Wednesday, January 29, 2020

Early Christian Music Essay Example for Free

Early Christian Music Essay Singing is an essential part of worship to God. Even the creation itself was accompanied by the singing of morning stars (KJV, Job 38:7). So, music and singing were a vital part of the Israel and in the Old Testament we may find numerous confirmations of this fact. Jesus Himself sang hymns with His disciples before His sufferings (Matthew 26:30). During the Apostolic Era, singing in temple and synagogues still united the Jewish nation, and the apostles urged the believers to sing psalms, when anyone is merry (James 5:13), and in his letter to Corinthians, when he mentioned about the order in the congregation, Paul wrote that â€Å"everyone of you hath a psalm, hath a doctrine †¦Ã¢â‚¬  (1-Corinth. 14:26), where psalm is mentioned first. Psalms became the primary source texts for Christian music and liturgy establishment. Christianity, which originated from the Middle East and had spread throughout the Roman Empire during the first five centuries A. D. , was founded on the basis of the Jewish religion and, therefore, its key practices, such as the sacrificial concept and worship, are rooted and were formed from the traditions and commandments of the Old Testament. The center of Church singing became Christ, the Lord. Music was not limited by canons or regulations; it was simple and exalted, joining the loving souls. Love to the Savior Jesus Christ was so deep that the first Christians were aware of the tiniest step towards worldly and pagan influence; therefore, pomp and coddle of roman music did not attracted them. The basis of singing in the early church was music of the Temple in Jerusalem – the chant of words from the Scripture. One was leading, while the whole congregation repeated him. Other Christian singings included: â€Å"speaking to [themselves] in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in [their] hearts to the Lord† (Eph. 5:19), which represented a two-part singing by-turn; being filled with the Holy Spirit, Christians were making and singing new songs, like the new song to honor the Lamb in the Revelation of John. Pliny the Younger, the Roman appointee in Bithynia, in his report to the Roman â€Å"Early Christian Music† â€Å"Page #2† Emperor 110 A. D. , had found out that the activities of Christians are not anti-social and their meetings are simple and start with singing a hymn of praise to Christ, as God. During the Roman persecution, Christians were forced to make services in catacombs – the walls of these galleries still keep the images of singers and, moreover, the texts of hymns. Monotonous music of hymns was amazing in its austerity and exaltation at the same time. Musical instruments were not allowed because of their heathen usage. On the first council of Nicaea in 325, the persecuted church became the state one. Therefore, singing and worship, staying monotonous, was supplemented with such chants as Gallican France, Mozarabic (Visigothic) Spain, Old Roman, Ambrosian, and Sarum use – England (Norton, 2002) and was influenced by national differences. The second council in 381 had excluded non-Christian singing, for Christian music, enjoying the freedom for decades, had been loosing its vitality and simplicity. 100 years later, Manlius Severinus Boethius had written a five-volume book on music – De institutione musica (Fundamentals of Music) – where he had concluded writings and findings of Greek authors (Nicomachus, Ptolemy, Pythagoras, Euclid and Aristoxenus). Boethius had divided music into three categories: musica mundane – described the universe, planets, seasons – music of the spheres; musica humana – described the interrelations of body and soul; musica instrumentalis – described music performed with the help of instrument or voice (Norton, 2002). He claimed that music must be a representation of harmony, knowledge, and order. St. Ambrose and St. Gregory the Great played the most significant role in the development of early Christian music – they have left the patterns, which are now called Ambrosian and Gregorian chants, though the founders themselves had no intention to establish a canon. Ambrose, the bishop of Milan, realized the need to enrich the monotonous hymn’s â€Å"Early Christian Music† â€Å"Page #3† performance and wrote a number of hymns for his church, which reproduce the psalms of David in verses. He depicted bright images, using a manifold oratorical language of Cicerone, Horatio and Vergilius. His music was simple and close to folk’s one. He introduced antiphonal singing, known in Jerusalem Temple, which represents a by-turn psalm singing of soloist, while the rest of congregation is refraining (antiphon) the verses. Besides, Ambrose had put a foundation for eight voice chorus in the West. The original form of Ambrosian chant is still kept in native Milan. Pope St. Gregory I, a son of roman Senator, who refused to serve these worldly passions, and, having sold his possessions, entered the St. Andrew’s monastery, became the first monk, who was elected to be the pope. Being devoted to liturgy, which was aimed at prayer and teaching, he advanced the plain singing as a sacred music and stressed on the importance of church music as an outer manifestation of faith that can raise man’s heart to spiritual level. This form of monophonic chant became a standard of monastery (Office) and public (the Mass) worship, as well as other services, and had been sung by choirs. This very chant had replaced Old Roman chant in Rome and has been revised and developed until the tenth century A. D. The singing itself started with â€Å"halleluiah† – the victorious exclamation of Christians after two and a half centuries of persecution. Its best samples were composed at the end of 5th century (between the invasions of Goths and Lombards), in the epoch of wars, destructions, plagues, famine, disasters – such horrifying that Gregory supposed them to be the signs of the end and presages of the Last Judgment. Yet, this singing is filled with peace and faith for the future. Therefore, the Early Christian Music was written in times of persecutions and hardships and was aimed to inspire and give faith to believers. That is why the chants and hymns of that time still restore the souls of mankind and are the basis for main services in the most of Christian world. Works Cited: Holy Bible, King James Version. Plume, 1974. Norton, W. â€Å"Music in the Early Christian Church†. Concise History of Western Music. 2002. W. W. Norton Company. 11 Apr 2008 http://www. wwnorton. com/college/music/concise/ch1_outline1. htm. Ward, Justine. â€Å"The Reform of Church Music†. The Atlantic Monthly 04 1906 1-10. 11 Apr 2008 http://www. musicasacra. com/publications/sacredmusic/pdf/ward. pdf.

