Oxford University Press's Blog, page 274

Romance and reality: clinical science in liver transplant for alcoholism

Many view organ transplantation as one of the miracles of modern medicine: preserving a person’s life by providing a new liver, heart, lung, kidney, or other organ where the original vital organ has failed. One sees the transplant surgeon as the proverbial knight in shining armor riding a white horse and impaling the demons of death and disease on the end of his sharp-pointed lance. In this view, the patient receiving the organ graft is naturally worthy, good-hearted, and grateful for the new hope of a long life that is used to pass along the gift from the knight and his or her retainers—in our day called the transplant team. What wonderful contributions in modern medicine from organ donors and their families, the recipients, and the medical professionals themselves.

So far, all is well and good. Enter the alcoholic with severe liver failure due in part to drinking, a condition that will claim his or her life—with “end stage” liver disease for which there is no medical alternative for a cure. An alcoholic? Give an alcoholic a new liver when they have destroyed with drink the one Nature already provided? Graft a new liver in someone who will destroy the graft with their uncontrolled drinking? Some estimate that one in every two households has direct experience with an alcoholic relative, and very unpleasant experiences when they are drinking. Throw a liver away on someone like that? Surely this will tarnish the reputation—and perhaps the shining armor—of the knight.

Is it really the case of an idealized knight-provider and a mythological fiend in human form who can’t be trusted? Clinical science argues no. The knight does not merely aim a lance and spur the charger on to certain victory. In a field in which the need for donated organs overwhelms the supply of viable donor organs, the knight must decide where best to allocate the resource, not merely charge ahead.

The alcoholic with liver disease has a liver from birth that is genetically vulnerable in some way to the ravages of drink. Only about 15% of heavy drinkers develop alcoholic liver disease. The other 85% of heavy drinkers will never need a transplanted liver. Should the 15% die because of their genetic vulnerability to alcoholism—a treatable condition in which large numbers recover every year?

“Should the 15% die because of their genetic vulnerability to alcoholism—a treatable condition in which large numbers recover every year?”

And again, for reasons no one understands exactly, women are more vulnerable to alcoholic liver disease than men. They can acquire it by drinking more alcohol than is good for their liver but not enough for their brain to lose the ability to control alcohol use—the principal characteristic of alcoholism. Should women with alcoholic liver disease—but without alcoholism—die each year because of their gender and the genetics associated with it—confusing liver disease with brain alcohol addiction? Rather, clinical science brings its principles and its need for evidence, rather than surface biases, to bear in finding appropriate answers.

Over thirty years ago, a judge in the US state of Michigan held that alcoholism alone was not sufficient grounds for denying liver transplant. Transplant programs must provide rational criteria that can be fairly applied in deciding how to allocate a precious resource. The transplant surgeons and the internal medicine liver specialists then turned to a humble, itinerant psychiatrist to assist with this along the lines the Court guided. In a field full of biases, including for wishful cures, guidance came from the work of George Vaillant and his landmark studies in The Natural History of Alcoholism and its second Revisited edition.

There followed a clarification of the factors leading to sustained abstinence from alcohol that could be assessed in liver transplant candidates. As alcoholic candidates received life saving liver grafts, outcome studies across many centers demonstrated that alcoholic recipients fared as well or better than those receiving new livers for non-alcohol related conditions. Striking among them were the high rates of abstinence, again documented across centers. Findings such as this now drive pursuit of further scientific understanding.

Much research and discussion has since centered on transplant candidate evaluation and selection, as well as patient/candidate subgroups including those suffering from intractable alcoholic hepatitis. Long-term post-transplant outcomes among alcoholics receiving liver grafts have further informed candidate selection. Clinical observations have opened a door to basic research on the role of immunosuppressants found to decrease alcohol use in rodents.

Scientific findings such as these point to a miracle, not in the wishful sense of shining knights and storm-ridden demons, but rather of persistent searches for evidence by all who examine biases and pre-ordained conclusions in this multi-faceted topic.

Featured image credit: High magnification micrograph of a liver with cirrhosis. Trichrome stain. The most common cause of cirrhosis in the Western world is alcohol abuse – the cause of cirrhosis in this case. Image by nephron. CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons. 

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Greenwashing the garrison state

Across the globe, the garrison state has “gone green” as national militaries have become partly involved in stewardship of the natural environment. On the face of it, this is a puzzling development. After all, protecting plants and animals from the depredations of humankind is not a job that most people expect from women and men in uniform. Yet the co-existence of militarized sites with environmental protection zones is now commonplace, with military organizations increasingly taking a role in conserving the natural world—at least nominally. How and why has this shift come about? And for whose benefit and expense?

Perhaps nowhere is the unlikely alliance between militarism and environmentalism more pronounced than in the Chagos Archipelago, a collection of around 60 tiny islets in the central Indian Ocean. Formerly governed by the British Empire as part of the Colony of Mauritius, the Chagos Islands were made into a new colony, the British Indian Ocean Territory, in 1965. At the time, the islands were home to around 1,500 indigenous islanders. Within just eight years, however, the colonial authorities in London had emptied the entire territory of its native inhabitants in order to clear the way for a US military base on the largest island of Diego Garcia. “The object of the exercise is to get some rocks which will remain ours,” officials confided.

