Journal articles on the topic '- Fantasy variations'

The effects of erotic content and subject sex on sexual fantasy were mediated by general sexual attitudes. When erotic content consisted of mild erotica showing males rather than females, male subjects ( N=123) expressed significantly more negative themes in briefer fantasy productions than females ( N=123). Analyses of affective and arousal responses to single-sex and heterosexual erotica indicated patterns generally consistent with the fantasy outcomes. Negative sexual attitudes were associated with negatively-toned fantasies, more negative affect, and less sexual arousal. Variations in affective and arousal responses to erotic stimuli, as discussed by the theory of the Sexual Behavior Sequence, were demonstrated to extend to the production of sexual fantasy.

The following study starts out from the examination of two fragmentary piano compositions by Liszt: Introduction des variations sur une marche du Siège de Corinthe and Maometto Fantasy , which were based on two Rossini operas, Le Siège de Corinthe and Maometto II , respectively. Since the literature has tended to confound the sources related to these two works, I strive to clarify and reinterpret the intricate connections between the two fragments and their different manuscript sources. I propose that the “Maometto — Mosè Fantasy,” the Valse à capriccio sur deux motifs de Lucia et Parisina , the Variations de bravoure pour piano sur des thèmes de Paganini , the Fantasie über Motive aus Figaro und Don Juan and the God Save the Queen. Paraphrase de concert all reflect the composer’s intense concern with the integration of themes of different origins in a single work — an aesthetic problem that haunted him for decades, and remained unresolved in most of the above cases. Liszt appears to have been able to solve this problem satisfactorily only if he could rely on some kind of “outside” musical help, like the common genre of the waltz in the Valse à capriccio ; or if he succeeded in “sublimating” one of the themes, as in the case of God Save the Queen . For want of such extraordinary solutions, all other compositions that experimented with the integration of themes of different origins in the late 1830s and early 1840s were eventually buried in oblivion by Liszt himself.

One of the many wonders that fullerenes have brought to us during the past few years is the variety of their shapes. When the elusive C60 finally showed up in 1990, the perfect symmetry and astounding beauty of its molecular structure touched the hearts of scientists before they could consider the molecule's vast technical possibilities. Already much has been said about the unique shape of C60 and its potentialities. C70 and higher fullerenes have simultaneously been found in the same soot that produced C60 and were quickly revealed to be shaped like rugby balls or oblong eggs. Hence we were aware that there had to be an extensive series of roundish polyhedral clusters of carbon atoms.Then, in the following year, multilayered tubular fullerenes (Figures 1a and 1b) were discovered by Iijima and were named buckytubes (see the article by Iijima in this issue). Iijima also observed similarly huge and multilayered carbon balls, before C60 was discovered. Soon after, buckyonions were recognized as an important class of fullerene (Figure 1c, see article by Ugarte in this issue). So, in the early days of fullerene research, we already knew three forms of fullerene: sphere, tube, and particle. At that time, however, nobody anticipated that this was only the beginning of a big show of stunning variations in the shapes of fullerenes. This article introduces current developments in the study of these fullerene styles.

KENNETH LEIGHTON: Sonatinas Nos. 1 and 2, op.1; Sonata No.1 op.2; Sonata No.2 op.17; Five Studies op.22; Fantasia Contrappuntistica (Homage to Bach) op.24; Variations op.30; Nine Variations op.36; Pieces for Angela op.47; Conflicts (Fantasy on Two Themes) op.51; Six Studies (Study-Variations) op.56; Sonata (1972) op.64; Household Pets op.86; Four Romantic Pieces op.95; Jack-in-the-Box; Study; Lazy-bones. Angela Brownridge (pno). Delphian DCD 34301-3 (3-CD set).PATRICK PIGGOTT: Fantasia quasi una Sonata; 8 Preludes and a Postlude (Third Set). Second Piano Sonata. Malcolm Binns (pno). British Music Society BMS 430CD.SORABJI: Fantasia ispanica. Jonathan Powell (pno). Altarus AIR-CD-9084.ROWLEY: Concerto for piano, strings and percussion, op.49. DARNTON: Concertino for piano and string orchestra. GERHARD: Concerto for piano and strings. FERGUSON: Concerto for piano and string orchestra, op.12. Peter Donohoe (pno and c.), Northern Sinfonia. Naxos 8.557290.Severnside Composers’ Alliance Inaugural Piano Recital. GEOFFREY SELF: Sonatina 1. IVOR GURNEY:Preludes, Sets 1, 2 and 3. JOLYON LAYCOCK: L’Abri Pataud. RICHARD BERNARD: On Erin Shore. STEVEN KINGS: Fingers Pointing to the Moon. SUSAN COPPARD: Round and Around. JOHN PITTS: Aire 1; Fantasies 1, 5. JAMES PATTEN: Nocturnes 3, 4. SULYEN CARADON: Dorian Dirge. RAYMOND WARREN: Monody; Chaconne. Peter Jacobs (pno). Live recording, 23 February 2005. Dunelm DRD0238.Severnside Composers’ Alliance – A Recital by two pianists. MARTINŮ: Three Czech Dances. BEDFORD: Hoquetus David. JOHN PITTS: Changes. HOLLOWAY: Gilded Goldbergs Suite. JOLYON LAYCOCK: Die! A1 Sparrow. POULENC: Élégie. LUTOSLAWSKI: Paganini Variations. Steven Kings, Christopher Northam (pnos). Live recording, 14 May 2005. Dunelm DRD0243.‘Transcendent Journey’. FOULDS: Gandharva-Music, op.49; April-England, op.48 no.1. CORIGLIANO: Fantasia on an Ostinato. PROKOFIEV: Toccata, op.11. With works by BACH-CHUQUISENGO, HANDEL, BEETHOVENLISZT, BACH-BUSONI, SCHUMANN. Juan José Chuquisengo (pno). Sony SK 93829.

AdornoÕs view of Schubert's Wanderer Fantasy is of flawed music. He regards the finale as yet another compositionally disastrous failure by Schubert to know how to round off a sonata or symphony. But he is clearly intrigued by the slow movement's acts of negation and alienation. This article investigates these two crises. First, what is actually--if one may dare ask such a thing--wrong with the finale? That it is all empty mock-fugue and sequence and passage-work? And thus it lacks truth-content? That Schubert is not really composing this finale; it is somehow composing him? Here I investigate analytically what Adorno's "temporal series of atemporal cells" means. Second, how does the slow movement move us from lightness into despair? Death for Schubert, Adorno tells us, is not about pain, but mourning, something Schubert takes us right inside--or to use Adorno's image, through a portal to the underworld (29). I believe that this landscape is also nested within the slow movement of the Wanderer Fantasy. If, as always with variations, the task of the analyst is not so clear here, the task of the (rightly) evidence-bound hermeneut probably is.

Franz Schubert’s D760 is entitled “fantasy”, although the four sections of the work recognisably reference the formal models of a four-movement sonata. Since those models appear in their traditional order, the “fantasy” elements have to manifest themselves differently, transgressing the norms of sonata in two ways: Schubert transforms and deconstructs the individual forms of the four-movement model, while suspending the autonomy of each movement. Both strategies are interrelated: by blurring the form of each movement, Schubert opens them up to the following sections. This is rendered plausible because the movements, which connect seamlessly, are derived from the same thematic material.The deconstruction of the formal models manifests itself in the elision of formal units, the interpolation of non-formal sections, and the startling curtailing of developmental procedures within the formal units. These formal licences generate ambiguous structures that do not lend themselves to definite formal interpretations. Thus formal ambiguity is a constituting element of the “fantastic” in D760.The thematic unity of the work is a result of the continuous transformation of a motif first presented in the main theme of the first movement; a process, in which new variants emerge from the synthesis of previous variations. Furthermore, the Presto, which stands in for the scherzo movement of the Fantasy, reverse engineers the sonata form of the first movement (which had been abandoned before the recapitulation) while completing and normalising the form of the first movement by aligning it with the scherzo form. Thus the Presto assumes the formal function of the missing recapitulation, whose “wrong” key of A flat major is “rectified” through the C-major finale.

For a number of Italian writers the modem city has come to mean as much a style, a fractured syntax, a paratactic sign-system, as a physical construct with certain demonstrable boundaries. In the works of such authors as halo Calvino and Francesca Duranti the crisis of reason is symbolized by indeterminate aleatory structures - such as the labyrinth or the chessboard - all of which can be considered variations on the theme of the modem city. Calvino and Duranti’s invisible or labyrinthine cities serve as an infinitely malleable poetic dramatization of the mind. The cities are both projections of their respective narrators and images that shape the reader's experience. By analysing the spatial structures of the narratives and by examining the use of space as a locus of fantasy this article shows how these novels chart cityscapes of the mind.

Dragons are a staple of fantasy literature, and various aspects of the creatures (most notably their anatomy) have been explored scientifically across different forms of media. Their distinct anatomical characteristics and the variations therein among the recognized “species” of dragons make the taxa appropriate models for basic phylogenetic analysis in an undergraduate general biology or systematics class. The wyvern, an obviously more primitive, distant cousin of the “true” dragons, is also an appropriate outgroup for these estimations of shared evolutionary history. Separating metallic from chromatic dragons, the generated tree shows relationships among the species that are consistent with their separation in the Dungeons & Dragons games according to alignment, scale color, and religion, three characters that are not used in the analysis. Manual construction of a character matrix and cladogram of dragons followed by repetition of this process via conventional computer software allows the students to track their progress not only in terms of understanding such concepts as choice of character states and parsimony but also in terms of the applicability of said software.

"Phraseology is considered nowadays a well-established and promising field of study. However, phraseological variation is a real phenomenon that, in certain contexts, is a deliberate decision. Therefore, we suggest with this article an approach to phraseological variation as a stylistic device for the translation of fantasy and science fiction literature. To do so, we analyze the cases of phraseological variation drawn from the novel La Plaie, written by the French author Nathalie Henneberg, as a resource that encourages the contextualization of the readers within a fictional universe thanks to the rhetorical, semantic and cultural features of the original phraseological units. Results showed a wide range of phraseological variation with lexical terms related to the story."

AbstractThis essay focuses on questions central to Husserl’s essential methodology, specifically his notion of ‘free-fantasy variation,’ which he regarded as his ‘fundamental methodological insight.’ At the heart of this ‘vital element of phenomenology’ is what he often terms ‘as-if experience’ thanks to which anything whatever (actual or possible) can be considered either for its own sake or as an example of something else. Further analysis explores the act of exemplification, the act of feigning (termed possibilizing) and the shifts of attention and orientation that ground free-fantasy variation. Exemplification and possibilizing are then examined in daily life to discern what makes the complex act of feigning at all possible. An examination of the phenomenon of upsets (of what is typically expected) brings the core sense of possibilizing to light. A focus on the dramatic force intrinsic to these experiences, and the essential place of reflective awareness inherent to them, makes apparent how the rudimentary sense of self begins to emerge, and there follows an analysis of this self-referentiality of possibilizing. The analysis then concludes with a brief examination of Husserl’s so-called ‘zig-zag’ method of constitutive phenomenology.

