Systems engineering and program management (SE/PM) constitute a large portion of the acquisition cost of military aircraft and guided weapons systems. The goal of this study was the development of a set of cost-estimating relationships that can be used to estimate the SE/PM cost element for development and production of aircraft and weapons programs. The authors canvassed government and industry personnel to learn about current techniques for estimating SE/PM costs, and they collected historical data from several aircraft and weapons programs to investigate trends in SE/PM costs over time and to generate methods that cost analysts can use early in the life cycle of a program when little cost information is available. The authors also investigated the effects on SE/PM costs from acquisition reform, including the reduction in the number of military specifications and standards, the use of integrated product and process teams, and the trend toward "evolutionary acquisition." This product is part of the RAND Corporation monograph series. RAND monographs present major research findings that address the challenges facing the public and private sectors. All RAND monographs undergo rigorous peer review to ensure high standards for research quality and objectivity. Book jacket.
The Air Force has several options for sustaining weapon systems and components but has, in recent years, increasingly chosen contractor logistics support (CLS) over organic support. Still, questions remain about costs and efficiency, even about whether CLS is the best option. The authors explored these by reviewing the relevant government and DoD documents and data and by speaking with various knowledgeable individuals. The authors noted that CLS contracts have often gone to original equipment manufacturers because, lacking the technical data, the Air Force could not choose a third party. They also noted that contracts that guarantee large annual sums limit the Air Force's ability to adjust when its own funding changes and that the reasons underpinning these decisions are not always complete or consistent across the service. Centralizing and standardizing data and the related management skills would help make them available across the Air Force. More important, to retain all its choices for logistics services throughout a system's life cycle, the Air Force should acquire the technical data or data rights near the start of the acquisition process.
The Birth of an Opera offers illuminating insight into how operas are written and the personalities, incidents, and musical circumstances that have shaped their composition. Through a deft compilation of primary sources—letters, memoirs, and personal accounts from composers, librettists, and performers—Michael Rose re-creates for his readers the circumstances that gave rise to fifteen operatic milestones. From Monteverdi and Mozart to Puccini and Berg, each chapter focuses on a well-known opera and tells the story that lies behind its creation. Rather than retreading familiar ground with pages of historical and musical analysis, Rose places each opera firmly in the context of the composer’s life and provides an engaging text in which the varied and colorful personalities involved are seen to discuss, comment, and contribute in one way or another to the progress of its composition. The reader will find Mozart with a new and flamboyant librettist tackling the risky enterprise of Le Nozze di Figaro; Wagner confessing his hidden love for the woman who inspires him as he creates the passionate drama of Tristan und Isolde; Verdi deep in Shakespearian discussion with Boito as they remodel the tragedy of Otello; and Debussy coming almost literally to blows with Maeterlinck over the soprano to take the leading role in Pelléas et Mélisande. Throughout, Rose offers his readers the most direct possible link to events that have often become twisted or obscured by operatic myth, and in so doing he captures the bizarre interactions of chance, genius, practical necessity, and dogged determination that accompanied the making of some of opera’s most enduring masterpieces.
Are special and incentive pays to retain current U.S. Air Force pilot officers more efficient for sustaining the size of the pilot force than accessing new pilots? If so, how much do those pays need to be?
The Birth of an Opera offers illuminating insight into how operas are written and the personalities, incidents, and musical circumstances that have shaped their composition. Through a deft compilation of primary sources—letters, memoirs, and personal accounts from composers, librettists, and performers—Michael Rose re-creates for his readers the circumstances that gave rise to fifteen operatic milestones. From Monteverdi and Mozart to Puccini and Berg, each chapter focuses on a well-known opera and tells the story that lies behind its creation. Rather than retreading familiar ground with pages of historical and musical analysis, Rose places each opera firmly in the context of the composer’s life and provides an engaging text in which the varied and colorful personalities involved are seen to discuss, comment, and contribute in one way or another to the progress of its composition. The reader will find Mozart with a new and flamboyant librettist tackling the risky enterprise of Le Nozze di Figaro; Wagner confessing his hidden love for the woman who inspires him as he creates the passionate drama of Tristan und Isolde; Verdi deep in Shakespearian discussion with Boito as they remodel the tragedy of Otello; and Debussy coming almost literally to blows with Maeterlinck over the soprano to take the leading role in Pelléas et Mélisande. Throughout, Rose offers his readers the most direct possible link to events that have often become twisted or obscured by operatic myth, and in so doing he captures the bizarre interactions of chance, genius, practical necessity, and dogged determination that accompanied the making of some of opera’s most enduring masterpieces.
