Digital Commons Network^™

Voxna Festival, 2024 Edition, Sue Flaster

Newsletter of the Jussi Björling Societies of the USA & UK

For the last 21 years, Sällskapet secretary Stefan Olmårs has managed to produce both outstanding concerts and evenings of warmth and fellowship in the environs of Voxna Church and Herrgård (estate manor) up in the Hälsingland province of Sweden. Harald Henrysson has attended nearly all of them, usually assigned the task of overseeing and narrating the part of the evening dedicated to playing Jussi Björling recordings. This year, the 22nd, was no exception. What was – for me – exceptional this year was the powerful emotional impact of the afternoon of July 8.

Full Issue

Newsletter of the Jussi Björling Societies of the USA & UK

No abstract provided.

Words Of Remembrance Of Jacob Forsell 1942-2023, Janel E. Lundgren

Newsletter of the Jussi Björling Societies of the USA & UK

The eminent photographer and writer Jacob Forsell has died at the age of 81. He has been of great importance both to Jussi Björling’s cause as well as to the Jussi Björling Society. He had a strong connection to Jussi via his close kinship with John Forsell: he was the grandson of the renowned singer and opera director, who meant so much to Björling’s early career. Therefore, he seemed specially sent to be the editor of a luxurious gift and anniversary book with the name: Jussi: the Song, the Man, the Pictures, together with Harald Henrysson and Björn Ranelid. This …

Full Issue

Newsletter of the Jussi Björling Societies of the USA & UK

No abstract provided.

Conrad L. Osborne To Speak On “The Art Of Jussi Björling”, Conrad L. Osborne

Newsletter of the Jussi Björling Societies of the USA & UK

JBS-USA is privileged to present the American master of opera critics in a special Zoom presentation for the Society on Tuesday, October 25 at 7:30 pm ET. Members will receive an email invitation to this occasion in September. Current details of event registration appear following this article.

As part of his presentation, Mr. Osborne plans to talk about Jussi’s technique, specifically, his “functional technique,” which is to say the hows and whys of his voice’s makeup. Those are the things that account for the actual sound of the voice, and which made possible Jussi’s extensive command of what Osborne will …

Paul’S Porneia: A Lexical Study Of Sexual Ethics And Communal Boundaries In The Pauline Corpus, Robert G. Flores

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This thesis thoroughly examines the Apostle Paul’s use of the Greek term πορνεία within the Pauline corpus to challenge the normative translation of sexual immorality and the accompanying assumptions connected to this broad phrase. Modern scholarship continually isolates individual occurrences of πορνεία leading to inconsistent and reductionistic interpretations. Rather, through sustained philological analysis of πορνεία and its cognates, this thesis aims to situate Paul’s πορνεία within its contemporary cultural, historical, and lexical milieu with the objective of making Paul’s πορνεία distinct. With this background, it is posited that πορνεία functions as a communal boundary marker used to differentiate between the …

“I Know He Would Do Anything If I Asked”: To All The Boys I’Ve Loved Before, Female Power Fantasy, And The Ya Romance, Ilse Eskelsen

Undergraduate Honors Theses

The female power fantasy in which a powerless woman conquers a powerful man, thereby symbolically winning his status within the patriarchy for herself, is a classic feature of adult romance. It is visible, too, in YA romances like Jenny Han’s To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before. Sitting in tension with this inheritance from adult romance is the fact that YA is generally expected to be pedagogical, teaching young readers how to live and love well. In blending pedagogy with power fantasy and its associated escapism, To All the Boys essentially upcycles the tropes of adult romance for young …

Using Facial Landmarks For Lip Motion Interpretation Applications, Kimi S. Wright

Theses and Dissertations

Facial motion, particularly lip movement, carries rich information about human speech that can be leveraged for a variety of computer vision and speech-processing tasks. Unlike other pixel-based methods, this work investigates the use of facial landmarks as a compact, privacy- preserving, and computationally efficient representation for lip-motion analysis. We evaluate landmark-based models across multiple tasks, including visual voice activity detection (VVAD), lip–audio synchroniza- tion, and visual speech recognition (VSR) for liveness detection. Using LRS3-VVAD1 and LRS22 datasets, we demonstrate that landmark-only models can achieve performance comparable to pixel-based systems for VVAD and synchronization, while significantly reducing parameter counts and inference …

Full Issue

Journal of the Jussi Björling Societies of the USA & UK

No abstract provided.

