New Releases by Eric Thomas

This book provides a critical introduction to the full range of Williams' work - fiction and non-fiction. It assesses the significance of his contribution in understanding culture, politics and society. Fair-minded, accurate and sensitive, the book makes crucial connections between the different aspects of Williams' work and the underlying concern for a democratic polity which informed it.

A simplified version of the Bible, from Creation to Revelation.

"Claudio Monteverdi''s sixty-year compositional career spans one of the most crucial junctures in Western music. Laying the groundwork for harmonic tonality - the pervasive musical language of Western culture until the twentieth century - Monteverdi''s break with the self-contained harmonic world of the Renaissance and his confident assertion of human rationality and order through music was a crucial contribution to the emergence of the Baroque style." "Monteverdi''s Tonal Language is a provocative new examination of the theoretical issues surrounding the emergence of early seventeenth-century tonality combined with systematic analysis of a wide range of Monteverdi''s secular works. Eric Chafe argues that the composer''s music was rooted in a strong sense of musical logic and a secure grasp of tonality combined with Monteverdi''s assertion that music should be dominated by allegory Chafe offers a new framework for understanding the complex historical style and systematic features of the tonal language of Monteverdi''s time and the composer''s particular version of it." "Building on Carl Dahlhaus''s analysis of emerging tonality in Monteverdi''s madrigals, Chafe expands the scope of the "modal-hexachordal" system rooted in the composer''s work at the time of his fourth and fifth madrigal books. In addition to covering text-music relationships of a large and representative amount of Monteverdi''s music, Chafe discusses several unexplored areas crucial to any understanding of the composer''s tonal language. The two madrigals "Cor mio, mentre vi miro" (from Book Four) and "O Mirtillo" (from Book Five) illustrate the theoretical features of early seventeenth-century tonality. Chafe examines the pronounced sense of tonal clarity that distinguishes the Fourth Book of Madrigals, and he articulates the tonal styles Monteverdi used as organizing criteria in the Fifth Book. In subsequent chapters he demonstrates how the characteristic devices of Orfeo emerge as basic properties of the "modal-hexachordal" system, and discusses Monteverdi''s creation of ordered reality in Il Ballo delle in grate and the "Lamento d''Arianna." He further argues that the Sixth Book symbolized the interaction of polyphonic madrigal and monody, and demonstrates convincingly that the Seventh Book was a milestone in Monteverdi''s creative development, assuming the characteristics that marked his later tonal style. In the Eighth Book the composer set forth a manifesto for the allegorical nature of Baroque music; Il ritorno d''Ulisse un patria is a mature working out of the potential of tonal allegory. Finally in the last three chapters, Chafe discusses the tonal-allegorical framework, aspects of musical characterization, and questions of authenticity in Monteverdi''s last opera, L''incoronazione di Poppea."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Industrial processes such as long-wall coal cutting and me- tal rolling, together with certain areas of 2D signal and image processing, exhibit a repetitive, or multipass struc- ture characterized by a series of sweeps of passes through a known set of dynamics. The output, or pass profile, produced on each pass explicitly contributes to that produced on the text. This interpass interaction can lead to the growth of oscillations, and hence a form of instability, in the se- quence of pass profiles which require control strategies that explicitly incorporate the essential repetitive struc- ture of the process in their decision making. This monograph is unique in developing the new techniques necessary for sy- stematic control systems design in the form of a stability theory and computationally feasible stability tests based on finite simulations and polynomial analysis. Its development requires a basic knowledge of linear frequency domain and state-space theory and a knowledge of basic functional ana- lysis would be beneficial. The text is aimed at researchers in the area of control and systems theory and should also be of interest to those working in the related area of signal and image processing.

Here is a practical manual concerning the development, care, arrangement and administration of a record collection. It was intended for both the novice and the experienced collector and directs itself to monaural collections.