Monday, January 20, 2020

How Does William Blake convey his anger in the poem London ? Essay

How Does William Blake convey his anger in the poem London ? The poem 'London' by William Blake, relfects his feelings upon the society that he was living in , and how despreratly it needed help. Blake thought that all of the poverty and misfortune that was happening on the streets were caused by the political opression in London. Blake was angered by what he saw in his homeland as other countries started fighting for their indipendence and equality whilst his country stayed dormant, eventhough he felt that there was a serious need for serious action. Eventhough Blake wasn't a typical romantic writer, he too possesed the same beliefs of fighting for what one believes in, and the urge to be liberated from the opression of society. So, by being a writer of the romantic period, watching a controlled and restricted society not showing an intent to break free and fight against the monarchy, angered him and inspired him to convey his ideas and feelings throuh the poem 'London'. In the poem, Blake travels through London and descibes what he sees. And as a result, he sees a severly opressed society that is caused by the authority, such as royalty and the church. This is as Blake sees that even the 'streets' and the 'thames' are 'chartered' and governed by the authorities. This is furthur emphasised by his repitition of the word 'chartered' which then gives the reader an image of the lack of freedom that the people in London posses as the 'streets' is a metahor for the general public while the 'thames' represents their freedom, this is as rivers are normally associated with free will while the 'streets' are gernerally associated with the lower class in society. So, by describing the streets and the thames ... ...y that the monarcy creates. I feel that the poem 'London' effectively convyed William Blakes anger towards the society and his feelings about it. This is as Blake is awear of everything that goes on in the society, and the poem clearly expresses his repulsiveness towards the political opression imposed by the monarchy. However, Blake does not soley balme the monarcy, but also the people of his country. This is because he saw all the other countries that previously suffered the opression of a monarcy, fight for their rights and equailty. Eventhough the monarcy did impose rules upon society, Blake strongly believed that people could overthrow the authorities if they were to truly try and do so. Hence, a part of Blake's anger was conveyed by descibing the self-imprisonment of the people, and how they could break free anytime, but still chose not to do so.