When The Muses Went Silent And Almost Died:, Thomas M. Hines

Journal of the Jussi Björling Societies of the USA & UK

What would life be like if there were no fine or performing arts? If music could not be heard in public, if great paintings of famous artists of the past and present could not be seen—in other words, how would we adjust in an esthetically deprived existence? In truth, we could continue to see and hear; nature would still be around us, but the interpretative acuity of our senses would be dulled. Opportunities to witness works of art would not be readily available. Our creative images would be internalized and not reflective of visual or auditory models. It would be …

“I Was So Nervous For Him” – Kerstin Thorborg And Jussi Björling, Nils-Göran Olve

Journal of the Jussi Björling Societies of the USA & UK

Kerstin Thorborg (1896–1970) was a leading mezzo-soprano with the Metropolitan for thirteen seasons, singing twenty roles in 350 performances. Her debut was as Frick in Die Walküre on 21 December 1936 and her final performances in 1950. Fifteen years older than Jussi Björling and born in the same Swedish region Dalarna (Dalecarlia), she enjoyed twenty years of rather solitary retirement there and died ten years after him. Her Met repertoire focused on Wagner so they met rarely on stage, but of course they knew each other well during the years they met professionally (1936–41 and 1945–50). They can be heard …

Conrad L. Osborne:, Conrad L. Osborne

Journal of the Jussi Björling Societies of the USA & UK

JBS-USA is once again privileged to present the American master of opera critics in a special Zoom presentation for the Society on Tuesday, February 20 at 7:30 pm ET., which will be repeated on Saturday, February 24 at 12 noon ET. Following the presentation will be a Q & A segment, to which attendees may submit questions.

About his presentation, Mr. Osborne observes: “In my lifetime, there have been two fundamental shifts, both negative in their impact, in how opera is performed. One is in theatrical presentation – the rise of laissez-faire re-interpretation of the canon by directors and designers. …

A Glistening Record – The Conferences Of Jbs-Usa, Walter B. Rudolph, Dan Shea, Sue Flaster

Journal of the Jussi Björling Societies of the USA & UK

At the end of 1998, two years of preliminary organizational work finally had led to the existence of a USA chapter of the Jussi Björling Society. This new group of enthusiasts from North and South America, Europe – and the whole English-speaking world – felt ready to join forces with the British Appreciation Society and the Swedish Sällskap in studying and honoring the career of Jussi Björling.

We were connected by the newsletters that our first leaders published, and also very much by a new feature of those times: the newly popular internet with individuals forming all sorts of specialty …

Three Important Books From Jbs-Usa

Journal of the Jussi Björling Societies of the USA & UK

Among the tasks taken up by JBS-USA has been the publication and distribution of books which amplify and explore the legacy of Jussi Björling, as well as the efforts in research and organization which make that exploration possible. In the last several years, three important books have been published by the Society which contribute significantly to understanding both the legacy of the great tenor, and the efforts made in supporting that legacy.

The Art Of Jussi Björling, Conrad L. Osborne

Journal of the Jussi Björling Societies of the USA & UK

Hello, everybody. Thanks to all of you looking in, and special thanks to Janel Lundgren, who extended the invitation to speak, to Walter Rudolph for hosting our event, to Steve Fischman for handling the sound fragments we’ll be hearing, and to my wife, Molly Regan,for all her help getting the fragments out to Steve. I’ve been following the activities of the Society at one degree of separation for many years, and have met or corresponded with several of you along the way, so I know I’m on home ground, among people as devoted as I am to keeping alive an …

Featuring Chicago’S Frederick Schauwecker, Pianist With Tenor Jussi Björling, Dan Shea

Journal of the Jussi Björling Societies of the USA & UK

The Met’s Opera News magazine featured many articles about Jussi Björling during his career in the USA, mostly highlighting his operatic exploits but occasionally acknowledging his concert career in North America. From September 1945 until Jussi’s last North American concert (Santa Monica in April 1960), his main accompanist was Frederick Schauwecker. Luckily someone at Opera News had the good idea, a decade after Jussi’s death, to arrange an interview with him.

