Secular music of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries encompasses an extraordinarily wide range of works and practices: courtly love songs, music for civic festivities, instrumental music, entertainments provided by minstrels, the unwritten traditions of solo singing, and much else. This collection of essays addresses many of these practices, with a focus on polyphonic settings of vernacular texts, examining their historical and stylistic contexts, their transmission in written and printed sources, questions of performance, and composers' approaches to text setting. Essays have been selected to reflect the wide range of topics that have occupied scholars in recent decades, and taken together, they point to the more general significance of secular music within a broad complex of cultural practices and institutions.

Taking up questions and issues in early chant studies, this volume of essays addresses some of the topics raised in James McKinnon's The Advent Project: The Later Seventh-Century Creation of the Roman Mass, the last book before his untimely death in February 1999. A distinguished group of chant scholars examine the formation of the liturgy, issues of theory and notation, and Carolingian and post-Carolingian chant. Special studies include the origins of musical notations, nuances of early chant performance (with accompanying downloadable resources), musical style and liturgical structure in the early Divine Office, and new sources for Old-Roman chant. Western Plainchant in the First Millenium offers new information and new insights about a period of crucial importance in the growth of the liturgy and music of the Western Church.

Molded from the bowels of the high desert, Mesquite, Nevada boasts four casinos where visitors can dodge the heat, drop a dollar and ruin their morals. Ben Tolken should have blasted through this town exceeding the speed limit. His vehicle is rendered useless and strands him at the Thousand Pines Hotel and Casino. With no options, Ben tries to spend his time bowling and drinking. Stacy Mooney wanders into his life and convinces him she is a better bang for his buck. Their fling is short-lived when they stumble upon a drug deal perpetrated by wannabe thug Beau Hitchens and his gang of dimwitted lackeys. Ben and Stacy opt for flight instead of fight and the two head for safety on the packed casino floor with Beau in close pursuit. The stakes are raised as Stacy's autistic brother is thrown into the mix and the local drug lord transforms a simple night of booze, babes and bling into a modern Western of bang, bang, you're dead.

This literary work is the culmination of both personal experiences and undergraduate research that illustrate my identity as an African Latina. It is a combination of memoirs, poems and research material that explain the effects of race on identity from an academic standpoint while sharing my own life as a living example.

This report seeks to provide managers, supervisors and safety and health professionals with a greater understanding of Low Back Pain (LBP) and low back disability (work time lost due to LBP). The report attempts to improve one's understanding of the many factors that influence LBP, provides the latest research information related to its causes, and describes methods that have proven to be effective in preventing LBP and disability.

For many today Johann Sebastian Bach and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart stand as towering representatives of European music of the eighteenth century, composers whose works reflect intellectual, religious, and aesthetic trends of the period. Research on their compositions continues in many ways to shape our broader understanding of eighteenth-century musical thought and its contexts. This collection of essays by leading authorities in the field offers a variety of new perspectives on the two composers, as well as some of their important contemporaries, Haydn in particular. Addressing topics as diverse as the historiography of eighteenth-century music, concepts of time and musical form, the idea of the musical work and its relation to publishing practices, compositional process, and performance practice, these essays together constitute a major contribution to eighteenth-century studies.

This book had its origin in a conference that took place at the Music Department of Harvard University on September 23 25, 2005, to honor Professor Christoph Wolff, Adams University Professor at Harvard University.