Later life is a fraught topic in our commercialized, anti-aging, death-denying culture. Where does creativity fit in? The canonical composers whose stories are told in this book--Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901), Richard Strauss (1864-1949), Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992), and Benjamin Britten (1913-1976)--offer radically individual responses to that question. In their late years, each of these national icons wrote an opera around which coalesced major issues about their own creativity and aging, ranging from declining health to the critical expectations that accompany success and long artistic careers. They also had to deal with the social, political and aesthetic changes of their time, including World Wars and the rise of musical modernism. By investigating their attitudes to their creativity in the face of aging, together with their late compositions and the critical reception of them, this book tells the stories of their different but creative ways of dealing with those changes. Bringing their respective specialties of medicine and literary criticism to bear on the study, the authors show how the late nineteenth century, where these stories begin, saw the discovery and definition of "old age” as a social, economic, and medical construct. And thus were born, in the twentieth century, both geriatrics and gerontology as disciplines. Despite recent medical advances and increased life expectancy, the strikingly dichotomous cultural views of age and aging--both positive and negative--have not changed much at all. What also has not changed are the reception of late-life works as caught between decline and apotheosis and the fraught discourse of "late style.” The stories in this book weave all these elements together, highlighting both the shared vicissitudes of aging and the individual power of creativity as a way to meet them.
Historical Dictionary of Romantic Music, Second Edition covers the persons, ideas, practices, and works that made up the worlds of Western music during the long 19th century (ca. 1780–1918). It’s the first book to recognize that Romantic music was very nearly a global phenomenon. It includes more women, more Black musicians and other musicians of color, and more exponents of musical Romanticism from Central and South America as well as Central and Eastern Europe than any other single-volume study of Romantic music—thus challenging the conventional hegemony of musical Romanticisms by men and by Western European nations. This book includes entries on topics including anti-Semitism, sexism, and racism that were pervasive and defining to the worlds of musical Romanticism but are rarely addressed in general studies of that subject. It includes Romantic musicians who were not primarily composers, as well as topics such as the Haitian Revolution, spirituals, and ragtime that were more important for music in the long 19th century than is generally acknowledged. The result is an expansive, inclusive, diverse, and more richly textured portrayal of Romantic music than is elsewhere available. Historical Dictionary of Romantic Music, Second Edition contains a chronology, an introduction, an extensive bibliography, and a dictionary section with more than 600 cross-referenced entries on traditions, famous pieces, persons, places, technical terms, and institutions of Romantic music. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about Romantic music.
In Performing Opera: A Practical Guide for Singers and Directors Michael Ewans provides a detailed and practical workbook to performing many of the most commonly produced operas. Drawing on examples from twenty-four operas ranging in period from Gluck and Mozart to Britten and Tippett, it illustrates exactly how opera functions as dramatic form. Grounded in close analyses of performances of thirty scenes and five whole operas by first-rate singers and celebrated directors, Performing Opera provides readers with an appreciation of the unique challenges and skills required by performers and directors. It will assist them in their own performance and equip them with detailed knowledge of works most commonly featured in the repertoire. In the first part of the book the analysis progresses from scenes in which the singers are silent, via arias and monologues, duets and confrontations, up to ensembles. Wider issues are subsequently addressed: encounters with offstage events, encounters with the numinous, characterization, and the sense of inevitability in tragic opera.
An aspect of dying in opera, rarely observed or commented on, is Sudden Unexpected Death. There are many deaths in this melodramatic genre: most follow expected causes like murder, suicide, or old age. This book explores those deaths which occur without obvious natural causes. These are often central to the overall drama of the opera, representing denouements forming the epiphany of the story and the apotheosis for the audience. The book identifies 50 operas where such events occur, exploring the role of the dramatis personae, the circumstances of their dying, and specific themes that emerge. These include a preponderance of females, especially in the 19th century, who die mainly at the end of the operas, often in the context of tragedy. It charts the growing awareness in the medical sciences of the unconscious forces driving human behaviour, including liminal mental states and trances, which influenced these operas and continue to affect human behaviour to the present day. In addition, the changing philosophies that are intertwined with operatic narratives, in particular stemming from Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, are important in the book’s exegesis, as is the special role of Wagner’s compositions. This leads to the exploration of recurrent concepts such as the Liebestod, the ewig Weibliche and redemption itself.
