Antonio Vivaldi Essays - Operas, Antonio Vivaldi, Anna Gir

Antonio Vivaldi Essays - Operas, Antonio Vivaldi, Anna Gir Antonio Vivaldi Antonio Vivaldi was born in Venice on March 4th, 1678. Through ordained a priest in 1703, according to his own account, within a year of being ordained Vivaldi no longer wished to celebrate mass because physical complaints ?tightness of the chest? which pointed to asthmatic bronchitis, or a nervous disorder. It is also possible that Vivaldi was faking his illness. There is a story that he sometimes left the alter to jot down a musical idea. He had became a priest against his own will, because priesthood was often the only way possible for a poor family to obtain free schooling. Vavaldi wrote many memorable concertos, such as the Four seasons and the opus 3, he also wrote many works for students. People and students still play these pieces all over the world. Vavaldi was employed for most of his working life by by the Ospedale della Pieta. Often termed orphanage, this Ospedale was in fact a home for the female offspring of noblemen and their numerous dalliance with their mistresses. Many of Vavaldi?s concerti were indeed exercises which he would play whith his many talented pupils. Vavaldi?s relationship wth the Ospedale began right after his ordination in 1703, when he was named as the violin teacher there. Until 1709, Vavaldi?s appointment was renewed every year and again and after 1711. They think between 1709 and 1711 Vivaldi was not attached to the Ospedale. They think he might started working for the Teatro Sant? Anngelo an opera theater. He was still was a composer though, in 1711 twelve of his concertos were written and and published in Amsterdam. In 1713 Vavaldi was given a months leave from the Ospedale to stage his first opera, it was called Ottone in ville. He did this opera in Vicenza. He produced another opera in the period between 1713 and 1714. Thse highest part of Vavaldi?s life was the end of 1716. In November he managed to have the Ospedale perform his great oratorio, it was called the Juditha Triumphans devicta Holofernis barbaric. This piece was about the victory of the Christians over the Turks in August of 1716. Vavaldi Moved to Mantua in the late 1717 for two years in order to take up his post as Chamber Kapellmeister at the court of Landgrave Philips van Hessen Darmstadt. His task there was to provide operas, cantatas, and perhaps concert music, too. Vavaldi in 1720 returned to Venice where he again staged new operas that he wrote himself. In Mantua he had met a singer by the name of Anna Giraud, she moved in with him Vavaldi said that she was just a housekeeper and agreat friend, just like her sister, Paolina, who also moved in. Anna Giraud was young, born in Venice. She was daughter to French wigmaker. She was?nt beautiful, though she was elegant, a small women with beatiful eyes and a fascinating mouth. She had a very small voice, but she could speak many languages. Vivaldi taught her how to sing and stayed with her until he died. Vavaldi wrote works for commission from foreign rulers, such as the frech king, Louis XV. He serenaded La Sena festeggiante at the festival of the Seine. The bad thing is that they can not date this music, but they know it was written after 1720. In rome Vavaldi found a patron in the person of Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni, a great music lover, who earlier had been the patron of Arcangelo Corelli. Vavldi himself was asked by the pope to play the violin for him at a private audience. He totally loved it, it also was a great time in his life. Despite his stay in Rome and other cities, Vivaldi remained in the service of the Ospedale della Pieta, he was nominated the Maestro di Concerti. He had to send two concertos per month to veniceand he received a ducat per concerto. His presence was never required. He also remained dictator of the Teatro Sant Angelo, as he did in the 1726, 7 and 8 seasons. Between 1725 and 1728 eight opera were made by Vavaldi. In three months Vavaldi composed three operas, two for Venice and one for florence. During these years Vavaldi also extremely active in the field of Concertos. In 1725 the publication of Il Cimento dell?Armenia e dell?invenzione and opus 8, appeared in Amsterdam. this consisted of twelve concertos, seven of which were descriptive: The Four Seasons, Storm at Sea, Pleasure and The Hunt. Vivaldi transformed the tradition of descriptive music into a typically Italian musical style with its unmistakable timbre in which the strings play a big role. These concetos were enormously successful, particulary in france. In the second half of the