Ever since the expulsion of the native Chagossians, the Chagos Archipelago has been a contested site. To the Chagossians, of course, the islands are a lost homeland; the islanders have been nothing but indefatigable in their political and legal efforts to win a restoration of their right to return. To Britain and the US governments, meanwhile, the Chagos Islands are a vital military asset—the site of one of the most important naval bases in the world, prized by the Pentagon for its unparalleled seclusion as much as its natural harbor and strategic location.

Over the last decade, however, a new audience has taken a keen interest in the Chagos Islands: environmental scientists and conservationists. To these groups, Chagos is valued as a “near pristine” natural environment and a “safe haven” for endangered wildlife. Because Diego Garcia is the only island in the Chagos Archipelago to have been permanently inhabited for the past 50 years, the surrounding marine environment of Chagos has had a chance to flourish free from “anthropocentric impacts.” The coral reefs, fish, turtles, rare species of birds and more have been able to thrive in the shadow of the military base.

In 2008, a group of scientists involved with studying the Chagos marine environment joined forces with an array of conservation groups to push for the establishment of a Marine Protected Area (MPA) in Chagos. Calling themselves the Chagos Environment Network (CEN), these groups sought to persuade the British government to designate a “no-take” MPA in the territory. With few exceptions, the leading Chagossian groups opposed this particular form of MPA, viewing it as an additional hurdle to their eventual resettlement of the islands. Far better, they and their supporters argued, to frame the MPA in a way that would allow their sustainable resettlement of the islands. From this view, environmental protection and human rights could go hand-in-hand.

Instead, the UK government sided with the conservationists and announced the creation of a massive MPA to cover the entire British Indian Ocean Territory, except for a small area surrounding the island of (and base on) Diego Garcia. The announcement was made over and above the protestations of Mauritius—an act later found to have been in breach of international law—and despite opposition from the biggest Chagossian organizations, but was warmly welcomed by the constituent parts of the CEN: Pew Environment, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, the Zoological Society of London, the Linnean Society, and others.

The co-existence of militarized sites with environmental protection zones is now commonplace, with military organizations increasingly taking a role in conserving the natural world.

To be sure, not all conservationist groups supported the MPA proposal as put forward by the CEN. One sticking point was the conspicuous exemption granted to the base on Diego Garcia. Yet the largest and most powerful environmental groups backing the Chagos MPA proposal made no criticism of the military base. Certainly Pew Environment, which played a major role in financing the campaign for a “no-take” MPA, did not censure the base for its polluting activities. Nor even did Greenpeace, an organization which had previously lent its full support to the islanders’ plight.

In effect, a bargain has been struck between environmentalist groups like Pew Environment and the UK and US governments. London and Washington have acquiesced in the creation of a conservation zone around their prized military asset while environmentalists have agreed to tolerate—and, indeed, to work closely alongside—the base on Diego Garcia in the name of conserving and studying the rest of the Chagos marine environment.

For London and Washington, the benefit is clear. Instead of being the site of an historic ethnic cleansing, the Chagos Islands are now best known for boasting a “pristine” natural environment. The biggest losers from this arrangement are the Chagossians. The islanders’ cause would have benefited enormously if some of the world’s most powerful conservation groups had chosen to ally with them against colonialism and militarism instead of cozying up to White Hall and the Pentagon. Mauritius, too, has lost out: with British rule in Chagos buttressed by the MPA, the decolonization of Africa’s easternmost maritime extremity looks as distant a prospect as ever.

The irony, of course, is that military organizations must surely rank among the least reliable custodians of the natural environment. For now, the US military’s interests in Chagos might well coincide with those of Pew Environment, Greenpeace UK, and their fellow travelers. After all, the MPA places no restrictions on the military’s freedom of maneuver (not even on the rights of US service personnel to fish in the waters of Chagos), while offering valuable “greenwash” to disguise the military’s more unpalatable activities—including instances of severe environmental degradation.

But what happens when the Pentagon decides to expand its base on Diego Garcia? Or what if the other Chagos Islands are earmarked for the construction of new military installations? Of course, the MPA and wider concerns over the Chagos marine environment would be sidelined in favor of increased militarization. If that happens, environmental scientists and conservationists working on Chagos might quickly come to regret their politics of pragmatism.

Featured image credit: lagoon boat sunset the water shed by Kanenori. Public domain via Pixabay.

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How to spot ambiguity

Not long ago, a colleague was setting up a meeting and suggested bringing along spouses to socialize after the business was done. Not getting a positive reply, she emailed: “I’m getting a lack of enthusiasm for boring spouses with our meeting.”

A minute later, a second, clarifying email arrived indicating that she “meant boring as a verb not an adjective.” She had spotted the ambiguity in the first message.