The purpose of this article is to identify the individual-style features and genre characteristics of romantic fantasy for the academic professional guitar. The methods of the research are based by investigator on the application of a comprehensive approach, namely: evolutionary and historical methods – in the disclosure of the processes of formation and subsequent evolution of the genre under study; analytical – in the study of different genre literature, concerning the chosen problem and others. The scientific novelty lies in the fact that fantasies for F. Tarrega’s guitar is analyzed by researcher for the first time. On their example, the individual-style features of the fantasy genre are revealed by scholar. Conclusions. In the course of the work, the genre characteristics of F. Tarrega’s romantic fantasy were analyzed, and it was discovered that virtuosity comes to the forefront as a mandatory quality of fantasy, which was associated with the emergence of virtuosos of composers and performers Napoleon Costa and Francisco Tarrega. Thanks to them, the guitar falls a focus of attention of famous virtuosos who study its chamber and orchestral capabilities. Fantasies for the guitar are improved in form and thematism, using as exclusively original thematism, and borrowed. In the era of romanticism, fantasies on a borrowed topic get the most development, a prerequisite for which was the growth of a virtuoso style of performance, which undoubtedly led to revolutionary achievements in the field of expressive means. One of the main features of guitar fantasies on a borrowed topic was the superiority not of composing, but of performing means of expression: agogics, dynamics, intonation and others. Fantasies for the guitar are extremely virtuosic and require considerable performing skills. However, virtuoso techniques are only of a subordinate nature, and borrowed themes become only an impulse for creating a new artistic integrity. From the point of view of the actual musical structure, such works are characterized by a combination of the form of fantasy with the variational principle of material development.

This paper suggests interpreting Husserl’s thesis of the “fictional destruction of the world” (gedankliche Destruktion der Welt) in the light of the eidetic method of variation. After having reconstructed Husserl’s argument and shown how it relies on the methodologically regimented joint venture of free fantasy and bounded concepts, the author concludes that (1) the a priori of a world, namely its empirical (more or less rational) style, is tantamount to the a priori of a world that can be possibly experienced by some conceivable form of consciousness. (2) If consciousness is a priori bound to transcendence, such transcendence is not necessarily supposed to be the transcendence of a world, for a non-world would be enough to entertain the intentional directedness. This twofold claim allows for a novel interpretation of Husserl’s principle of the asymmetry between world and consciousness.

Little is known about drought stress resistance of Freeman maples (Acer ×freemanii E. Murray), which are hybrids of red maples (A. rubrum L.) and silver maples (A. saccharinum L.). The objective of our study was to measure plant growth and leaf water relations of `D.T.R. 102' (Autumn Fantasy), `Celzam' (Celebration), and `Marmo' Freeman maples subjected to drought. Plants grown from rooted cuttings were subjected to four consecutive cycles of water deficit followed by irrigation to container capacity. Average stomatal conductance at container capacity for all cultivars was 255 mmol·s-1·m-2 in the first drought cycle and 43 mmol·s-1·m-2 during the fourth drought cycle. Predawn and midmorning leaf water potentials of droughted plants at the end of the fourth drought cycle were 1.16 and 0.82 MPa more negative than respective values for control plants. Osmotic potential of leaves at full turgor was -1.05 MPa for controls and -1.29 MPa for droughted plants, indicating an osmotic adjustment of 0.24 MPa. Root and shoot dry mass and leaf area were reduced similarly by drought for all cultivars, while Celebration exhibited the least stem elongation. `Marmo' treated with drought had the lowest root-to-shoot ratio and the greatest ratio of leaf surface area to root dry mass. Autumn Fantasy had the lowest ratio of leaf area to stem xylem diameter. Specific leaf mass of drought-stressed Autumn Fantasy was 1.89 mg·cm-2 greater than that of corresponding controls, whereas specific masses of Celebration and `Marmo' leaves were not affected by drought. Leaf thickness was similar among cultivars, but leaves of droughted plants were 9.6 μm thicker than leaves of controls. This initial characterization of responses to drought illustrates variation among Freeman maples and suggests that breeding and selection programs might produce superior genotypes for water-deficient sites in the landscape.

Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology which he characterized as an eidetic science of transcendentally reduced phenomena aims at least at material-apriori laws of a special kind, namely eidetic descriptive laws built up from pure descriptive concepts. The paper explicates Husserl’s notion of essence in the broad sense as a state-of-affairs-function (Sachverhaltsfunktion); this noematic function is the objective „correlate“ of the propositional function which we call a „concept“ and which is part of the proposition, i.e. the state-of-affairs-meaning (Sachverhaltsmeinung), in which a state of affairs is projected. Essences in the narrow or pregnant sense are pure essences which Husserl named „Eidé“. The concept of pure essence relevant for the phenomenological descriptive eidetics is elucidated through the explication of Husserl’s notion of a pure descriptive concept, so as to show how these concepts, which are pure type concepts, differ from impure descriptive concepts, especially from concepts denoting natural kinds. Grounded exclusively in pure descriptive concepts, the eidetic descriptive laws (Wesensgesetze) have special truth conditions and a need for special ways of examination. The proper place of the method called „eidetic variation“ is the examination, falsification or justification of presumed eidetic descriptive laws. Starting from familiar exemplary cases of states of affairs which confirm the presumed law, the free variation, which operates in pure fantasy, has the task of constructing possible counterexamples to falsify the presumed eidetic law. The property of being falsifiable by counterexamples constructed in pure fantasy allows for a distinction between empirical laws and the eidetic descriptive laws of Husserlian eidetics. The falsifiability by fictional and factual counterexamples shows that Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology is a scientific enterprise open to intersubjective examination precisely due to its eidetic character.

The first part of a two article series presented the hypotheses explaining the variation in dream recall, a model of the dream recall process and the empirical data concerning trait factors. The present article includes earlier data concerning state factors, new empirical data on how these influence dream recall, and some final conclusions. State factors such as nocturnal awakenings and focusing on dreams in the morning along with trait factors of fantasy life, creativity and visual memory all play an important part in explaining the variability in dream recall. Additionally, some suggestions for future research in explaining why there is such variability in our ability to recollect what we dreamt in a given night are presented.

It seemed like a good idea while it lasted, but we should have known it could not last. the era of sustainability is over. behind our shared cultural narratives of sustainability sits a fantasy about stasis, an imaginary world in which we can trust that whatever happened yesterday will keep happening tomorrow. It's been pretty to think so, but it's never been so. In literary studies, we name this kind of fantasy pastoral. Such a narrative imagines a happy, stable relation between human beings and the nonhuman environment. It seldom rains, mud doesn't clog our panpipes, and our sheep never run away while swains sing beautiful songs to coy shepherdesses. In this sustainable green world, complicated things fit into simple packages, as literary criticism has recognized, from William Empson's “pastoral trick” (115) to Greg Gerrard's “pastoral ecology” (56–58). This green vision provides, in Gerrard's phrase, a “stable, enduring counterpoint to the disruptive energy and change of human societies” (56). That's the dream toward which sustainability entices us. To be sustainable is to persist in time, unchanged in essence if not details. That's not the human experience of the nonhuman world. Remember the feeling of being wet, like King Lear, “to the skin” (Mentz, “Strange Weather”). Changing scale matters, and local variation does not preclude global consistency, but the feeling of the world on our skin is disruptive. Our environment changes constantly, unexpectedly, often painfully.

The aim of the present article is to carefully review the research carried out hitherto regarding factors influencing dream recall. With respect to the hypotheses explaining the variation in dream recall frequency (DRF) and a model of the dream recall process, the empirical data has been divided into two groups, trait factors and state factors. In the first part of the article the studies on the influence of trait factors are reviewed. The second part incudes data concerning state factors, new empirical data and some final conclusions. State factors such as nocturnal awakening and focusing on dreams in the morning and trait factors such as fantasy life, creativity and visual memory play a major role in explaining variability in dream recall.

Consider the thought experiment offered at the conference that generated this collection of essays: in this fantasy, face transplants are safe and effective. A young woman is the victim of a devastating accident. A face transplant will enable her to live a completely normal life. But, say she is African American, or Asian. Would it be ethically permissible to allow her to take the face of a Caucasian woman? Or, say you have a child with a muscle wasting disorder. Would it be permissible to alter his muscle repair system so that he not only does not have the genetic variation that causes the disease, but he has the capacity for enhanced muscular strength, beyond that of his peers, such that he could become a big league pitcher?