Human psychological adaptations Essays

Human psychological adaptations Essays Human psychological adaptations Paper Human psychological adaptations Paper Another method of analysing human psychological adaptations has employed more traditional psychological tests. For example, in assessing human parental investment, German researchers, Euler Weitzel (1996 in Gaulin, 1997) asked people to rate on a seven-point scale how much each of their grandparents had cared for them during childhood. They found a pronounced matrilateral bias, with maternal grandmothers being the most caring and paternal grandfathers being the least. Clearly, this type of research falls prey to the usual confounding factors, but its benefits are that it falls within accepted empirical paradigms and that it is based on humans, rather than a leap having to be made from non-human species to human behaviour. In terms of mate choice, Miller (1997) attacks the recent trend for simply cataloguing sexual cues. He seems to claim that this approach is too simplistic and puts too much emphasis on physical characteristics rather than behavioural cues. He also claims that there has been no attempt to model the cognitive mechanisms of human mate choice and to this end suggests the way forward for this area of research, to arrive at a normative idea of human sexual behaviour.  The accumulated evidence to explain levels of maternal and paternal evidence has come from the following varied sources, each has contributed much to body of evidence regarding paternal investment but each study must be evaluated in terms of its ecological validity and normal experimental confounding factors. An analysis of the correlation between inheritance and the probability of paternity resulted in the statement that paternity probability must be slightly below 0.5 (0.46 actually) before a man would realise an evolutionary benefit by refocusing his investment on sisters sons rather than wifes sons (Hartung, 1985 in Gaulin, 1997, p. 201). This is an example of a within-species, contemporary, cross-cultural study. Another correlational analysis has found a relationship between lower infant and child mortality rates and paternal investment. However, it is likely that an underlying factor of assortative mating means that higher quality males mate with higher quality females and so offspring have a higher chance of survival (e.g. Geary, 1997; Parker Simmons, 1996 in Geary, 2000). Studies of hunter-gatherer societies (pre-industrial societies presumably being closer, socially and ecologically to ancestors) have confirmed the hypothesis that higher levels of paternal investment results in lower mortality rates (Geary, 2000). An example of this type of study was a study of the San people of Botswana who were found to have a very high maternal investment and little paternal investment. Though they are hunter-gatherers it must be noted that they have evolved and may not represent the hunter-gathering way of life of progenitors (Plomin, DeFries and McClearn, 1980). Research on how human behaviour has evolved in terms of mating and parenting has seen the gamut of psychological research from comparative methods to cross-cultural correlational studies. But while research methods have changed, in fact the theories of these factors of behaviour have not Darwins theories are still valid. Individuals, through evolution, have been ingrained with genes that benefited their reproductive success. That is, their mating behaviour, mate choice and parental investment have evolved so that individuals are programmed to reproduce effectively. References Cartwright, J. (2000). Evolution and Human Behaviour. London: Macmillan Press Ltd.  Sherry, D. F. (1997). Cross Species comparisons. In Ciba Foundation Symposium. Characterizing Human Psychological Adaptations. Chichester: John Wiley Sons Ltd.  Geary, D. C. (2000). Evolution and Proximate Expression of Human Paternal Investment. In Psychological Bulletin, 126 (1), 55-77.  Gleitman, H. et al. (1999). Psychology. 5th Ed. New York London: W. W. Norton Company.

Rhetorical Analysis Memo Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 250 words

Rhetorical Analysis Memo - Essay Example He attempts to prove that he is similar to whites by doing everything that the Americans do. He speaks perfect, unaccented English to show that he is no less than Americans discriminative against race and other immigrants.Liu appeals to the sympathetic emotions of the audience by admitting that he had never been a victim of discrimination (Liu 1). Liu proceeds to tell about the betrayal he earned from his hair. The hair betrayal instance shows how petty his discriminators were. Liu’s curse arose from his hair that failed to feather back. The hair remained straight, rigid, and wiry and continued to grow in the wrong way as he adds on. The nature of this discrimination was cruel as the discriminators blamed Liu’s natural being. It pushed him towards blaming his Chinese genes, a factor that he could neither moderate nor change. Liu lived a disgusting and complicated life trying every day to live other people’s lives. Liu’s text reveals seclusion that dominated relations between Whites and Asians in America. He views the blending and assimilation as cruel and fair giving justifying evidences. The reader can tell how Liu’s life at school was more complicated since the American tutors extended discrimination to