We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
To save content items to your account,
please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies.
If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account.
Find out more about saving content to .
To save content items to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org
is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings
on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part
of your Kindle email address below.
Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations.
‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi.
‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Librettists and composers began to create operas based on Greco-Roman myths in 1598, but operas based on ancient history did not appear until 1643, and Alexander operas not until 1651, when Sbarra’s Alessandro vincitor di se stesso and Cicognini’s Gli amori di Alessandro Magno, e di Rossane were produced. Source materials are problematic for identifying every received title accurately, but clearly the corpus of Alexander operas is large. Pagan divinities appeared in the earliest Alexander operas, particularly in prologues, but this was operatic convention, not because of Alexander’s divinity. Thereafter, Venetian operatic plot formulas often shaped Alexander’s characterisation, as did aristocratic patronage. But because the Alexander historians described so many types of episodes displaying a range of characterisations from magnanimous to vindictive, roles for the operatic Alexander varied widely, as did texts for individual productions. Metastasio’s Alessandro nell’Indie was the most frequently produced Alexander opera, enduring for nearly a century. But after the Napoleonic era production dwindled considerably.
Art and money, culture and commerce, have long been seen as uncomfortable bedfellows. Indeed, the connections between them have tended to resist full investigation, particularly in the musical sphere.The Idea of Art Music in a Commercial World, 1800-1930, is a collection of essays that present fresh insights into the ways in which art music, i.e., classical music, functioned beyond its newly established aesthetic purpose (art for art's sake) and intersected with commercial agendas in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century culture. Understanding how art music was portrayed and perceived in a modernizing marketplace, and how culture and commerce interacted, are the book's main goals. In this volume, international scholars from musicology and other disciplines address a rangeof unexplored topics, including the relationship of sacred music with commerce in the mid nineteenth century, the role of music in urban cultural development in the early twentieth, and the marketingof musical repertories, performers and instruments across time and place, to investigate what happened once art music began to be understood as needing to exist within the wider framework of commercially oriented culture. Historical case studies present contrasting topics and themes that not only vary geographically and ideologically but also overlap in significant ways, pushing back the boundaries of the 'music as commerce' discussion. Through diverse, multidisciplinary approaches, the volume opens up significant paths for conversation about how musical concepts, practices and products wereshaped by interrelationships between culture and commerce.
CHRISTINA BASHFORD is Associate Professor of Musicology at the University of Illinois.
ROBERTA MONTEMORRA MARVIN is Director of the Opera Studies Forum in the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies at the University of Iowa, where she is also on the faculty.
CONTRIBUTORS: Christina Bashford, George Biddlecombe, Denise Gallo, David Gramit, Catherine Hennessy Wolter, Roberta Montemorra Marvin, Fiona Palmer, Jann Pasler, Michela Ronzani, Jon Solomon, Jeffrey S. Sposato, Nicholas Vazsonyi, David Wright
Hercules films and television programs have proliferated in three clusters of concentrated production and wide popularity. The first consists primarily of the European “ancients” produced between 1958 and 1965; the second of the 1990s television series Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, its spinoffs, and the Disney film (1997); and the third of the recent 2014 Hercules products that have been offered in the new millennium. Classical reception studies focusing on the modern era often require the preliminary steps of identifying, collecting, and surveying the corpus to be investigated. This is certainly true for the filmed Hercules corpus studied here, so the relatively limited critical and scholarly analysis that has already been published will be relegated to the scholarly citations, while the purpose here is to survey the corpus, the origins of each cluster, their chronological span, media types, and plot range. In this instance, in assembling the Hercules corpus of the past sixty years, we will see the various characterizations of the ancient hero. Also a significant by-product will be the observation that the mythological figure Hercules has generated an extraordinarily large and varied number of filmed products that differentiates him from other successfully dramatized legendary figures.