Background. The peculiarities of the worldview and philosophy of modern contradictory era put forward before the art new requirements and benchmarks, which the Postmodern aesthetics embodies. The phenomenon of «Postmodernism» covers different levels of contemporary life. In philosophy, this concept was first introduced by J.-F. Lyotard in his report «The status of postmodernism». The French philosopher revealed the essence of Postmodernism consisting in «awareness of diversity and pluralism of forms of rationality, activity of life, as well as the recognition of this diversity as a natural positive state» [2], and defined Postmodernism as «the general direction of modern European culture, formed in 1970–80-es» [2]. Now there is no single definition of «postmodern», probably, due to the incompleteness, continuity of formation of this phenomenon. Some philosophers, in particular, J. Habermas, D. Bell and Z. Bauman, consider postmodernism as the result of politics and ideology of neo-conservatism, which is characterized by aesthetic eclecticism [3]. Italian philosopher and writer U. Eco understands postmodernism as a process of changing one cultural era to another, perceiving it as «... the answer to modernism: since the past cannot be destroyed, because its destruction leads to dumbness, it needs to be rethought, ironically, without naivety» [5: 77]. This approach most accurately reveals the essence of postmodern art. In the field of aesthetics, the work of F. Jameson, «Postmodernism or The cultural logic of late capitalism», where postmodernism is represented as a «cultural dominant» is quite indicative. The philosopher defines such typical phenomenon of postmodern culture as a simulacrum, weakening of affects, the consequence of which is «the replacement of alienation of the subject by its fragmentation» [1: 105], the disappearance of the individual subject and the emergence on this basis of the practice of pastiche [1: 108], the loss of historicity. In musicology, the question of the essence of postmodernism has not yet received a sufficient scientific basis. From the latest works of Ukrainian researchers, in our opinion, it is disclosed most complete in the D. Ruzhinsky’s article “Specificity of the manifestation of postmodernism in musical creativity” [4]. The object of presented research is the specificity of postmodernism manifestations in an art; the subject of research are the postmodern landmarks in the individual style of outstanding Canadian pianist and composer M.-A Hamelin. The purpose of the article is to reveal the interrelation of the composer’ and performing style by M.-A. Hamelin with the aesthetic paradigms of Postmodernism. The methodological basis of the research consists of the concepts of postmodern philosophy and aesthetics presented in the works of J. Habermas, D. Bell, Z. Bauman. U. Eco, F. Jameson. For more full understanding of specificity of the postmodern traits implementation in M.-A. Hamelin’s activity, the “creative portrait” genre as well as analyses of some fragments of his music was used. Presenting the main material. The art of postmodernism reflects a fundamentally new attitude to the process of creativity, which includes of such typical features as 1) quoting or using famous plots, which are the realities of the culture of previous eras; 2) intertextuality; 3) the prevalence of the audience interpretation over the composer’s idea, when the author’s position is not decisive (according to M. Foucault, “the death of the author”); 4) syncretism; 5) the irony and the parody-game designing of works. The creativity of Marc-André Hamelin (b.1961) – the world-renowned Canadian virtuoso pianist and composer – is one of the brightest personifications of these principles, as well as their individual understanding. In 1985, he won the First prize at the competition at Carnegie hall, with which he began his ascent to the musical Olympus as a performer. To date, M.-A. Hamelin, an outstanding pianist and soloist, performs with many leading world orchestras, and his discography total more than 60 albums, including both his own works and the works of many composers of different genres and eras. In addition to intensive performance and interpretation activities, the Canadian artist is also engaged in composition, and his artistic search is concentrated mainly within the framework of piano music, which is quite natural. Among the works for piano solo the transcriptions can be identified, such as the “Etude-fantasy ‘Flight of the bumblebee’” by Rimsky-Korsakov (1987), “Waltz-minute, in seconds” (transcription of Chopin’s waltz). Another group of works ‒ miniatures are, for example, the “Little Nocturne” (2007), “Preamble to the imaginary piano Symphony” (1989), “My impressions about chocolate” (2014); the cycles of miniatures – “Con intimissimo sentimento” (1986–2000); the larger-scale pieces – “Barcarolle” (2013), “Chaconne” (2013). The composer wrote the three cycles of variations and the cadenzas for piano concertos by Mozart (K453 and 491), for the Fourth piano Concerto by Beethoven, the Third and Fourth Concertos by Haydn and The second Hungarian Rhapsody by Liszt. In addition to the solo piano music, the composer turned to the chamber genre (“Fanfare” for three trumpets, “Passacaglia”» for piano quintet, «Four perspectives» for cello and piano). His style is characterized by the frequent using of thematic material from the works by other composers of different eras. From the very beginning, Hamelin rethinks this material, not introducing it in its original form, but transforming it. For example, in the “Variations on The theme of Paganini” the theme of the Twenty-fourth Caprice is already “modernized”: maintaining the harmonic basis of it, the author adds the non-chords sounds and the remark to tempo, which notes that the theme should be played “with a groove”, as it is typical for salsa, rock and fusion style. Interpretations of the quoted material are not in the original, but in its creative processing can see although in the Seventh variation with the theme of the Third variation of Sonata No. 30 by Beethoven. Another typical feature of postmodernism of the Canadian artist’s work is manifested in a certain game with the listener, because to catch all the allusions, to understand the quotes and styles of different eras, he must be intellectually well prepared. Some of the noted features of the composer’s creation find their direct projection in the performing pianistic style of M.-A. Hamelin. For example, virtuosity, which is present in his works in both explicit and veiled form, fully manifests itself in the interpretation of the works of other composers. Another characteristic feature of the performing style of M.-A. Hamelin is his aspiring to end-to-end development and cyclicity. In his discography, there are many different cycles, sometimes quite voluminous, performed by him as a whole. In practice of composition this is manifested at the level of the musical form (cycles, parts of which often follow directly one after another, and sometimes even the final harmony of one of the parts becomes the beginning of the next part). Conclusion. The results of the research confirm the idea of the relationship of Hamelin’s individual creative style with the basic ideas of postmodernism aesthetics. Quite typical for the manner of writing of the Canadian artist is the attraction to the throughness of development, to the creation of micro-cycles (as well as to the performing of cyclic works of other composers); the combination of ironic rethinking of thematic material with virtuosity; the playing with the listener on the basis of the introduction of quotation material and work with it; the combination of different styles within one work. Such manner requires a prepared, meaningful perception, that is, to paraphrase U. Eco, the «ideal listener».

The effluent from municipal wastewater treatment plants is a major point source of contamination in Canadian waterways. The improvement of effluent quality to reduce contaminants, such as pharmaceuticals and personal care products, before being released into the environment is necessary to reduce the impacts on organisms that live in the river downstream. Here, we aimed to characterize the metabolic and gill physiological responses of rainbow (Etheostoma caeruleum), fantail (Etheostoma flabellare), and greenside (Etheostoma blennioides) darters to the effluent in the Grand River from the recently upgraded Waterloo municipal wastewater treatment plant. The routine metabolism of darters was not affected by effluent exposure, but some species had increased maximum metabolic rates, leading to an increased aerobic scope. The rainbow darter aerobic scope increased by 2.2 times and the fantail darter aerobic scope increased by 2.7 times compared to the reference site. Gill samples from effluent-exposed rainbow darters and greenside darters showed evidence of more pathologies and variations in morphology. These results suggest that darters can metabolically adjust to effluent-contaminated water and may also be adapting to the urban and agricultural inputs. The modification and damage to the gills provide a useful water quality indicator but does not necessarily reflect how well acclimated the species is to the environment due to a lack of evidence of poor fish health.

<p>This research aims to describe responds and cultural practice that happened in Mangkunagaran based on the repression of tourism world. This research is an analytical research based on ethnographic study. Triangulation data is collected from the interviewees together with the manuscript of dance performance and direct observation of Bedhaya Bedhah Madiun dance. Classification of tourism dance is responded by Puro Mangkunagaran as the objectification of Bedaya Bedhah Madiun as a free dance. The cultural response potentially alters the semiotic sign system associated with ‘bedhaya’ sign. This is a sign to Bedhaya to add the profanity of Bedaya as a tourist attraction. The objectivity of Bedhaya Bedhah Madiun by Puro Mangkunegara also has a potency to deconstruct the understanding of Bedhaya Bedhah Madiun as a tourist attraction, Bedhaya Bedhah Madiun is not an imitation from the origin and it is not full of variation. Cheap or expensive the dance is, becomes relative. Furthermore, secrecy does not exist in the stage reality, but moves to hyper reality (in the fantasy and nostalgia of the audience). Respond and cultural practice of indicated Puro Mangkunagaran as a cultural institution which is active in doing the production-reproduction of meaning and the tourism enhancement.</p>

Tujuan penelitian ini adalah untuk mengungkapkan tentang latar belakang dan cara atau teknik pembuatan sebuah komposisi musik oleh Jazeed Djamin yang berjudul “Variation on theme of Sepasang Mata Bola”. Karya tersebut diciptakan dalam bentuk Piano Concerto dengan 9 variasi yang berdasar dari tema lagu “Sepasang Mata Bola” karya Ismail Marzuki. Penelitian ini dilakukan dengan metode penelitian kualitatif serta menggunakan pendekatan musikologi. Dari hasil penelitian dapat menunjukkan bahwa dipilihnya lagu “Sepasang Mata Bola” sebagai tema dari karya variasi tersebut untuk menunjukkan optimisme yang besar dari Jazeed Djamin terhadap potensi musikal negeri ini (Indonesia) yang sangat kaya dan layak digarap dalam bentuk-bentuk karya musik konvensional dan yang lebih besar. Selain itu Jazeed Djamin ingin mengenalkan dan mengangkat lagu-lagu asli Indonesia ke pentas Internasional. Karya tersebut diciptakan menjadi 9 variasi dengan diawali sebuah introduksi dan berakhir dengan suatu coda yang menjadi satu bagian dengan variasi IX, dan memiliki 469 birama dengan durasi sepanjang 25 menit. Setiap variasi memiliki karakter yang mengacu pada karakter variasi karya-karya musik jaman romantik. Teknik komposisi yang digunakan antara lain: variasi cantus firmus, variasi fixed harmony, variasi melodi dengan fixed harmony serta variasi fantasia. Karya tersebut juga memiliki bagian kadensa yang unik, karena tidak diletakkan menjelang akhir bagian lagu atau coda, tetapi sebagai bagian dari variasi VI. Idiom-idiom musik didalamnya sangat ilustratif karena mampu menggambarkan efek suara kereta api yang sedang berjalan.

The basic style of East-European Jewish (East-Ashkenazic) prayer chant (davenen), even when it might seem to be simple on paper, in transcription, has a complex and unique system of micro-structure. This micro-structure, which is evident in subtleties of rhythm and melody, voice quality, form, techniques of variation and ornamentation, is inventive and daring, and creates a compelling aesthetic and spiritual effect in the auditory experience. The present article discusses the question of how this creative compositional practice might have evolved. The article claims that the uniqueness of davenen results from the fact that children begin learning this “art” at a very early age, before they are able to speak and conceptualize the phenomena of the surrounding world. With davenen, a spontaneously felt language before language is learnt: a language in which words and melodies, rhythms and musical gestures and effects, emotions and fantasies and associations are merged into one whole. As a result, in the realization of prayer chant, even in the case of professional prayer leaders, originality and tradition, copying and fantasy occur together in a continual fusion of memory and forgetfulness. This article discusses Eastern European Jewish prayer chant and its learning process on the basis of its author’s decades of fieldwork and of literature and memoirs from before WWII.

Modern receptive poetics encourages the study of verbalized end-to-end motives of Lesia Ukrainka’s work. Embodied in various linguistic forms – lexical-semantic, phrase-forming, syntactic-rhythmic and intonation, Lesia Ukrainka’s poetic texts testify to the change of the traditional dictionary of Ukrainian poetry, filling it with new associative connections, consistent with the needs of a particular historical era. Emphasis is placed on the connection of the word with music, not only formal, but also concretized in rhythms, syntactic and intonational variation of verse lines. The considered textual variants of the sonnet “Fantasy” convince in dynamism, originality of figurative-associative linguistic thinking of the poetess. The dynamics is traced in the textual representation of concepts фантазія, мрія, сон життя, in the symbolic meaning of the token камінь and вогонь, камінь and байдужість. Emphasis is placed on various forms of contrast expression – from antonyms, oxymorons, to opposing sentences-judgments. They are representatives of the logical and sensual content of Lesya Ukrainka’s poetic texts. On the example of evaluative significant words to the concept-token WORD as an instrument of poetic creativity, a conclusion about the antithetical thinking of the poetess is made. The dynamic perception of semantics is fixed вогонь, жар, пожежа, associated with a negative assessment of the destructive element, but in the poetic contexts of the author, these symbols are positively assessed as the ability to be a stimulus to creative inspiration, inflammatory, caring soul of the creator. Poetic phraseology to denote the concept of “indifference”, which acquires the meaning of linguistic and aesthetic sign in the Ukrainian language culture, is recorded.

Présenté comme un « antépisode moderne au conte de Cendrillon », le roman Javotte de Simon Boulerice s’inscrit dans le courant des variations cendrillonesques, en référant aux versions de Charles Perrault et des frères Grimm, ainsi qu’à l’adaptation filmique de Walt Disney. Toutefois, il a la particularité de se recentrer plutôt sur le personnage de la demi-soeur, « tirée d’un conte de fées, mais catapultée dans son xxie siècle » (Javotte, p. 105), qui est tiraillée entre sa méchanceté et le fantasme obsessif de ressembler à une princesse. L’imaginaire archaïque du conte nourrissant l’intrigue y est ainsi détourné par la narratrice entretenant un rapport trouble avec ces oeuvres. Dans cet article, l’auteure cherche plus particulièrement à dégager la vision subversive et parodique que le roman propose de l’éclatement de la mémoire des contes merveilleux à notre époque, où l’« [o]n n’a plus les contes que l’on avait » (Javotte, p. 105), tout en montrant comment leur accumulation participe à l’ambiguïté identitaire de la narratrice, qui cherche simultanément à s’y comparer et à les mettre à mal.