Ambiguity, as the word itself suggests, arises when words or phrases can be understood in more than one way. It can come from a word with more than one meaning (like “fresh”), from different words that sound and spell alike (like “bow” or “bare”/”bear”), or from words that can be combined in different ways, like “boring spouses.” Many ambiguities are easily resolved by linguistic or social context. The words “with our meeting” mostly disambiguates things in the example above, but until the reader gets to that phrase, “boring” could be read as either a verb or an adjective.

Of course, words can be ambiguous even if their part of speech is clear. At a lunchtime presentation, a visiting writer mentioned that he belonged to a bimonthly writers’ collaborative. I stopped listening for a few seconds, pondering whether the group met every two months or every two weeks. I even thought about asking for clarification, but the speaker had already moved on to another point.

As writers and speakers, we know what we want to say, so potential ambiguity does not always strike us until later—when we see what we have written or when someone else reads it and points it out to us. When a journalist writes “between two and ten thousand people will be affected,” they almost certainly mean between two thousand and ten thousand. Otherwise, that is a rather useless estimate. Most listeners or readers will not be misled by the phrasing, but some readers will (as I was when I heard that sentence on the radio).

As writers and speakers, we are not always as clear as we would like.

Pronouns create problems involving ambiguity of reference. A line in the description of the play Off the Rails recently tripped me up: “Captain Angelo orders the Sherriff to arrest Momaday, a young Pawnee boy, for impregnating his love, the Irish orphan Caitlin.” Is the “his” of “his love” Captain Angelo’s or Momaday’s? When you know that the play is a reimagining of Measure for Measure, you can figure out the ambiguity, but without the context or other clues provided by intonation, the sentence may be confusing.

Some ambiguities are hard to diagnose even when you spot them. I got an email about a campus retirement event that invited me in large, bold type to COME CELEBRATE THE RETIREMENT OF so-and-so. I knew what was intended, but it seemed to me that the wording could be taken two ways: as an invitation to celebrate someone’s future absence (the good-riddance interpretation) or to celebrate the person’s freedom from labor (the lucky-stiff interpretation). In other words, the phrase “celebrate the retirement of” can be understood from the perspective of the workplace or from the perspective of the retiree. We naturally go for the more polite interpretation, but the other is there, lurking in the corner.

As writers and speakers, we are not always as clear as we would like. But as editors and self-editors, we should cultivate an eye for the possibility of multiple meanings that distract and derail our audience.

Even the most commonplace expressions can surprise you with their Janus-like character. As the last academic year wound down, I cheerily mentioned to someone that “It is all downhill from here.”

“You know,” she replied, “you can take that two ways.”

Featured image credit: “Keyboard” by Jeroen BennInk. CC by 2.0 via Flickr . 

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Introducing March Mammal Madness

March is a notable month for basketball enthusiasts across the United States, as college teams face off and are narrowed down to one final champion. But for those of us who aren’t as inclined to get in on the sporting excitement, there is an alternative: March Mammal Madness (MMM).

MMM was started in 2013 by Dr. Katie Hinde, Associate Professor at Arizona State University. Dr. Hinde, who studies the influence of mammal milk on infant development, had stumbled upon an “Animal Madness” bracket from a popular website, but was disappointed that it was based on “cuteness” rather than scientific research. It also contained only 16 competitors. Deciding there should be an alternative, Dr. Hinde enlisted three colleagues to help her create “March Mammal Madness”, a virtual competition between a whopping 64 different species.

The bracket for MMM is modeled after the NCAA Championship bracket, and participants fill it out based on which animal they think would win a real face-off based on scientific evidence. The species engage in a virtual “battle”, which is narrated on Twitter and is backed by scientific research. The winning species is based on fact and a bit of chance.

While this fun competition serves a variety of audiences, its most prominent venue has been classrooms across America. Educators can request early-access to the bracket in order to get ahead on lesson planning. Kids of all ages and abilities enjoy learning about the various species of mammals all month long. Linda Correll of Kettle Run High School in Virginia says “MMM is a wonderful and engaging teaching tool that gets kids excited about biological themes like ecology, evolution, and animal behavior. Students will remember MMM and the lessons they learn from it long after the class is over.”

Lindsey Brant of South Stark Career Academy in Ohio assigns each student in her Small Animal Science and Care program one of the animals in the bracket to research. Students present their findings to the class, who use the information to inform the way that they complete their brackets. Brant has been utilizing MMM in her curriculum since it began six years ago, and says it’s “a unique and engaging way to get kids excited about learning about animals, habitats, and threats to survival. My students get so excited to hear about the match-ups and we have very lively discussions about why we agree or disagree with what happened in the battle.”

Laura Julien of Lancaster High School in Ohio uses the program less formally. “The day after each battle we discuss the particulars and students update their brackets. Students really get into their chosen animal and talk about the features of the animal.”