After a decomposed body is discovered in an abandoned military tunnel, Inspector Aurelio Zen travels north to the Italian Alps to investigate. At first glance, the death appears to have been an accident. But when Zen takes a closer look, a mysterious tattoo begins to tell a much more sinister tale, especially after the body is snatched from the morgue. As Zen races to discover the inner workings of a clandestine military organization named Medusa, he is reminded of just how lethal Italian history can be. Medusa takes us on an exploration of the dark history of post-war Italy and a modern-day sightseeing tour of what Zen calls Italia Lite. In the urbane and pragmatic Zen, world-class mystery novelist Michael Dibdin has given us a detective unlike any other. And in this latest installment of this critically acclaimed series, we are treated to a mystery that drips with intrigue and a thriller so satisfying the pages cannot be turned fast enough.
This authoritative and vividly written book brings readers into the heart of Italian literary culture from the 1690s to the present. It probes the work of major authors in their broad cultural context, traces the history of audiences and publishers, explores the shifting relationship between public and private, assesses the impact of significant historical trends and events on creative processes, and establishes the continuities as well as the discontinuities of the Italian literary tradition. A synoptic overview at the beginning of the volume is designed to help the reader get her or his bearings in the detail of the nine chapters which follow. Using an essentially chronological framework, the book is divided into three major cultural time-spans: the long eighteenth century, the decades of national identity formation and the creation of modern', industrial Italy between 1816 and 1900, and the twentieth century with its constant renegotiation of national cultural identity. A final epilogue provides a snapshot of Italian literary culture in the near-present. This is a book which will be readily accessible to students and all those interested in Italian culture, and at the same time is based on the most up-to-date scholarship. New readings of the canonical authors rub shoulders with a refreshing attention to standard and popular writing, gender issues, and the interaction between written and oral forms, producing a history of modern Italian literature which is new in its conception and its scope.
Institutional bypass is a reform strategy that creates alternative institutional regimes to give citizens a choice of service provider and create a form of competition between the dominant institution and the institutional bypass. While novel in the academic literature, the concept captures practices already being used in developing countries. In this illuminating book, Mariana Mota Prado and Michael J. Trebilcock explore the strengths and limits of this strategy with detailed case studies, showing how citizen preferences provide a benchmark against which future reform initiatives can be evaluated, and in this way change the dynamics of the reform process. While not a 'silver bullet' to the challenge of institutional reform, institutional bypasses add to the portfolio of strategies to promote development. This work should be read by development researchers, scholars, policymakers, and anyone else seeking options on how to promote change and implement reforms in developing countries around the world.
Michael Macdonald sees Europe (and particularly England, France, and Germany) as the primary foundation of our western way of life, producing many of our greatest thinkers, artists, writers, politicians, and saints. While Europe, A Tantalizing Romance affirms the value of all European cultures, Macdonald chooses to focus mostly on the literary, artistic, philosophical, and theological contributions of England, France, Germany, Russia, central Europe, and Scandinavia, as well as a number of Europe's most visited cities--London, Paris, Berlin, Munich, Vienna, Prague, Moscow, St. Petersburg, Copenhagen, Rome, Florence, Venice, Madrid, and Athens. This book provides readers with a brief, scholarly, practical synthesis of what Europe stands for and has to offer its visitors. Revised numerous times based upon the author's experiences as Director of the European Quarter at Seattle Pacific University, this is an invaluable guide for travelers and non-travelers alike.
Now available in paperback and with over 10,000 entries, the Oxford Dictionary of Music (previously the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Music) offers broad coverage of a wide range of musical categories spanning many eras, including composers, librettists, singers, orchestras, important ballets and operas, and musical instruments and their history. The Oxford Dictionary of Music is the most up-to-date and accessible dictionaryof musical terms available and an essential point of reference for music students, teachers, lecturers, professional musicians, as well as music enthusiasts.