Background. The French composers’ creativity of the late XIX – first third of XX centuries is the admirable treasury of the world musical art. It is worth mentioning such remarkable and original artists as C. Debussy and M. Emmanuel, P. Dukas and E. Satie, A.Roussel and M.Ravel. The name of G. Pierné (1863–1937) can surely be added to this series of authors. But his oeuvre is still terra incognita for us. The thorough considerable researches about the author are not numerous. The monograph “Gabriel Pierné: musicien lorrain” by G. Masson was created in 1987, and the publication of the composer’s letters named as “Correspondance romaine” was published in 2005. In the 2000s, a lot of audio recordings of his best works were published, which testifies to the relevance of the author’s heritage and confirms the urgency of present topic of article. Objectives of this study is to focus researchers on G. Pierné’s personality and art, to consider his works for piano and symphonic orchestra – Fantasy-Ballet, Piano Concerto, Scherzo-Caprice, Symphonic Poem. Methods. The research is based on the historical biographical, the intonational, the comparative research methods. Results. C. Debussy, M. Ravel and composers of “Les Six” at their time outshined Pierné’s work. But years have passed and interest in the personality of this author has appeared. During his training in Paris Conservatory (1871–1882), G. Pierné achieved excellent results, having won in many student competitions. He studied composition in the class of J. Massenet (together with E. Chausson, G. Charpentier, G. Ropartz). Having won the competition for the Prix de Rome (1882), the young author was given the opportunity to live at Villa Medici (1883–1885). Spent time in Rome was one of the best episodes of his life. The first concert work by G. Pierné – Fantasy-Ballet (1885) for piano and orchestra was written there. The composition is based on the sequence of contrasting dancing episodes in the character of march, gallop, waltz, tarantella. It is significant that the ballet genre took pride of place in the work of G. Pierné later. The composer’s staying in Italy caused visibility, colorfulness, cheerfulness, feed activity, energy of images, using of genre motifs in FantasyBallet. The series of various episodes conveys a whimsical change of mood and resembles a sketches of impression. Returning to Paris in 1885, G. Pierné sought to strengthen his reputation as a soloist by entering the salon circles. At this time, he created many piano works, including the three-movement Piano Concerto c-moll (1886). This composition contains many dramatic moments which concentrated in the first and third movements of the cycle. However, as is often the case with French Romantic composers, such using of dramatic elements has a somewhat superficial, rhetorical character. The first movement is written in sonata form. The theme of the main subject (in c-moll), expounded by the piano octaves, is active and boisterous. And the secondary Es-dur subject is peaceful and lucid. There is the same entrancing serenity as in the lyrical theme of the E. Grieg’s Piano Concerto finale. In the first movement, the development is very short, and the recapitulation is abridged. It should be noted that G. Pierné refused to use the cadence of the soloist. The second movement is written in a three-part form with elements of variation and rondo. This light scherzo takes the listener away from the anxieties of previous movement. Every bar of this music, in which everything is made with elegant French taste, caresses the ear. The main theme, including the dotted rhythm, serves as a refrain that permeates the entire movement. The finale is distinguished by its developmental forcefulness and truly symphonic reach. So, the continuation of C. Saint-Saëns’s covenants is in the concentration of thematic material, the observableness of form, the rhetorical syllable, and rhythmic activity at the Pierné’s Piano Concerto. Scherzo-Caprice (1890) enriched the French miniature line. The image sphere of this opus is lucid lyrics, good-gentle jocosity, and solemnity. The melodic talent of the composer proved itself very convincing here. The theme of the waltz echoes the waltz episode from the Fantasy-Ballet in some details. Being written also in A-dur, it contains the upward melody moves with a passing VI# (fisis), and also diversions into the minor (cis-moll in Scherzo-Caprice, fis-moll in Fantasy-Ballet). At the turn of the century, the influence of C. Franck’s music was produced on the G. Pierné’s style. This is reflected in such works as the Symphonic Poem “L’An Mil” (1897), Violin Sonata (1900), oratorio “Saint François d’Assise” (1912), and Cello Sonata (1919). An appeal to the Symphonic Poem for piano and orchestra (1903) is also a clear sign of rapprochement with the late romantic branch (C. Franck, E. Сhausson). Here we see a departure of G. Pierné from the C. Saint-Saëns’s concert traditions, which he held before. In the Poem, such qualities as virtuosity, concert brilliance, and representativeness are somewhat leveled, which is caused with the narrative character of this work. Conclusions. During the “Renovation period” of French music, the piano and orchestra compositions experienced a real upsurge in its development. Composers began to turn more often not only to the Piano Concerto genre, but also to non-cyclic works – Fantasies, Poems, Rhapsodies, etc. G. Pierné contributed much to this branch along with C. Saint-Saëns, B. Godard, Ch.-M. Widor. In his Fantasy-Ballet, Piano Concerto, Scherzo-Caprice, we find the continuation of C. Saint-Saëns’s instrumental traditions. This is manifested in the moderation of the musical language, the normative character of harmonious thinking, the absolute clarity of discourse, concern for the relief of the melodic line. In the Symphonic Poem, contiguity with the musical aesthetics of С. Franck is revealed, which is reflected in harmony modulation shifts, appeal to polyphonic technique, differentiated and more powerful orchestration.

Bistani DA, Listyawati S, Setyawan AD. 2007. Diuretic effect of milk coffee on white rat (Rattus norvegicus) with variation of milk types. Biofarmasi 5: 8-15. Caffeine content in coffee is a mild diuretic which increase glomerule filtration and reduce natrium reabsorbtion in renal tubule. Some people mix milk into the coffee because they do not like the bitter taste from caffeine. Milk contains glucose which can cause osmotic diuretic and increase urine excretion. The aim of this research was to find out the diuretic effects of orally intakes of coffee-milk on white male rats (Rattus norvegicus) with a variation of milk kind. This research was done in Biology Sub Laboratory, Central Laboratory of MIPA UNS, Surakarta, Central Java. A Completely Randomized Design with five groups and four replications to each group was used in this study. The treatments applied for those groups were: (i) aquadest (group I), (ii) coffee solution (group II), (iii) coffee + sweetened condensed milk solution (group III), (iv) coffee + soymilk solution (group IV), and (v) coffee + skim milk solution (group V). The parameters used for the physical characteristics of urine were volume, colour, clearness, pH value and density. The parameters used for the chemical characteristics were the glucose analysis by Benedict test for qualitative and spectrophotometry for quantitative, and the analysis of NaCl content by Fantus method. The data were analyzed by using the analysis of variance (Anova) and continued with Duncan Multiple Range Test (DMRT) at a significance level of 5%. The results showed that a variation of milk kind was not effect on volume, colour, clearness, pH value, density, and glucose content after 4 hours of treatments, but effect on NaCl content after 4 hours of treatments.

Background. Contemporary musical art is an open stage for collision and coexistence of various artistic ideas, landmarks, styles, etc. The work of the recognized Canadian pianist-composer Marc-André Hamelin (born in 1961) raises a particular interest. The fact that the peculiarities of the musician’s performing and composing style are insuffi ciently covered in Ukrainian musicology determines the research rationale. It is also caused by the need to identify the specifi c features of the author’s inheritance, ensuring its consistency with the present time, where the laughter phenomenon becomes an important component of the picture of life. Objectives of the study are the comprehension of Marc-André Hamelin’s composer searches in the aspect of laughing cultural tradition and the defi nition of the author’s proposed ways of its embodiment in music. Methods. The research is based on the principles of complex approach, which involves using the biographical, the systematic, the genre and style, the structural and functional, and the comparative methods, etc. Results. M.-A. Hamelin appears to be a universal personality. He implements his creative intentions in various performing incarnations – as a soloist-pianist, a distinct interpreter and recognized virtuoso and intellectual; a performer who actively collaborates with the orchestra; a piano duo participant; a chamber ensemble participant and a studio musician. The repertoire palette he chose includes world-famous works, opuses of transcendental complexity, rarely performed music, and his own music works. His choosing some of the original works outlines the sphere of laughter as he searches new performing techniques, which has an infl uence on him as a composer. The original style of M.-A. Hamelin aims to create a special “rebus” fi eld, where the multiplicity of artistic perception is related to the degree of immersion into a given playing situation. The piano cycle “12 Études in all minor keys” was intended to be hommage to the samename work by Charles-Valentin Alkan. The iconic ceremoniousness of the title forms a special fi eld of culture, which creates a laughter background. Most of the cycle items correspond to the creativity of a particular artist whose musical image appears through the original style of writing. The synthesizing type of composer’s thinking contributes to the combining the music and the colorifi c etude, that is, the virtuoso music piece and the exercise at the same time, and a graphic sketch-drawing, and to the creation of a musical portrait “gallery” (F. Chopin, N. Paganini, F. Liszt, Ch. Alcan, D. Scarlatti , P. Tchaikovsky, J. Rossini, V. Goethe and the author himself). Using masks, theatrical techniques, bright characters is manifested at all levels and serve as markers of a carnival. The existing playing mode ensures the importance and essentiality of laughter. M.-A. Hamelin refers to the established palette of the piano techniques and formulas, while demonstrating new algorithms of interpreting the existing traditions. A musical rebus is the leading idea. To embody this idea, it is required to use not only artistic ingenuity, but also the competition elements. These are “Triple” etudes Nr. 1 (after Chopin) and Nr. 4 (after Alkan), where counterpoint techniques are enriched by the principle of combination. The other side of “rebusness” is demonstrated in the Etude Nr. 8, where the plot of “The Elf King” ballad by Goethe is very accurately reproduced through the piano means of expressiveness. Competitive ingenuity presides in the Etude Nr. 7 for the left hand (“The Lullaby” by P. Tchaikovsky) and Nr. 3 – an alternative transcription of “La campanella” by N. Paganini, which turns into an evil joke compared to Liszt’s interpretation. This is another side of laughter, a dark one, an enhancement of grotesque imagery. Etude Nr. 5, “Toccata grottesca”, looks similarly. Here, the grotesque images are represented by transcendental pianism, unceasing “drive”, change of metric pulsation and rhythmic groups, and wide dynamic amplitude. The lookalike expressive complex is also used in another music piece – toccata “L’Homme armé”. Another variant of laugher is the creation of a musical “shapeshifter” – re-interpretation of an original source to the point where it is hardly recognized. For example, Etude Nr. 9 (after Rossini) and Nr. 10 (after Chopin), where the principle of transformation is prevailing. The presence of a highly-intellectual play allows us to draw a parallel with baroque inventory. In the latest etudes of the cycle, M.-A. Hamelin uses such genres as “Minuetto” (Nr. 11) and “Prelude and Fugue” (Nr. 12). Therefore, using a certain genre model, the composer places it in different context conditions, creating a special laughter-playing space, where all the main sources of comic elements are involved: a parody, implemented through the stylization or the style dialogue-collision; daily mode of like, which is refl ected in a festive-carnival worldview, and fantasy, which determines the composer’s inventiveness. M.-A. Hamelin chose the same creative strategy when composing “Variations on the theme of Paganini” for piano solo. A playful piece “Waltz-Minute” is another example of the laughter potency. It resembles either a relative transcription of the famous work by F. Chopin, or a music sketch, or a fi xed improvisation. In the reprise, the graceful and airy waltz turns into a friendly caricature through using the dissonant seconds, the change of touche and an excellent artistic presentation. This creates the effect of distance in time, in epochal or individual style, even in the own “Me”. Another area of the laughter direction employment is the actualization of the playing sound image of the instrument. These are music pieces designed for a player piano. It is signifi cant that the composer tends to the theme of circus, which echoes with carnival, stunts, and fun. Conclusions. Being a universal personality, the artist determines the predominance of combinatorics as a guiding principle of author’s thinking. The key to understanding the composer’s style is the laughter tradition. The main artistic ideas are: portrait, character, mask, “rebus”, competition, creation of “shapeshifting” music pieces, “duality”. Talking about the level of musical stylistics, these features appear through the usage of a quoted material, stylization, grotesque, caricature and pamphlet elements. They are also expressed through the transformation of the original themes, re-interpretation, using multiple rhythmic layers, redesign of modes and counterpoint ingenuity.