Sunday, January 12, 2020

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Essay

Artificial intelligence (AI) results to simulation of intellectual practice such as comprehension, rationalization and learning symbolic information in context. In AI, the automation or programming of all aspects of human cognition is considered from its foundations in cognitive science through approaches to symbolic and sub-symbolic AI, natural language processing, computer vision, and evolutionary or adaptive systems. (Neumann n. d.) AI considered being an extremely intricate domain of problems which during preliminary stages in the problem-solving phase of this nature, the problem itself may be viewed poorly. A precise picture of the problem can only be seen upon interactive and incremental refinement of course, after you have taken the initial attempt to solve the mystery. AI always comes hand in hand with machine logistics. How else could mind act appropriately but with the body. In this case, a machine takes the part of the body. In a bit, this literature will be tackling about AI implemented through Neural Network. The author deems it necessary though to tackle Machine learning and thus the succeeding paragraphs. Machine Learning is primarily concerned with designing and developing algorithms and procedures that allow machines to â€Å"learn† – either inductive or deductive, which, in general, is its two types. At this point, we will be referring to machines as computers since in the world nowadays, the latter are the most widely used for control. Hence, we now hone our definition of Machine Learning as the study of methods for programming computers to learn. Computers are applied to a wide range of tasks, and for most of these it is relatively easy for programmers to design and implement the necessary software. (Dietterich n. d. ) Machine learning techniques are grouped into different categories basing on the expected outcome. Common types include Supervised, Unsupervised, Semi-supervised or Reinforcement learning. There is also the Transduction method and the ‘Learning to learn’ scheme. A section of theoretical computer science, Computational Learning Theory is the investigation on the computation of algorithms of Machine Learning including its efficiency. Researches on Machine Learning focuses mainly on the automatic extraction of information data, through computational and statistical methods. It is very much correlated not only to theoretical computer science as well as data mining and statistics. Supervised learning is the simplest learning task. It is an algorithm to which it is ruled by a function that automatically plots inputs to expected outputs. The task of supervised learning is to construct a classifier given a set of classified training examples (Dietterich n. d.). The main challenge for supervised learning is that of generalization that a machine is expected in approximating the conduct that a function will exhibit which maps out a connection towards a number of classes through comparison of IO samples of the said function. When many plot-vector pairs are interrelated, a decision tree is derived which aids into viewing how the machine behaves with the function it currently holds. One advantage of decision trees is that, if they are not too large, they can be interpreted by humans. This can be useful both for gaining insight into the data and also for validating the reasonableness of the learned tree (Dietterich n. d. ). In unsupervised learning, manual matching of inputs is not utilized. Though, it is most often distinguished as supervised learning and it is one with an unknown output. This makes it very hard to decide what counts as success and suggests that the central problem is to find a suitable objective function that can replace the goal of agreeing with the teacher (Hinton & Sejnowski 1999). Simple classic examples of unsupervised learning include clustering and dimensionality reduction. (Ghahramani 2004) Semi-supervised learning entails learning situations where is an ample number of labelled data as compared to the unlabelled data. These are very natural situations, especially in domains where collecting data can be cheap (i. e. the internet) but labelling can be very expensive/time consuming. Many of the approaches to this problem attempt to infer a manifold, graph structure, or tree-structure from the unlabelled data and use spread in this structure to determine how labels will generalize to new unlabelled points. (Ghahramani 2004) Transduction is comparable to supervised learning in predicting new results with training inputs and outputs, as well as, test inputs – accessible during teaching, as basis, instead of behaving in accordance to some function. All these various types of Machine-Learning techniques can be used to fully implement Artificial Intelligence for a robust Cross-Language translation. One thing though, this literature is yet to discuss the planned process of machine learning this research shall employ, and that is by Neural Networks.

Saturday, January 4, 2020

Critical Pedagogy ( Cp ) - 1728 Words

Critical pedagogy (CP) is after fostering a critical and analytical lens which may suggest diverse possibilities of appreciating the active relationship between teachers-learners and teaching-learning processes. Without thinking critically and working critically, the monotonous process of systems may keep going. Human beings are not robots or machines to be given some instructions by a designer in advance to run for a while in a routine and repetitive manner. They are ashamed of staying still and stagnant because they may feel rotten. Everything in the world is considered as a process, as all human beings go through a process to see reality from diverse sources, a process that is continuous, changing, and unstable. They are not a†¦show more content†¦Freire gave a new standpoint on education and changed the perspectives of stakeholders. He raised the issue of empowerment, social change and transformation, dialogic teaching, praxis, humanization, problem-posing education, dem ocratic and liberating education as the cornerstones of critical pedagogy (Freire, 1970; Robert Freire, 2008; Shore Freire, 1987). In addition, he rooted up the concept of banking model in which it deemed students as empty agents to be filled by the knowledge of their teachers. The following attitudes and practices are the buzz words of banking education: (a) The teacher teaches and the students are taught; (b) The teacher knows everything and the students know nothing; (c) The teacher thinks and the students are thought about; (d) The teacher talks and the students listen-meekly; (e) The teacher disciplines and the students are disciplined; (f) The teacher chooses and enforces his choice, and the students comply; (g) The teacher acts and the students have the illusion of acting through the action of the teacher; (h) The teacher chooses the program content, and the students (who were not consulted) adapt to it; (i) The teacher confuses the authority of knowledge with his own professional authority, which he sets in opposition to the freedom of the students; (j) The teacher is the subject of the learning process, while the pupils are mere objects (Freire, 1970, p. 73). The pillars of critical pedagogy are to increaseShow MoreRelatedCommunity Health Nursing Final Exam Study Guide Essay15874 Words   |  64 Pages-- 1. Health care for homeless, why is it so costly? They typically have to stay in the hospital for a longer amount of time because they have a lot more co-morbidities that need to be treated. Being brought to the ED is extremely expensive. Critical interventions are very costly, and so are all the diagnostic tests that must be done. They usually don’t have insurance. High mental heath issues in the homeless population. High risk for infections, trauma, violence. Don’t age very well. WhereRead More_x000C_Introduction to Statistics and Data Analysis355457 Words   |  1422 Pagesare arithmetic and graphing exercises. They become statistics problems only when a context gives them meaning and allows for interpretation. While this makes for a text that may appear â€Å"wordy† when compared to traditional mathematics texts, it is a critical and necessary component of a modern statistics text. Examples and exercises with overly simple settings do not allow students to practice interpreting results in authentic situations or give students the experience necessary to be able to use statistical