The result was a 2-page article “On the Road with Jussi,” with interesting information on how this tenor and accompanist decided to join forces, how they worked together and …

Jbs – Usa Silver Anniversary Conference Chicago, March 23-26, 2023 Thomas Club At Symphony Center

Journal of the Jussi Björling Societies of the USA & UK

The Board of Directors is delighted to announce registrations are now available for our 25th Anniversary Conference in Chicago. In addition to celebrating Jussi’s career, we will be adding extra activities and remembrances of 25 years of JBS-USA.

Full Issue

Journal of the Jussi Björling Societies of the USA & UK

No abstract provided.

Singer’S Choices:, Allan Buchalter

Journal of the Jussi Björling Societies of the USA & UK

On occasion, a composer will place an additional musical staff above a solo singer’s staff so that the singer can choose which version he/she wishes to sing. Sometimes it is a difference of just a few notes, but can also completely change the melodic line, as I’ll illustrate towards the end of this article, with a Björling and Corelli example, after first mentioning a few “oppure” choices (generally abbreviated in scores as “Opp.”).

What oppure is not, is when due to tradition, or for some other reason, a singer takes it upon himself/herself to add something to an aria, duet, …

Voice Types:, Nils-Göran Olve, Sue Flaster ,Translator, Harald Henrysson ,Translator

Journal of the Jussi Björling Societies of the USA & UK

Just as for sopranos, there are, of course, various kinds of tenors. Don Basilio in Le nozze di Figaro, Rodolfo in La bohème, and Siegmund in Die Walküre, are probably never candidates for each other’s roles. For audiences, Rodolfo in particular defines what it means to be a tenor. That role fach (voice type) is called lyric tenor, and from the 1840s and up to our day, there is one such in every stereotypical opera libretto: the more or less tragic male figure in a love story. At the beginning of the 1800s, similar tenor roles were often written for …

“The Researcher’S Lot Is Not An ’Appy One”, Andrew Farkas

Journal of the Jussi Björling Societies of the USA & UK

Wonderful people that they are, Karl and Toby Hekler no doubt have been called by nicer names or described in more flattering terms in the past. For the purpose of this report, however, let’s just called them catalysts. Many of you reading these lines attended our successful inaugural Jussi Björling Society-USA conference in Washington, D. C., last June. The organizers were kind enough to invite me to speak, and through a series of coincidences I chose for my topic “Ma se m’è forza perderti,” the third act aria of Un ballo in maschera that Björling consistently and inexplicably omitted in …

If Only:, Walter B. Rudolph

Journal of the Jussi Björling Societies of the USA & UK

The idea is perpetual. It meanders through most of our noggins, yet remains welcome in its brain-draining manner. The Anna-Lisa Björling/ Andrew Farkas biography, Jussi, keeps reminding us of the likes of Il tabarro with Leontyne Price and George London (Amadeus Press, 1996, page 335). Elsewhere it is suggested that the RCA/Serafin Otello with Jon Vickers, Leonie Rysanek and Tito Gobbi was RCA’s means of salvaging what was to have been Jussi’s Otello recording. The facts and tales are out there. We salivate every time we read or re-read them. Since many others have had a hand in that creative …

Craft Meets Code: Digital Pathways For Fine Press Collections, Nicole Lewis, Brooke Farnsworth

Faculty Publications

Fine press books embody a unique blend of artistry and craftsmanship, yet their rich material and bibliographic details often remain locked in specialized catalogs or physical archives. This project explores how integrating fine press information into Wikidata—a global, linked open data platform—can preserve and amplify the cultural significance of these works in a digital context. Using the BYU Library’s fine press holdings, we’re modeling presses, printers, and editions within Wikidata’s semantic framework, creating opportunities for discovery, visualization, and computational analysis that respect the material heritage of the book arts.