Chromic acid reagent as an alternative colorimetric method for the quantitative determination of reducing sugars and ascorbic acid in some selected fizzy drinks: Seven Up, Limca, Mirinda, Cocoa-Cola, Fanta, Pepsi Cola, Maltina, Guinness Malt, Hi-Malt and Maltonic) and fruits: pineapple (Ananas cosmoses), sweet orange (Cimifi sinensis), grape fruit (Dints paradise) and tangerine (Citrus reticulate) has been studied. Chromic method involves sugar solution of about 1% concentration. treated with an equal volume of concentrated nitric acid and a few drops of a 5% solution of potassium dichromate was added, a blue colour develops in less than a minute in the cold and the absorbance taken in a Spectronic 20D Spectrophotometer at 560 um. Results obtained from the simple chromic acid as test method compares well with those obtained from the titrimetric methods of Association of Official Analytical Chemists (AOAC, 2012) and Pearson (1991) as control, with negligible variations. Apart from being a very powerful oxidizing agent, its reaction with monosaccharide, disaccharides and ascorbic acid are less-time consuming, showed distinct colour development and its easy preparation, made chromic acid reagent a faster, better and suitable alternative method for the quantitative determination of reducing sugars and ascorbic acid in routine analyses of foods.
 Keywords: reducing sugar, ascorbic acid, chromic reagent.

This article challenges the privileged position that Glinka’s Kamarinskaia (1848) has assumed in accounts of Russian instrumental music. The first half of the article investigates nineteenth-century reception of Glinka’s orchestral works and demonstrates that his Jota Aragonese (1845) and Memory of a Summer Night in Madrid (1851) were just as popular as Kamarinskaia among Russian audiences of the time. It also traces the persistent references that critics such as Vladimir Stasov and Alexander Serov made to the organic qualities of all three of these orchestral fantasias. Although the variational techniques that Glinka employs in the fantasias have commonly been viewed as the very opposite of organic, Stasov and Serov appear to have been relying on a different theorization of musical organicism, namely that of Adolf Bernhard Marx. A Marxian framework helps to explain the popularity of Jota and Madrid alongside Kamarinskaia in nineteenth-century Russia, and it also provides an entry point for closer analytical investigations of the three fantasias. These analyses, comprising the second half of the article, illustrate certain distinguishing features of each fantasia as noted by nineteenth-century musicians and suggest that the fantasias represent highly divergent approaches to orchestral composition. Given the prominence of all three fantasias in nineteenth-century Russia, an awareness of these contrasting approaches allows for a more nuanced understanding of the compositional choices made by subsequent generations of Russian composers.

Relying on knowledge of Karl Engel's edition of the Volksschauspiel, Karl Simrock's version of the puppet play, Gotthold Lessing's Faust fragments, and versions of the Faust legend by Christopher Marlowe and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, among others, Ferruccio Busoni crafted his own hybrid libretto that depicts a mystical and broadminded Faust. Busoni's music reflects the richness of Faust's mind, combining heterogeneous timbres, forms, and styles. Busoni juxtaposes a Gregorian Credo, Palestrina-style choral settings, a reformation hymn, a Baroque instrumental dance suite, an organ fantasia, recitatives, a lyrical ballad, and orchestral variations, with impressionistic symphonic writing, and experimental passages. While stylistic heterogeneity can be heard throughout many of his mature instrumental and vocal works, Busoni also used this heterogeneity in a descriptive way in Doktor Faust to characterize Faust. At the same time, Busoni sought to write “a history of man and his desire” rather than of a man and the devil. It is Faust's own dark side, rather than the devil, that distracts him and prevents him from completing his greatest work. With Kaspar removed from the plot, Mephistopheles, who as spirit is not always distinct from Faust the man, becomes Faust's alter ego. This duality is expressed musically when Faust assumes Mephistopheles's characteristic intervals. Although Busoni's incomplete Doktor Faust, BV 303, has already been studied by several scholars, including Antony Beaumont, Nancy Chamness, and Susan Fontaine, there is still no detailed analysis of Busoni's treatment of Faust. Through analyses of autobiographical connections, Busoni's early settings of Faustian characters, and the text and music in Doktor Faust, with special attention on the Wittenberg Tavern Scene that has no precedent among the versions of the Faust legend, this article reveals Busoni's vision of Faust as a broadminded, and yet conflicted character, shaped idiosyncratically to convey Busoni's personal artistic ideals. In so doing, the article not only contributes to ongoing discourse about Doktor Faust, but also expands knowledge about ways the Faust legend was interpreted and set musically in the early twentieth century through intertextual comparisons.

Ch.-M. Widor (1844–1937) inscribed his name in the history of French music primarily as an author of organ works (10 Organ Symphonies, 1872–1900, in particular). But other genre branches of his creativity (symphonic, chamber-instrumental, chamber-vocal, operatic, choral) remains less famous for wide public. This quite vast layer is mostly not studied in musical science. However, at the recent time the interest is somewhat growing both among musicologists (A. Thomson, E. Krivitskaya, M. R. Bundy), and among the performers, which confi rms the relevance of this article. The objectives of this study are to consider compositions by Ch.-M. Widor (Piano Concerto No.1, Fantasy, Piano Concerto No.2) both in terms of features of individual creator style and context of concert branch history in France. Information about works is supplemented by the analysis of the basic musical text parameters. Ch.-M. Widor graduated the Brussels Conservatory, where he was studied from 1859 to 1863 – in classes of organ (J.-N. Lemmens) and composition (F.-J. Fetis). At 1860s, the young man was visiting Paris. Soon he was acquainted with C. Saint-Saens, which infl uenced Ch.-M. Widor not only in terms of his executive career turn, but also was etalon of instrumental writing. It seems that the writing of instrumental Concertos for violin (ор. 26, 1877), cello (ор. 41, 1877), and piano (ор. 39, 1876) in many ways is owed by C.Saint-Saens and the impulse to French music of the 1870s given by him. Piano Concerto No.1 f-moll by Ch.-M.Widor was well appreciated by the contemporaries of the composer. In fi rst movement (Allegro con fuoco) the active narrative is combining with predominantly lyrical mood. It passes in constant pulsation without any whimsical tempo deviations, as well as without cadenza using. Contemplative and philosophical meditations are concentrated at the second movement (Andante religioso). The exposition of ideas is embodied in oppositions of characters, concentrated and depth in front of light and joyous. By the way, a little similar can be found in Andante sostenuto quasi adagio of Piano Concerto No.1 (published in 1875) by C. Saint-Saens. The cycle is crowned with a lively scherzo fi nal with elegant dotted rhythm using. On the whole we can say that the Piano Сoncerto No.1 by Ch.-M. Widor purposefully continues the traditions of C. Saint-Saens. This is noticeable in the clarity of the structure, emphatic melody, and also in some specifi c features – the avoidance of long-term solo cadenzas and the absence of expanded orchestra tutti’s, as well as the laconicism of development section at the fi rst movement. Echoes of F. Liszt and C. Franck can be heard in Fantasy As-dur op. 62 for piano and orchestra (1889, dedicated to I. Philipp). Ch.-M. Widor shows interest in this genre type as many other French authors at 1880–1890s. In work there are many counterpoint and variation elements, which is due to author’s mastery of organ-polifonic writing. In our opinion, eclectic combinations of the main subject in the spirit of F. Liszt – R. Wagner with oriental saucy theme at the end of composition are quite in the style of C. Saint-Saens. Piano Concerto No.2 c-moll (1905) is standing out with its clear attachment to the late-romantic line. It is somewhat out of the general context of genre existence in France, especially when comparing with signifi cantly more traditional Piano Concertos by B. Godard (No.2, 1894), C. Saint-Saens (No.5, 1896), T. Dubois (No.2, 1897), A. Gedalge (1899), J. Massenet (1902). This manifests itself in appeal to fateful gloomy spirit, abundance of dark paints in the sound, the complication of the tonal-harmonic language, increased expressivity, psychologization. Here are found more fi ne-tooth application of timbre orchestral potential (in comparison with the Piano Concerto No.1), as well as increasing of orchestra importance upon the whole. This is paradoxical, but its performing tradition has developed not in the best way, so that nowadays this remarkable work is very rarely heard at concert halls. In our time, the author’s creativity is a real terra incognita that encompasses a lot of hidden masterpieces. Results of the research bring to light that examined works by composer are outstanding illustrations of French romantic music. Ch.-M. Widor is an example of original talent that continues the late Romanticism line in France at the end of 19th and fi rst third of the 20th century, together with other authors – L. Vierne, V. d’Indy, A. Magnard, F. Schmitt. His works for piano and orchestra quite deserve to become on a par with recognized masterpieces, included in the concert repertoire of pianists and orchestras by different countries of the world. The perspectives of the further research are defi ned in more detailed analytical labors, including the extension of analysis over Violin Concerto op. 26 and Cello Concerto op. 41 by author. The learning of these works will allow to complement the history of the concert genre of French Romanticism with new details, that will enable to see the evidence of succession and the vitality of traditions.

