Description: The music of Béla Bartók is defined in part by its unique blend of rhythmic vitality and inventiveness, and his string quartets offer a glimpse into a consistency of technique evident throughout his compositional career. Bartók's rhythmic environments are primarily metrical, but many of his rhythmic configurations are placed in such a way as to potentially override established meter. It is necessary, therefore, to institute an analytical means by which the delineation and comparison of rhythmic structures both within and without the metrical context may be accomplished. An analytical method using Timepoint Accent Structures (TAS) allows for the comparison of rhythms resulting from patterns of accent produced by pitch onset, dynamic stress, articulation or any other accentual factors. Timepoint Grouping Structures (TGS) delineate the number of timepoints present in alternating groups/blocks in a texture, thereby allowing for the recognition of patterning created by these larger groups. By applying TAS and TGS analysis, relationships of rhythmic equivalency, rotation, retrograde, complementation, augmentation, diminution, subset, superset, exchange, compression and expansion are clearly confirmed in the string quartets. In addition, symmetrical structures and arithmetic progressions are discovered. In many ways, Bartók's rhythmic organization mimics his procedures of pitch structuring.

Description: In 1939, composer Julia Smith's first opera Cynthia Parker dramatized the story of a Texas legend. Smith manipulated music, text, and visual images to make the opera accessible for the audience in accordance with compositional and institutional practices in American opera of the 1930s. Transparent musical themes and common Native Americans stereotypes are used to define characters. Folk music is presented as diegetic, creating a sense of authenticity that places the audience into the opera's Western setting. The opera is codified for the audience using popular idioms, resulting in initial but not lasting success.

Description: Information systems (IS) are indelibly linked to the global economy and are indispensable to society and organizations. Despite the decisive function of IS in organizations today, IS development problems continue to plague organizations. The failure to get the system requirements right is considered to be one of the primary, if not the most significant, reasons for this high IS failure rate. Getting requirements right is most notably identified with Frederick Brooks' contention that requirements are the essence of what IT professionals do, all the rest being accidents or risk management. However, enterprise architecture (EA) may also provide the discipline to bridge the gap between effective requirements, organizational objectives, and the actual IS implementations. The intent of this research is to examine the relationship between IS development capabilities and requirements analysis and design capabilities within the context of enterprise architecture. To accomplish this, a survey of IT professionals within the Society for Information Management (SIM) was conducted. Results indicate support for the hypothesized relationship between IS development and requirements capabilities. The hypothesized relationships with the organizational demographics were not supported nor was the hypothesized positive relationship between requirements capabilities and EA perceptions. However, the nature of the relationship of requirements and ...

Description: Knowledge workers are an important resource for the typical modern business firm, yet financial reporting ignores such resources. Some researchers contend that the accounting profession has stressed reliability in order to make the accounting appear objective. Others concur, noting that accounting is an insecure profession and adopts strict rules when faced with uncertainty. Accountants have promulgated a strict rule to expense human resource costs, although many know that such resources have future benefits. Some researchers suggest that any discipline must modify its language in order to initiate change toward providing useful social ameliorations. If accounting theorists extend this idea to the accounting lexicon.s description of investments in human resources, investors and other accounting user groups might gain greater insight into how a firm fosters and nourishes human capital. I tested three hypotheses related to this issue by administering an experiment designed to assess financial analysts. perceptions about alternative financial statement treatments of human resources in an investment recommendation task. I predicted that (1) analysts' perceptions of the reliability (relevance) of the information they received would decrease (increase) as the treatment of human resources increasingly violated GAAP (became more current-oriented), (2) analysts exposed to alternative accounting treatments would report a lower ...

Description: The purpose of this study is to examine the technical accounting statements of the Securities and Exchange Commission to determine the extent of agreement between them and the opinions of the leading authorities in the field of accounting and the extent to which the advanced accounting students at North Texas State Teachers College have mastered the principles expressed in the statements.