The presentation will highlight:

•        Utilizing library holdings to compile a …

Albumin-Binding Domains In Therapeutic Protein Engineering: A Structural And Computational Perspective On Rational Design, Matthew Argyle, Dallin M. Chipman, Anna Claire Woolley, Bradley C. Bundy, Dennis Della Corte

Faculty Publications

Therapeutic proteins face a critical pharmacokinetic challenge: rapid clearance from circulation limits their clinical efficacy. Albumin-binding domains (ABDs) offer an elegant solution by enabling therapeutic proteins to “hitchhike” on serum albumin’s favorable 19-day half-life through FcRn-mediated recycling. Clinical validation through approved therapeutics like ozoralizumab demonstrates the success of this approach, with preclinical studies showing fusion to an ABD extended half-life to 18 days. This review provides an analysis of ABD-fusion protein design, integrating structural biology, computational prediction, and rational engineering principles. We catalog the major classes of albumin-binding modalities, including bacterial three-helix bundle domains, engineered peptides, antibody-derived binders, and alternative …

Master Any Language 100x Faster, Yoshihiko Ariizumi

Learning, Teaching, & Researching Optimization

Learn any language 100x faster with this booklet of high-speed acquisition techniques!

Neurocore: A Gnn Approach To Configurable Ip Core Identification In Fpga Netlists, Dallin Dahl, Keenan Faulkner, James Usevitch, Jeffrey Goeders

Student Works

Netlist reverse engineering enables many applications, including detecting IP theft, verifying CAD tool correctness, and detecting hardware trojans. However, reconstructing high-level information and circuit structure from a flat, nameless netlist is challenging. In this work we focus on the problem of locating known IP cores in an FPGA netlist, which is especially challenging due to the prevalence of highly configurable IP cores. We present Neurocore: a graph neural network-based approach to classifying nodes in a netlist as instances of known IP cores, and present and evaluate different models for different use cases. We have created a large open-source dataset of …

Data For "Unified Vapor Pressure Correlations For Lanthanide And Actinide Chlorides: An In-Depth Statistical And Thermodynamic Approach", J. Marvin Torrie, Nicolas Marvin Christensen, Kyle Duke, Carlos Mejia, Larry Baxter, Devin Rappleye

ScholarsArchive Data

This submission contains machine readable data (.csv) for all data from the publication "Unified Vapor Pressure Correlations for Lanthanide and Actinide Chlorides: An In-depth Statistical and Thermodynamic Approach". It contains the data contained in all figures in the paper and its supplementary material except for the water vapor pressure data in Figures 1 and 2. In addition, this submission contains all the original vapor pressure measurements (241 sets) from the sources reviewed in the paper.  Sufficient information is provided that readers can identify the original sources of these data sets if needed.

From Zwingli’S Switzerland To The American South:, Celeste Carroll Onchuck

Swiss American Historical Society Review

“Here – here shall be my grave!” declared Rudi Gallmann, standing near Huldrych (or Ulrich) Zwingli and his comrades on the damp ground in the gently sloping Albis hills of the Zurich countryside on October 11, 1531. When the weather was clear and the sun shone over the towering Kappel monastery, one might be overcome with a sense of peacefulness, but that day, the clouds hung low, bringing light rain to accompany the winds that blew over the hillsides. Although morale was not at its zenith among the Protestant troops at Kappel am Albis that day, Gallmann and the others …

From Islands To Mountains:, Stephanie Velasco Poserio

Swiss American Historical Society Review

This reflection, by Ms. A. Martinez, a Filipino-American living and working in diversity education at a castle museum near Bern, Switzerland, highlights how cultural connections are maintained even when one is geographically distant from one’s country of origin. In addition to Ms. Martinez’s Filipino-American perspective, I met and interviewed others who shared their stories as Filipino or Filipino-Swiss migrants. The migration of Filipinos from the islands of the Philippines to the mountains of Switzerland illustrates a dynamic journey that began with labor migration in the early 1970s and reflects a vibrant diaspora today. This article presents a cultural and historical …

Hollywood’S Toughest Stunt Clan Comes From Gossau, Canton St. Gallen:, Roland Schäfli

Swiss American Historical Society Review

Hans Epper from eastern Switzerland conquered Hollywood as a stuntman in the 1930s. His descendants continue to perform death-defying stunts for Quentin Tarantino and Steven Spielberg to this day. A family history like something out of a movie.

When Hans Epper arrived in New York on Whit Monday (the day after Pentecost) in 1926, he gave his name as “John” to the immigration authorities.

He discarded “Hans” just as he wanted to discard his origins: his past in the eastern Swiss municipality of Gossau. An official at the town hall of the industrial village in St. Gallen had scribbled “Off …