CLUSTER ONE
The first cluster begins with Italian producer Federico Teti, who in 1957 invited a 1950s Mr. Universe, Steve Reeves, to play the role in Galatea Film's Le fatiche di Ercole, directed by Pietro Francisci, a film that claimed to have adapted Apollonius’ Argonautica but focused more on physical, political, and romantic labors for Hercules. The film might have languished in Italy, but Joseph E. Levine, as he told Variety, refurbished it for American audiences and spent enormous sums of money on promotion.
When I was told about “Hercules,” I flew over to Italy to look at it. The picture broke down when we were showing it, the titles were bad, it was in Italian and I couldn't understand it, but there was something in it that made me realize there was a potential fortune tied up in it.
To investigate an outbreak of Pseudomonas aeruginosa infections and colonization in a neonatal intensive care unit.
DESIGN
Infection control assessment, environmental evaluation, and case-control study.
SETTING
Newly built community-based hospital, 28-bed neonatal intensive care unit.
PATIENTS
Neonatal intensive care unit patients receiving care between June 1, 2013, and September 30, 2014.
METHODS
Case finding was performed through microbiology record review. Infection control observations, interviews, and environmental assessment were performed. A matched case-control study was conducted to identify risk factors for P. aeruginosa infection. Patient and environmental isolates were collected for pulsed-field gel electrophoresis to determine strain relatedness.
RESULTS
In total, 31 cases were identified. Case clusters were temporally associated with absence of point-of-use filters on faucets in patient rooms. After adjusting for gestational age, case patients were more likely to have been in a room without a point-of-use filter (odds ratio [OR], 37.55; 95% confidence interval [CI], 7.16–∞). Case patients had higher odds of exposure to peripherally inserted central catheters (OR, 7.20; 95% CI, 1.75–37.30) and invasive ventilation (OR, 5.79; 95% CI, 1.39–30.62). Of 42 environmental samples, 28 (67%) grew P. aeruginosa. Isolates from the 2 most recent case patients were indistinguishable by pulsed-field gel electrophoresis from water-related samples obtained from these case-patient rooms.
CONCLUSIONS
This outbreak was attributed to contaminated water. Interruption of the outbreak with point-of-use filters provided a short-term solution; however, eradication of P. aeruginosa in water and fixtures was necessary to protect patients. This outbreak highlights the importance of understanding the risks of stagnant water in healthcare facilities.
THE process of popularizing and commercializing ancient Greek music in the United States began in the 1870s, and by the late 1920s and 1930s, a number of publications as well as theatrical and radio performances had made a limited but credible impact on popular culture. What makes this process particularly interesting is that within the parameters of the history of Western music, ancient Greek music had until 1893 remained stubbornly arcane and widely misunderstood and misrepresented. That ultimately by the end of our period of study there were a number of public performances and commercial applications of ancient Greek music testifies to the powerful economic and commercial forces that accelerated during the latter third of the nineteenth century and the first third of the twentieth. But the recovery, study and publication of several ancient Greek musical texts had provided a new impetus for scholars to share their findings with fellow academics in both print and performance venues, and then the press found these to be inherently fascinating and continued to report developments to the public at large in national and local newspapers around the country, thereby helping to create the market for commercialization.
Because newspaper reports, announcements and reviews were so instrumental in creating and sustaining this small, unique market, the bulk of the data mined for this study required a search that would have been relatively difficult until a few years ago. The development of Proquest's digitized newspaper database has made focused searches of major American (and English) newspaper archives much more practicable within research library networks, as has the Library of Congress's website Chronicling America (www.chroniclingamerica.loc. gov). The emergence of publicly marketed, online newspaper archives like newspaperarchive.com and genealogybank.com has made available a variety of corpora containing searchable local newspapers. Together these contemporary resources allow scholars researching popular culture to delve into a period that produced and preserved sufficient amounts of traditional newspaper coverage to support the chronological survey presented in this study, which therefore claims to be neither comprehensive nor complete. Perhaps resources in the near and distant future will yield richer details about individual performances.