The Yeast Nucleus edited by P. Fantes and J. Beggs Oxford University Press (2000) 338 pages. ISBN 0–19-963772-5?32.50 Without question, numerous studies in yeast and mammals have revealed a striking commonality of underlying mechanisms that govern basic biological operations. Perhaps the most famous example from recent years has been the recognition that genes required for maintaining the yeast genome play a critical role in preventing cancer in humans. However, examining the molecular differences - the variations on a common theme, so to speak - can also be useful for understanding core biological processes. These ideas are the foundation for The Yeast Nucleus, a valuable contribution to Oxford University Press's ‘Frontiers in Molecular Biology’ series. The textbook compares and contrasts various nuclear processes in budding yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) and fission yeast (Schizosaccharomyces pombe), pointing out the similarities - and differences - that make these two somewhat unrelated yeasts the dominant model systems for studying fundamental eukaryotic processes. Each of the nine chapters is an authoritative review written by experts in the field. The opening chapter surveys the technologies that have propelled efforts to elucidate the functions of the ~6000 predicted protein-encoding genes in S. cerevisiae; this chapter includes sections on bioinformatics, genome-wide transcription and proteome analysis. The next four chapters - covering DNA replication, the mitotic cell cycle, cell cycle checkpoints and nuclear division - form a well-integrated quartet that describes the complex molecular and genetic pathways governing faithful chromosome replication and segregation. The cell cycle chapter, in particular, is presented from a unique perspective: rather than focusing on the physiological changes that occur at each stage, it instead illustrates the molecular machines (i.e. the cyclin-dependent kinases) that propel the cell cycle. The fifth chapter provides a comprehensive discussion on RNA polymerase II transcription in S. cerevisiae that incorporates sections on general transcription factors, coactivators and repressors. It also includes a brief synopsis of the effects of chromatin on transcription, which creates a nice segue to the following chapter on the structure of chromatin at centromeres and telomeres. The final two chapters, on pre-mRNA splicing and nuclear transport of RNA and proteins, focus mainly on the mechanisms identified in budding yeast. The only obvious shortcoming with respect to the scope of this textbook is that it fails to include in-depth discussions of DNA repair and recombination. This publication has several attributes that make it an excellent reference source. First, it is a comprehensive review that weaves a great deal of supplementary information into each chapter. It not only is extensively referenced, but also frequently includes citations to reviews and to yeast database websites for further details. Second, the book is well written and readable. Each chapter is organized in a logical sequence - for example, the chapter on DNA replication starts with origin recognition and ends with Okazaki fragment processing. Furthermore, although the descriptions of genetic and molecular pathways are often encyclopedic, extensive summary tables and/or simple diagrams supplement the discussions and assist the reader in grasping the information. The value of such summary tables can be greatly appreciated when navigating through the maelstrom of mismatched S. cerevisiae and S. pombe CDC and RAD gene nomenclature. Lastly, there is an overall congruity that pulls together the topics of the separate chapters and relates them to one another. For instance, examples of genome-wide analyses are highlighted in several chapters to convey the practicality and usefulness of this approach, and the chapters on splicing and nuclear transport both include small sections that link these activities to other nuclear processes that have been discussed. It is important to note, however, that a complete understanding of many of the sections will require prior knowledge of fundamental genetic principles and molecular biology techniques; for this reason, the book may be better suited to the more advanced reader. The Yeast Nucleus is designed to stimulate thinking - not only about the similarities and differences between the budding and fission yeasts, but about whether comparable mechanisms might be used in other organisms as well. To achieve this goal, it goes beyond a comparative analysis of the two yeasts, and draws parallels with bacteriophage, viral and a variety of metazoan systems when applicable. The result is a well-integrated view that succeeds in providing a foundation for provoking thought about the unity of basic biological mechanisms. Moreover, each chapter concludes with an insightful look at the future direction of the field. In these regards, this publication will serve as a fabulous guidebook for experts as well as students.

Background. Lesia Dychko (born in 1939) is one of the innovators in Ukrainian music of the second half of the 20th century. Among many composers, she is distinguished by the attraction to the music associated with the word. Despite the prevalence of the choral genre in her oeuvre, she pays a lot of attention also to opuses for the solo voice with the instrumental accompaniment. In the fi eld of chamber vocal music, there are characteristic signs of the composer’s style, the richness of the harmonic language, and the author’s fi ligree work with the poetic word. Such features of the L. Dychko’s creative personality are refl ected in the works of many researchers. However, currently there are no studies that addresses the principles of the embodiment of the poetic text. This reveals the relevance of the proposed topic. The purpose of the article is to identify the way in which the semantic and structural properties of P. Tychyna’s poems are refl ected in the song cycle “Enharmonic” by L. Dychko. The following methods have been used to solve the research tasks: historical, genrestyle, structural-functional and comparative. Results. Most of L. Dychko’s chamber vocal cycles for the voice and piano show the composer’s attraction to the heritage of Ukrainian poets, such as P. Grabowsky, V. Kolomiets, I. Franko, and P. Tychyna. The appeal to Tychyna’s poems is indicative of the composer’s aesthetic preference. The reason for the choice was the innovative nature of the poet’s works, which are inherent in poly-rhythm, poly-meter of the poetical lines, musicality of the content and structure, a combination of folklore samples and advanced techniques, and the rich world of images. All these signs already appeared in the fi rst book of P. Tychyna – “The Sun Clarinets” (1918). Its pages are fi lled with sophisticated landscapes, made with bright colours, radiating goodness and humanism. The poems of the collection are endowed with special musicality, numerous sound images, which resulted in the name of many compositions. In particular, the name of the poetic cycle selected by L. Dychko – “Enharmonic” – causes some musical association. It consists of four compositions. Their names describe the state of nature and target the perception of poems – “The Fog”, “The Sun”, “The Wind”, and “The Rain”. The fi gurative and semantic series of each of them is constructed so that their textual basis is a kind of “semantic enharmony” to the title. “Semantic enharmony” means the difference between the text and its name (or other text) by the meaning, but their similarity according to the meaning. To refl ect the rich fi gurative content of the works by P. Tychyna, L. Dychko uses the mixed technique. The synthesis of distant stylistic devices is inherent in all the semantic-structural levels of the romance “Enharmonic”. The proof of this is that the composer gives each composition of the cycle an additional genre designation that has a purely instrumental nature: “The Fantasy” (No. 1), “The Prelude” (No. 2), “The Pastoral” (No. 3), and “The Scherzo” (No. 4). In view of this, in the opus by L. Dychko two kinds of a cyclical composition are combined – vocal and instrumental. When joining poetic and musical rhythms, the composer usually relies on two different principles of the poetic text vocalization, which allows a subtle reproduction of all moods and emotional changes in the verses. In “The Fog” there is the recitation and counter-rhythm, in “The Wind” and “The Rain” the metric and accent increase. Only in “The Sun” metric scheme of the poetic source is retained almost completely. In the domain of the vocal melody, the author combines both the diatonic nature of the short songs with a specifi c modal colouration and chromatic feature and sharp tonal transitions. For example, in “The Fog” there is a gradual complication of melodies: from the Phrygian and Dorian modes with a limited interval to freely interpreted 12-tone space. In “The Wind”, the voice part can be divided into two types according to intonation features which are instrumental and recitativerecitational with song traits. A large mix of different techniques is also announced in the piano part. There is a harmony of classical-romantic type here, impressionistic linearity, and modern sonorous means. Such a variety of different types of the composition and principles of organization of the vertical helps L. Dych ko to convey the range of feelings of Tychyna’s poetry as accurately as possible. Such synthesis of the means of musical expression does not deprive the vocal cycle of integrity, which manifests itself both on the intonation level and on larger levels such as in the structure and principles of the approach to the embodiment of verses. In most cases, the composer limits the interval composition of the vocal melodies of romances, selecting those moves that would refl ect the semantics of the poetic primary sources most clearly. The basis consists of second, third, fourth, and fi fth intonations, and other moves are less common and serve to enhance the expression of the phrase. The unifying factor for all the works of the “Enharmonic” appears to be also the functional purpose of the piano part. It acts as an equal member of the vocal-piano duo and contributes to the implementation of the multilayer semantics of Tychyna’s poetry and its symbolic content. Some regularity also appears in the structure of romances, since “The Fog”, “The Wind” and “The Rain” have similar principles of construction. They are characterized by an improvisational character, a free expansion of the form with a change in the musical content of the sections, the variety of textual types and the culmination at the point of the golden section. “The Sun” is the exception. Its form has features of the couplet-variation structure, since the musical elements from the fi rst stanza are repeated at the beginning of the second, although their elevation is changing. Conclusions. In the embodiment of the symbolic poetry by P. Tychyna, L. Dychko shows an active author’s position, refl ects her vision of its content, emphasizing the important fi gurative and semantic-image units. An important role in this is played by the piano part, which serves as a vivid underline for the main images of the original sources, a kind of “enharmony” of their names. The foregoing confi rms that at the early stage of creativity L. Dychko had already proved herself as an initiative inventor; by combining various stylistic and style techniques, she found the musical equivalent of the content of the poems, revealed their subtext and embodied her own impressions of the perception of P. Tychyna’s poetry.

<p><strong>Abstract.</strong> This is a critique – a rebuke of a method that I helped promote and grow within the cartographic discipline.</p><p>During this era of big-data fetishism, cartographers (including this author) have been searching for ways to analyze maps that are more quantitative than previous, descriptive methods. This discipline-specific shift is part of a much larger, well-documented swing in the sciences away from qualitative analysis (observation, interviewing, and descriptive evaluation) to quantitative data analysis (eye tracking, mouse-click watching, and statistical evaluation). To garner broad research appeal today (i.e., grant funding and publication), cartographic researchers often need to embrace some sort of statistical analysis.</p><p>It is argued here, however, that the results of this positivist trend are <i>not</i> all positive.</p><p>Enter Quantitative Content Analysis (QCA). In a matter of less than 10 years, QCA has gone from an esoteric research technique borrowed from the social sciences to a sure-fire method with which to push out numbers-driven cartographic publications.</p><p>I argue that QCA, a method that once gave promise to help bridge the art-versus-science dichotomy in the mapping sciences, is utterly failing the discipline. The cumulative result of contemporary QCA studies, both well and poorly done, is banal cartography. <i>Banal cartography</i> is defined here as map research that is largely insignificant, unoriginal, and sheds little-to-no-insight on maps that was not already discernible via qualitative observation.</p><p>There are three broad reasons QCA is failing.</p><p>First, QCA is frequently used for the wrong reason. All foundational literature on QCA notes that it should only be used to help answer pre-existing research questions of significance. Reviewing twenty-first-century QCA research in cartography, it is obvious that this is rarely the reason the method is chosen. Instead, it is often used in cartography to create large amounts of numeric data from which researchers can harvest answers to post-facto research questions of dubious merit. This approach nullifies the legitimacy of QCA.</p><p>Second, QCA simply sucks the soul out of cartographic research. The results of the research result in descriptive statistics – when we’re lucky! – that do nothing more than describe a sample of maps that is rarely, if ever, random. The journal articles read like fantasy football statistics about teams and players no one has ever heard of.</p><p>Instead of allowing us to analyze maps for what they are – a communication device in a particular social context – researchers using QCA typically break maps down into a set of binary codes of 1s and 0s.</p><p>Map has a north arrow? Check (1); Map has a title? No (0); ad nauseam.</p><p>Ironically, the numeracy of QCA is working to undermine our understanding of the complexity of maps. QCA merely provides a sum of all a map’s, or group of map’s, parts. We know that maps are always more complex than the elements comprising them. In this regard, QCA adds to a cartographer’s understanding of maps what counting the number of different brush strokes comprising a piece of fine art does for an art historian. With QCA, we are literally taking a visual communication and trying to force it into a data table. What a godawful thing to do!</p><p>Third, cartographers are often sloppy at content analysis making it unlikely most of the (typically inane) results could ever be replicated. If the results can’t be reliably replicated, what’s the point of stripping maps down into numbers and squashing them into spreadsheets? After all, one of the main benefits of content analysis is its supposed replicability.</p><p>Content analysis is brutal. I often quip to my students that I wouldn’t wish the method on my worst enemies. Developing useful codes takes hours, days, and even months of trial and error. Finding a sample of maps that is robust, non-homogenous, and not too systematically sampled is a chore. Then actually doing the analysis? Please see the first sentence of this paragraph for a synopsis.</p><p>That is a summary for one researcher. Content analysis is supposed to be replicable. One must find a second researcher willing to memorize the archaic coding scheme developed by the first, and then go through the same arduous process. Human error and sleep-deprived cheating exists in almost all studies. (Few researchers would openly admit this. But humans are involved in processing massive amounts of visual data. Some of whom are not paid much, if anything, to do it. Of course the work is fallible!)</p><p>Finally, after all of this work, <i>what</i> researchers discover is rarely a diamond in the rough. More typically a lump of coal. Of course, in science this is what is supposed to happen. If you aren’t failing to prove things most of the time, you aren’t doing science. In reality, of course, after spending months, years, and tons of assistant money on coding large datasets, you cannot end up with nothing.</p><p>And alas we come full-circle back to the original problem. New research questions are asked, post-facto (one of the biggest sins in QCA).</p><p>Questions like:</p><p>Was there variation in the dimensionality of bar charts found accompanying <i>Average Annual Precipitation</i> maps in Goode’s World Atlas? Result: Wow! They went three-dimensional for two editions in the 1990s even against the sage advice of Edward Tufte? We can write about this! (Never mind that, perhaps given the context, the change had nothing to do with cartographic decision-making, but a new intern hired to create the graphics.) QCA has a place in cartography, but it’s time we call a spade a spade. Many of the studies using this method are done poorly, are of minimal relevance, and probably don’t provide any knowledge or insight we couldn’t get more reliably via other means. I am not critiquing others alone. Some of my previous research is guilty of this as well. I never felt quite right about it. Artificial intelligence of maps will help alleviate much of the human error and allow us to ask more interesting questions about large samples of maps in the future. It may not alleviate the issues discussed in reason two, however. And until cartographic researchers stop creating QCA datasets to simply harvest for publications, the problem of banal cartography will continue for the foreseeable future. If nothing else, hopefully this abstract helps fuel a debate in the methodology sections of these future papers.</p>

