It is now well established that stock voice-leading patterns were an essential component of eighteenth-century compositional and improvisational practices both in Italy and abroad. In this article I focus on one of those patterns, which, as far as I am aware, remains unscrutinized: a dominant pedal point in the bass with a paradigmatic upper voice that descends chromatically from scale steps 5 to 2. In the first two sections, I deal with this pattern successively in eighteenth-century music pedagogy, with special emphasis on the teaching of the Neapolitan maestro Fedele Fenaroli, and in actual galant repertory, thereby exploring both its voice-leading and its syntactic possibilities. In the third section, I compare how this dominant pedal relates to other, already identified pedal-based patterns.

In his own time Diogenio Bigaglia (1678–1745) was viewed as the equal of Venice's three great amateur musicians active during the first half of the eighteenth century (Tomaso Albinoni, Alessandro Marcello and Benedetto Marcello), but he is largely forgotten today. Part of the reason is the secluded, uneventful life he led as a Benedictine monk at the abbey of San Giorgio Maggiore. This article analyses an impressive early work: a twelve-movement Dixit Dominus probably composed between 1700 and 1710. This work occupies the borderland between late seventeenth-century musical practice and the more progressive musical forms, styles and techniques introduced in the early eighteenth century. It survives in a late eighteenth-century copy by the Venetian copisteria of Giuseppe Baldan that probably passed via Domenico Dragonetti to Vincent Novello, who donated it to the British Museum in 1843. The music contains many attractive features, including an imaginative use of the instruments and dextrous counterpoint, pointing the way forward to the choral masterpieces of Bigaglia's maturity.

In this article, we analyze how the Stabilization and Association Agreement (SAA), which signalizes the overall (positive) progress and development of the potential candidate country of the post-Yugoslav space, is not straightforwardly translated as a benchmark for progress and development by the political elite. Drawing on securitization theory in order to understand the grammar of security, the wider discursive context, and the position of power and authority in RS during the analyzed period – and informed by the triangulation of content and discourse analysis – we show how the negotiations for the SAA were (mis)used in order to present both the “internal and external Other” as an existential threat for Republika Srpska. Our analysis shows that although the securitizing acts of the political elite from RS did not succeed in terms of the final outcome as the SAA was signed, certain security narratives, which are present in the contemporary sociopolitical landscape in BiH, have been constructed during this period and embedded into the wider discursive context and consolidated the position of power and authority of Milorad Dodik’s SNSD.

In the Bronze Age, warriors are probably the best-known social class. Evidence for warfare and other violent encounters links them to aggression and bloodshed that could be translated into social status. This made warriors a potential two-fold threat to the social cohesion of their communities: not only did they risk threatening the integrity of communities as agents of death but also they could challenge local authority and cause internal conflict. Here, the author presents evidence that suggests that internal conflict was a major concern for Nordic Bronze Age societies, in that warriors constituted an internal social challenge, and proposes that local communities may have mitigated this threat in rituals such as the sacrifice of weapons and the construction of social narratives through rock art.

Luis Inácio Lula Da Silva, originally a metalworker and trade union activist, was president of Brazil from 2003 to 2010, leading the largest country of Latin America, with more than 212 million people. In 2020, social and labour historian John D. French, with a long career devoted to Brazilian labour history, published the much acclaimed biography Lula and His Politics of Cunning: From Metalworker to President of Brazil.1 In this book, French explicitly aims to give a bottom-up account of Lula's life.