Todd Ryan of Westborough High School in Massachusetts has played MMM with his students every year for the past three years. “I have a couple of students that have emailed me every year since my class showing me their bracket and asking to see mine! The students are in serious research mode when filling in their brackets and are genuinely disappointed when their chosen champion gets knocked out!” Ryan also incorporates MMM into an art project to help his AP Biology students destress after their Advanced Placement exam.

Brackets hang in the classroom of Laura Julien of Lancaster High School in Ohio. Image used with permission.

Alternative MMM artwork by Michelle Li, a student from Todd Ryan’s AP Biology class at Westborough High School in Massachusetts. Image used with permission.

Lara Durgavich‏ plays MMM with her two-year-old daughter, utilizing animal toys to teach the different species. Image used with permission.

Graduate departments and organizations enjoy getting in on the MMM fun too! This plaque hangs in a lab at UW Madison. Image used with permission.

MMM is a great learning activity for all ages. Here, daughters of Marc and Jenna Kissel pose with their 2017 bracket. Image used with permission.

Non-traditional classrooms implement MMM as well. Kristin Huff of Fort Wayne, IN homeschools her children and this will be her second year using MMM with them. “MMM is the best kind of learning – it naturally combines elements from several disciplines in a fun way. The kids loved it!” Huff uses the program to teach her children not only about biology but also about statistics and probability.

MMM has also been implemented in special education classrooms. Christian Adams of Broomfield Heights Middle School in Colorado says that he supports exceptional students as they navigate the challenges of middle school:

“One common challenge area many students face is their struggle with ‘all or nothing’ thinking. Often when they face a challenge, they struggle with perseverance due to a belief that they’ve already lost. I implement a variety of strategies and lessons to attempt to help them develop critical thinking skills and a sense of ‘incremental loss’ being a reality that can coexist with overall success. MMM serves as an opportunity for our class to practice those skills and strategies in a creative, dynamic, and flat-out fun activity. Each time that MMM results are revealed, I proactively remind students of the steps that they need to take when dealing with a result that they don’t like, and remind them of the opportunities for success still to come. As a teacher, seeing our students connect their learning to a creative and content-connected program like MMM is truly rewarding.”

One of the great things about MMM is that it meets kids right where they are. In a time when social media is ever-present, using Twitter as the platform for this learning experience is a great use of technology in the classroom. Amy Holtschneider of York High School in Virginia says “The scientists [do] a really great job engaging the youth by tapping into their social media networks. They love the use of Twitter for the battle narration, [they] follow it up by watching videos about the animals on YouTube.”

However, you don’t have to be a teacher or student to get involved. Download a bracket and get in on the fun. Make sure you conduct proper research using a collection of resources from the American Society of Mammalogists to inform your bracket-making decisions. Follow along on Twitter each week to see who will become the March Mammal Madness 2018 reigning champion!

Featured image credit: animals, close-up, cold by Anthony. CC0 public domain via Pexels. 

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Engaging African music in music theory

The most recent publication by leading theorists Michael Tenzer and Pieter van den Toorn brings to the fore issues relating to the analysis of African music. Well known for work on Balinese music and for championing the new movement towards analysis of world music, Tenzer here indulges a long-standing interest in African music by exploring deep parallels between two compositions: a beautifully elusive flute-and-voice piece recorded in 1966 by Simha Arom and Genevieve Taurelle and given the title Hindehu; and Nhemamusasa, a standard item from the Shona mbira repertoire recorded by Paul Berliner in 1977.

Mustering an array of analytical techniques, Tenzer argues that the two pieces are versions of each other. To demonstrate that transformation, he devises 14 nodes or pathways through Hindehu while performing a series of operations on individual segments in order to arrive eventually at the target piece, Nhemamusasa. This is speculative music theory at its most intriguing.  Support for historical, generic or stylistic links between the two compositions is tenuous, but the author follows through with his initial hunch that they share a deep-level affinity.

Tenzer does not provide counter examples of cyclic compositions that fail to transform into one another. Is it possible that the operations he deploys (transposition, retrogadation, octave transference, deletion, and others) are so general and in such widespread use that they undermine the specificity of this particular Hindehu-into-Nhemamusasa derivation? And yet it is precisely the force of abstraction and composerly invention, so long under-utilised by anthropologically-oriented ethnomusicologists, that Tenzer’s essay, written in full methodological awareness, celebrates. It’s a mark of a successful article that one can still find plenty to engage with—indeed to be inspired by—even if one is less persuaded by the ethnographic specifics upon which it is based.

Pieter van den Toorn, too, engages African music, but with a different goal. An authority on the music of Stravinsky, van den Toorn seeks an answer to the ultimate source of the effects in the Rite of Spring: “What accounts for the vitality of the Rite, the ability of this music to excite?” That search leads him through varieties of pitch combination, many of which sport a residual tension (or duality, or incompatibility), to rhythmic repetition, and to West African drumming.

Did Stravinsky know African music? The answer appears to be ‘no’. We’re therefore not dealing here with questions of influence. Does some of Stravinsky’s music sound African? The answer to that question appears to be ‘yes.’ Showing that something sounds African is, however, not always straightforward, whereas showing that something is organized in ways analogous to West African ways of organizing polyrhythmic ensemble music is very doable.