In London, 1892, a well-guarded young nobleman goes missing under distressing circumstances. The nobleman, one Baron Renfrew, is actually Prince Albert Victor, eldest grandson of Queen Victoria. He disappeared while he was visiting a house of ill repute, with bodyguards both inside and outside the building—with his inside bodyguard rendered unconscious and the trussed-up corpse of a brutally murdered young woman left behind. Hoping to find the missing Prince and to clear him of the murder, the royal family is looking for a brilliant—and, more importantly, discreet—investigator. Sherlock Holmes, alas, is out of the country so, at the suggestion of his brother Mycroft, they turn to the only man who just might be more brilliant—Dr. James Moriarty. Moriarty, at the time, is up on charges of murder, awaiting retrial after his first jury was hung. In exchange for his release and the murder charges (of which he's innocent), the so-called "Napoleon of Crime" will use all his resources to track down the missing prince and find out who is behind his disappearance and the brutal murders left in his wake. He soon finds that someone out there is laying a trail, setting up Moriarty himself to take the fall for the crimes. If the real Moriarty doesn't manage to unravel and foil this plot soon, he may never again draw another free breath. Who Thinks Evil is the fifth Professor Moriarty novel from Michael Kurland.
Penetrating, sometimes controversial insights into her genius, commenting on her choice of repertory, and speculating about the reasons behind the concert cancellations that brought her so much publicity. The book also features a discography, a complete list of Callas's performances, and 31 photographs, many previously unknown. With enthusiasm and vitality, Michael Scott has brilliantly captured Callas's life and artistic milieu in a fascinating exploration of one of.
An interdisciplinary study of the interconnected subtexts of erotic attraction, illness, and death in several 19th- and 20th-century operatic texts. This is an examination of how opera uses the singing body to give voice to the suffering person. It presents medical and literary sources to make sense of the changing depiction of disease in opera.
The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Music is the most authoritative and up-to-date dictionary of music available in paperback. Coverage includes musical terms from allegro to zingaro, and musical works from Aida to Zauberflote, as well as composers, librettists, musicians, singers, and orchestras. It provides a mine of information for all lovers of music." "The book includes musical instruments and their history; and covers living composers and performers, with over 150 added for this edition."--BOOK JACKET.
A glorious plum-pudding of a book, to be consulted, with pleasure and profit, over and over again' Sir Jeremy Isaacs Michael Steen's 'Great Composers' was originally published in 2003. A lifetime's work and almost 1000 pages long, it has since become 'the' reference point and key read on the biographical backgrounds to classical music's biggest names. Authoritative and hugely detailed - but nonetheless a joy to read - this new edition will expand its readership further and capitalise on a newfound popular interest in classical music. Steen's book helps you explore the story of Bach, the respectable burgher much of whose vast output was composed amidst petty turf disputes in Lutheran Leipzig; or the ugly, argumentative Beethoven in French-occupied Vienna, obsessed by his laundry; or Mozart, the over-exploited infant prodigy whose untimely death was shrouded in rumour. Read about Verdi, who composed against the background of the Italian Risorgimento; or about the family life of the Wagners; and, Brahms, who rose from the slums of Hamburg to become a devotee of beer and coffee in fin-de-siecle Vienna, a cultural capital bent on destroying Mahler ... and much, much more.
Aging and creativity can seem a particularly fraught relationship for artists, who often face age-related difficulties as their audience’s expectations are at a peak. In Four Last Songs, Linda and Michael Hutcheon explore this issue via the late works of some of the world’s greatest composers. Giuseppe Verdi (1813–1901), Richard Strauss (1864–1949), Olivier Messiaen (1908–92), and Benjamin Britten (1913–76) all wrote operas late in life, pieces that reveal unique responses to the challenges of growing older. Verdi’s Falstaff, his only comedic success, combated Richard Wagner’s influence by introducing young Italian composers to a new model of national music. Strauss, on the other hand, struggling with personal and political problems in Nazi Germany, composed the self-reflexive Capriccio, a “life review” of opera and his own legacy. Though it exhausted him physically and emotionally, Messiaen at the age of seventy-five finished his only opera, Saint François d’Assise, which marked the pinnacle of his career. Britten, meanwhile, suffering from heart problems, refused surgery until he had completed his masterpiece, Death in Venice. For all four composers, age, far from sapping their creative power, provided impetus for some of their best accomplishments. With its deft treatment of these composers’ final years and works, Four Last Songs provides a valuable look at the challenges—and opportunities—that present themselves as artists grow older.
This book covers comprehensive text and reference work on atmospheric models for methods of numerical modeling and important related areas of data assimilation and predictability. It incorporates various aspects of environmental computer modeling including an historical overview of the subject, approximations to land surface and atmospheric physics and dynamics, radiative transfer and applications in satellite remote sensing, and data assimilation. With individual chapters authored by eminent professionals in their respective topics, Advanced Topics in application of atmospheric models try to provide in-depth guidance on some of the key applied in atmospheric models for scientists and modelers.