AbstractFew investigations have analyzed the neuroanatomical substrate of empathic capacities in healthy subjects, and most of them have neglected the potential involvement of cerebellar structures. The main aim of the present study was to investigate the associations between bilateral cerebellar macro- and micro-structural measures and levels of cognitive and affective trait empathy (measured by Interpersonal Reactivity Index, IRI) in a sample of 70 healthy subjects of both sexes. We also estimated morphometric variations of cerebral Gray Matter structures, to ascertain whether the potential empathy-related peculiarities in cerebellar areas were accompanied by structural differences in other cerebral regions. At macro-structural level, the volumetric differences were analyzed by Voxel-Based Morphometry (VBM)- and Region of Interest (ROI)-based approaches, and at a micro-structural level, we analyzed Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI) data, focusing in particular on Mean Diffusivity and Fractional Anisotropy. Fantasy IRI-subscale was found to be positively associated with volumes in right cerebellar Crus 2 and pars triangularis of inferior frontal gyrus. The here described morphological variations of cerebellar Crus 2 and pars triangularis allow to extend the traditional cortico-centric view of cognitive empathy to the cerebellar regions and indicate that in empathizing with fictional characters the cerebellar and frontal areas are co-recruited.

Abstract:We analyze a group of literary motifs for building fictive interactions, recurring across one of the richest examples of affective communication in Greek literature: the expression of the causes and effects of love in terms of scenes between lover and beloved. In this thematic set, the poetic expression of love is articulated through a direct or indirect interaction between lover and beloved. We expose the main patterns for the integration of concepts that recur across such interactions, showing how entrenched cognitive templates interplay with different cultural contexts and aesthetic goals. Across different periods, authors blend a variety of conceptual elements, producing different levels of fantasy and mediation between the lover’s viewpoint and the beloved’s ‘reality’. Although there is significant variation in how these scenes are built across periods and genres, they all share a core structure and a number of flexible rules that are based on fundamental cognitive operations. Understanding this cognitive core allows us to model how the meaning is built by the different texts. Examining how particular texts use the template for their specific purposes shows us that cognitive structures with arguably a universal nature are not rigid patterns but fluid recipes, providing starting points for creating novel meanings through skillful usage.

AbstractGuar gum-g-polyacrylamide is a graft copolymer which is used for many industrial applications. This paper outlines the details of synthesis of guar gum -gacrylamide by using potassium peroxymonosulphate/ mercaptosuccinic acid redox pair in an inert atmosphere and their characterization by infrared spectroscopy, UV analysis and study of swelling and thermal properties. Grafting characteristics: %G, %E, %C, %A and %H were determined by using Fanta’s definition; rate of grafting was also calculated. On studying the effect of reaction conditions on grafting characteristics, it was found that the optimum concentration of peroxymonosulphate, mercaptosuccinic acid, hydrogen ion, acrylamide and guar gum for maximum % of grafting were 8.0×10-3, 3.2×10-3, 8.0×10-3, 16.0×10-2 mol dm-3 and 60.0×10-2 g dm-3 respectively. The optimum time duration and temperature of reaction were found to be 120 min and 40 °C respectively. During the study [H+] variation showed prompt changes on grafting characteristics. It was found that after 310 °C the polyacrylamide grafted guar gum was thermally more stable than pure guar gum.