The specific Stravinskian device of interest to van den Toorn is stratification or superimposition. The Rite, indeed, may be said to be defined by it. Interrogating stratification means attending to the relative autonomy of individual strata, to the propulsive forces of rhythmic repetition, and to the relative stasis in the harmonic field as chords are suspended or juxtaposed without the syntactical obligations of Germanic functional harmony.

It is precisely in connection with such stratification that the author’s analogies with Gahu and other ensemble musics from West and Central Africa are most persuasive. Yes, there are differences on many levels: Gahu exists in an oral tradition, is played by an ensemble of bells, rattles and drums, is danced to by dancers who double as singers, has no ‘harmony’ in the Western sense, and thrives on pre-arranged signaling between lead drummer and dancers. But the ultimate compositional challenge of producing a polyrhythmic texture in which strata featuring unvaried repetition are aligned in unpredictable ways invites analytical scrutiny of the sources of dynamism in the two musics.

Contextualists who might be waiting for historical evidence that will legitimize these acts of comparison may have to wait for a very long time. In the meantime, Tenzer and van den Toorn have accomplished something in the vein of Edward Said’s contrapuntal reading–reading across repertories or compositions while ignoring conventional constraints of history, genre or style. The fact that music lives on in performance, that its tense is very much a present tense, gives the lie to musicology’s and ethnomusicology’s insistence on background information, performer testimonies, and the like. If the actual notes and patterns produced by musicians, both African and non-African, are to be properly understood, they need at some stage to be isolated and inspected at close quarters. Direct engagement, not mediated engagement, is music’s truest demand. The drastic mode triumphs over the gnostic.

The acts of border-crossing represented in these two articles are positive transgressions likely to enrich both the discourse of music theory and the intellectual capital of African music. Thanks to van den Toorn, we can compare the rhythmic procedures of no less a figure than Beethoven with those stemming from a more ancient West African tradition. This possibility can be heard in a scherzo from the string quartet in B-flat, op. 18 no. 6. And thanks to Tenzer, whose essay owes much to a composer’s curiosity, we can explore other encounters with African music, be they appropriations of Ashanti music by Roy Travis, use of Yoruba and Ewe time lines by Steve Reich, or the striking parallels between Ligeti’s polyphonic thinking and that displayed in Banda-Linda horn orchestras. The potentials for dialogue and insight are immense and exciting.

Image credit: By Maxime Niyomwungeri. Public domain via Unsplash.

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Celebrating women in STM [timeline]

Throughout the month of March, Oxford University Press will be celebrating women in STM (science, technology, and medicine) with the objective of highlighting the outstanding contributions that women have made to these fields. Historically many of the contributions made by women have gone unsung or undervalued, and these fields have been male-dominated and inaccessible for women to enter. Today, there are many groups and individuals championing women to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering, and medicine and the gender imbalance is slowly beginning to be redressed.

This timeline provides a curated selection of achievements, discoveries, and innovations made by women in science and medicine, from outstanding contributions to astronomy to the identification of the virus known to cause AIDS. Of course, this is just a very small highlight of the remarkable contribution made throughout history, so please do share any other notable highlights in the comments section below!

Featured image credit: A photograph of Pierre and Marie Curie at work in their laboratory by  Wellcome Collection. CC BY 4.0 via Wellcome Collection. 

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Voice classification: system or art?

The process of ‘creating order’ through categorisation has always constituted an essential part of our social progress because of its measurable functionality. Vocal categorisation has been no exception, but given that all singing voices are unique – the musical equivalent of fingerprints – any attempt at fitting them neatly into categories ought to generate a clear justification for how this might benefit the art as well as the performer.

Voice classification is an important part of a singer’s vocal identity: we self-identify with our category in a very direct way when we say ‘I am a bass’, or ‘I am a soprano’. The importance of this struck me as I was writing my PhD dissertation, and one of the singers I interviewed preferred to resist such self-identification and say that she ‘sings as a mezzo’, rather than ‘she is a mezzo.’

Historically, various models of voice classification developed in order to keep up with the demands of an ever-expanding, rich repertoire. In opera for example, the mezzo-soprano category emerged in the middle of the 18th-century both in Italy and France, because composers began writing higher ornamental passages that pushed up vocal tessitura overall; this triggered the need to differentiate between those singers who could sustain this tessitura and those who could not.

This schism also generated a noteworthy status debate, as it is recorded that certain singers insisted on keeping their ‘soprano’ label, despite having to ask composers and orchestras to amend or transpose the music to suit their lower voices. The development of the voice classification system that followed was based on ‘physiological’ features, characteristic to each voice: range, preferred tessitura, colour, flexibility, volume.

Typical male and female vocal ranges for choral singers by www.becomesingers.com. Used with permission.

