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Performance practice is the study of how music was performed over
the centuries. This encyclopedia offers entries on composers,
musicians/performers, technical terms and musical instruments.
Performance practice is the study of how music was performed over
the centuries, both by its originators (the composers and
performers who introduced the works) and, later, by revivalists.
This first of its kind "Dictionary" offers entries on composers,
musicians/performers, technical terms, performance centers, musical
instruments, and genres, all aimed at elucidating issues in
performance practice. This A-Z guide will help students, scholars,
and listeners understand how musical works were originally
performed and subsequently changed over the centuries. Compiled by
a leading scholar in the field, this work will serve as both a
point-of-entry for beginners as well as a roadmap for advanced
scholarship in the field.
In twenty-first-century Britain, scientific advice to government is
highly organized, integrated across government departments, and led
by a chief scientific adviser who reports directly to the prime
minister. But at the end of the eighteenth century, when Roland
Jackson’s account begins, things were very different. With this
book, Jackson turns his attention to the men of science of the
day—who derived their knowledge of the natural world from
experience, observation, and experiment—focusing on the essential
role they played in proffering scientific advice to the state, and
the impact of that advice on public policy. At a time that
witnessed huge scientific advances and vast industrial development,
and as the British state sought to respond to societal, economic,
and environmental challenges, practitioners of science,
engineering, and medicine were drawn into close involvement with
politicians. Jackson explores the contributions of these emerging
experts, the motivations behind their involvement, the forces that
shaped this new system of advice, and the legacy it left behind.
His book provides the first detailed analysis of the provision of
scientific, engineering, and medical advice to the
nineteenth-century British government, parliament, the civil
service, and the military.
The tenth volume of The Correspondence of John Tyndall contains 402
letters covering a two-year period from January 1867 to December
1868. The period centers around the death of Michael Faraday in
August 1867. This was a great personal loss for Tyndall, and it led
to substantial changes in his professional and personal
circumstances, as he succeeded Faraday as superintendent of the
house and director of the laboratory at the Royal Institution of
Great Britain (RI) and moved into accommodation in the building. He
remained there until his resignation in 1887.
The 308 letters in this volume cover a critical period in Tyndall's
personal and scientific lives. The volume begins with the difficult
ending of his relationship with the Drummond family, disputes about
his work in glaciology, and his early seminal work on the
absorption of radiant heat by gases. It ends with the start of his
championship of Julius Robert Mayer's work on the mechanical
equivalent of heat. In between, Tyndall carefully establishes his
own priority for his work on radiant heat, and he accepts the
position of professor of physics at the Government School of Mines.
The lure of the Alps also becomes ever stronger. In this period
comes perhaps Tyndall's greatest mountaineering achievement, the
first ascent of the Weisshorn, and a remarkable winter visit to
Chamonix and the Mer de Glace. As his reputation grows, Tyndall
continues to make his way in society. He is elected to the elite
Athenaeum Club on January 31, 1860.
Rising from a humble background in rural southern Ireland, John
Tyndall became one of the foremost physicists, communicators of
science, and polemicists in mid-Victorian Britain. In science, he
is known for his important work in meteorology, climate science,
magnetism, acoustics, and bacteriology. His discoveries include the
physical basis of the warming of the Earth's atmosphere (the basis
of the greenhouse effect), and establishing why the sky is blue.
But he was also a leading communicator of science, drawing great
crowds to his lectures at the Royal Institution, while also playing
an active role in the Royal Society. Tyndall moved in the highest
social and intellectual circles. A friend of Tennyson and Carlyle,
as well as Michael Faraday and Thomas Huxley, Tyndall was one of
the most visible advocates of a scientific world view as tensions
grew between developing scientific knowledge and theology. He was
an active and often controversial commentator, through letters,
essays, speeches, and debates, on the scientific, political, and
social issues of the day, with strongly stated views on Ireland,
religion, race, and the role of women. Widely read in America, his
lecture tour there in 1872-73 was a great success. Roland Jackson
paints a picture of an individual at the heart of Victorian science
and society. He also describes Tyndall's importance as a pioneering
mountaineer in what has become known as the Golden Age of Alpinism.
Among other feats, Tyndall was the first to traverse the
Matterhorn. He presents Tyndall as a complex personality, full of
contrasts, with his intense sense of duty, his deep love of poetry,
his generosity to friends and his combativeness, his persistent
ill-health alongside great physical stamina driving him to his
mountaineering feats. Drawing on Tyndall's letters and journals for
this first major biography of Tyndall since 1945, Jackson explores
the legacy of a man who aroused strong opinions, strong loyalties,
and strong enmities throughout his life.
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