmly on Viennese productions. In December 1905, Victor Léon and Leo Stein’s adaptation of Henri Meilhac’s L’Attaché d’Ambassade as Die lustige Witwe, set to music by Franz Lehár, opened with great success at the Theater an der Wien; in May the next year it was at the Berliner Theater, and a year later it was performed as The Merry Widow at Daly’s Theatre, London, and the New Amsterdam Theatre, New York. The English version, by Basil Hood and Adrian Ross, was used for both. The London production opened on 8 June 1907 and ran for a remarkable 778 performances. The New York production opened on 21 October that year and notched up 416 performances. The massive success of The Merry Widow opened up a flourishing market for Viennese operetta in these cities. This was confirmed by the huge success of Oscar Straus’s The Chocolate Soldier in New York in 1909 and London the following year

Novel Bayesian Networks for Genomic Prediction of Developmental Traits in Biomass Sorghum.

The ability to connect genetic information between traits over time allow Bayesian networks to offer a powerful probabilistic framework to construct genomic prediction models. In this study, we phenotyped a diversity panel of 869 biomass sorghum (Sorghum bicolor (L.) Moench) lines, which had been genotyped with 100,435 SNP markers, for plant height (PH) with biweekly measurements from 30 to 120 days after planting (DAP) and for end-of-season dry biomass yield (DBY) in four environments. We evaluated five genomic prediction models: Bayesian network (BN), Pleiotropic Bayesian network (PBN), Dynamic Bayesian network (DBN), multi-trait GBLUP (MTr-GBLUP), and multi-time GBLUP (MTi-GBLUP) models. In fivefold cross-validation, prediction accuracies ranged from 0.46 (PBN) to 0.49 (MTr-GBLUP) for DBY and from 0.47 (DBN, DAP120) to 0.75 (MTi-GBLUP, DAP60) for PH. Forward-chaining cross-validation further improved prediction accuracies of the DBN, MTi-GBLUP and MTr-GBLUP models for PH (training slice: 30-45 DAP) by 36.4-52.4% relative to the BN and PBN models. Coincidence indices (target: biomass, secondary: PH) and a coincidence index based on lines (PH time series) showed that the ranking of lines by PH changed minimally after 45 DAP. These results suggest a two-level indirect selection method for PH at harvest (first-level target trait) and DBY (second-level target trait) could be conducted earlier in the season based on ranking of lines by PH at 45 DAP (secondary trait). With the advance of high-throughput phenotyping technologies, our proposed two-level indirect selection framework could be valuable for enhancing genetic gain per unit of time when selecting on developmental traits

Gradients of glucose metabolism regulate morphogen signalling required for specifying tonotopic organisation in the chicken cochlea

In vertebrates with elongated auditory organs, mechanosensory hair cells (HCs) are organised such that complex sounds are broken down into their component frequencies along a proximal-to-distal long (tonotopic) axis. Acquisition of unique morphologies at the appropriate position along the chick cochlea, the basilar papilla, requires that nascent HCs determine their tonotopic positions during development. The complex signalling within the auditory organ between a developing HC and its local niche along the cochlea is poorly understood. Using a combination of live imaging and NAD(P)H fluorescence lifetime imaging microscopy, we reveal that there is a gradient in the cellular balance between glycolysis and the pentose phosphate pathway in developing HCs along the tonotopic axis. Perturbing this balance by inhibiting different branches of cytosolic glucose catabolism disrupts developmental morphogen signalling and abolishes the normal tonotopic gradient in HC morphology. These findings highlight a causal link between graded morphogen signalling and metabolic reprogramming in specifying the tonotopic identity of developing HCs

NMDA receptor subunit expression and PAR2 receptor activation in colospinal afferent neurons (CANs) during inflammation induced visceral hypersensitivity

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Visceral hypersensitivity is a clinical observation made when diagnosing patients with functional bowel disorders. The cause of visceral hypersensitivity is unknown but is thought to be attributed to inflammation. Previously we demonstrated that a unique set of enteric neurons, colospinal afferent neurons (CANs), co-localize with the NR1 and NR2D subunits of the NMDA receptor as well as with the PAR2 receptor. The aim of this study was to determine if NMDA and PAR2 receptors expressed on CANs contribute to visceral hypersensitivity following inflammation. Recently, work has suggested that dorsal root ganglion (DRG) neurons expressing the transient receptor potential vanilloid-1 (TRPV1) receptor mediate inflammation induced visceral hypersensitivity. Therefore, in order to study CAN involvement in visceral hypersensitivity, DRG neurons expressing the TRPV1 receptor were lesioned with resiniferatoxin (RTX) prior to inflammation and behavioural testing.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>CANs do not express the TRPV1 receptor; therefore, they survive following RTX injection. RTX treatment resulted in a significant decrease in TRPV1 expressing neurons in the colon and immunohistochemical analysis revealed no change in peptide or receptor expression in CANs following RTX lesioning as compared to control data. Behavioral studies determined that both inflamed non-RTX and RTX animals showed a decrease in balloon pressure threshold as compared to controls. Immunohistochemical analysis demonstrated that the NR1 cassettes, N1 and C1, of the NMDA receptor on CANs were up-regulated following inflammation. Furthermore, inflammation resulted in the activation of the PAR2 receptors expressed on CANs.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Our data show that inflammation causes an up-regulation of the NMDA receptor and the activation of the PAR2 receptor expressed on CANs. These changes are associated with a decrease in balloon pressure in response to colorectal distension in non-RTX and RTX lesioned animals. Therefore, these data suggest that CANs contribute to visceral hypersensitivity during inflammation.</p

American Society for Enhanced Recovery (ASER) and Perioperative Quality Initiative (POQI) joint consensus statement on optimal analgesia within an enhanced recovery pathway for colorectal surgery: part 1-from the preoperative period to PACU

BACKGROUND: Within an enhanced recovery pathway (ERP), the approach to treating pain should be multifaceted and the goal should be to deliver "optimal analgesia," which we define in this paper as a technique that optimizes patient comfort and facilitates functional recovery with the fewest medication side effects. METHODS: With input from a multi-disciplinary, international group of clinicians, and through a structured review of the literature and use of a modified Delphi method, we achieved consensus surrounding the topic of optimal analgesia in the perioperative period for colorectal surgery patients. DISCUSSION: As a part of the first Perioperative Quality Improvement (POQI) workgroup meeting, we sought to develop a consensus document describing a comprehensive, yet rational and practical, approach for developing an evidence-based plan for achieving optimal analgesia, specifically for a colorectal surgery ERP. The goal was two-fold: (a) that application of this process would lead to improved patient outcomes and (b) that investigation of the questions raised would identify knowledge gaps to aid the direction for research into analgesia within ERPs in the years to come. This document details the evidence for a wide range of analgesic components, with particular focus from the preoperative period to the post-anesthesia care unit. The overall conclusion is that the combination of analgesic techniques employed in the perioperative period is not important as long as it is effective in delivering the goal of optimal analgesia as set forth in this document