Another model of classification is the Fach system, which groups together roles of similar features (character and vocal) – this is subject to socio-temporal ‘tastes’. The usefulness of the Fach system’s many subcategories has been debated upon, and those that are still in use are, arguably, considered most helpful – to both singers and managements. However, since all voices exist on a ‘continuum’, further subdivisions can always be proposed.

At present vocal classification plays a crucial role in the development and progress of singers, be it for a solo career or as part of a chorus. One of the main reasons for the importance of classification is that regardless of repertoire, singing is ultimately about vocal comfort. Accurately identifying one’s voice type, alongside a reliable vocal technique, enables the singer to freely portray a character, or to focus on conveying the meaning of the music.

Adriana Festeu (mezzo soprano) playing the role of the young Composer in Ariadne auf Naxos by Richard Strauss. Used with permission from Adriana Festeu.

Classification assumes a degree of vocal self-knowledge – not only of one’s range, but of one’s most comfortable tessitura. This is an important distinction to make, as the more trained a voice is, the more likely it is to have expanded in range, and yet the ‘core’ tessitura will remain in place.

I have heard quite a few baritones with top notes so secure that they could easily unsettle any tenor, or mezzos able to spin phrases as high as the infamous F6 sung by the ‘Queen of the Night’. But no matter how impressive these features of their voices are, they do not define their category. The main distinction between voice types is made by observing the singer’s preferred tessitura, their flexibility, and their vocal colour and timbre.

The issue of preferred tessitura is also important in choral repertoire, where the writing for each voice type requires sustaining a tessitura in a particular register for extended periods of time. For example, sopranos with heavier voices might not be suitable to the soprano section in a choir, since their most comfortable register lies under the secondo passaggio, where most choral music is written; also, their voices might not blend so easily in that register.

We should think of the evolution and development of voice and role-classification as a twisted, needs-based construction, rather than an orderly, well thought-through system that it is sometimes presented as. This would encourage us all to think more creatively about our own vocal capabilities, and to accept the fact that some voices will fit more neatly into categories than others.

Since each voice is specific to the individual, any systematic categorisation of voice types will inevitably generate exceptional elements – the ever-elusive ‘Zwischenfach’ (Ger. = in between categories). If art is to be served, then we need to be open-minded about the way in which these exceptions can be included and heard.

Featured image credit: The word “SING” written in vintage ink stained wooden letterpress type in a partitioned printer’s drawer by enterlinedesign © via Shutterstock. 

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Women artists in conversation: Narcissister

Narcissister is a Brooklyn based artist whose work includes performance, dance and activism as essential elements. She continues the tradition of second wave feminist artists, such as Adrian Piper, Lorraine O’Grady, Carolee Schneemann,  etc., who challenged the status quo in their examination of gender roles, sexuality and equal rights. Narcissister wears a trademark vintage mask in most works, obscuring her identity and provoking the viewer to think of the artist as an “everywoman” rather than about an individual experience.

In 2011, she appeared on America’s Got Talent and was boosted to public attention on the national stage. Narcissister’s live works often incorporate elements of burlesque, strip tease, and vaudeville. She is known for performances like Hot Dog and Every Woman, in which she performs a self-described “reverse strip tease,” removing items of clothing from her bodily orifices and using them to dress. In 2014, she launched Untitled (Bare Breasted), in which she and other women walked the streets of New York City topless, highlighting the taboo against women being shirtless in public although it is acceptable for men. Her work questions society’s definitions of femininity and opens venues for political discussion, particularly regarding women’s rights.

In a conversation with Kathy Battista, Editor in Chief of the Benezit Dictionary of Art, she talks about her work, its relationship to earlier feminist practice, and her recent foray into the feature film world.

Still from Forever Young (2017). The performance artist wears one of her trademark vintage masks. Image courtesy of the artist.

Kathy: Your work often includes and uses your own body as performance object and prop. Does this relate back to early feminist works where the artists—Carolee Schneemann, Adrian Piper, etc—were very much present in the performance?

Narcissister: Who and what I am–my ethnic background, my upbringing, my education, my sensitivities–has informed the work I have made as Narcissister, and my sensibility of course is so central in the work, so in this way my presence has been essential, at least for the project’s inception. I do take myself out of the work to a great extent with the Narcissister is You project, a photo series and video installations of other women and some men embodying the Narcissister character. Extending the project and the character beyond me is central to my vision for the project, and makes sense as I already portray different women (and men) as Narcissister. And because of the mask, this kind of extension is built-in– it’s easy and inevitable. It informs the work that other people are involved, it adds interesting complexity and meaning. I don’t know how important it will be over time for me to be part of the work. Perhaps it won’t be essential for the project’s continued success. What I do know is that performing as Narcissister brings me so much joy and satisfaction! I don’t plan to stop performing at any point. I would love to perform as Narcissister throughout my life. I hope to have the opportunity to perform as Narcissister as a very old woman.

Still from Hot Dog (2014). Image courtesy of the artist.

K: Is it important that work addresses issues of race as well as gender? 