(Amadeus). Think opera's just about starving artists, vengeful goddesses, randy noblemen, and adulterous lovers? Think again. In So When Does the Fat Lady Sing? , Michael Walsh, the former music critic for Time magazine, takes audiences on a wise and witty dash through 400 years of operatic history and culture. More a freewheeling dialogue between author and reader than a traditional quiz book, So When Does the Fat Lady Sing? poses irreverent and impertinent questions designed not so much to test knowledge as to inspire and entertain both expert and novice alike. Curtain up!
Your complete introduction to Shakespeare William Shakespeare has been hailed as one of the greatest thinkers of all time, one of the world's finest artists, poets and dramatists. Shakespeare: A Complete Introduction introduces and explains the plays by looking at how they work, taking you on a journey through the genres of comedy, history and tragedy. The best known and most popular plays are discussed in detail and even plays in which Shakespeare may have had only the briefest creative and collaborative interest as a writer, get at least a mention. With material on his poetry and discussions on aspects of his life too, this truly is a complete introduction to Shakespeare. 'A very lively and enthusiastic introduction to the full range of Shakespeare's plays' John Drakakis, Professor of English, University of Stirling 'A masterpiece of the genre, written as it is with passion, without condescension, without jargon, thoughtful and open to changing critical theories, but always returning to the plays themselves, plays that fully reveal themselves most in performance.' Martin Wine, Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC)
Bodily Charm is a passionate defense of opera as a living as well as live art. Written for both the opera lover and the specialist by a physician and a literary critic, it is an accessible and engaging interdisciplinary exploration of the operatic body—both the actual physical bodies of the singers and audience members and the represented body on stage in operas such as Death in Venice, Salome, Rigoletto, Der Ring des Nibelungen, and Elektra.
On the eve of World War II, a promising young high school musician has his dreams and aspirations for a life in music suddenly interrupted by the call to war. With a fateful and circuitous path leading Arnald D. Gabriel to participate as a machine gunner with the 29th Infantry, on June 6, 1944-D-Day-he finds himself fighting for his country on Omaha Beach. However, from frontline combat and the horrors of war comes the story of a hero who will ultimately realize his dream. The Force of Destiny chronicles the journey of Colonel Arnald D. Gabriel as he navigates the challenges of war and its aftereffects to eventually rise to the pinnacle of his profession as the commander and conductor of the United States Air Force Band in Washington, DC. Conducting in all fifty states and across the globe in fifty countries, Col. Gabriel is known worldwide for his innovative and powerful leadership style and his unique musical genius. Not just a hero in the music profession, his Bronze Stars and other combat awards speak to his heroism in defense of his country and its values. With a destiny in music and a fate that would shape his personal character and professional future, discover in his powerful story a quest of courage and triumph, magnificence and admiration, and the pursuit of excellence.
Fifty-year-old Bill Harness is on a strange but seemingly benign journey, rambling across the country in an old Pontiac and anonymously leaving large checks with promising young opera singers. His fuel, however, is sorrow, and it isn't until he arrives in Seattle and befriends Gabriella Compton, a phenomenally talented soprano, that he is able to address the three great tragedies of his vocally-gifted family.
Marking the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Aldous Huxley (1894–1963), Temporaries and Eternals focuses on the music column that Huxley wrote for The Weekly Westminster Gazette in 1922–23. Readers of Huxley’s novels, essays and travel writing will be aware of the wealth of musical detail in these works, and this book suggests that such references can only be fully understood in the context of the opinions voiced in Huxley’s music criticism. Not only does Huxley’s column offer a fascinating snapshot of musical life in 1920s Britain, but several of the themes that Huxley explores continue to have contemporary relevance. These include music and technology, the composer-performer relationship, the nature of the child prodigy, musical tradition and innovation, the suitability of opera libretti, and how to write about music effectively. However, Huxley’s central theme, reflected in the title of this book, is the problematic question of how to judge the significance and potential longevity of specific composers and their works, from Palestrina to Schoenberg. After an extended introduction placing Huxley’s music criticism in the context of his other writings, the book reproduces all 64 of Huxley’s weekly articles, with footnote commentary to help the reader appreciate his wide-ranging textual references.
Thank you for visiting our website. Would you like to provide feedback on how we could improve your experience?
This site does not use any third party cookies with one exception — it uses cookies from Google to deliver its services and to analyze traffic.Learn More.