IntroductionIt has been nearly half a century since the appearance of Susan Sontag’s landmark essay “The Imagination of Disaster.” The critic wrote of the public fascination with science fiction disaster films, claiming that, on the one hand “from a psychological point of view, the imagination of disaster does not greatly differ from one period in history to another [but, on the other hand] from a political and moral point of view, it does” (224). Even if Sontag is right about aspects of the imagination of disaster not changing, the types, frequency, and magnitude of disasters and their representation in media and popular culture suggest that dynamic conditions prevail on both counts. Disaster has become a significantly urban phenomenon, and highly publicised “worst case” scenarios such as Hurricane Katrina and the Haiti earthquake highlight multiple demographic, cultural, and environmental contexts for visualising cataclysm. The 1950s and 60s science fiction films that Sontag wrote about were filled with marauding aliens and freaks of disabused science. Since then, their visual and dramatic effects have been much enlarged by all kinds of disaster scenarios. Partly imagined, these scenarios have real-life counterparts with threats from terrorism and the war on terror, pan-epidemics, and global climate change. Sontag’s essay—like most, if not all of the films she mentions—overlooked the aftermath; that is, the rebuilding, following extra-terrestrial invasion. It ignored what was likely to happen when the monsters were gone. In contrast, the psychological as well as the practical, social, and economic aspects of reconstruction are integral to disaster discourse today. Writing about how architecture might creatively contribute to post-conflict (including war) and disaster recovery, for instance, Boano elaborates the psychological background for rebuilding, where the material destruction of dwellings and cities “carries a powerful symbolic erosion of security, social wellbeing and place attachment” (38); these are depicted as attributes of selfhood and identity that must be restored. Similarly, Hutchison and Bleiker (385) adopt a view evident in disaster studies, that disaster-struck communities experience “trauma” and require inspired responses that facilitate “healing and reconciliation” as well as material aid such as food, housing, and renewed infrastructure. This paper revisits Sontag’s “The Imagination of Disaster,” fifty years on in view of the changing face of disasters and their representation in film media, including more recent films. The paper then considers disaster recovery and outlines the difficult path that “creative industries” like architecture and urban planning must tread when promising a vision of rebuilding that provides for such intangible outcomes as “healing and reconciliation.” We find that hopes for the seemingly positive psychologically- and socially-recuperative outcomes accompanying the prospect of rebuilding risk a variety of generalisation akin to wish-fulfilment that Sontag finds in disaster films. The Psychology of Science Fiction and Disaster FilmsIn “The Imagination of Disaster,” written at or close to the height of the Cold War, Sontag ruminates on what America’s interest in, if not preoccupation with, science fiction films tell us about ourselves. Their popularity cannot be explained in terms of their entertainment value alone; or if it can, then why audiences found (and still find) such films entertaining is something that itself needs explanation.Depicted in media like photography and film, utopian and dystopian thought have at least one thing in common. Their visions of either perfected or socially alienated worlds are commonly prompted by criticism of the social/political status quo and point to its reform. For Sontag, science fiction films portrayed both people’s worst nightmares concerning disaster and catastrophe (e.g. the end of the world; chaos; enslavement; mutation), as well as their facile victories over the kinds of moral, political, and social dissolution the films imaginatively depicted. Sontag does not explicitly attribute such “happy endings” to wish-fulfilling phantasy and ego-protection. (“Phantasy” is to be distinguished from fantasy. It is a psychoanalytic term for states of mind, often symbolic in form, resulting from infantile wish-fulfilment, desires and instincts.) She does, however, describe the kinds of fears, existential concerns (like annihilation), and crises of meaning they are designed (purpose built) to allay. The fears are a product of the time—the down and dark side of technology (e.g. depersonalisation; ambivalence towards science, scientists, and technology) and changes wrought in our working and personal lives by urbanisation. In short, then as now, science fictions films were both expressions of deep and genuine worries and of the pressing need to inventively set them to rest.When Sontag claims that “the imagination of disaster does not greatly differ” (224) from one period to another, this is because, psychologically speaking, neither the precipitating concerns and fears (death, loss of love, meaninglessness, etc.), nor the ways in which people’s minds endeavour to assuage them, substantively differ. What is different is the way they are depicted. This is unsurprisingly a function of the political, social, and moral situations and milieus that provide the context in which the imagination of disaster unfolds. In contemporary society, the extent to which the media informs and constructs the context in which the imagination operates is unprecedented.Sontag claims that there is little if any criticism of the real social and political conditions that bring about the fears the films depict (223). Instead, fantasy operates so as to displace and project the actual causes away from their all too human origins into outer space and onto aliens. In a sense, this is the core and raison d’etre for such films. By their very nature, science fiction films of the kind Sontag is discussing cannot concern themselves with genuine social or political criticism (even though the films are necessarily expressive of such criticism). Any serious questioning of the moral and political status quo—conditions that are responsible for the disasters befalling people—would hamper the operation of fantasy and its production of temporarily satisfying “solutions” to whatever catastrophe is being depicted.Sontag goes on to discuss various strategies science fiction employs to deal with such fears. For example, through positing a bifurcation between good and evil, and grossly oversimplifying the moral complexity of situations, it allows one to “give outlet to cruel or at least amoral feelings” (215) and to exercise feelings of superiority—moral and otherwise. Ambiguous feelings towards science and technology are repressed. Quick and psychologically satisfying fixes are sought for these by means of phantasy and the imaginative construction of invulnerable heroes. Much of what Sontag says can straightforwardly be applied to catastrophe in general. “Alongside the hopeful fantasy of moral simplification and international unity embodied in the science fiction films lurk the deepest anxieties about contemporary existence” (220). Sontag writes:In the films it is by means of images and sounds […] that one can participate in the fantasy of living through one’s own death and more, the death of cities, the destruction of humanity itself. Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects in art. In science fiction films disaster is rarely viewed intensively; it is always extensive. It is a matter of quality and ingenuity […] the science fiction film […] is concerned with the aesthetics of disaster […] and it is in the imagery of destruction that the core of a good science fiction film lies. (212–13)In science fiction films, disaster, though widespread, is viewed intensively as well as extensively. The disturbances constitutive of the disaster are moral and emotional as well as material. People are left without the mental or physical abilities they need to cope. Government is absent or useless. We find ourselves in what amounts to what Naomi Zack (“Philosophy and Disaster”; Ethics for Disaster) describes as a Hobbesian second state of nature—where government is inoperative and chaos (moral, social, political, personal) reigns. Science fiction’s way out is to imaginatively construct scenarios emotionally satisfying enough to temporarily assuage the distress (anomie or chaos) experienced in the film.There is, however, a tremendous difference in the way in which people who face catastrophic occurrences in their lives, as opposed to science fiction, address the problems. For one thing, they must be far closer to complex and quickly changing realities and uncertain truths than are the phantastic, temporarily gratifying, and morally unproblematic resolutions to the catastrophic scenarios that science fiction envisions. Genuine catastrophe, for example war, undermines and dismantles the structures—material structures to be sure but also those of justice, human kindness, and affectivity—that give us the wherewithal to function and that are shown to be inimical to catastrophe as such. Disaster dispenses with civilization while catastrophe displaces it.Special Effects and Changing StorylinesScience fiction and disaster film genres have been shaped by developments in visual simulation technologies providing opportunities for imaginatively mixing fact and fiction. Developments in filmmaking include computer or digital techniques for reproducing on the screen what can otherwise only be imagined as causal sequences of events and spectacles accompanying the wholesale destruction of buildings and cities—even entire planets. Indeed films are routinely promoted on the basis of how cinematographers and technicians have advanced the state of the art. The revival of 3-D movies with films such as Avatar (2009) and Prometheus (2012) is one of a number of developments augmenting the panoramas of 1950s classics featuring “melting tanks, flying bodies, crashing walls, awesome craters and fissures in the earth, plummeting spacecraft [and] colourful deadly rays” (Sontag 213). An emphasis on the scale of destruction and the wholesale obliteration of recognisable sites emblematic of “the city” (mega-structures like the industrial plant in Aliens (1986) and vast space ships like the “Death Star” in two Star Wars sequels) connect older films with new ones and impress the viewer with ever more extraordinary spectacle.Films that have been remade make for useful comparison. On the whole, these reinforce the continuation and predictability of some storylines (for instance, threats of extra-terrestrial invasion), but also the attenuation or disappearance of other narrative elements such as the monsters and anxieties released by mid-twentieth century atomic tests (Broderick). Remakes also highlight emerging themes requiring novel or updated critical frameworks. For example, environmental anxieties, largely absent in 1950s science fiction films (except for narratives involving colliding worlds or alien contacts) have appeared en masse in recent years, providing an updated view on the ethical issues posed by the fall of cities and communities (Taylor, “Urban”).In The Invasion of the Bodysnatchers and its remakes (1956, 1978, 1993), for example, the organic and vegetal nature of the aliens draws the viewer’s attention to an environment formed by combative species, allowing for threats of infestation, growth and decay of the self and individuality—a longstanding theme. In the most recent version, The Invasion (2007), special effects and directorial spirit render the orifice-seeking tendrils of the pod creatures threateningly vigorous and disturbing (Lim). More sanctimonious than physically invasive, the aliens in the 1951 version of The Day the Earth Stood Still are fed up with humankind’s fixation with atomic self-destruction, and threaten global obliteration on the earth (Cox). In the 2008 remake, the suave alien ambassador, Keanu Reeves, targets the environmental negligence of humanity.Science, including science as fiction, enters into disaster narratives in a variety of ways. Some are less obvious but provocative nonetheless; for example, movies dramatising the arrival of aliens such as War of the Worlds (1953 and 2005) or Alien (1979). These more subtle approaches can be personally confronting even without the mutation of victims into vegetables or zombies. Special effects technologies have made it possible to illustrate the course of catastrophic floods and earthquakes in considerable scientific and visual detail and to represent the interaction of natural disasters, the built environment, and people, from the scale of buildings, homes, and domestic lives to entire cities and urban populations.For instance, the blockbuster film The Day After Tomorrow (2004) runs 118 minutes, but has an uncertain fictional time frame of either a few weeks or 72 hours (if the film’s title is to taken literally). The movie shows the world as we know it being mostly destroyed. Tokyo is shattered by hailstones and Los Angeles is twisted by cyclones the likes of which Dorothy would never have seen. New York disappears beneath a mountainous tsunami. All of these events result from global climate change, though whether this is due to human (in) action or other causes is uncertain. Like their predecessors, the new wave of disaster movies like The Day After Tomorrow makes for questionable “art” (Annan). Nevertheless, their reception opens a window onto broader political and moral contexts for present anxieties. Some critics have condemned The Day After Tomorrow for its scientific inaccuracies—questioning the scale or pace of climate change. Others acknowledge errors while commending efforts to raise environmental awareness (Monbiot). Coincident with the film and criticisms in both the scientific and political arena is a new class of environmental heretic—the climate change denier. This is a shadowy character commonly associated with the presidency of George W. Bush and the oil lobby that uses minor inconsistencies of science to claim that climate change does not exist. One thing underlying both twisting facts for the purposes of making science fiction films and ignoring evidence of climate change is an infantile orientation towards the unknown. In this regard, recent films do what science fiction disaster films have always done. While freely mixing truths and half-truths for the purpose of heightened dramatic effect, they fulfil psychological tasks such as orchestrating nightmare scenarios and all too easy victories on the screen. Uncertainty regarding the precise cause, scale, or duration of cataclysmic natural phenomena is mirrored by suspension of disbelief in the viability of some human responses to portrayals of urban disaster. Science fiction, in other words, invites us to accept as possible the flight of Americans and their values to Mexico (The Day After Tomorrow), the voyage into earth’s molten core (The Core 2003), or the disposal of lava in LA’s drainage system (Volcano 1997). Reinforcing Sontag’s point, here too there is a lack of criticism of the real social and political conditions that bring about the fears depicted in the films (223). Moreover, much like news coverage, images in recent natural disaster films (like their predecessors) typically finish at the point where survivors are obliged to pick up the pieces and start all over again—the latter is not regarded as newsworthy. Allowing for developments in science fiction films and the disaster genre, Sontag’s observation remains accurate. The films are primarily concerned “with the aesthetics of destruction, with the peculiar beauties to be found in wreaking havoc, in making a mess” (213) rather than rebuilding. The Imagination of Disaster RecoverySontag’s essay contributes to an important critical perspective on science fiction film. Variations on her “psychological point of view” have been explored. (The two discourses—psychology and cinema—have parallel and in some cases intertwined histories). Moreover, in the intervening years, psychological or psychoanalytical terms and narratives have themselves become even more a part of popular culture. They feature in recent disaster films and disaster recovery discourse in the “real” world.Today, with greater frequency than in the 1950s and 60s films arguably, representations of alien invasion or catastrophic global warming serve to background conflict resolutions of a more quotidian and personal nature. Hence, viewers are led to suspect that Tom Cruise will be more likely to survive the rapacious monsters in the latest The War of the Worlds if he can become less narcissistic and a better father. Similarly, Dennis Quaid’s character will be much better prepared to serve a newly glaciated America for having rescued his son (and marriage) from the watery deep-freezer that New York City becomes in The Day After Tomorrow. In these films the domestic and familial comprise a domain of inter-personal and communal relations from which victims and heroes appear. Currents of thought from the broad literature of disaster studies and Western media also call upon this domain. The imagination of disaster recovery has come to partly resemble a set of problems organised around the needs of traumatised communities. These serve as an object of urban governance, planning, and design conceived in different ways, but largely envisioned as an organic unity that connects urban populations, their pasts, and settings in a meaningful, psychologically significant manner (Furedi; Hutchison and Bleiker; Boano). Terms like “place” or concepts like Boano’s “place-attachment" (38) feature in this discourse to describe this unity and its subjective dimensions. Consider one example. In August 2006, one year after Katrina, the highly respected Journal of Architectural Education dedicated a special issue to New Orleans and its reconstruction. Opening comments by editorialist Barbara Allen include claims presupposing enduring links between the New Orleans community conceived as an organic whole, its architectural heritage imagined as a mnemonic vehicle, and the city’s unique setting. Though largely unsupported (and arguably unsupportable) the following proposition would find agreement across a number of disaster studies and resonates in commonplace reasoning:The culture of New Orleans is unique. It is a mix of ancient heritage with layers and adaptations added by successive generations, resulting in a singularly beautiful cultural mosaic of elements. Hurricane Katrina destroyed buildings—though not in the city’s historic core—and displaced hundreds of thousands of people, but it cannot wipe out the memories and spirit of the citizens. (4) What is intriguing about the claim is an underlying intellectual project that subsumes psychological and sociological domains of reasoning within a distinctive experience of community, place, and memory. In other words, the common belief that memory is an intrinsic part of the human condition of shock and loss gives form to a theory of how urban communities experience disaster and how they might re-build—and justify rebuilding—themselves. This is problematic and invites anachronistic thinking. While communities are believed to be formed partly by memories of a place, “memory” is neither a collective faculty nor is it geographically bounded. Whose memories are included and which ones are not? Are these truly memories of one place or do they also draw on other real or imagined places? Moreover—and this is where additional circumspection is inspired by our reading of Sontag’s essay—does Allen’s editorial contribute to an aestheticised image of place, rather than criticism of the social and political conditions required for reconstruction to proceed with justice, compassionately and affectively? Allowing for civil liberties to enter the picture, Allen adds “it is necessary to enable every citizen to come back to this exceptional city if they so desire” (4). However, given that memories of places and desires for their recovery are not univocal, and often contain competing visions of what was and should be, it is not surprising they should result in competing expectations for reconstruction efforts. This has clearly proven the case for New Orleans (Vederber; Taylor, “Typologies”)ConclusionThe comparison of films invites an extension of Sontag’s analysis of the imagination of disaster to include the psychology, politics, and morality of rebuilding. Can a “psychological point of view” help us to understand not only the motives behind capturing so many scenes of destruction on screen and television, but also something of the creative impulses driving reconstruction? This invites a second question. How do some impulses, particularly those caricatured as the essence of an “enterprise culture” (Heap and Ross) associated with America’s “can-do” or others valorised as positive outcomes of catastrophe in The Upside of Down (Homer-Dixon), highlight or possibly obscure criticism of the conditions which made cities like New Orleans vulnerable in the first place? The broad outline of an answer to the second question begins to appear only when consideration of the ethics of disaster and rebuilding are taken on board. If “the upside” of “the down” wrought by Hurricane Katrina, for example, is rebuilding of any kind, at any price, and for any person, then the equation works (i.e., there is a silver lining for every cloud). 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New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2009.———. “Philosophy and Disaster.” Homeland Security Affairs 2, article 5 (April 2006): ‹http://www.hsaj.org/?article=2.1.5›.FilmographyAlien. Dir. Ridley Scott. Brandywine Productions, 1979.Aliens. Dir. James Cameron. Brandywine Productions, 1986.Avatar. Dir. James Cameron. Lightstorm Entertainment et al., 2009.The Core. Dir. Jon Amiel. Paramount Pictures, 2003.The Day after Tomorrow. Dir. Roland Emmerich. 20th Century Fox, 2004.The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Dir. Don Siegel. Allied Artists, 1956; also 1978 and 1993.The Invasion. Dirs. Oliver Hirschbiegel and Jame McTeigue. Village Roadshow et al, 2007.Prometheus. Dir. Ridley Scott. Scott Free and Brandywine Productions, 2012Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope. Dir. George Lucas. Lucasfilm, 1977.Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi. Dir. George Lucas. Lucasfilm, 1983.Volcano. Dir. Mick Jackson. 20th Century Fox, 1997.War of the Worlds. Dir. George Pal. Paramount, 1953; also Steven Spielberg. Paramount, 2005.Acknowledgments The authors are grateful to Oenone Rooksby and Joely-Kym Sobott for their assistance and advice when preparing this article. It was also made possible in part by a grant from the Australian Research Council.