N: Yes, issues of both race and gender are important to me. I am drawn to explorations of these issues from many different angles, through many different lenses. I have realized, because of the sheer reality of my identity, that it is impossible for me to not address these issues on some level. These issues come into play in the work whether I directly intend it or not. I have become more interested in these subtleties recently.

Still from The Basket (2009). In this short film, Narcissister’s play on the tropes of “racial kitsch” from Eastern European folk figures to the African American “mammy” challenges female racial stereotypes. Image courtesy of the artist.

K: Your new film, Organ Player , which premiered at Sundance in January, is based on your personal experience, which in itself is a feminist topic. Can you say something about the experience of making a feature film, which is a new departure for you?

N: Yes, making a film was a new departure for me and my work as Narcissister as it’s autobiographical- there are pictures and videos from my family life, and I am the narrator. I speak directly about how my family and my upbringing in Southern California impacted me. My work as Narcissister has always referred to my personal history but in an enigmatic and oblique way. It was a huge leap to take and I felt uncomfortable levels of vulnerability at first. Ultimately I am grateful I had the inspiration to tell this very personal story and that I was able to finish a film that is deeply meaningful to me and which also resonates with other people.

K: Were there other artworks of films about the mother/daughter relationship that inspired your work on Organ Player ?

N: There are many works that inspired me, not necessarily ones about mother/daughter- The Beaches of Agnes, Vessel (about Women on Waves), Tarnation, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Maggie Nelson’s candid writing about her personal experience, Frida Kahlo’s imagery. These are a few works that come to mind today!     family life,

Still from Marilyn (2017). In Marilyn, Narcissister subverted the iconography of film star Marilyn Monroe, an American symbol of femininity and sexuality. Image courtesy of the artist.

K: How do you feel that your work departs from or furthers earliest feminist performance? What is different about it?

N: I think the main element that separates my work from much of this work is my embrace of humor, and the deeply subversive potential it carries. Also, perhaps my unabashed embrace of pop forms, my commitment to the mask, and my brash aesthetic separates my work from this early feminist work. Worth considering also is my/our distance from pivotal movements–the women’s liberation movement and civil rights movement. Perhaps this distance affords me more space to be more playful, less overtly serious? I am not sure I am furthering early feminist performance work. I still look to early feminist performance work for inspiration. I certainly aspire to be just as powerful as the best of it.

In 2018 the Benezit Dictionary of Artists has devoted a year to commissioning new biographies to revising and expanding current entries on women artists.

Featured image credit: Still from The Basket (2009). Image courtesy of the artist.

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Why so much fuss about the history of emotions?

The history of emotions has emerged as one of the fastest growing areas of historical study in recent years—no doubt helped by the fact that almost all historical topics have emotional aspects. The last two international conferences I’ve attended, one on The History of Concepts (in Oslo) and one on Law and Government (in Western Ontario), both had significant numbers of papers exploring emotional themes. The history of emotions has loose borders which can be and are being pushed outwards. Yet, it has benefited from speedily achieving an institutional base. Three centres have been established to promote its study: at Queen Mary University of London, at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, and in Australia — with distinct ‘nodes’ in the universities of Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Western Australia, and Queensland. These centres have done much to integrate a larger and rapidly expanding world-wide constituency of researchers; through conferences, by attracting academic visitors, and through publications—for example, the Emotions in History series, (co-edited by the directors of two of these centres, Thomas Dixon from Queen Mary and Ute Frevert from Berlin.)

The Australian Centre has spawned a professional association, the Society for the History of Emotions, and under this aegis has recently launched an online reading and discussion group with a globally dispersed and mainly young membership. The whole enterprise demonstrates what can be achieved in the modern academic institutional and technological environment—though its take off probably hasn’t seemed so quick to those who were early in the field: Thomas Dixon, for instance, published his From Passions to Emotions in 2003.

Electro–Physiologie, Figure 64, by Guillaume-Benjamin-Amand Duchenne de Boulogne. Photo by Adrien Tournachon. Public domain via The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

One impetus for these developments has been interest in building intellectual bridges between arts and sciences—though more has been done in this line in the literary field, where ‘neuro lit crit’ is flourishing, if amidst a certain amount of contention (not all neuroscientists return literary critics’ sympathetic interest in their work). Interest in brain science distinguishes this recent flow of work, in both literature and history, from older work whose orientation was more psychoanalytic, for example (in the case of history) work by Peter Gay and in the Journal of Social History. Other historians have shown little interest in how neuroscientists think, but have been interested in extending the somatic (and sometimes psychoanalytic) approaches associated with the ‘history of the body.’Given the power of these impulses, it’s ironic that arguably the most substantial achievements to date have been in the fields of intellectual history and the history of concepts—assisted by the fact that some philosophers, including historians of philosophy, have recently taken an ‘emotional turn.’ Historical work of all these kinds has been coloured by historians’ routinely contradictory impulses: to discover, on the one hand, the strange, and on the other hand, the familiar (their interaction with neuroscience has often been bound up with interest in how far that work sustains one or the other).

Work on the history of emotions was initially often quite broad-brush, being directed towards the identification of ‘cultures of feeling’ or ‘emotional communities.’ Though work focussing on particular individuals and moments is becoming more common, the two approaches, if well-conceived, are in fact complementary: understanding individual behaviour necessarily involves locating it within larger patterns, but highly focussed study should also refine our understanding of these larger patterns. Diverse though scholarship in the field has been, the existence of institutional centres has helped to create and sustain a core culture, within which certain works have achieved canonical status: William Reddy’s 2001 The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions has been cited 1354 times (according to Google Scholar, as of 13 February 2018); Barbara Rosenwein’s 2002 American Historical Review article ‘Worrying about emotions in history’, 658 times.

The bridge to neuroscience looks shaky to me—and in any case, probably not capable of bearing much heavyweight historical traffic. Nonetheless, a great merit of this burgeoning of interest has been that it has brought historians with diverse backgrounds and interests into conversation with each other—not least, into conversation about similarity and difference across both time and space. If there’s a danger, it seems to me (to keep working the metaphors) it’s that the flow of work might start to swirl within a vortex. It’s good for historians to attend to emotions as concepts, to emotional experiences and to emotions as shapers of behaviour: history without emotion would not be a human history. But the specific knowledge and skills of the ‘historian of emotions’ are not sufficient in themselves to produce outstanding historical work. Historians of emotions must—like other historians—continue to undertake probing source criticism; they must respect the ‘discipline of the historical context’, that is, they must attend to the significance of the particular circumstances in which things happen; and they must remain alive to the complexities of human interaction, to the many levels at which, and means by which, human beings do and don’t interact with each other, and to the consequently differing impacts different individuals’ emotions have on those around them, at any given time and place. And then they must keep all these complexities in mind when they construct their larger narratives of continuity and change.

Emotions help to make history, but only as elements within a variegated, multi-dimensional, tension-ridden, constantly changing field of force.

Featured image credit: The Illuminated Crowd sculpture by Dominic Simpson. CC-BY-2.0 via Flickr .

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Defiant rulers and (real) superheroes: Black History Month

The first incarnation of Black History Month began in 1926, when Carter G. Woodson, historian and author, established an observance during the second week of February coinciding with the birthdays of social reformer Frederick Douglass and President Abraham Lincoln. The month-long celebration was then proposed at Kent State University, Ohio, in February 1969, beginning the following year. We at the Oxford African American Studies Center (AASC) want to reflect on the history of African and African American Studies, integral to the history of America—and its future.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. has been a leading figure in the field of African and African American studies for a generation. 2018 marks the 10th anniversary of the publication of the landmark African American National Biography, which continues to grow online on the AASC. In honor of Black History Month, Gates reflects on the state of the field: its major accomplishments, its remaining challenges, and its direction in the years to come.

You have traveled worldwide to piece together the story of people of African descent. What is the most surprising story you’ve come across in your research?

I think the most surprising story, and certainly one of the most moving, was my first encounter with the legacy of the great university that was located at Timbuktu, in Mali, and meeting Abel Kader Haidara, the “librarian” whose mission is to protect and preserve the manuscripts written in Arabic by some of the greatest scholars that the African continent has produced—hundreds of thousands of books, written by black men largely between the late Middle Ages and the fall of Timbuktu to Morocco in 1591. This library disproves racist claims in the Enlightenment that Africans didn’t or couldn’t write.  I was moved to tears when I saw and handled these books.

Is there a major figure from Black History who, for whatever reason, has been “lost” to modern readers?

Given the phenomenal success of Black Panther, Hollywood should turn to actual figures who are hiding in the archives of African history. My favorite would be Queen Nzinga (or Njinga). Linda Heywood, who wrote on the life of Nzinga, describes the queen as:

[The] defiant female ruler of the independent central African state of Ndongo/Matamba. Her military victories against the Portuguese and their African allies, her strategic economic and military alliances with the Dutch, and at times the Portuguese, and the spiritual diplomatic relations she engineered with Rome assured the independence of her state. She bequeathed to Angolans and to people of African descent in the Americas a proud legacy of resistance which they mobilized in Angola and Brazil to challenge colonialism and enslavement.

What has changed the most in the field since you began working in it?

Digitization has changed the fields of African and African American Studies most dramatically, making both archival material and journal articles and even books accessible to people throughout the world who previously would have been denied access to this knowledge because of costs or lack of proximity. We see this clearly in the revolution of genealogical and ancestral genetic research, which is one of the most important intellectual phenomena of the last decade or so. We can do in minutes or hours research that formerly would have taken weeks or months. And we can do it cheaply.

What areas are left to explore? What direction do you see this field taking in the next ten years?

I think the intersections of race and class will remain a compelling field of inquiry in African and African American Studies. But I also look for a renaissance of scholarship about the humanities and the arts in Africa, Afro-Latin America, and their relationship to African American culture and history.

Featured image credit: “Old book bindings” by Tom Murphy VII. CC0 via Wikimedia Commons . 

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